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Slackery News Tidbits: March 24, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • The historic Dobie Theatre, located in the Dobie Center mall off the University of Texas campus, is scheduled to reopen after renovations as a first-run movie house by the end of this year, Austin Business Journal reports. The four-screen theater closed in 2010 and was the original home for Austin Film Society screenings.
  • A production company behind last year's Austin-shot, action-comedy Machete Kills filed a request with Travis County District Judge Scott Jenkins for an injunction against the current rules regarding applications for the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, according to The Austin Chronicle. Machete Productions argues that the movie met all reasonable criteria for the fund, and that it should be eligible for a reimbursement from the state for the $10 million in qualified spending. The company's attorney says its application was denied because of "inappropriate content." A hearing date has not yet been set.
  • Machete Kills co-writer/director Robert Rodriguez commented on the lawsuit, posted on Austin Movie Blog. Rodriguez says he is in no way affiliated with Machete Productions and that this financier was made well aware that Machete Kills would not qualify for a production incentive. He goes on to say that he will not be cooperating with the company, does not approve of the lawsuit and stands with Texas. 
  • In festival news, the Hill Country Film Festival recently announced three of its official selections: Austin filmmaker Andrew Disney's comedy Intramural, which makes its world premiere during Tribeca Film Festival next month; the SXSW 2014 world premiere Before I Disappear (Don's review), chronicling a day-in-the-life of a suicidal New Yorker forced to babysit his precocious niece; and the documentary Lord Montagu, co-scripted by Bradley Jackson, who also produced Intramural. The Fredericksburg festival, which takes place April 30-May 4, will announce the remainder of this year's fifth anniversary lineup later today.

Slackery News Tidbits: March 17, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

Slackery News Tidbits: March 3, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • The Austin-shot film Hellion has been acquired for US distribution by Sundance Selections (via Hollywood Reporter). The movie premiered at Sundance this year and will screen at SXSW. Read Debbie's review and her interview with filmmaker Kat Candler.
  • At the Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, the Robert Altman Award went to Mud (Debbie's review), from Austin filmmaker Jeff Nichols (via Indiewire). The award is given to a director and ensemble cast -- for Mud, the cast includes Austin actor Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan (Joe) and Reese Witherspoon. In addition, McConaughey took home the Best Actor award for his role in Dallas Buyers Club (Caitlin's review).
  • But that wasn't all for McConaughey, who also won an Academy Award last night for Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club.
  • In Alamo Drafthouse news, Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez's El Rey Network has partnered with the Drafthouse to screen the premiere episode of From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, a television adaptation of his 1996 cult film From Dusk Till Dawn, on Tuesday, March 11 at nine Drafthouse markets across the country to coincide with its television premiere at 8 pm that day, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Drafthouse founder and CEO Tim League will host a live Q&A with Rodriguez and the series cast following the Austin screening at Alamo Slaughter. This Q&A will be livestreamed into other participating Drafthouse theaters and on the El Rey Network YouTube channel. The Austin-shot From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series will be the first scripted original series to air on Rodriguez's new cable network.

Slackery News Tidbits: February 24, 2013

in

Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • The Fifth Annual RxSM Self-Medicated Film Expo will take place March 6-13 at various locations around Austin. The free festival will feature more than 130 movies at four venues that honor "edgy, boundary-expanding storytelling," like the East Texas-shot documentary Little Hope Was Arson (Elizabeth's dispatch), which played at last year's Austin Film Festival, and native Dallasites Luke and Andrew Wilson's Satellite Beach, a short drama about the journey of two space shuttle transports. You can RSVP for the festival, which kicks off at the Spider House Chapel (2908 Fruth St.).
  • Speaking of AFF, their annual Oscar Prediction Contest is now open and will close on Sunday, March 2 at 6 pm, the start of the award show's telecast. The top five entrants who most closely predict the winners of the 86th Annual Academy Award winners will each win a Lone Star Badge to this year's festival and conference. 
  • The Alamo Drafthouse's South Lamar location and popular bar, The Highball, both of which closed in January 2013 (Rod's dispatch), will open this summer in the newly redeveloped Lamar Union complex at the previous address, according to Austin Movie Blog. The Highball, which will be adjacent to the movie theater, will feature karaoke rooms, a ballroom with dance floor and stage, a lounge area and an outdoor patio.

