Special Screenings

I've got plenty of Austin film news to share today, from premieres to DVD news to some articles you won't want to miss. Here we go:

• Slackerwood is sponsoring a special preview screening of The Men Who Stare at Goats (pictured at right) on Thursday night. Follow our Twitter feed to find out how you can get free passes.
• The general release date for Richard Linklater's latest film, Me and Orson Welles, has been pushed back to December 11. No word yet on whether that's the date when the film will open in Austin.
• However, if you live in Austin, you can see Me and Orson Welles at the Austin Film Society gala premiere on Monday, November 30 at the Paramount. Tickets are on sale now for AFS members, and will go on sale for the general public on Nov. 9. Linklater will be at the event along with actors Zac Efron and Christian McKay. Proceeds from the screening benefit the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund.

Were you lucky enough to catch the documentary Winnebago Man at SXSW this year? All the screenings sold out really quickly, and I never got to see it myself. After its world premiere at SXSW (complete with a real Winnebago, shown at right), the film hit the film-fest circuit, winning a half-dozen awards at festivals such as Cinevegas, Hot Docs in Toronto and the Traverse City Film Festival. Now it's returning to Austin for a sneak-preview fundraiser so the movie can be prepared for a wider, non-fest release.

You can see Winnebago Man on Tuesday, October 27 at the Monarch Events Center. This is a venue in the Lincoln Village strip mall, often used for conferences ... which used to be part of a four-screen theater complex, back in the day. A pre-screening reception starts at 7 pm, and the movie starts at 8, with a Q&A to follow. Admission is a minimum donation of $10. Tickets are available online and if not sold out, at the door.

The documentary is about Jack Rebney, whose 1989 outtakes from his Winnebago sales video earned him notoriety first in the underground video world, and then of course on the Internet. Part of the film's storyline is the director of Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer, trying to track Rebney down now and find out more about him.

Over the past week, an amazing number of news items have rolled in about distribution for Austin movies or movies that have played in local fests. Check out this list to see if any of the movies you've liked at recent fests will be getting a wider release and a second chance to grab audiences.

• Richard Linklater's most recent films are both in the news this week. First of all, Me and Orson Welles, which played at SXSW this year, now has U.S. distribution through Cinemax. As Linklater told us during the Extract red carpet, the movie will hit theaters around Thanksgiving. Jette thinks it's the best Zac Efron movie she's seen to date.
• In addition, Linklater's documentary about Longhorn baseball and coach Augie Garrido, Inning by Inning, is now available on iTunes. The movie was released on DVD in May. Jette doesn't like baseball much, but liked this movie a lot anyway.
• Speaking of movies you can watch from a computer or other device, the locally shot feature For Love & Stacie, written and directed by Raymond Schlogel, is now available for viewing online at Underground Planet. 

While volunteering for the SCARE for a CURE haunt last year, I was intrigued and amazed by the visually impaired students who also volunteered for the event. The students had their own scene which focused around an audio studio. One student, Johnathan, was also filming the haunt experience. Although he could not see the activity going on around him, he thoroughly enjoyed the narrative and "boo scares" as much as our typical guests. Turns out that John is an aspiring filmmaker who won the high-school division award in the 2007 Cinema Touching Disability Short Film Competition.

The competition is part of the Cinema Touching Disability Film Festival, which returns in its sixth year to continue its mission of raising awareness of disabilities. The film fest will be held November 6-7 at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.

This year the festival will feature the documentary The Eyes of Me, an up-close look at four high-school teens who have lost their sight. The film premiered at SXSW earlier this year -- Filmmaker magazine published an interview with director Keith Maitland.

Last week, almost at the last minute, my husband and I decided to catch a special screening of Bobcat Goldthwait's latest film, World's Greatest Dad, at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. We had toyed with the idea of watching the movie at home through Amazon Video on Demand ... but Goldthwait would be attending the Alamo screening, so we couldn't resist. We both enjoyed his previous film, Sleeping Dogs Lie, and I was interested to hear him in person.

It was an evening of surprises. First, Goldthwait said he wanted to show his latest work in progress before the film. Before I could get excited about the possibility of a huge scoop, however, the footage appeared onscreen and I was laughing too hard to care. It was a short film from the 1930s that, as Goldthwait explained afterward, is called a "Barkie" because the cast is all dogs who are dressed as people, trained to walk on their hind legs and dubbed with human voices. Barkies are primarily old-fashioned melodramas or gangster films. Jules White, who directed many Three Stooges shorts, also directed a lot of Barkies. I love learning film history in the most unexpected places. (Felt sorry for the dogs, though -- there were no agencies for humane animal care monitoring moviemaking in the Thirties.)

The world premiere of Mike Judge's new film Extract took place on Tuesday night in Austin at the Paramount Theatre, with star Jason Bateman (pictured above with Judge) and others attending. The premiere was a benefit for the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. It's been a big week for Austin Film Society (AFS), with the recent announcement as reported by Jette of the TFPF grants awards announcement and now a major premiere benefiting the fund. I spoke with actors from Extract as well as AFS founder and filmmaker Richard Linklater, who was in attendance supporting fellow Austin filmmaker Mike Judge and the TFPF benefit. 

