Texas Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Austin was celebrating film this week before the SXSW crowds even arrived. On Thursday night, Austin Film Society held its ninth annual Texas Film Hall of Fame awards gala at Austin Studios, honoring Texans and "honorary Texans" in the film industry. It's a fundraising event for filmmaker grants and educational programs, and attire ranges from the glitziest cocktail dresses to blue jeans and cowboy boots. Thomas Haden Church emceed the ceremony, revealing surprising depths of bizarre-yet-enjoyable humor. Really, I think someone should consider him to host the Oscars next year, although I don't know what his singing and dancing talents might be.

Thirteen and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, shown above, received the Ann Richards award for someone in film who "who breaks barriers and forges new creative paths." Her award was presented by Brendan Fraser. The Star of Texas award for an exceptional film made in Texas went to Rushmore, which was filmed in Houst -- Luke Wilson accepted the award. Linda Gray, who nearly goosed Thomas Haden Church onstage, inducted her Dallas co-star Larry Hagman into the Hall of Fame. Keith Carradine inducted Powers Boothe. Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater shared a tribute to Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, a Hall of Famer who died earlier this year. And Dennis Quaid presented the Tom Mix Honorary Texan award to his The Alamo co-star Billy Bob Thornton, who explained to us how he was more of a real Texan than an honorary one, anyway.

We've got photos of the event's honorees in the gallery below (as well as a few other familiar-looking attendees); check 'em out.

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

I've seen a lot of documentaries in the past few years about the decline of small towns and rural areas, how the population has dwindled and local businesses have closed shop and so forth. So it was strange to watch the opening sequences in the documentary Crawford, where the small Texas town starts to flourish when George W. Bush (then-governor, now President) buys a ranch in the area.

Crawford examines the effects on the town and its residents from the day Bush bought the Prairie Chapel Ranch in 1999 through 2007. At first, everyone in the town couldn't have been happier, especially once Bush became U.S. President. Businesses thrived as tourists and media flocked to the town, the local school band traveled to Washington, DC to perform at the inauguration, and the minister of the Baptist church felt confident that any day now, the First Family might join his congregation. However, a lot of things can change in half a decade, and Cindy Sheehan's 2005 protest in Crawford triggers even more radical effects.

Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) announced its jury prizes, the Target Filmmaker Awards, on Thursday night. These awards don't merely bring the filmmakers good publicity and critical acclaim -- each winning filmmaker receives a $50,000 cash prize. The Best Narrative Feature winner was August Evening, a Spanish-language drama about an undocumented older worker's relationship with his widowed daughter-in-law. The film is writer-director Chris Eska's feature debut. Texans might be interested to know that August Evening received Texas Film Production Fund grants in 2005 and 2006 (as did last year's winner, Gretchen ... LA must like those Austin filmmakers). August Evening landed a distribution deal this week with Maya Entertainment.

Billy the Kid (pictured at right) took home the Best Documentary Feature prize. The film, which follows a teenage boy in Maine, also won the documentary jury prize at SXSW this year. Monika Bartyzel caught a screening at Hot Docs and said, "Watching this documentary is an exercise in restraint -- the restraint not to write down everything that Billy says." The film is directed by first-timer Jennifer Venditti, and has stirred up some controversy lately for potentially exploiting its subject. LAFF has not yet announced its audience awards but will wait until Sunday, the festival's closing night.

I'll admit that I am a jaded enough movie-goer that very few bits of news manage to make me giddy with anticipation, but the Paul Thomas Anderson fansite Cigarettes and Red Vines has made me giddy as a fanboy on the opening day of ComiCon. The site posted a "spoilerish " photo (it's only fair to warn you) from the set of his latest movie There Will Be Blood -- one of the first photos to emerge since the production was announced. The film is based on the Upton Sinclair book Oil!, and is the story of the early days of the oil business starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a prospector in rural Texas. Anderson wrote the screenplay for the film, and there is talk of release in October of this year, which would put it right in the wheelhouse for Oscar contention, if it's as good as we hope it will be.

Usually whenever Anderson's name is mentioned, it's in connection to the other directors who just don't produce the amount of films they should (other nominees include Wes Anderson, David Fincher, David O. Russell, and Spike Jonze.) Considering the amount of truly awful movies I see, I'm just grateful Anderson's making one at all. The few he has made so far are among my favorites, so I really can't complain. Throw Daniel Day-Lewis into the mix and it's like Christmas in July -- or I guess in this case, October.

According to John Horn of the L.A. Times, the film critics of Dallas/Ft. Worth are the best at predicting the Oscars. Yes, the DFA Film Critics Association frequently chooses as its own pick for best picture the same film that goes on to win best picture at the Academy Awards. And when I say frequently, I mean that the group has done this in four of the past five years. Last year they didn't pick Crash (not that anybody saw that coming save for Chicago, right?). Horn doesn't mention that they also didn't match in 2000.

This year, the DFAFCA has picked United 93 as their favorite film of 2006, so as long as Crash was just a fluke, it probably should get the Oscar. Horn doesn't analyze any of the other categories nor how Dallas/Ft. Worth correlates with the Oscars in them, so I took a look myself. In the major categories the group is as scattered with the hits and misses as any group. The actress has matched only twice in six years; the actor three times.

