New Releases

If some films are smart, Sleepwalk with Me is NPR smart.

I call comedian Mike Birbiglia's terrific new comedy "NPR smart" for two reasons. First, the film is awash in the sort of sophisticated wit, wry observations and cultural relevance that make National Public Radio a welcome refuge for discerning radio listeners. Sleepwalk with Me has a very NPR-ish sensibility, playing like a mashup of the funniest lines from shows like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! and Car Talk (albeit without all the cackling).

The second reason why Sleepwalk with Me is NPR smart is that Birbiglia had the astonishingly good sense to enlist public radio god Ira Glass as a co-writer. (Glass hosts NPR staple This American Life, which co-produced the movie.) Birbiglia, Glass and co-writers Joe Birbiglia and Seth Barrish have delivered one of the funniest and brainiest films of the year.

Based on Mike Birbiglia's off-Broadway show and bestselling book, Sleepwalk with Me is the story of aspiring comic Matt Pandamiglio (Birbiglia), whose life and stand-up career are equally frustrating. "Career" is a generous term; Matt sometimes delivers short comedy routines -- and always bombs -- at the club where he tends bar. His relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Abby (Lauren Ambrose), has reached a critical juncture under pressure from friends and family to get married and start a family.

"Fixed-gear, no brakes, can't stop, don't want to either" -- Watching Premium Rush, my first thought was that it seemed somehow familiar. That may be because it brought to mind the short-lived 1995 sitcom Double Rush, which featured an opening-credit sequence shot by Spike Jonze. Watch it at the end of this review and compare it with the Premium Rush trailer. Purely coincidence, no shared DNA here besides the shared bike messenger subject material, but an interesting comparison.

Eighteen years later, David Koepp has directed an exciting flick that unlike its sitcom sister takes place almost entirely on two wheels. Written by Koepp and John Kamps, who previously collaborated on Zathura, the movie Premium Rush takes its name from the highest-priority delivery service (just like Double Rush). The story centers around one particularly important delivery and the efforts Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Wilee must make to see it through to the destination.

What should be a simple pickup and dropoff is complicated by a rival messenger who wants to steal Wilee's girlfriend, a bicycle cop who wants to shut him down and one very bad villain who wants the contents of that envelope. Michael Shannon plays this last role with frightening intensity. If he had looked straight at the camera, I would have feared to look back.

Wilee is a live-fast, party-hard anti-establishment hipster law school graduate who refuses to take the bar exam because he doesn't want to live his life stuck behind a desk.  He almost never stops moving through a film that looks as slick as a Fedex commercial. It's a great role for Gordon-Levitt, though the impressive bike riding involved the support of five doubles (one for stunts/crashes, one for tricks, etc.) collectively making him look like the Superman of bike riding.

Unfortunately, the conclusion of Premium Rush, after so much action, slows to a crawl and puts back on the training wheels. The promise of a "flash mob" yields something somewhat less satisfying (read: underwhelming) and the best stunts are confined to the middle of the film.  So, this movie isn't quite a "'premium" experience, though it's still fun, light-hearted entertainment with some great action.

Cosmopolis has confirmed my suspicions that while David Cronenberg's films are interesting, some of them would be far more interesting if they didn't implode under their own heavy-handed dreariness.

I tried to like Cronenberg's latest venture into relentless cinematic oppressiveness, hoping I would enjoy it the way I enjoyed the director's Eastern Promises and Crash, or at least find it as intriguing as A Dangerous Method. But while I'm a fan of dark films, Cosmopolis exceeded even my tolerance for movies that explore the bleaker aspects of human nature.

Based on a Don DeLillo novel, Cosmopolis has a simple premise: 28-year-old billionaire asset manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson, sans fangs) takes a limo ride across Manhattan in search of a haircut. While stuck in traffic due to a Presidential visit and violent street protests, Packer's ride turns into something of a nightmare. Protesters attack the limo, and he encounters an odd cast of characters who ruin his world as the day drags into night.

And that's really all there is to Cosmopolis, much of which happens within the ultra-swank confines of Packer's ultra-stretch limo, a none-too-subtle symbol of Wall Street excess.

