Reviews

Paul Gordon's The Happy Poet had its world premiere this week at SXSW to an over-capacity and appreciative crowd at Alamo Ritz.

Bill (Paul Gordon) has a dream to open a healthy and organic food cart. This simple dream seems impossible due to poor credit and no experience (he's a poet), and no one believing in him, but he's determined to make it work, despite the pressure to open a hot-dog stand instead. With the unlikely allies of unemployed friend Donnie (Jonny Mars), a slacker-philosopher who haggles for the first sandwich (Chris Doubek), and Agnes (Liz Fisher), who quickly becomes a regular, it looks like his dream will take off. But can the Happy Poet food stand make a stand for healthy food, or will Bill be forced to sell out and sell hot dogs?

Contributor Rod Paddock returns to Slackerwood, this time with a review.

Every once in a while at film festivals, you come across a film with a strange title, some spare time and if you are lucky a seat in the theatre. A lot of times these movies turn out to be lumps of coal, but sometimes, these movies prove to be a gem in the rough. Well, I had some time on my hands this week during SXSW and found a 100 percent hidden gem: The Parking Lot Movie.

Seeing The Parking Lot Movie reminded me a lot of viewing Kevin Smith's debut Clerks at the Seattle International Film Festival in 1996. This movie treats the viewer with 90 minutes of witty banter and exposition from people who work or worked in a parking lot over a period of many years. There is one major difference: These people didn't have a talented scribe like Kevin Smith writing their dialogue, they lived it.

What's the best way to say "creepy and at times bordering on the distasteful ... but in a good way"? When you figure it out, let me know so I can describe Lovers of Hate, the latest film from Austin filmmaker Bryan Poyser, which premiered at Sundance this year before screening at SXSW and on IFC Video on Demand (where it's now available to watch). Normally I'm not fond of movies with unlikeable characters doing things that make me wrinkle my nose in distaste, but somehow Poyser and his excellent cast and crew pull it off in an arresting manner.

Rudy (Chris Doubek) is the saddest sack blowing around Austin -- his wife kicked him out and he has nowhere to live except his car, and his job prospects are dwindling by the moment. All he wants is a shower, and his wife Diana (Heather Kafka) back. In the middle of this, his brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky) shows up, a famous children's author in a Harry Potter sort of way. Paul's books are based on stories Rudy used to tell him when they were growing up, and Rudy hasn't finished his own magnum opus (with the same title as the film), so he's nursing a helluva grudge. He convinces his wife to pretend they're still a couple while they have dinner with Paul, but the shaky premise simply can't hold up. Rudy's also suspicious of his brother Paul having designs on Diana. What he wants is for Paul and himself to travel to a secluded house where Paul's been staying in Park City, so they can both finish their writing, but somehow nothing turns out quite as planned.

Please welcome contributor Laurie Coker, whose reviews you can also read at True View Reviews.

Romantic comedies always hit and miss with me. I like them, for the most part, but have grown weary of the formulaic plots and pat endings. Still, with fresh writing, quality gags and dialogue, a good director coupled with a fine screenwriter, can make even formulaic fun. Director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa and screenwriters Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman offer some hilarious moments in Our Family Wedding. Had they left out at least three very stupid gags, it would have been a fine romantic comedy. But they did not avoid the silly, actually asinine, defeating what could have been a decent film overall, which will most certainly disappoint some.

One of my favorite actresses, America Ferrera, plays Lucy Ramirez, a young woman who drops out of law school, becomes engaged to an African-American man, Marcus (Lance Gross), who is heading to Laos as a physician for Doctors Without Borders. Lucy does so without mentioning any of it to her very conservative and traditional Hispanic parents, Miguel (Carlos Mencia) and Sonia (Diana-Maria Riva). Making matters worse, on the weekend they arrive, Miguel has a not so pleasant (and racially charged) encounter with Marcus's father Brad (Forest Whitaker). When the families finally meet, things get wild and cultural traditions clash in crazy mayhem.

Films about small-town decline and despair share many hallmarks. No matter the setting, the themes and stories often are similar, with residents of blighted rural burgs living hapless lives against a crumbling backdrop of poverty and isolation, surviving on a familiar stoicism that barely masks their underlying frustration.

Thus, the brilliantly told story of Terribly Happy -- a Danish import that played Fantastic Fest 2009 and is back in Austin at  the Arbor this week -- has a universal appeal, as it could have happened in any small town from the Australian Outback to the Texas Panhandle. A dark and sometimes darkly comic thriller set in a dreary town near Copenhagen, Terribly Happy has much in common -- in a good way, that is-- with other films about rural life: The locals mind each other's business more often than minding their own, have little use for big-city ways, and rely on their own brand of frontier justice and morality to sort out good and evil. Above all, they welcome outsiders with a mix of suspicion and hostility.

