New Releases

Austin fans of actor Edward Norton (Fight Club, American History X) will be able to get a double -- or should I say triple -- dose of him this weekend with two major film events. Norton will be in town for the premiere of Stone at Fantastic Fest on Friday, September 24 at 7 pm -- a gala screening at the Paramount Theatre. He'll also be at Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz for the sold-out 8 pm showing of Leaves of Grass, which opens in Austin this weekend.

Don't assume Leaves of Grass is a "stoner comedy," as I almost did. This movie defies typecasting into one genre, as it ranges from comedy to drama to thriller. Norton stars as twin brothers -- Bill, a straight-laced Ivy League professor; and Brady, an uncultured pot grower in the backwoods of Oklahoma. Actor and director Tim Blake Nelson also wrote the screenplay, which is centered more around classical tragic themes in such a manner that viewers won't take long to forget that the characters are played by the same actor.

I sat down with several other film critics during SXSW this past March for a roundtable discussion with Norton and Nelson the day after Leaves of Grass played the fest. To find out why Nelson has inspired me to read classic Latin literature, read his and Norton's responses to our questions after the jump, and check out my review of the film appearing later this week:

When it was announced that the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In would be remade for American audiences, many responses were skeptical. The selection of Matt Reeves as director for Let Me In left fans and film critics conflicted. Cloverfield had such a distinct cinematographic style that many folks were left wondering if Reeves could possibly stay true to the spirit of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel on which the films are based, as well as meet the bar set by director Tomas Alfredson and Lindqvist's original screenplay. Let the Right One In was so compelling that I immediately followed up by enjoying the book, so my expectations for Let Me In -- this year's Fantastic Fest opening-night film -- were not very high. However, Reeves has delivered a worthy homage to the original movie while adding more emotion to the lead characters.

Let Me In focuses on Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a stereotypical young 98-pound weakling. The school bullies terrorize him on a daily basis, and the only person he could possibly confide in is his mother (Cara Buono) who drinks herself into a stupor every night. Instead he lies about injuries suffered at the hands of his attackers as he is subjected to public humilation.

When Abby (Chloe Moretz) moves in next door with her guardian, Owen befriends her despite her protestations. We quickly learn that she must consume blood to live, and that her guardian "Father" (Richard Jenkins) is charged with the precarious task of finding fresh blood sources on a regular basis. Father gets sloppy, and a frenzied Abby takes matters into her own hands, which jeopardizes their new home. Meanwhile Abby encourages Owen to stand up for himself and fight back. Although he succeeds in turning the tables on his tormentors, it backfires by making him the target of the head bully's older brother in a supernatural climax reminiscent of Carrie.

The opening image of Lebanon is bright and beautiful and tranquil, and yet strangely startling. The movie opens abruptly with a shot of a vast field of sunflowers under a brilliant sun, an image that lingers much longer than expected.

This image is a stark contrast to the rest of Lebanon, a violent and harrowing film about an Israeli tank crew in the First Lebanon War in 1982. All action in the film, which opens today at the Arbor, takes place inside the tank, a setting that could not be more distant from a sunny field of flowers.

Lebanon's story is compact, spanning only a day or so during the war's opening in June 1982. Amid the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, a lone tank and a platoon of paratroopers enter a bombed-out Lebanese town in search of remaining enemy forces. The tank crew expects the mission to be relatively easy -- defeating the assumedly weak resistance and occupying the town for a short time. It quickly turns into a nightmare, however, when they find themselves in a violent situation. The crew's somewhat naïve hopes for a quick victory disappear in a hail of gunfire and explosions, and their mission becomes one of mere survival. To reveal more about the story would spoil much of the astonishing dramatic tension.

The marketing campaign for the movie Catfish centers around "secrets" that are meant to intrigue you enough to see what's going on. It is suggested that people who have seen the film not spoil it by mentioning anything at all, not even the premise. If you like this way of seeing a movie, stop reading this review, and come back again after you've seen the film. I don't think that Catfish is the kind of movie that deserves a "the less you know, the better it is" review style. On the other hand, the more I think about it, the less I like it, so there may be some basis for that line of thought.