AFF Is Bringing Us Writers All Year Long

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AFF LogoAwards season is in full swing, and the Austin Film Festival, known for its recognition of screenwriters, announced last week that Academy Award-winning writer/director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) will receive this year's Distinguished Screenwriter Award, joining past award recipients Harold Ramis and Robert Altman, among others. Sheridan will accept the award at the fest's annual awards luncheon on Oct. 25 and will also speak on panels during the 2014 conference. 

Other confirmed panelists at the 21st annual AFF and Screenwriters Conference, which will take place Oct. 23-30, 2014, include writers and producers from such television series as Breaking Bad, Girls and Seinfeld and movies like Fight Club and Donnie Darko. Some of these industry insiders will be present for meet and greets and roundtables during the conference, as well. Read the full list of 2014 panelists at the bottom of this article.

But you don't have to wait until October to stay up to date on the movie industry. This Saturday, Beau Willimon -- creator of the Netflix Original Series House of Cards -- will discuss the show's creative process at 2 pm at the Harry Ransom Center through AFF's Conversation in Film Series

Slackery News Tidbits: February 17, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • Local filmmaker Richard Linklater won the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear award for best director for his long-awaited feature Boyhood, which chronicles the life of a child from age six to 18 and stars native Texan Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, Indiewire reports. University alumnus Wes Anderson's movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, slated to hit U.S. theaters March 7, also won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (a kind of runner-up to the Golden Bear for Best Picture).
  • Drafthouse Films-distributed documentary The Act of Killing (Elizabeth's review) took home the Best Documentary Feature award at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) ceremony on Sunday. The Best British Film award went to the movie Gravity, which stars Austin-based actress Sandra Bullock.
  • Variance Films has partnered with filmmaker Chris Eska to bring his feature The Retrieval (Don's review) to theaters this spring, according to Variety. The Civil War drama tells the story of a boy who is sent north by his bounty-hunter gang to retrieve a wanted man.
  • The Austin Film Society will host a special screening of From Dusk Till Dawn, about a duo of criminals and their hostages who unknowingly seek refuge in a bar populated by vampires, on Wednesday, March 5 at the Marchesa Hall & Theatre. Tickets go on sale Feb. 26. Actor Fred Williamson, who played Frost in the movie, will speak at AFS's Moviemaker Dialogue before the screening.

Review: Winter's Tale

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Winter's Tale PosterI have to be honest, I initially thought Winter's Tale was an adaptation of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, The Winter's Tale -- I hadn't heard of author Mark Helprin's 1983 novel, adapted into the new movie, until watching the trailer.

It's no coincidence that the movie made its U.S. theatrical debut on Valentine's Day -- a marketing ploy, of course, to get couples to hunker down in the dark for two-ish hours to watch actor Colin Farrell make love look even more confusing than it already is. This says something about Farrell, a chap whose real-life romantic mishaps have made headlines and had heads shaking (lest we forget his public outings with Britney Spears). 

And its hard to forget this in the aptly named Winter's Tale because Farrell plays the burglar-with-a-heart-of-gold, Peter Lake, so much like his public persona: greasy, strangely-cut hair and all... with an Irish accent. 

There really is no need for Peter to have an Irish accent because he was raised in New York City. The same can be said for the movie's female lead, Beverly Penn (Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay), whose convenient English accent is only briefly explained as a byproduct of her birth across the pond, despite her newspaper tycoon father's (William Hurt) American accent. 

But this is just the tip of the unexplained plot point iceberg in Winter's Tale

This trans-century romance begins on Ellis Island, where baby Peter is left in a model boat and sent afloat into New York Harbor by his parents, who are refused entrance into the country because of his father's supposed illness. Somehow, someway Peter becomes the unwilling scion of the Devil's (Will Smith) minion, Pearly (an over-earnest Russell Crowe). When Peter rejects Pearly as a father figure, he is hunted by even lesser minions and stumbles across a Pegasus-like horse, which he names Horse. How original. 

