Film Festivals

It's a big night at the Paramount, of course, with Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Grace is Gone lighting up the big screen at the Bullock, but it's also your last chance to see a couple of the really great films that may not be coming to your local cineplex soon. Heck, you could spend the whole night at the Dobie and be supremely entertained:

America Unchained - in this amusing doc, a British gent decides to try driving a 1970 Torino station wagon from L.A. to New York without eating, sleeping, or tanking up at a chain restaurant/hotel/gas station. It's this last that becomes really difficult. A great audience flick. 6:00 p.m., Dobie.

First Saturday in May - There's a lot of buzz around this documentary about the Kentucky Derby, and rightfully so: it speaks from an insider's perspective and keeps things interesting by never letting the story rest for long. Even if horses aren't your thing, any sort of sports enthusiast should check this out. 7:45 p.m., Dobie.

Blood Car - In the very near future, gas is up to $30 and an enterprising young vegan inadvertently invents an engine that runs on blood. If you're thinking Roger Corman blood and guts and unpleasantness, you're half right -- it's all played for laughs, and rather successfully. If you're any kind of comedy or horror enthusiast, this is a can't-miss. 9:30 p.m., Dobie.

Tickets are $8 at the door. Visit austinfilmfestival.com for more information.

"Best bet" articles about film festivals always seem like such a raw deal -- sure, you're hearing about the big splashy films, but what about the undiscovered gems that will fill only half the theater? They deserve better. So here in chronological order are some of my picks for films that deserve your attention more than the big studio previews playing at the Paramount. (You'll be able to see those movies in a few months at the multiplex anyway, right?)

If human interest stories are your thing, turn your attention to Owl and the Sparrow tonight at 7, part of the Viet Film Wave series. If historical biopix are more your thing, check out Neal Cassady, which traces the life of Cassady "as he goes from his trip with Jack Kerouac on the road to literary stardom, a friendship with Ken Kesey and membership in the Merry Pranksters, toward a downward spiral into drugs and self loathing."

Need something with a little more oomph? Check out Bloody Aria at the Dobie (kind of a Korean Wrong Turn but with a decent screenplay) or the more uplifting The Go-Getter at the Bob Bullock. Ah, Zooey Deschanel ....

If you're in a documentary kind of mood, check out local filmmaker Anne Lewis' film Morristown, which examines the plight of migrant workers in a global economy.

Night owls should check out the Troma-esque Street Team Massacre at the Hideout.

All shows are $8 at the door or buy your film pass ($35 for unlimited films!) or badge at the Driskill Hotel.

If you're a film geek, September and October are pretty great months to live in Austin. Within the space of five weeks there will be nearly five hundred different features and shorts on display, many of them well outside the mainstream and which won't be screening again in Austin for months -- if ever. Here's a quick guide to the three big festivals of the Fall in the capital of Texas.

Fantastic Fest (Sept. 20-27)

In their words: "Fantastic Fest is a week-long festival featuring the best in new science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation, crime, Asian, and all around badass cinema."

What they play: Fantastic Fest has tighter focus than its cousins and (potentially) more bang for the buck if you're into genre film. Fantastic Fest is the place to see the weird, the wonderful, the what-the-eff-was-that movies of the yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Claim to fame: Organized by Tim and Karrie League of the Alamo Drafthouse and programmed by such guiding lights as Matt Dentler (SxSW), Lars Nilsen (Weird Wednesday), and Harry Knowles (Ain't It Cool News), Fantastic Fest has geek cred coming out the wazoo. The Leagues pull out all the stops to get the festival's filmmakers into town for the show. If the names Bruce Campbell and Shusuke Kaneko aren't familiar, however, you might not care about the celebrity-types wandering the Alamo halls during this festival. Though I guess Mel Gibson did pull a surprise appearance last year, so who knows?

Visit the Fantastic Fest website.

I forgot to mention in Movies This Week that the Seguin Film and Arts Festival takes place this weekend. In fact, the fun started last night with a screening of Rear Window (for some weird reason, they weren't allowed to announce the title, but I assume that I've guessed the correct "Hitchcock thriller starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly"). If you're looking for some alternative film choices today, you might want to make the drive (it's about the same distance as San Antonio).

Here's the film schedule: Today (Saturday), you can enjoy a number of short films during the day -- I haven't seen any of them myself but they sound entertaining. Most were shot in Texas. Tonight at 9 pm, the festival will screen several classic horror movies: Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness (more of a cult film really), and House on Haunted Hill, which will be accompanied by a few locally made horror shorts. The evening event is a fundraiser for a proposed festival award to be given in memory of the late art director and Seguin resident Robert A. Burns (the 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator). On Sunday, the festival will show more short films, including a Spanish-language lineup. You can buy a festival pass for $15, which is about as cheap as it gets.

The Seguin festival sounds like fun, and I kind of regret that this year it takes place right at the end of Austin Fall Film Fest Madness, because otherwise it might have been a nice getaway weekend for us. Maybe next year, since I noticed that Austin Film Festival's 2007 dates are a week earlier than 2006 (and I'm wondering how that will affect aGLIFF and other fests ... guess we'll find out next summer).

The locally made feature film Gretchen, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, has been added to the Los Angeles Film Festival lineup. Gretchen was directed by local filmmaker Steve Collins as an expansion of his short film Gretchen and the Night Danger.

I was surprised and pleased by the film about an awkward teenage girl when I saw it at SXSW. I was impressed by the cinematography from the ubiquitous P.J. Raval, as well as the music by Graham Reynolds (who also scored A Scanner Darkly). If you're going to LAFF at the end of June, the film is well worth seeing.

If you're in Austin, you also may get a chance to see Gretchen soon -- I ran into the Screen Door Film guys earlier this week, and they told me that they're planning to host a screening of the movie in the next couple of months.

[via Back to Me]

Kat Candler's film Jumping Off Bridges, which premiered at SXSW this year, will screen at Texas State University in San Marcos this Friday, April 21. The university's newspaper, The University Star, includes a good profile of Candler.

The screening is part of the new Chatauqua Film Festival, which I didn't know about until I read the above-mentioned profile. The two-day festival starts today (Thursday) and includes panels and short films as well as Jumping off Bridges, Rescue Me, and Alas! Poor Yorick. Refer to the University Star article for specific times and locations.