Nearly everyone is willing to share the film's setup: Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman share an office with photographer Nev Schulman, Ariel's brother. In 2008, Nev starts getting artwork in the mail -- paintings of his photos, and notes from an 8-year-old girl, Abby, who says she loves his photos and loves making art from them. Nev is interested, and starts a correspondence with Abby via the internet -- she sends him pictures and videos of her painting, he friends her entire family on Facebook. He also starts talking to some of Abby's family members on the phone. And then ... that's where I'm supposed to stop telling you about the storyline, lest I spoil anything.

That doesn't work for me. If you say "And then ..." and get all ominous, I am going to watch this film waiting for someone to leap out from the bushes with an axe. Or perhaps a chainsaw. I love going into movies knowing practically nothing (this is why you rarely see me writing about trailers; I like to avoid them), but somehow the lack of understanding what this movie was, and where it might go, was more annoying than thrilling. I truly was waiting for something brutal and fatal.

As The Town opens, a black screen with white quotes regarding the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown appears. This is "the town": the neighborhood of Charlestown in which, we are told, an extremely large percentage of armored truck/bank robbers reside.

Director/actor Ben Affleck's crime-romance movie follows two main storylines: bank robber Doug MacRay (Affleck) falling for bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as he tries to keep her from discovering too much, and Jon Hamm's FBI Agent Frawley as he endeavors to capture Doug's gang. Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner plays Doug's hot-tempered pal and crime partner James "Jem" Coughlin, and Gossip Girl's Blake Lively plays Coughlin's drugged-up kid sister Krista. Throw in Chris Cooper as Doug's jailed father, Irish indie favorite Pete Postlethwaite as a sadistic florist/drug dealer, and Titus Welliver (The Good Wife) as Frawley's FBI partner and you have a pretty stellar cast.

The stellar cast and their performances draw the viewer into the story. The Town isn't a dismal film, though it deals with dark issues (drugs, murder, and more). Affleck's smooth direction and the screenplay (by Affleck, Peter Craig, and Aaron Stockard, based on a book by Chuck Hogan) have a lot to do with this. At the point in the movie when Claire says to Doug, "On sunny days, I always think of someone dying," the line seems portentious, yet Hall's delivery is far from maudlin. Claire and Doug's connection is almost palpable, and Affleck is able to pull off a true anti-hero with this role. Doug has done some bad things, but Affleck keeps the character likable and the audience pulling for him.

Easy A (directed by Will Gluck, written by Bert V. Royal, starring Emma Stone, with Malcolm McDowell as the principal) is a surprisingly well-written and intelligent teen comedy with oh-so-many inside jokes and film references.

A high-school girl decides to pretend she and a gay male friend had sex at a party so her friend will stop being beaten up at school. However, her plan backfires when her reputation as a "loose lady" spreads all over. Soon, she is making money off her bad reputation by letting loser high school boys spread rumors of her various sexual exploits with them for varying retail gift card amounts -- $50 at Home Depot for saying there was a grope session behind the athletic field, $250 at Office Max for saying the deed was done in the back of Mom's car, etc.

Coincidentally, the protagonist Olive (Emma Stone) has a slight crush on her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), who is teaching The Scarlet Letter in her class.  He is rather paternalistically enamored of her as well, believing she is the one person in her class who has actually read The Scarlet Letter, although we see in various montages of clips from the silent movie version of The Scarlet Letter that Olive has only watched the oldest movie version of the book she could find.

The Great State of Oklahoma's female incarceration rate is the highest in the nation, and is more than twice the rate of any other state. This statistic says a lot about the state's conservative, law-and-order political climate. As Oklahoma State Senator Cal Hobson said, "Oklahoma leads America, and America leads the free world in incarceration."

This lock-'em-up mentality is the backdrop for Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, a powerful and bittersweet documentary about female inmates who compete in the 2007 Oklahoma State Penitentiary Rodeo. The film, opening today at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar, is at once an intimate portrait of prison life, a thrilling rodeo action film, and an astute sociological study of criminal justice in America.