Oh, that's right, writer/director Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) is trying to shove theological and philosophical metaphors down audiences' throats. Of course, Horse acts as both spirit guide and guardian angel to Peter, and according to a Google search, there is a difference between the two terms. 

Justin Arnold on 'Love & Air Sex'

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Love and Air Sex posterPart-time Texan Justin Arnold credits his role as Levi in the indie drama 5 Time Champion as the reason why he had the opportunity to audition for former Austin Film Society staffer Bryan Poyser's latest movie Love & Air Sex, formerly called The Bounceback (Don's review), which opens a weeklong run tonight at Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter during the movie's nationwide roadshow.  

Poyser enjoyed 5 Time Champion, winner of the Texas Filmmaker Award at the 2011 Dallas International Film Festival, Arnold said. This and the friendship between Poyser and the movie's director, Berndt Mader, led to Arnold being cast in Poyser's comedy short The Fickle

"Bryan, he's the man," Arnold said. 

But that doesn't mean Arnold wasn't put through a rigorous audition process for Love & Air Sex

"(Poyser) put me on the hot seat for about two hours," he said. 

Arnold plays Tim in the Austin-shot comedy that premiered at SXSW 2013. It follows a group of twentysomethings looking for love during a weekend in the Live Music Capital of the World (and the soundtrack includes some toe-tappin' ditties by artists like Austinite Shakey Graves). 

And Arnold can relate to some extent to the movie's lead, an actor-turned-pizza-delivery-guy in Los Angeles. Not to say that he's struggling -- he has a number of movie's in post-production -- but he admits it took some time for him to find a day job, working for a veterinary clinic, when he moved to L.A. about a year ago. 

"L.A. is what you make of it," Arnold said optimistically. He recently moved into a new apartment with another actor not too far away from his Love & Air Sex costars Sara Paxton and Zach Cregger. Although Arnold didn't know any of the movie's cast prior to his 15 days on set, he said it eventually felt like home.

Slackery News Tidbits: February 10, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • The Texas Filmmaker's Showcase is now accepting entries to its annual short movie contest until April 1. Filmmakers whose projects are selected to participate in the showcase will be flown to Los Angeles in June for a screening of all chosen works and will have opportunities to meet various industry professionals. 
  • Gravitas Ventures has acquired the rights to Austin-based Hammer to Nail magazine editor and filmmaker Michael Tully's feature Ping Pong Summer, Indiewire reports. The coming-of-age comedy, based on Tully's own childhood experiences, premiered at Sundance (Debbie's review) and is scheduled for an early summer theatrical and digital release.
  • KLRU will air One Square Mile: Austin, an episode of the documentary television series One Square Mile: Texas, on Thursday at 8 pm. 
  • Dallas actor Barry Nash, star of the DFW area-shot movie Bob Birdnow's Remarkable Tale ..., won the Mississippi-based Oxford Film Festival's Special Jury Prize for Best Performance in a Narrative Feature for the drama. 

Slackery News Tidbits: February 3, 2014

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Here's the latest Austin and Texas film news.

  • The "completely insane" zom-com Buck Wild, which premiered at the Dallas International Film Festival and then screened at the Hill Country Film Festival (Jette's dispatch), has been acquired by Millenium Entertainment. This tongue-in-cheek buddy adventure, about a hunting vacation gone awry, is scheduled for a VOD/DVD release on March 18, with an early digital release on Feb. 18.
  • The Houston Film Commission is currently taking submissions for its annual Texas Filmmaker's Showcase of short films. Selected films are screened in Los Angeles in June, as well as at other venues in Texas.
  • Entries are now being accepted for the Austin Film Festival's Screenplay and Teleplay Competition. The final deadline is May 31.
  • In more AFF news, the AFF 2012 Official Selection Punk in Africa, which traces the multiracial punk movement in three countries, will screen at 9:35 pm on Feb. 10 at Alamo Ritz as part of the theater chain's Music Mondays series. The documentary is also scheduled for a DVD release March 11.
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