Russell Brand announced on Friday that he would not be attending any of his planned SXSW appearances.
Russell Brand/Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/RussellBrand]
In a surprise statement on Friday, Russell Brand announced that he has canceled all planned SXSW appearances, including a much-publicized keynote speech. Brand was invited to the festival to discuss BRAND: A Second Coming, a documentary about his rise to fame and struggles with substance abuse. The film will premiere at SXSW on Friday.
The star posted a lengthy apology on his website, explaining that the film is difficult for him to watch and speak about. "You'd think a narcissist would like nothing more than talking about themselves and their 'rags to riches,' 'hard luck' story," says Brand. "But actually, it felt like, to me, my life was hard enough the first time round and going through it again was painful and sad."
The documentary took seven years and 21 different investors to produce. Although Brand originally spearheaded the project, he eventually handed over the directorial reigns to Ondi Timoner, the acclaimed filmmaker behind Dig!.
"Ondi is a very beautiful person and a director of peerless integrity. I suppose what I didn't consider was that in letting go of the film, I was agreeing to be the subject of a biography," Brand states. "Posthumously this is a great honor but while you're alive, oddly intrusive and melancholy."
Brand ends his post with an apology to the festival. "I apologize sincerely to the organizers of SXSW for my non-attendance, especially Janet Pierson, Brian Solis and Rynda Laurel from the Interactive festival, who were responsible for the keynote talk that I was due to do."
Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.
Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.
Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.
He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.
Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.
For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers — there are three credited directors and three credited writers — seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.
Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.
There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.
The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.