Among the world premieres at SXSW 2010 is Texas native Chad Feehan's feature writing/directing debut, Wake, which screened at the Paramount this afternoon. Wake is a twisty thriller featuring The Bone Collector's Josh Stewart and Soprano's Jamie-Lynn Sigler as a couple on the way to a wedding when they decide to stop for the night in a roadside motel. Instead of a restful night's sleep, strange encounters force them to deal with a haunting secret from the past, including a overly helpful and creepy hotel clerk. 

Very slowly two apparently unrelated storylines evolve that eventually collide with devastating results.  While atmospherically shot, Wake suffers from simultaneously trying to be too clever and making sure all the pieces are tightly assembled.  One of the more frustrating aspects of catching films at festivals is finding ones with an intriguing concept that doesn't quite work as delivered to the screen. 

Just how much privacy do we have these days? Director David Bond decides to find out on a personal level by attempting to disappear for 30 days in the documentary Erasing David.

With a wife and child at home, he plans to leave home and avoid two trained investigators who will try to chase him down. In the beginning, Frank M. Ahearn, privacy consultant and co-author of How to Disappear (Volume 1) advises Bond of ways he can be tracked and just how easily surveillance can be initiated. But the comical interludes with Ahearn set up some very real and understandable paranoia. 

Erasing David picks up where Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public leaves off -- instead of choosing to live in public and seeing the results, Bond focuses on a relatively ordinary life and how invasive the lack of data privacy is within the Information Age.

Known for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass brings more nonstop action to the screen in the historical action drama Green Zone, inspired by the novel "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. From April 2003 to October 2004, Chandrasekaran was The Washington Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, covering the American occupation of Iraq and supervising a team of correspondents. He lived in Baghdad for much of the six months before the war, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections process and the build-up to the conflict.

Director Greengrass joins forces with Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and re-teams with Bourne lead Matt Damon, who plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller. The story begins in the first month of the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, when Miller and his team are dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in various Iraqi locations, but come up emptyhanded. Everything points to the intelligence being flawed, but high officials stand by their source. Instead of searching for chemical agents, Chief Miller begins looking for the truth. Standing in his way is Washington's mouthpiece Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), who is too intent on advancing his mission to rebuild Iraq as an American-style democracy.

I had hoped that watching Bitch Slap would let me get in touch with my inner Joe Bob Briggs, giving me a good excuse to write a purposely lowbrow review of a purposely lowbrow exploitation film. After all, film critics have few opportunities to include breast counts and phrases like "lesbian bikini fu" in their reviews.

Sadly, Bitch Slap, now available on DVD, isn't the festival of guilty pleasures it should be. In many ways, it's an accurate homage to exploitation films; the film delivers plenty of impressively large cleavage, impressive (and even larger) weapons, cheap-thrill sexuality, and nonstop action awash in blood and blasted with pyrotechnics. But Bitch Slap also is accurate in the worst way: While it tries earnestly to be a campy send-up of a campy genre, it's mostly as dull and unsatisfying as the grindhouse schlock that inspired it.

At the outset, Bitch Slap looks promising. After an intriguing and funny opening credits montage of vintage exploitation film clips, the film opens with a scene of a battered, bleeding, scantily clad woman lying in a desert, surrounded by the fiery aftermath of a fierce battle. Everything about this scene and the ones that follow it -- from lingering cleavage shots to tough-girl dialogue -- instructs the audience to forget taking Bitch Slap seriously and just go along for what no doubt will be a mindlessly sexy and violent ride.

I'm going to jump in right here and admit that my expectations for District 13: Ultimatum were extremely low. I know one person who walked out of the film when it played Fantastic Fest last year, and I was warned that this movie wasn't going to be nearly as enjoyable as the first District 13 movie. So I figured I'd suffer the storyline and take pleasure from any good fight scenes or parkour scenes that might appear.

And you know, sometimes this is the way to watch a movie, expecting it to be not so hot. When it's less bad than you suspected, you end up with an enjoyable movie experience. Same thing happened to me at Live Free or Die Hard -- my husband, who was looking forward to a fun movie, felt disappointed, while I figured it would be awful and therefore liked any bits that weren't. District 13: Ultimatum is certainly better than Live Free or Die Hard, and at least there are no really stupid CGI effects. It's kind of like a 90-minute-long Burn Notice, but without the humorous supporting characters, bikinis and yogurt.