New Releases

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." 
--Mark Twain

This statement is a perfect metaphor for the documentary The Imposter, which screened at SXSW 2012 and returns to Austin theaters on Friday. The Imposter tells the story of Nicholas Barclay and Frederic Bourdin. Nicholas is a boy from San Antonio who disappeared one day in 1994 after playing basketball with friends. Frederic is a serial imposter who in 1997 managed to convince Barclay's family as well as authorities in Spain and the U.S. that he was Nicholas. This story would make an interesting piece of fiction if it were not true. It definitely makes for an interesting documentary.

The movie was directed by Bart Layton, who is known for creating the British TV series Locked Up Abroad. Layton's extensive experience making documentaries shows in this movie, his first feature. The Imposter uses a style similar to the one found in Locked Up Abroad (yes, I have seen a few). Extensive use of interviews as well as re-creations of events breathe life into Barclay and Bourdin's joint story.

Written and directed by Peter Hedges (Dan in Real Life), The Odd Life of Timothy Green stars Jennifer Garner as Cindy Green and Joel Edgerton as Jim Green, a young couple who reside in idyllic small-town Stanleyville. Cindy works at the pencil museum owned by the austere Ms. Crudstaff (Dianne Wiest) and Tim works in a failing pencil factory ran by arrogant Franklin Crudstaff (Ron Livingston).

The story begins with the Greens pleading to adopt a child, by sharing a fantastical story with adoption agency staff. The Greens have tried unsuccessfully to have a child. Devastated by the news that they've exhausted all possibilities to conceive a child, they deal with their grief by fantasizing what their child would have been like. They write down all the qualities and achievements their imaginary child would have, including "love and be loved" and "scoring the winning goal." The Greens put the notes into a box and bury it in their garden.

A freak rainstorm occurs over their house in the middle of the night, and they discover that the garden has produced an unnatural harvest a la Tom Thumb-- a 10-year-old boy named Timothy (CJ Adams) who calls them Mom and Dad. Timothy seems like a normal boy, with the exception of several leaves growing from him. He also exhibits all the qualities they'd envisioned, although some of the literal translation is vaguely reminiscent of but less gruesome than W. W. Jacob's short horror story, "The Monkey's Paw."

Is an action movie really an action movie if only a third of it moves at a fast pace? The Bourne Legacy is the slowest of that genre I've seen in a while. The overwhelming sense of urgency woven into the earlier trilogy is missing in this new addition to the franchise. Unfortunately, also missing is any convincing reason for the audience to root for the new protagonist, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner).

Like Jason Bourne, Aaron Cross is part of a covert operation by the U.S. government. Elements of The Bourne Ultimatum (even exact scenes) show up in The Bourne Legacy as these ops are about to be exposed. Cross is involved in Outcome, a program which doses former soldiers with viral pills to increase their smarts and physicality and make them super-spies or something like. Retired Col. Eric Byer (Edward Norton with gray hair), afraid that the secrets of the Department of Defense's program will soon come to light, decides to end the program.

"War has rules, mud wrestling has rules -- politics has no rules."
--Ross Perot

This quote opens the new movie The Campaign, directed by Jay Roach of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents series. Scripted by Chris Henchy (Land of the Lost) and Shawn Harwell (Eastbound & Down), this raunchy political comedy takes Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis through an escalating battle of wills guided by the Perot quote.

Though the humor is tongue-in-cheek, there is no pretense at subtlety in this film. Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow play the Motch brothers, parodies of real-life industrialists the Koch brothers. Hoping to profit from the passage of unprecedented labor and environmental laws in Congress, the pair decide to back Zach Galifianakis' Marty Huggins in a race against previously unopposed candidate Cam Brady (Will Ferrell). Thus begins a rivalry that takes the pair through such incidents as baby punching and snake dancing.

While aiming a very sardonic mirror at the American electorate and electoral process, The Campaign concerns itself with a focus on the undue influence of money in the politics of both parties and switches around the stereotypical roles of each party. As Cam Brady, Ferrell looks and spouts rhetoric vaguely like a caricature of Republican George W Bush, though the character is a Democrat. His opponent Marty Huggins, though Republican, dresses and acts like the misfit lovechild of Stuart Smalley and Leslie Jordan and speaks up for the little guys.

