The screening of Chalk I attended was the only sold-out movie I encountered at Austin Film Festival, and it was on a Tuesday night after the conference had ended. I heard that the previous night's showing of the feature film sold out as well -- and this was at the Arbor's largest screen. Was it because the movie won AFF's narrative feature award? Or was there some sort of word-of-mouth building in town among Austin educators, since teachers were the focus of this film? Before the movie started, Chalk's director Mike Akel asked how many teachers were in the audience, and I saw a large show of hands. It probably didn't hurt that Chalk was filmed in Austin, either.
Chalk uses that mock-documentary style found in The Office to focus on a group of high-school teachers (and one former teacher, now a vice principal) struggling to deal with their jobs in the course of a school year. There's the brand-new teacher, Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), who can't maintain control of his classroom; a comically ambitious, extroverted teacher, Mr. Stroope (co-writer Chris Mass); the short-haired, strident gym teacher, Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer); and continually overworked vice-principal Mrs. Reddell (Shannon Haragan). The situations are usually played for laughs, but there are a few touching moments, particularly with Mr. Lowrey as he tries to connect with his students. Since they occasionally look right in the camera and talk to us, we know who has a little crush on whom, who's about to lose their mind, and who wants to strangle certain other teachers.
As I've mentioned before, Austin Film Festival has a screenwriters conference to accompany its weeklong program of films. In fact, the event used to be better known for its writing panels and sessions than for the films that screened. I'm not a screenwriter so I don't attend many panels anymore, but this year I decided to sit in on on the "Writing Family Films" panel.
Why did I choose a panel on children's and family films? I could have gone with some friends to a session down the hall about comedy writing, featuring Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, which I'm told was quite entertaining. I don't have any kids, and I've never written anything that was aimed toward a younger audience. But I've always enjoyed watching quality children's films (although I often feel like the only unaccompanied adult in the theater), and I wanted to hear more about the ways in which writers approach material intended for kids.
The panelists (in the order pictured above) were Bob Dolman, who wrote the screenplay for Willow and adapted and directed How to Eat Fried Worms; Susannah Grant, who worked on the scripts for Pocohontas, Ever After (a favorite of mine) and the upcoming Charlotte's Web; and Mike Rich, who wrote Finding Forrester, The Rookie, and The Nativity Story. University of Texas screenwriting instructor Stuart Kelban moderated the session. The small conference room at the Stephen F. Austin hotel was well-filled with writers and other film-industry people.
I don't normally see films with titles like Come Early Morning unless vampires are involved. However, I was intrigued about the feature directorial debut of Joey Lauren Adams, who also wrote the script, and I liked Ashley Judd so well in Bug that I thought the movie might be worthwhile. Unfortunately, Come Early Morning suffered from an amateurish script, predictable characterizations, and a lack of vampires.
Judd, as the main character Lucy, is playing almost the same exact character as in Bug, but with a little more money and a little less desperation. Lucy lives in a small Arkansas town and has a nasty habit of drinking too much at the local honky-tonk and waking up in hotel rooms with strange men. However, we know right away that she's an independent woman who doesn't want to rely on anyone -- she insists on paying for the hotel rooms herself. The title is probably derived from her habit of getting up before her bedmates in an attempt to sneak out of the hotels before she has to talk to them.
During the course of the film, Lucy starts to realize her life isn't the way she wants it to be. She takes steps to become closer to her dad, takes in a stray dog, and tries to start what might become more than a one-night stand with Cal (Jeffrey Donovan), a new guy in town. She also takes home the local honky-tonk's old jukebox, although she's not sure why, or what she'll do with it. (The old jukebox does provide the film with a fantastic soundtrack, including Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Billy Joe Shaver songs.) She's a contractor, complete with a hard hat, but she doesn't seem to get much satisfaction from the job.
It's a challenge to take photos during a film festival. You never know which screenings will be the kind where you'll be subjected to a metal detector, purse search and repeated warnings about No Cameras. And if you're attending a big splashy premiere at the Paramount in downtown Austin, you usually have to park pretty far from the theater, so you can't just run back to the car at any time to dump your camera. Despite these limitations, I did manage to snap some pictures from this year's Austin Film Festival, which I thought I'd share.
