Anne Heller's blog

Easy A (directed by Will Gluck, written by Bert V. Royal, starring Emma Stone, with Malcolm McDowell as the principal) is a surprisingly well-written and intelligent teen comedy with oh-so-many inside jokes and film references.

A high-school girl decides to pretend she and a gay male friend had sex at a party so her friend will stop being beaten up at school. However, her plan backfires when her reputation as a "loose lady" spreads all over. Soon, she is making money off her bad reputation by letting loser high school boys spread rumors of her various sexual exploits with them for varying retail gift card amounts -- $50 at Home Depot for saying there was a grope session behind the athletic field, $250 at Office Max for saying the deed was done in the back of Mom's car, etc.

Coincidentally, the protagonist Olive (Emma Stone) has a slight crush on her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), who is teaching The Scarlet Letter in her class.  He is rather paternalistically enamored of her as well, believing she is the one person in her class who has actually read The Scarlet Letter, although we see in various montages of clips from the silent movie version of The Scarlet Letter that Olive has only watched the oldest movie version of the book she could find.

[Editor's note: The Unforeseen, a documentary about development in Austin that focuses on Barton Springs, has been playing at Alamo Drafthouse (first at South Lamar, currently at Ritz) for a few weeks now and is apparently still popular enough to stick around. If you haven't seen it, now's the time -- the lovely cinematography makes the documentary worthwhile to see in theaters. To whet your interest in the film, here are some excerpts from director Laura Dunn and producer Robert Redford, who were in Austin in March to promote the film.]

Laura Dunn, director: "A little over 5 years ago now, a group of us who really love Austin came together and started working on this film. We saw it as being the story of the long-running battle over Barton Springs and specifically lensing it as a microcosm for what's going on everywhere in communities across the globe. As we grow, how do we protect our most precious natural resources, like Barton Springs?

"I worked on this film for over 5 years and interviewed hundreds of people ... everyone from real estate developers to environmentalists to lobbyists to politicians to swimmers to long-time Austinites to artists, scientists, you name it. It was pretty exhausting.

From February 9 - 11, star of River's Edge and Charlie's Angels Crispin Glover gave several performance readings of his books and screened the first two films of his controversial self-produced and directed It trilogy at the Alamo Ritz. This is what he had to say during the post-screening Q&A about his books, slideshow, self-funding his projects, and his films What Is It? and It is Fine! Everything is Fine.

"I have been performing the slideshow since 1992," Glover said, "after writing and publishing books through my company Volcanic Eruptions. I try to play to the humor in the material which I perform from the books [including excerpts from The Rat Catcher, The Backwards Swing, and Around My House, among others]."

"I started experimenting with old books in the early 1980s, blacking out parts of text by drawing tendrils and such using India ink or writing in the margins. I've always drawn and wrote since I was a child. I was taking an acting class near a bookstore which sold bindings from the 1800s for cheap, so I used books I picked up from there. Around 1985 or 86, I finished my first book Around My House. I have completed 18 books so far and plan to complete several different slide show versions using excerpts from various books.

Filmmaker, stuntman and Austinite Gary Kent started his career by fighting his way through many low-budget biker and exploitation films. He acted and was a stuntman in Richard Rush's The Savage Seven (1968), Psych-Out (1968) and Freebie and the Bean (1974), as well as Peter Bogdanovich's classic thriller Targets (1968). He also was in The Girls from Thunder Strip (dir. David L. Hewitt, 1966), which will screen at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar for Weird Wednesday on August 15 with Kent in attendance. Kent was stunt coordinator for Hell's Angels on Wheels (dir. Rush, 1967). He was also the production manager for Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and the second unit/assistant director for Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971).

With all the work Kent was getting at this time, it's surprising that he found time to write and direct The Pyramid (1975). This highly personal, mystical and metaphysical low-budget movie was shot in Dallas primarily with local talent.

The Pyramid tells the story of young TV news cameraman Chris Lowe (pre-videotape -- he carries around a 16mm camera) and his disillusionment with the politics and petty bullshit of his profession. This disillusionment goes hand-in-hand with his personal development as a "sensitive male," which he nurtures through yoga and discussing metaphysics, psychic phenomena and mysticism with his reporter friends and his girlfriend. Chris plays guitar and is not afraid to cry or show emotions. He attends his girlfriend's confrontational therapy encounter group. He's a modern non-racist Southern man (circa 1975) whose close friend and work partner is L.A. Ray, the African-American news reporter at the TV station. (More after the jump.)

[Ed. Note: Please welcome our latest contributor to Slackerwood, Anne Heller, who's reporting on one of the Weird Wednesday screenings from July.]

Hooch (director/screenwriter: Edward Mann, 1977) is a very funny, authentic regional exploitation action-comedy starring Gil Gerard (a Southerner himself, later the star of the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) and an otherwise unknown cast. Shot in Cleveland and Rutherford counties in the Appalachian Mountain region of North Carolina (also at Earl Owensby Studios in Shelby, N.C.), Hooch is about a small county in the Appalachians and its many moonshine-brewing inhabitants, who are all struggling to make a living. The older "brewers" are pissed off at the success of handsome young upstart Eddie Joe (Gerard), who is charmingly stealing their regular customers.

Meanwhile, the owner of the country store (also a moonshiner) conspires with a trio of carpetbagging Mafioso who want to take over the moonshine business in that county as an extension of their Northern business ventures. The store owner's daughter seduces Eddie Joe, whose steady girl is actually a very childlike, prudish yet buxom youth choir director and Sunday School teacher at the local Baptist church. Her uncle, the local sheriff, has a vendetta against Eddie Joe because he's the only moonshiner in the county who refuses to bribe the lawman to look the other way. (More after the jump!)