The SXSWCares Big Benefit will take place April 12- 20 at participating venues around Austin.
Courtesy of Austin Music People
The greater Austin community rallied together quickly after the tragic Red River accident that took place during SXSW 2014. The SXSWCares Fund was created on March 13 (just hours after the incident), to raise funds for those affected by the tragedy. Now, less than a month after its inception, SXSWCares is launching a multi-day, mega-event to further the cause.
Organized by Transmission Events, the Red River Cultural District, Austin Music People and SXSW, the SXSWCares Big Benefit will take place April 12 - 20. The nine-day initiative will feature day and evening events and an online auction to continue fundraising efforts (approximately $180,000 has already been raised).
Participants — more than 20 venues and 30 area businesses so far — will host events (or promotions) in an effort to raise additional funds that will be directed to SXSWCares at the Austin Community Foundation. Austin Music People Executive Director Jennifer Houlihan reiterated to CultureMap that this is not a festival — no street closures, no wristbands, no free drinks. Instead, individual events will take place under the larger umbrella of the Big Benefit name.
Venues include ACL Live, Cheer Up Charlie's, Mohawk, Holy Mountain, Red 7, Stubbs, The White Horse and more.
With a multi-day event at controlled locations, organizers hope to maximize fundraising efforts by offering businesses and individuals multiple chances to participate. It's also the hope that by participating in the recovery efforts, the community will gain closure. Interested businesses can join in on the community-wide fundraising effort by contacting Austin Music People.
And for those who want to participate by attending one — or multiple — scheduled events, a comprehensive list of mini-fundraisers is available via Do512. The list will be updated as more venues and businesses enlist to support SXSWCares.
Writer/director Lynne Ramsay does not make feel-good movies. Her previous two films —You Were Never Really Here and We Need to Talk About Kevin — were about a traumatized veteran who tracks down missing girls for a living and parents reckoning with a child who might be a sociopath, respectively. Her latest, Die My Love, has a story as dark as its title.
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are a married couple who move into a run-down house that used to belong to Jackson’s uncle, who shot and killed himself on the property. That doesn’t exactly scream “great vibes,” but the somewhat manic duo quickly introduce a child into the equation, an event that forms a schism between two people who previously seemed to be on the same off-kilter wavelength.
While Jackson works to provide for the family, Grace is left to take care of the baby and herself at the somewhat remote house. She doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the arrangement, engaging in all manner of odd behavior, like crawling around the floor, talking to herself, and taking the baby on miles-long walks to visit her mother-in-law, Pam (Sissy Spacek), who’s not doing well herself after recently losing her husband, Harry (Nick Nolte).
Ramsay, who co-wrote the film with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, foregrounds Grace’s experience above all others, but the film is far from straightforward. The idea of post-partum depression is raised as a reason for Grace’s weird behavior, but as both she and Jackson are introduced as two people who skew to the “ab” side of normal, it’s difficult to say that everything she does is due to feelings that arise after giving birth.
Plus, Grace has plenty to be upset about in general, including living in a death house, being left alone with their child the majority of the time, and Jackson bringing home a yapping dog without even so much as a conversation. But the manifestation of her anger/depression is hard to parse, as Ramsay includes scenes of her carrying around a butcher knife, meeting up with a mysterious figure on a motorcycle, and other strange things that may or may not actually be happening.
There is clearly a lot of metaphorical work being done by seemingly random things like the reappearance of a black horse on multiple occasions, blaring rock music that accompanies several scenes, and the use of the 1x1 aspect ratio by Ramsay. It’s easy to feel the intensity of the film’s central relationship and their conflicts even if you can’t make heads or tails of the allusions that the filmmaker seems to love.
Lawrence is put through the wringer almost as much as she was in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and her performance is one that can be felt strongly. Still, because the narrative is unclear, she often appears to be overwrought in certain scenes. Pattinson never fits well with his uncaring and/or oblivious character. Spacek makes a nice impression in a limited amount of screen time, but why Ramsay chose to use the ultra-talented LaKeith Stanfield in the nothing part of the motorcycle rider is baffling.
Those who love to dig into symbolism and non-linear storytelling will have a field day with the arty Die My Love. But for everyone else, anything Ramsay might have been trying to say about the difficulties of being a mother gets buried under many scenes that don’t make any logical sense and over-the-top acting that’s only fit to match the bizarreness of the film itself.