I love the marquee at the Paramount, so I had to take at least one photo of it all lit up. The Paramount was the venue for AFF's biggest films this year, since it's centrally located and has a pretty large capacity. The TV Set was AFF's opening-night film.
I kept having flashbacks while I watched the documentary The Third Monday in October. No, not the drug-induced kind, but the kind that you get when you're watching a situation that you encountered yourself a long time ago. The Third Monday in October is about student council elections, which I often entered and never, ever won, so I was cheering for the underdogs right away.
The Third Monday in October was shot during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election campaign, and focuses on student-council presidential elections in four middle schools around the country: Francisco Middle School in San Francisco, Hall Middle School in Marin County, Inman Middle School in Atlanta, and St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin. (I drive past the Austin school practically every day, so I was specially interested to see what goes on there.) The film follows eleven of the student candidates, although some get more screen time than others. The filmmakers also interview teachers and advisers involved in the student election process. Eleven students may seem like a lot for one documentary feature, but a few stand out along the way.
I wasn't sure what to expect from a movie called Special, "special" being a word that gets used snarkily and ironically these days. Fortunately, Special turned out to be a good narrative feature with elements of comedy and drama, giving character actor Michael Rapaport a chance to really shine in a complex lead role.
Rapaport plays Les, who works as a meter maid -- only of course, being a guy, he's a parking enforcement officer. He won't admit to feeling depressed, but his job is causing him problems, so he signs up for a pharmaceutical trial of a new antidepressant, Special (Specioprin Hydrochloride). The drug is supposed to remove self-doubt; in Les, this means that he believes he has developed superpowers. He can feel himself floating in midair, and he can hear other people's thoughts. Perhaps he can even walk through walls. Is he becoming a superhero or progressively insane? His friends who run a comic-book store aren't sure whether they believe him, and the doctor who gave Les the pills is acting extremely odd. But Les is determined to pursue a life of heroic crime fighting, and he's not going to stop taking his Special pills.
This week's Austin Film Festival might not be quite as big as that other film festival that takes place in Austin in the spring, but it's still possible to see films on an entirely different parallel track to someone else. In other words, I can think of a few people I know who are also attending the festival whom I haven't seen because they're watching different films than I am. After all, it's impossible to see everything. Check out some of these blog entries from other AFF attendees who watched Death of a President while I was at Rescue Dawn, or who attended more conference sessions that I could manage.
Austinist has been covering AFF continually, and was the best place to find the latest info about awards and special screenings -- I believe the site is actually one of the festival sponsors. There's a good interview with Brian Helgeland, who screened a director's cut of Payback at AFF. I also liked Austinist's cool photos from the opening-night party.
The documentary Pirate Radio USA is an enjoyable if somewhat strident look at the world of pirate radio, in which do-it-yourself radio afficianados build their own (illegal) mini-stations and broadcast at ultra-low frequencies (called microcasting). The film strives to use pirate radio's legal difficulties to paint a larger picture about the disintegration of American rights and the influence of mainstream media and large corporations.
Pirate Radio USA is an unabashadly personal and partisan film --the filmmakers aren't afraid to appear on-camera to tell you what they think. Director and longtime radio pirate Jeff Pearson periodically narrates the film with help from Mary Jones on a stylized set that is actually a working pirate radio station, in their on-air personas of DJ Him and DJ Her. (The station set does not get raided by the FCC, which is fortunate but would have made the film even more interesting.) Pearson is engaging and amusing even when he gets a bit ranty about the FCC. He's got that Morgan Spurlock-style narration down pat.
The budget of Pirate Radio USA must not have been much bigger than that of one of the radio communities it profiles -- for example, cities are portrayed by crude yet cute plastic models. The Seattle model involves a big Starbucks coffee mug, of course. The models fit in nicely with the overall retro look and feel of the movie -- the filmmakers often use older stock footage in the public domain to illustrate their points, especially when discussing the history of low-frequency radio. (At Austin Film Festival, the documentary screened in the tiny theater at The Hideout, an independently owned coffeeshop, which provided the perfect setting.)