Jenn interviewed Mike Judge for Slackerwood earlier that day, so rather than inundate him with questions I did ask him the one question that was in the back of my mind:

The main event for Cinemapocalypse was Inglourious Basterds and guests, as I detailed in Part One. However, the all-night movie marathon offered so much more. The theme of the evening (and morning after) was war-centered "men on a mission" films, with each film preceded by relevant vintage trailers. Tarantino programmed the next two films, with the rest programmed by Tim League, and Alamo programmers Zack Carlson and Lars Nilsen.

Film:  Inglourious Basterds
Trailers:  Operation Eichmann, Ski Troop Attack, 36 Hours and Operation Amsterdam

Like I mentioned in Part One, Slackerwood will be doing a full group review later. I will say for now that I really enjoyed Basterds and I'm looking forward to seeing it again, and I suspect even people who aren't big fans of Tarantino will really enjoy it. It has all the spirit of post-WWII anti-hero and noir films. 

Film:  The Losers
Trailers:  The Naked Brigade, Merrill's Marauders, The Dirty Dozen, Casualties of War, The Rescue (I think it was the same film as Let's Get Harry, but I'm not entirely sure) and First Blood

This 1974 Vietnam war-era film, directed by Jack Starrett, was about a bunch of bikers led by Link (William Smith), who are sent to Vietnam to rescue a government advisor on the wrong side of the Vietnam border. This seriously surreal film included a love song/theme song abruptly fit into an unexpected romantic scene ("Life has so much to offer the losers ..."). Tarantino pointed out that this has has the distinction of being filmed during the Vietnam conflict, when it was politically very incorrect to do so. 

Film:  The Siege of Firebase Gloria
Trailers:  Up from the Beach, Play Dirty, Von Ryan's Express, Eye of the Eagle II: Inside the Enemy, Uncommon Valor and Gallipoli

Starring R. Lee Ermey and Wings Hauser, The Siege of Firebase Gloria is an uneasy mix of great filmmaking with some seriously cheesy dialogue (and a great chopper pilot).

In most posts, I try to be as objective as possible. I'm not even going to attempt it in this account of Cinemapocalypse, Saturday's all-night movie marathon. It is not complete, but it should be enough to help you live a little vicariously, if only to build your DVD queue or library. Those of us at Cinemapocalypse were very, very lucky, and the rest of y'all have a right to be jealous.

Earlier this year, Alamo programmers Zack Carlson and Lars Nilson took 18 exploitation films on an eight-night West Coast tour and called it Cinemapocalypse. Apparently it was so successful the Alamo gang decided to incorporate elements of QT Fest and have a dusk-til-dawn film fest in Austin, kicking it off with Quentin Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds. Only one of the films from the original tour made it into this weekend's marathon.

Despite only knowing that the first film would be Inglourious Basterds, that Tarantino would then program the next two films, and that none of the films besides Basterds would be known in advance, Cinemapocalypse Austin sold out in a record minute. The tickets went on sale at noon, and people who tried to start buying at 12:02 pm were out of luck -- and only Fantastic Fest 2009 badgeholders and AFS members could even try the first day. And yes, Alamo was verifying every single purchase.

In case you didn't notice from our recent podcast on Food in Movies, I am a foodie. Therefore I love to attend the Alamo Drafthouse signature events of film and feast, and was intrigued to see what gourmet surprises Chefs Trish Eichelberger and John Bullington would come up with for Julie & Julia. I was unable to attend a full feast due to other screenings I was attending - more on those later! - but managed to take some photos behind the scenes.

The evening started with pink champagne, as shown above. Here are a few more of the dishes, which were referenced in the film in one way or another.

First course - an amuse bouche that included oysters on the half shell, thin rye bread and butter:

[Warning: some of this content may spoil the film for you. Caution is advised.]

This has been a good summer for sci-fi fans, with three outstanding, classic style sci-fi films to hit screens across the country: Star Trek, Moon and now District 9, which opens on Friday. Ain't it Cool News hosted a special screening of District 9 with director Neill Blomkamp and star Sharlto Copley that featured one of the longest, and arguably one of the best Q&As in Austin in a long, long time.

Both Blomkamp and Copley were willing to answer questions for almost an hour. With most Q&As running 15 minutes, this was a rare treat. No one in the standing-room-only crowd left when the end credits started, and the first to leave the theater only missed the last 2-3 questions, and not just because those asking questions were rewarded with a commemorative t-shirt. One lucky audience member, who asked the final question, received an autographed rendering of the alien ship.

Set in the Johannesburg, South Africa area 20 years after an alien vessel has stopped over the city, District 9 is the story of a corporate stooge responsible for overseeing a mass eviction of the aliens, pejoratively known as "prawns" because of their resemblance to crustaceans.