Slackery News Tidbits, January 4

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The RetellingIt's a new year and already the Austin film news is pouring in! This morning we have some news about Austin films, film series and websites as well as a few end-of-decade retrospectives we found and want to share.

  • Austinites finally have another chance to check out Bob Byington's latest film, Harmony and Me (my review). The locally shot feature played a number of film fests around the country before hitting Austin Film Festival for one showing in October, and now it's back for a five-night run at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. Byington will be there on Sunday, Jan. 10, but you can catch the movie nightly through Jan. 14.
  • Good news for another Austin filmmaker: Emily Hagins's new horror movie The Retelling (pictured at right) will have its world premiere in February in Dallas, at the Pretty Scary Blood Bath Film Festival. Hagins, who is in high school but has made two feature films -- and is also the subject of the documentary Zombie Girl -- will be at the screening. The cast includes local film writer/artist John Gholson and filmmakers Kat Candler and Kristopher Aaron Morgan, with a score by Brian Satterwhite (Artois the Goat).
  • Alamo Drafthouse's schedule for the next couple of months is now available, and we're adding many of the events to the Slackerwood event calendar now, but I wanted to point out one new series: Cinema Club, which will feature classic films and include discussions with local film historians. The "discussions" aspect might have made me wary, but they're starting the series on Jan. 31 with the Ernst Lubitsch film Ninotchka, a favorite of mine. University of Texas film professor Charles Ramirez-Berg will introduce and discuss the film, and since I took several of his classes, I can vouch that it will not be stuffy or boring. Save the date.
  • Check out Joe M. O'Connell's list of the top Texas film news he's covered in the past decade.
  • Then head over to Austin360 for a list of landmark Austin movie-related events from the 2000s, whether they're related to moviemaking or movie-showing.
  • Finally, occasional Slackerwood contributor Anne Heller has just started a new website: Exploitation Cine Digest. She's posted some of her many videos of filmmakers and actors from Alamo events, including Quentin Tarantino at Cinemapocalypse Austin and Sybil Danning.