I reported a couple of months ago that Tommy Lee Jones' highly-praised The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - which he both directed and stars in - had secured US distribution, and that hopes were high for a December release that would make the film Oscar-eligible. Unfortunately, it won't be out until February 3 of next year, which totally destroys its Oscar chances - like anyone remembers what they saw in February. Still, it's great that a modern American western that's at least half in Spanish got a distribution deal at all, so I won't complain too loudly.

Though Karina wasn't over the moon about the film when she saw it in Toronto (She thought it would make a good Walker, Texas Ranger episode. OUCH.), the French trailer has me all excited. It looks dark and violent, as expected, but there are little bits of harsh humor that took me by surprise. Maybe that sort of thing will expand its appeal beyond the rabid westerns/Tommy Lee Jones/Lone Star fans among us, and lead to a wider release? Yeah, probably not.

[via Twitch]

Here in Austin, we're all waiting to see how serious the storms will get as a result of Hurricane Rita. The city is overflowing with Houston evacuees as well as visitors for the Austin City Limits music festival. Hopefully some of us can distract ourselves with film-related news and the fine selection of movies available around town this week. (And what does Harrison Ford have to do with any of this, other than that I will use the slightest excuse to post his photo? Find out after the jump.)

This week's Austin Chronicle includes a third column about the movie The Cassidy Kids, which completed shooting in Austin last month. The series of three columns by Spencer Parsons provides an interesting look at local filmmaking, particularly the collaboration between Burnt Orange Productions and the University of Texas Film Institute. I've been reading about the production at Bryan Poyser's blog, Back to Me, which contains some good insights about low-budget filmmaking. Poyser produced and co-wrote The Cassidy Kids and also wrote and directed Dear Pillow, a bare-bones-budget local movie that I enjoyed very much.

Also from Burnt Orange Productions, the Austin-shot movie The Quiet premiered at Toronto International Film Festival to favorable buzz. Variety describes it as "a Lifetime movie on crack" while Ain't It Cool News praises its look as "neo-expressionist, all cool desolate blues and streetlight creeping in like smoke through half-drawn venetian blinds." Intrigued yet? The Quiet stars Elisha Cuthbert and Edie Falco and is directed by Jamie Babbit, perhaps best known for But I'm a Cheerleader. [via Austin360]

In a report from Toronto on Steven Soderbergh's Bubble, my girl Manohla Dargis compares the 42-year-old Friend of Clooney's latest, with its "artful artlessness" and let-the-milleu-dictate-the-content ethics, to the early work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "It is an influence," writes Ms. Dargis,  that "Mr. Soderbergh readily concedes."

"Just the bluntness of his movies or most of them, I really like," Soderbegh says. "I was watching a lot of them and had some of them with me when I was in Ohio [shooting Bubble], not to ape anything in specific, just for the feeling...I'm just like Fassbinder, but without the drugs and the whores."

Exactly. We're in a pretty sad state of affairs if Steven Soderbergh is the new Bad Boy of cinema. Let's do a little compare and contrast, shall we?

Fassbinder: Born in 1945, he was notoriously debauched, and eventualy died of a drug overdose in 1982 at 37.
Soderbergh: Born in 1963, he's had little personal experience with drugs, but he made a movie called Traffic in which a clean-cut teen girl devolves into a crack ho.

Fassbinder: Directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a subversive remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.
Soderbergh: Produced Far From Heaven, which tried really hard to be a subversive remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.

Fassbinder: The most prolific filmmaker, like, ever, at one point he was making one film every 100 days.
Soderbergh: Has directed about 17 films since 1989. That's one film every 343.529412 days. About.

Got more of these?

Guest blogger Taylor Barratt files one last report, on Where the Truth Lies, The Matador and Transamerica.

On Day 7 we saw the excellent Where The Truth Lies, from Atom Egoyan. But there is a blemish, and it’s a pretty big one: Alison Lohman seriously stinks things up. There’s one speech she has to give in a driveway after one of the main characters discovers a secret about her with the other and it's so flat and poorly delivered it's like she was being fed the lines. Egoyan, during Q&A, was sure to mention twice that Lohman is the only actress in the world who can play a 12 and 25 year old character. While that may be true, I sure hope that wasn't the only reason for casting her, though we can't imagine what the other reasons could have been. During Q&A the NC-17 debacle was brought up, and after seeing the (uncut) film, I can say the rating is unjustified, as the sex scene is very central to the story. I would love to tell you the reason why Egoyan believes the film was issued the rating (a theory I do not agree with especially due to another film at the festival with similar content), but when you see it, you'll understand why I have not. While I think Egoyan is right about the MPAA and his comments about Blockbuster, I just don't buy his theory on his rating. At the end of the day, though, it's an unfortunate rating and he now believes the film will be released unrated. I suspect it would get an ‘R’ in Canada. 

Celebrity friendships that cross fields are totally fascinating to me. Sydney Pollack and architect Frank Gehry, for example, have been friends for years. How did they meet? What was it that they found they had in common that made them work to stay in touch? What do they mean to one another?