Driven by their campaign managers (Jason Sudeikis and an aggressively sleazy Dylan McDermott), the candidates find their poll numbers go up each time they commit increasingly objectionable acts and alienate their families.

Between Talladega Nights and The Campaign, Will Ferrell has shown he gives some of his best performances playing rednecks and Southerners. He's hilarious in this movie, as is Galifianakis. Some of the funniest moments, however, are in scenes with the supporting cast. Karen Maruyama and Jack McBrayer in particular steal the show. Well timed for release in the middle of a national election season, The Campaign is a refreshing and hilarious look at politics that doesn't devolve into political rhetoric.

Through his 30 years in the art world and his concurrent works of activism, Chinese native Ai Weiwei has become a larger-than-life figure. We have a tendency to almost canonize people who work for the betterment of their societies (see: Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa), and I admit I had started thinking of Ai in this fashion. The movie Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry reminds us that there is most definitely a man, foibles and all, behind the works of art and activism.

American director Alison Klayman's first film documents a few years (2008-2011) in the life of Ai. The Chinese artist is interviewed by various media, as well as the director, throughout the documentary. We are told some of his family history -- his dad, poet Ai Qing, suffered persecution and imprisonment by the Chinese government through large chunks of his life.  This gives some background into Ai's determination to make noise and be heard (also, it seems watching the Iran Contra hearings on TV while he lived in NYC made a large impact on him as well). "Chinese law is a big joke," he tells the camera at one point.

Ai Weiwei really burst into the international spotlight with his work on the Bird's Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics, followed by his outspoken refusal to attend the 2008 Olympics in his home country. The audience is shown glimpses of his artistic process for a few of his works. "I mainly make the decisions," he says, leaving assistants to do further work on his pieces.

An important rule in film criticism is to review the movie you saw, not the one you wanted to see.  That's ironic, since the hero of Total Recall is a guy who gets into trouble for trying to have his fantasies implanted in his brain as memories and thus experience what he wanted to see. It's also a relatively impossible rule to follow for a film that is itself a reimagining of something as iconic as Paul Verhoeven's 1990 adaptation of the 1976 Philip K. Dick story 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.'  The number one question in every fan's mind is "Will it be as good?"

So, a little background refresher about one of my all-time favorite films, which I will assume you have seen at least once. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a miner on Earth who nightly dreams that he is on Mars with an exotic beautiful woman who is definitely not his wife. Frustrated by his boring life, Quaid visits a business called Rekall that performs mind-altering procedures to create the memories of a vacation at a fraction of the cost of a real trip to Mars. However, it is discovered before the secret-agent portion of his memory implant is completed that Quaid actually IS a secret agent from Mars whose mind has been altered to keep him safely out of commission. Immediately attacked by his handlers, including his "wife," he escapes and travels to Mars, where he meets the beautiful girl from his dreams, Mileena. Together, they uncover the plot of evil Martian dictator Vilos Cohaagen who controls the air supply. After uncovering the remainder of Quaid's memories with the help of the telepathic leader of the Martian resistance, they activate an alien terraforming machine that frees the people from reliance on Cohaagen's air.

Verhoeven's tale expanded Dick's short story, which was more cerebral with little action, into a blockbuster adventure that originally was to receive a rating of X for extreme violence until shots were re-edited. For the 2012 re-adaptation, Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet, The Thomas Crown Affair, Sphere) and Mark Bomback (Unstoppable, Live Free or Die Hard) have penned a screenplay directed by Len Wiseman (Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard) that removes many of the most fantastic elements replacing them with a solidly earthbound plot. Total Recall is an action-packed homage to Verhoeven's 1990 film, painted with a visual palette mixture of Ridley Scott, Luc Besson and Spielberg's Minority Report. The stunning visuals and superb score by Harry Gregson-Williams, however, can't fill the empty pit resulting from the removal of the Martian plotline.

I'm all for romance and comedy, but I've never been a fan of romantic comedies. My problem with them lies less in the concept than the execution; most rom-coms are clichéd, formulaic, dumbed-down and totally unrealistic exercises in bad filmmaking. They tell script-by-committee stories wholly detached from the mundane and sometimes harsh realities of real-life dating, with pretty-faced actors portraying characters unlike anyone I know.