But it is a good bet this time the group's picks for actor and actress will be honored in February. Like nearly every other group in the country, it went with Mirren and Whitaker. Supporting actor and actress were a bit more interesting, going to Jackie Earle Haley and Cate Blanchett (for Notes on a Scandal), respectively. Though the comeback kid Haley did well with NY and SF critics, I'm pretty sure that this is Blanchett's first critic group mention (she is nominated for the Satellite and the Golden Globe). As far as how the DFWFCA rates compared to the supporting Oscars, it has matched only one actor and one actress in six years.

The group does fairly well with best director, picking four of the last six Oscar-winners. Their pick this year is Martin Scorsese (as it was in '04).

The rest of the awards, which are more or less with the majority, can be read here.

Central Texas bloggers are, for once, all talking about the same thing: Idiocracy. Austin, Dallas and Houston were three of the seven cities in which the Mike Judge movie opened last Friday, and local film bloggers grabbed the rare opportunity to write about a movie before the New Yorkers could. In addition to the film itself, alot of bloggers are also writing about how disgusted they are with Twentieth Century Fox's limited release and non-publicity accompanying the release. Here are a few reactions from Austin and Dallas film bloggers:

• Austin Movie Blog: Sarah Lindner calls Idiocracy "not half-bad." She notes, "The main thing that bothered me, though, is that you can tell the movie is unloved. While I liked Idiocracy's inventive vision of the future, the film looks cheap and rushed, especially some special effects."
• Dumb Distraction: Micah quotes his wife: "Funnier than Beerfest." He speculates on the reasons for the limited release: "When did a little thing like bad taste prevent a studio from releasing a film?" He also experiences some very Idiocracy-like moments on the drive home.
• Matt Dentler's Blog: Matt thinks Idiocracy is definitely flawed, and that the jokes get old after a while. However, he observes that the opening sequence is "so clever it could exist as its own short film (or could be virally sent around the Web or YouTube as a guerilla marketing campaign)."

More news on a different filmmaker currently in Austin: Blake at Cinema Strikes Back alerts us to a local news clip about Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's segment of Grind House. You can see Tarantino and Kurt Russell quite clearly over at the Texas Chili Parlor, but not that kickass car.

I'd been looking forward to seeing Mike Judge's latest film Idiocracy for some time, perhaps especially because I live in Austin, where the film was shot. I'm not wild about the film's star, Luke Wilson, but costar Dax Shepherd was the best part of Zathura, and besides, I do like Judge's style of humor. (I once worked in a high-tech office where I created an departmental intranet site with an Office Space theme. Those "TPS reports" jokes never got old.)

So you can imagine I was disappointed when Erik reported a couple of weeks ago that Fox had postponed the film indefinitely. Fortunately, this week's Austin Chronicle has some news confirming the "limited release," which isn't the usual NYC-and-LA routine. Starting next Friday, Sept. 1, Idiocracy will play in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and LA. For once, Texans get to see a movie before New Yorkers. Does this mean that we're going to be very lucky and unearth a hidden comedy classic before the rest of the country, or really sorry to suffer through a clunker? We'll find out next weekend. In the meantime, I can't find a single trailer, promotional Web page, or photos for the film beyond some blurred images of the poster and those two stills that everyone on the Web keeps using over and over.

Texas, the first feature from 29-year-old Italian director Fausto Paravidino, is clearly a very personal film. Paravidino co-wrote the screenplay with two of his stars, and, as Enrico the narrator, he himself also appears on screen. His movie has the feel of something for which public exposure is a bonus, not the goal; it exists because it has to, not because there is an audience to wow. That is not to say, however, that Paravidino isn't sure of himself as a filmmaker. Indeed, Texas practically explodes off the screen with a thrilling, inescapable confidence that expresses itself not in showy, attention-getting tricks but rather in a willingness to be wildly unconventional without regard for the reaction of viewers. The movie is crazed mix of tones, jumping from almost slapstick humor to complete solemnity at the drop of the hat, and combining one-joke, one-dimensional characters with fully-developed, tragic figures in virtually every scene. And yet, thrillingly, it works. Of the six New Directors/New Film offerings I've seen so far, Texas is easily the most assured, most accomplished of the bunch.

Letters from the Other Side brings up one of the perennial questions about documentary filmmaking: how much should you involve yourself in your subjects' lives, and to what extent? Should you run the risk of potentially affecting the outcome of your film, or is it more important to help people you encounter while shooting? Some filmmakers make a serious attempt not to have much effect on the stories unfolding around them, and don't employ voice-overs or let themselves be heard in their film. Others, meanwhile, are themselves a big part of their stories, the best-known example being Michael Moore. Heather Courtney, director of Letters from the Other Side, obviously decided to help—in fact, the stories in the documentary hinge on Courtney's ability to deliver video "letters" back and forth between women in small Mexican towns and their male relatives working in the United States.

Letters from the Other Side eloquently manages to present stories that show the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. and the unexpected side effects of recent American trade laws and border-tightening regulations. Courtney's documentary examines three family situations: Eugenia, whose husband left for the U.S. years ago when she was pregnant with their youngest daughter, and whose three sons have followed their dad to find work; Maria, a farmer whose two older sons crossed the border, and who is worried that as she and her husband grow old, no one will be left to work their own land; and Carmela and Laura, whose husbands died on their journey to the U.S. in a smuggling truck.