After a three-year wait, festival favorite The Revenant finally hits theaters today in a limited release that includes Austin. Director D. Kerry Prior won the Best Director Award at Fantastic Fest in 2009 (my podcast interview). At the time Prior mentioned he still had the challenge of securing distribution for his feature as well as finalizing visual effects. After a successful festival run, Prior re-cut portions of The Revenant to tighten up this dark comedy. The final cut enhances the darkness of this genre-defying film while ensuring its placement in the hall of "must-see" movies of the undead nature.

The Revenant centers around Bart Gregory (David Anders), a soldier who is killed in Iraq during a nighttime ambush. Bart is laid to rest as his best friend Joey (Chris Wylde) and girlfriend Janet (Louise Griffiths) mourn his death ... only it turns out that Bart isn't done with living. He reunites with Joey, who helps him make the best of his undead state. What ensues is an oddball execution of securing blood for Bart to consume so that he can "survive" as a non-glamorous and moldering walking corpse referred to as a revenant. After stumbling into a convenience store hold-up, the duo decide to kill two birds with one stone by taking out criminals in LA including drug dealers, rapists and robbers.

Prior pulls from his background in special effects to deliver great horror by relying very little on CGI and mostly on digital compositing. Practical effects were implemented as well. One particular visual effect early in The Revenant that had me cringing even during a second viewing is that of an embalmed Bart cutting through the threads of his stitched lips.

Escaping one's past is not an easy task, especially in the film industry. Many actors, writers and directors find themselves pigeonholed into a specific genre from which escape appears impossible. Others are stuck with moviegoers' preconceived negative expectations of their movies. For example, I've been flabbergasted by the relentless bashing of Uwe Boll (Rampage, Attack on Darfur).

Actor/filmmaker Dax Shepard is another actor/filmmaker who suffers from the same stereotyping as Boll. Despite his success in the television series Parenthood, it doesn't help that Shepard got his start as Ashton Kutcher's stooge in the MTV hidden-camera show Punk'd, along with roles in Let's Go to Prison and Without a Paddle.

Shepard received little critical acclaim for his directorial debut: the 2010 mockumentary Brother's Justice, in which he pretends to change genres from comedy to martial-arts action films. Expectations for his latest project, the road-chase movie Hit and Run -- which Shepard wrote, directed, edited and starred in -- have been low. However, Shepard demonstrates that he is capable of maturing as a writer when he focuses on drama rather than comedy.

One of the many enviable things Rod did at San Diego Comic-Con last month was to catch a sneak preview of the movie Lawless. In his review, he said, "Lawless is your chance to root for bootleggers with hearts of golden moonshine." The film stars Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman and Shia LeBeouf.

Slackerwood is giving you the chance to find out if you agree with Rod by attending one of two free Lawless preview screenings:

• Saturday, August 25 at 7 pm at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar
• Monday, August 27 at 7:30 pm at Alamo on South Lamar

After the jump, you'll find promotional codes and links to the Gofobo website where you can enter the code to get an admit-two pass for the screening of your choice. These are a first-come, first-served passes and seating is not guaranteed. If you've been to preview screenings, you know that often more tickets are given out than there are seats, so you'll want to arrive early to stake out a good spot in line.

Author Matt Bondurant, who wrote the book on which Lawless is based (The Wettest County in the World) will be at the Saturday night screening, which means it may be more exciting but of course will also be more popular ... you'll want to get there even earlier than usual.

Rod described Lawless in his review in a way I can't top: "From run-ins with the law, a thirst for fast cars, a hunger for success and a love of family, Lawless weaves a story of brotherly love and angst told in the context of the gritty world of moonshiners." The movie opens in Austin on Wednesday, August 29.

The Expendables started as an idea, albeit a simple one: Gather all the greatest action movie stars in one movie. It'll be bloody, fun and filled with more bullets than should ever be shot by one group of men at another. But for some, The Expendables didn't deliver. There was way too much dead space and odd pacing, and although the action was good, it certainly wasn't special or on the level promised by the prospect of so much bullet-ridden testosterone. It was almost too cerebral, like it didn't want to perpetuate whatever dismissive stereotypes a more sophisticated moviegoer would label this idea.

Yet the idea was good enough that massive amounts of potential still existed for a film like this to succeed on a level that would make the inner blood-hungry teenager in all of us emit delightful, girly squees. Enter The Expendables 2. Same premise, only this time, more of the greatest of the great would be added to the cast. Greats like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, who would have bigger roles than the cameos in the first film, plus Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme, who actually turned down an offer to be in the first film.