From its stark opening shots of prison walls and handcuffed inmates dressed in rodeo cowboy garb, Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo is a familiar look at life behind bars and yet a thoroughly original story about inmates who, to experience an unlikely sort of freedom, risk serious injury and even death. We've all seen prison documentaries with the standard mix of dreary cellblock cinematography and drearier inmate interviews, and there is some of this familiar territory in Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo. Although the interviewees' life stories are very interesting, they're not new or surprising. What sets the film apart from other prison docs, however, is its sports drama-like, root-for-the-underdog storyline.

"Finally, the movie that Eat Pray Love should have been."
-- Slackerwood contributor Don Clinchy, immediately after watching Machete

I feel I can't really do Machete justice without channeling Joe Bob Briggs, the drive-in movie of Grapevine, Texas, and giving you a count on decapitations, bare breasts, nine kinds of fu, and other grisly types of fighting, wounding, and death. And tattoos. But Joe Bob, I am not.

I also wish I'd seen Machete in a drive-in theater, but we don’t really have those in Texas anymore -- not the old-fashioned kind, anyway, with the crappy speakers that hook onto your cars and the scary faraway bathrooms and all that. Since drive-ins are nearly extinct, Robert Rodriguez's latest flick will flourish with a big, receptive, rowdy audience for full enjoyment. Don’t wait for DVD. You want the kind of crowd you get at an Alamo Weird Wednesday, who can respect the movie while at the same time cheering and applauding for the best lines and the most creative kills.

However, while Machete was born to be a midnight movie, the movie is happily free of too much self-awareness of this fact, and avoids an excess of camp, apart from the occasional knowing wink to the 1970s exploitation films that inspired it.

There have been worries in recent years that the romantic comedy genre is dead or dying. Going the Distance could prove that theory wrong; the amusing romantic comedy tends to stay outside the confines of the typical rom-com formula.

For starters, Drew Barrymore's Erin is a potty-mouthed broad who holds the high score on the neighborhood bar's Centipede game. She's also focused on her career track, and the film (thankfully) doesn't treat this as a negative quality.

Thirty-one and currently in grad school at Stanford, Erin is finishing up her summer internship at a fictional New York City paper when she meets affable twentysomething Garrett (Justin Long), who works for a record label. They agree after their first night together that neither of them is looking for anything serious, but they meet up often during the six weeks before Erin heads back to California. They decide to attempt a long-distance relationship.

We see the fondness between the two characters growing, while their friends and family give them unsolicited advice on how to deal with a long-distance relationship. As the professions Erin and Garrett have chosen -- working for the print media and the music industry -- are hard hit by the economy, the recession plays a role in their story. Will they ever be able to live in the same time zone when jobs are so hard to find? Should either of them give up their career to stay in the relationship?

While living in Houston over 20 years ago, I became acquainted with some of the principal and soloist male dancers from the Houston Ballet Dance Company. To me their lives were glamorous and dramatic. Their passion on stage with their pas de deux partners often extended beyond the stage to fiery romances. I also remember one young Chinese dancer who was friendly enough but more restrained than his boisterous British and American counterparts. I had no idea at the time what led to his employment with the Houston Ballet, but the less-than-glamorous circumstances were captured in Li Cunxin's 2003 autobiography adapted by Jan Sardi (Shine, The Notebook) for the screen in the biopic Mao's Last Dancer. Directed by Academy Award nominee Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies), this film captures the politics and drama involved in Cunxin's remarkable journey from rags to international stardom.

Mao's Last Dancer spans several decades through a series of flashbacks. At the height of China's Cultural Revolution in 1972, Jiang Qing -- also known as "Madame Mao" -- revived the Beijing Dance Academy. Mao's cultural advisors traveled through the country to select those children who not only had the physical attributes of a dancer but also devotion to serving in Chairman Mao's revolution. Li Cunxin was the sixth of seven sons born to peasants in the poverty-stricken Qingdao province, and his family welcomed the opportunity for Li to pursue a better life. At the age of 11, he left home to begin seven years of harsh training regimen at the Academy.