The opening scene of Catch and Release is a funeral reception ... on what was supposed to be a wedding day. A tragic accident befell the groom during his bachelor-party weekend. We see the florist accidentally bringing wedding bouquets instead of funeral flowers, a multi-tiered cake stashed in a refrigerator, and a very sad young woman in black instead of white. She escapes to a bathroom and hides in the tub to cry, but suddenly is interrupted by a laughing couple who ducks into the bathroom for a quickie. The combination of touching drama and absurd comedy is excellent and promises a good quirky movie, full of dysfunction, dark humor and the unexpected.
Unfortunately, Catch and Release doesn't fulfill the potential of that well-balanced opening, and ultimately turns into a typical contemporary romantic comedy, with the stress on the romantic. It's still an interesting movie to watch, but the cliches can be a little grating at times, and even as a romantic comedy it never reaches the level of, say, The Truth about Cats and Dogs.
The film is set in Boulder, which provides a charming background that's a pleasant change of pace from LA/New York. After her fiance's funeral, Gray (Jennifer Garner) tries to return to as normal a life as possible. She moves in with her two male buddies, Sam (Kevin Smith) and Dennis (Sam Jaeger). Gray finds out that her fiance was secretly a millionaire, and that every month he sent money to some unknown person. Grady's California friend Fritz (Timothy Olyphant) sticks around to help Gray deal with these revelations, and maybe because he likes her, too. Is he becoming another friend, or something more?
It seems like I'm getting news every day now about new speakers and panelists added to Austin Film Festival. The festival includes a conference geared towards screenwriting and filmmaking, which runs from Oct. 19-22, and a lineup of films running through Oct. 26. I've been volunteering for and/or attending the festival since 1996, when it was still called the Austin Heart of Film Festival. At the time, the films seemed like more than an afterthought -- everyone was there for the screenwriting conference, and the feature films were something to do when you got tired of hanging out at the Driskill bar with other writers. Over the years, however, the film festival has become bigger and stronger, and has added documentaries to its schedule. You can catch a studio film before it's released in theaters, or watch low-budget indie films that haven't yet found distribution.
This year's AFF screenings include the opening-night gala showing of The TV Set, with writer-director Jake Kasdan in attendance; Werner Herzog's latest film, Rescue Dawn (no, he's not going to be there); The Night of the White Pants, shot in Texas, with co-stars Nick Stahl and Janine Turner at the screening; The Amateurs, which stars Jeff Bridges as a wanna-be porn director; and Catch and Release (pictured above), a feature starring Jennifer Garner and Juliette Lewis. Cult movie fans will be happy to hear that actor Danny Trejo is scheduled to show up at a screening of Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror.
I did mention Kevin Smith, didn't I? Smith was in town earlier this year for a local Clerks II premiere, but he's returning to Austin not just to enjoy the cooler weather, but to promote Catch and Release, in which he has an acting role. He'll also participate in one of the conference panels, but the specifics have not yet been announced. The festival is presenting awards to several notable screenwriters and directors who will also be at the conference: Shane Black, Sydney Pollack, and David Milch. The AFF Blog has the latest details on scheduled panelists and special guests. I'll be covering the film festival for Cinematical, so if you're not in Austin in a couple of weeks, you can live vicariously through me. And no, I'm not going to spend the whole week at the Driskill bar.
In other parts of the world, people are gearing up for Toronto's big clambake, or those film festivals in Rome and Venice. Here in Austin, the fall film schedules are slowly being released and we couldn't be more excited. We don't even have to leave town! The next couple of months will bring a variety of festivals to central Texas:
Cinematexas, the renowned short film festival, runs from Sept. 20-24. This year's schedule hasn't yet been posted online.
Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (aGLIFF) runs from Sept. 28-Oct. 8 and the schedule went live this week. If you want more details, you can attend the free aGLIFF Launch Party on Sunday at noon at Cafe Caffeine. The festival is also looking for volunteers.
The first Austin Polish Film Festival will run over four Thursdays in October. The festival's theme is "50 Years of Polish Films from the Lodz School."
Austin Film Festival runs Oct. 19-26. A schedule of films isn't available yet, but you can view a list of panelists who tentatively are set to attend the screenwriting conference. Sydney Pollack, Shane Black, and David Milch will receive awards this year during the festival.