The plot is paper thin, and it's not necessary to have seen the first movie to gather what's going on. A CIA operative, Church (Bruce Willis) lays it out in one scene after the insanely bullet-riddled opening of the film. Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his crew are to retrieve a case from a safe stashed inside a gunned down airplane in Albania. The contents of the case aren't any of Ross's business, but it will clear up all of his debts to Church and band of psychotic mutts that are The Expendables will be free to live their lives doing what it is they do best.

ParaNorman begins with one of the coolest and most unusual scenes ever to appear in what to all outward appearances is a kid's movie, a stop-motion zombie film-within-a-film that itself demonstrates the potential for the animation technique that has yet to be unlocked.

This is just one of many ways in which Laika’s latest production charms and deceives. Beginning with Henry Selick’s award-winning Moongirl, (which played at Fantastic Fest in 2005) and continuing with Coraline in 2009, Laika is building a body of work that marks them as potentially doing for stop-motion what Pixar did for CGI while incidentally making them a much smaller, quirkier competitor.

Yes, ParaNorman is a family-friendly film, but with a sensibility and story that will appeal to adults as much as to their children. Dark humor and creepy moments abound, but the script is full of good chuckles delivered by a talented cast of newcomers supported by extremely notable side characters. Kodi Smit-McPhee, as the title character Norman, steps in from the supremely dark Let Me In to a more kid-friendly role. His pal in the film, Neil is voiced by Tucker Albrizzi, who has a sizable body of TV work but appears for the first time in a feature film here. Rounding out the main cast are Anna Kendrick and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. That supporting cast includes veterans John Goodman, Casey Affleck, Alex Borstein, Bernard Hill and Elaine Stritch.

Written by Chris Butler, who co-directed with Sam Fell, there is more than just a creepy, funny film about witches and zombies here.  ParaNorman contains a strong message about bullying among children and why many do it.  As a kid obsessed with the macabre who can talk to ghosts, Norman is victimized daily by schoolmate Alvin (Mintz-Plasse). His friend Neil with good-natured innocence explains matter-of-factly how he lets taunts and insults roll off his back. He unknowingly gives Norman the perspective he needs to save the day and become a hero.

The long-standing Middle Eastern religious wars are unlikely inspirations for comedy. Bathed in bloodshed and seemingly endless, the strife between religious factions is no laughing matter; it is difficult to make a serious film about the ongoing tragedy, much less a funny one.

So it's to filmmaker Nadine Labaki's great credit that the absurdly comic Where Do We Go Now? (Et maintenant on va où?) works so well. The Lebanese writer/director/actress has delivered a quirky, tragic and bitterly funny movie -- complete with musical numbers -- that finds humor without lessening the impact of unspeakable horror.

Where Do We Go Now? is set in a remote, dusty, crumbling Lebanese village where Christians and Muslims have been battling for what seems like forever; thanks to frequent violence, the town appears to have more dead residents than live ones. In relatively peaceful times, both sides seem to focus on their common interests, such as watching grainy, static-filled TV broadcasts on a village hilltop and hanging out in a café owned by the film's central character, Amale (Labaki). A Christian, Amale has an obvious crush on Rabih (Julian Farhat), a Muslim painter who is renovating the café.

Tensions have been rising lately, with each side blaming the other for acts of vandalism at the village mosque and Christian church. News of armed conflicts elsewhere in Lebanon further inflames the situation, and soon the villagers see their temporary truce evaporating.

"Sugar man you're the answer/That makes my questions disappear"
--Sixto Rodriguez

For two South Africans, the song lyrics they had heard for years, like the ones above, only prompted more questions. Who was this musician who wrote lyrics about a drug addict's love for his dealer? Were the rumors about his committing suicide onstage true, or was he still alive? Their curiosity led them on a years-long journey across continents, documented in the visually stunning albeit flawed film Searching for Sugar Man, which opens in Austin today.

Swedish director Malick Bendjelloul's Sundance award-winning documentary discusses Sixto Rodriguez's musical beginnings playing in dive bars in Detroit, where he was discovered (playing guitar and singing with his back turned to the audience) and subsequently signed to a two-album contract with Sussex and A&R Records.