A recent side effect of the compelling friendship is Pollack's first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry. The film, which was made at Gehry's request, recently screened at Toronto and was shot by Pollack himself with a mini-DVD camera. Lisa Rochon of the Globe and Mail reports that, through interviews and exploration of the architect's insecurities and techniques, Pollack achieves a tremendous intimacy with his subject. In addition, Pollack's naivete about architecture also gives the film an unusual perspective. Because he comes to the art (science?) without preconceptions, he is freed from the conventional ways of both looking at and interpreting buildings.

Rochon's excellent article (linked below) makes the film sound irresistible. Unfortunately, the damn thing doesn't seem to have a distributor, so at the moment we're screwed. Of course, we can always wait to see Brad Pitt's alleged Gehry doc, though I'm guessing it'll be just slightly different.

Despite the fact that Harvey and Bob aren't yet out the door, new Miramax head Daniel Battsek yesterday announced that he'd flexed his buying muscle for the first time. Battsek's first buy is The Heart of the Game, a documentary about "a tough inner-city girl's fight to play the game she loves and the eccentric tax professor who coaches her team" that is reportedly generating serious buzz at Toronto. First-time director Ward Serrill spent six years with the eccentric tax professor (Bill Resler) and his team, and this movie sounds freaking amazing. That said, as an ex-basketball player and coach myself, I admit that I may be sort of an easy mark for flicks like this one. Reviews are impossible to find (for me, anyway), but the few responses I've come across on the web are overwhelmingly positive - and Roger Ebert liked it! So maybe it's not just me, and this is the next March of the Penguins. Battsek certainly hopes so.

Cate Blanchett in Little Fish
Our 14th film of the festival and first of the day was North Country from Niki Caro, director of Whale Rider. This is the film chronicling the early 90's landmark sexual harassment suit from women working at a mining site in northern Minnesota. Charlize Theron is fantastic here, playing a very thick-skinned women who's put up with a lot in her life ,but refuses to take any more after her new mining job is able to help her give her and her children every modest thing they could ask for. I found it a very powerful film and would be interested in knowing just how much detailed in the film actually happened to Therons' real-life counterpart. The film is quite strong in all areas, especially its supporting cast.

Following North Country we went to see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the directorial debut from Tommy Lee Jones. Unfortunately no one was on hand to introduce the film, so just the piracy note and then straight into the screening. I'm not sure what to think of this film, though I am fond of Jones' character, Pete Perkins, as well as Melquiades who spends a very short amount of overall time on the screen. I bought into their relationship and Pete's motivation to carry out his friend’s final wishes. However, overall I feel the film is a little long in the tooth and repetitive, and could probably have been more successful as an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger or something than a feature length film.

 

Our first film of the day was Pride and Prejudice, our 9th overall. While I haven't read Jane Austen's novel, it's pretty obvious the whole way thorough how things are going to turn out. That said, it's wonderfully executed and entertaining even if it does run a little long. On hand for Q&A were the director, Brenda Bleythn and Matthew MacFadyen. Ms. Blethyn had the best response for a question regarding how she approached her character. She said she doesn't patronize her charater but rather puts herself in her character's place and plays it from there. A common response, but somehow it made more sense to me this time around. Maybe it was the accent.

• Fox Searchlight, seemingly resolved to ignore the plaintive cries of bidding war opponent Paramount Classics, has gone ahead and added Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking to its 2006 slate. Meanwhile, the Weinstein-less Miramax (who lost out to Fox on Bart Freundlich's Trust the Man), is said to be quietly pursuing several Toronto titles, including South African Oscar submission Tsotsi, and Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary by Sydney Pollack.
• Constantine director Francis Lawrence will next take on I Am Legend. Based on the Richard Matheson novel, it's a massive sci-fi project that's been languishing in development for ten years; Will Smith and Ridley Scott are amongst the formerly attached talent.
• Mike Medavoy's Phoenix Pictures will produce The Brass Wall as a vehicle for Mark Ruffalo. He'll play an undercover cop who discovers mob ties in the force.
• Finally, the news we've all been waiting for: Five of the Ernest movies are going back in to circulation on TV and DVD.

Teenage boys? Check. Skateboarding? Check. Punk rock sleaze? Check. Gratuitous nudity? Not so fast. Matthew's got a great review of Larry Clark's latest at Twitch, and though he seems to think the film is overall a bloody mess, is succeeds on one score: its general non-Larry-Clark-ness. Based on Matthew's description, Wassup Rockers is something of a cross between an unimpressive skate documentary and a wacky stoner comedy on the order of Super Troopers. About halfway through, "you honestly begin to wonder if Larry Clark has gone a bit mad," he writes. "For one, the scrapes are roughly the kind of thing, say, Harold and Kumar had to deal with on a trip to White Castle, including being attacked by rich Beverly Hills bullies (not exactly social commentary), fending off a gay rapist (funnier than it sounds, but not funny enough), and being shot by a facsimile of Charlton Heston (so cack-handedly done to appear as biting satire, it’s really quite funny after all)." I tried to find images of said facsimile, to no avail, but I have a hard time believing Larry Clark could come up with anything funnier than the above shot of Heston and his zucchini. I wonder what he's thinking about?