The SXSW
film festival lineup gets more celebrity-rich every day. Matt Dentler just announced more performers who will speak at the
conference and/or screenings, including Ray Romano, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Erykah
Badu. I'm still trying to decide which films to see ... there are some tough choices. Karina and I will be covering
the film festival for Cinematical but even with two of us, we won't be able to catch everything.
Kevin Smith will be in Austin early next week and will introduce a midnight
screening of House Party on Monday 3/6 at Alamo Downtown. Admission is free, but if you want to
guarantee a seat you can buy a food/beverage coupon from Alamo ahead of time. I am not sure what the actual connection
is between the Clerks director and the 1990 Kid 'N Play movie,
but I'm sure Smith will explain.
On Saturday I finally decided to go to some of the conference sessions
for Austin Film Festival. I could not resist the potential fun of writer-director Judd
Apatow interviewing writer-director Harold Ramis, whose film The Ice Harvest had screened at the festival the previous evening. Also, I knew that if I didn't get
downtown early, before all the University of Texas football traffic, I would never be able to find parking for the movies I planned to
see later that afternoon. People in burnt-orange Longhorn shirts were
everywhere on Saturday.
The first panel did not disappoint. Apatow apparently interviewed Ramis
for a radio show in the early 1980s and had saved a photo from that
momentous event. In fact, he blew up the photo to poster size so all of
us could see. It was full of Eighties goodness,
including a bulletin board in the background that appeared to be
covered in headshots from the Vacation cast.
I liked this line from Ramis about his directorial style: "I thrive on
disaster. I get really excited when things go wrong." He thinks the basis of his success as a director is due in part
to the experience he gained in his first job out of college: working in
a locked mental institution. "It expanded my tolerance for extremes of
human behavior, which was wonderful training for working with actors."
I saw low-budget documentaries in the smallest theater at Austin Film
Festival on Thursday, so I thought that on Friday, I would see the
big-name movies showing in the biggest theater. I like film festivals
in which you have both options and can alternate between the films that
you might never have another opportunity to see, and the films that you
get to see a couple of months before everyone else does (or better yet,
as a rough cut way before the release date).
Once again, work prevented me from attending the conference part of AFF—well, sort of. The fact is that the conference panels are meant to
appeal to screenwriters and filmmakers and right now I am neither. AFF
does not include panels for film critics, bloggers, or essayists,
perhaps because no one wants to encourage that kind of behavior. I
probably would have been able to make it downtown earlier for a panel
on the business of film writing, perhaps including Joe Bob Briggs.
I ran into some friends in line at the Paramount for The Ice Harvest.
The lines were pretty long, although I think Shopgirl still holds the
record this year. I find that the long lines are often a great way to
meet people or to spend some time chatting with people you already
know. We managed to nab some good seats, which was lucky because the
theater ended up being so full that people were sitting in the
limited-view box seats.
I like to get all organized about a film festival. I print a list of what I want to see and when and where. Sometimes I have more than one choice in a time slot so I can decide later, but usually I have a firm choice for every time slot. For Austin Film Festival (AFF) this year, I picked out films to see as well as a few panels and events during the conference. AFF holds a conference during the day and then shows films at night.
For Thursday, I decided that the movies I would see that night would be Going Through Splat, a documentary about screenwriter Stewart Stern, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I picked up my badge and other registration goodies, then against my better judgment, decided to drop in at the opening night party at Oslo. As I suspected, it turned out to be what I call a Black Hole of Calcutta party (I totally swiped the name from The Tall Guy)—a huge crowd of people crammed into a smaller venue. This kind of party is only fun if you know most of the people there and if you can tolerate an insane amount of noise. I made one circuit through the packed room, saw no one I knew, and slipped away.
The big movie on opening night of Austin Film Festival was Shopgirl, with Jason Schwartzman and Claire Danes in attendance. The lines to get into the Paramount Theater were unbelievable. I was very happy to get to the Stephen F. Austin for Going Through Splat and join a group of maybe a half-dozen people in line. However, I didn't pick quite as intelligently as I had thought. Turned out something was wrong with the movie media and despite valiant efforts from the film festival guys, the screening had to be cancelled. Well, these things happen at all film festivals. It was still early enough for me to try to slip into Shopgirl, but I knew I'd end up in a crummy seat and besides, I remembered not liking the book very much.
This week's 
It seems like I'm getting news every day now about new speakers and panelists added to 