So, given that I'm less than smitten with the genre, you may be shocked -- shocked -- to learn that I like Ruby Sparks.

Not totally, mind you, and perhaps somewhat grudgingly. But Ruby Sparks is sufficiently charming, funny, observant and clever that I'll forgive its occasional forays into predictability. It's also about far more than relationships, a rare quality in movies of the romantic persuasion.

Ruby Sparks's story isn't new, but it feels unexpectedly fresh. Successful but lonely novelist Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) creates a female character, the titular Ruby (Zoe Kazan, also the film's screenwriter), who miraculously springs to life. She suddenly appears in his house as an incarnation of the ideal girlfriend of his literary fantasies -- among other things, she's painfully cute and a gourmet cook. While the long-single Calvin knows her only from the pages of a manuscript, she acts as if they've been dating for some time.

As an alumnus of both SXSW Film Festival and Fantastic Fest, I've seen many disturbingly provocative films over the years that I've unintentionally and thankfully forgotten. However, there are those emotionally and mentally intense films that are forever burned into my memory, often surfacing just enough in my brain to psychoanalyze before locking away into a dark corner.

Most of all, it's the 2006 Fantastic Fest selection Bug that I still ponder over perception versus reality. Based on the play by Pulitzer award-winning winner Tracy Letts and directed by William Friedkin, the psychological thriller centers around a  veteran who holes up with a lonely woman in a run-down Oklahoma motel room. What's reality and what's imagination is unclear as the couple discovers a bug infestation. Friedkin contacted Letts after seeing the play, and the two collaborated on the screen adaptation. Friedkin has described the movie as "the most intense piece of work I've ever done."

Killer Joe reunites Letts and Friedkin in another stage-to-screen adaptation, as the play Killer Joe ran off-Broadway in 1998 for nine months. This darkly humorous and gut-wrenching film focuses on a young criminal, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), whose gambling debts endanger his life. He schemes to put a hit on his evil mother and collect the insurance payout, with the intent to split the money with his mentally challenged sister Dottie (Juno Temple), dim-witted father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and new stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon). Chris enlists the services of dirty cop and hitman Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey) to do the job for them.

Superbad writers Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen teamed up with Bolt writer Jared Stern, Saturday Night Live writer-director Akiva Schaffer, and of course a band of familiar faces for the late-summer movie The Watch. Late-summer films have a strange tendency and can go either way when it comes to their quality. Last summer had a slew of pleasant late-summer surprises in Return of the Planet of the Apes, Fright Night and Shark Night 3D. But 2011 didn't deliver any films as huge as The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, so this crew might have a very tall task on their hands here.

Starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade (whom fans of The IT Crowd will of course recognize), The Watch centers on small-town do-gooder and busybody Evan Trautwig (Stiller), a general manager of a Costco. He lives an innocuous existence in what he calls the greatest city in the greatest country on the greatest planet: Glenview, Ohio. When his world is turned upside down after his store security guard is brutally murdered, Evan puts together a neighborhood watch group composed of the most ragtag individuals possible. While on the search, they discover that the killer they're searching for is a creature from another planet.

Even though Drafthouse Films, the film distribution arm of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas that started here in Austin, is brand new, they've certainly made an indelible mark on the world of independent film. They haven't distributed many films, but it's easy to see that you can't lump their films into one genre. Drafthouse Films just releases films they think should be seen,  from an Academy-Award-nominated foreign drama to a downright silly film based on Dance Dance Revolution battles. This time, the folks over at Drafthouse Films bring moviegoers Klown (Klovn: The Movie), a film based on the Danish sitcom of the same name.

The sitcom was filmed in a similar style to The Office and has a pretty decent sized following. The movie follows the sitcom's characters, Frank (Frank Hvam) and Casper (Casper Christensen), as they go off on a canoeing and camping trip where Frank can prove to his girlfriend that he's ready to be a father, and happily married Casper can find some women to sleep with.

What sounds like an innocent road-trip comedy is anything but. Klown is incredibly vulgar and may not be for everybody, but it is great and nothing less should be expected from Drafthouse Films.