My father had a stroke a couple days after my last post. It's been a rather full and hectic world for me since then, but I nonetheless apologize for my without-a-trace disappearance.

I'm not going anywhere, and am in fact returning to not only this column but am taking the reins of the long-derelict Discland area of the site. The first new post there in some time will be a review of the new Criterion Bluray edition of The Last Emperor. Can't yet guarantee a day, but it'll be this week.

Playbill reports that the Nicholson/Streep-starring Ironweed is set to hit DVD for the first time on 24 February 2009. No word on extras, but good to see the movie going digital. MSRP is a tenner and a five, probably indicating a $9.99 first-week price. Here's five minutes I found on YouTube:

Was no one available for "30th anniversary" extras? Guess not.

The legend from last night:
Trailers in italics,
previews in bold,
features in big bold. First full writeup comes this afternoon.

Beastmaster 2
C.H.O.M.P.S.
Hot Dog lobby snack ad
The Secret of Magic Island

The thought of remaking Beastmaster (was that being talked up) makes me chuckle. Devin from CHUD is right-on wanting to see The Secret of Magic Island. Looks like an ASPCA horror show of animal abuse.

White Dog (1982)

I gotta be honest, I missed parts of this due to exhaustion and slow, lingering closeups. Definitely deserves a re-watching and poring-over...Read More

Blocking out 24 hours of your life on a weekend this time of year for an all-you-can-be-fed film festival makes various things very difficult to catch up on, especially sleep and your day job. I've recovered enough on both fronts that I can start piecing together adequate coverage of this year's 26-hour (once all was said and done) tenth annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon. I'll be delivering full-length features on individual films and chunks of related material, topping it off with a BNAT list of some sort regarding favorites and so on. For now, I'll drill through the lineup as it happened, trailers and all, limiting...Read More

Getting prepped for a 24-hour film festival takes a lot out of you. Ashley and I are getting our last things done before heading to the Alamo South Lamar, and I wanted to throw some last minute guesses based on the "fake lineup" Harry posted late last night. The movies below correspond to something we're seeing, whether new, old, clips or the whole movie.

1. THE CHAMP (1931)
-not The Wrestler, that's too obvious
2. SOMEWHERE IN TIME (1980)
-Star Trek
3. ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010)
-Coraline
4. ISHTAR (1987)
-Reds? hell, I have no...Read More

SXSW announced an hour ago that they are now accredited as an Academy Award qualifying fest, so if your short film gets in, you don't have to do the "one week run" to qualify. Bravo! Some of my favorite weekend afternoons in March are spent watching the Shorts Programs. The animated stuff is absolutely killer every year.

Karina Longworth really took to Kelly Reichardt's Wendy & Lucy (which I reviewed during AFF) and just posted a nice chat with the director. They get into rabid US consumerism, the economic crisis, and the state of things now that Obama's been elected, as well as how Reichardt's life and work have evolved over the years. It's always good to see a female director get some celebratory attention that isn't gossipy and juvenile.

This year, the Academy should recognize comedy for once.

Like I expected back when I first reviewed Let the Right One In, it's outpacing Twilight over time in terms of staying power, with attendance remaining steady over time as Twilight drops off. So says the Alamo Drafthouse, so it is.

Zombie Girl was a fun doc I reviewed back in September when it played Fantastic Fest, the hajj of genre film enthusiasts. It's now moving on up to Slamdance 09 according to the lineup that Cinematical posted this morning.

This is excellent news in light of the recent blow to female directors in the Hardwicke Whacking of 08. Let's hope Emily really represents as much the future of female directors as her own generation. Emily and her mom Megan will be at ButtNumbAThon X this weekend, I'll see about grabbing a quote from them about where the movie is otherwise.

Speaking...Read More

Nikki Finke has reported and many others have hopped aboard news that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke is off the franchise. The most interesting piece of the story comes in Finke noting that Summit (who owes its newly-flush coffers to the movie that Hardwicke directed) is positioning her as "irrational" and "difficult to work with" (I'm paraphrasing the second there), similarly to how Julie Taymor was described on Across the Universe.

Why does this sound like a man breaking up with a woman with no good reason other than some one else waiting in the wings? I'm not saying I know anything about...Read More

Thanks to a mandatory 6-hour online defensive driving course, I've taken the copious free time included in that timeframe and the poor judgment of a friend who already bought Hancock on DVD and have finished getting through it playing in a tiny window in the background while I complete the course. This was spurred by the overabundance of extra time included and a commenter on Jeff's counter-Hancock post asking about the differences:

In the first ten minutes, there's a character-building scene that expands Hancock in the bar early on. Readers of the original Tonight, He Comes script will see a piece of that...Read More

I'm going to immediately be accused of ageism, that much I anticipate.

The going logic that keeps coming around is that the "Geezers of Gold" that killed Brokeback Mountain a few years ago are the real swing voters of the US. This means that as go the old folks, so goes the Academy in terms of nominations, snubs, and winners in many but not all cases. Even if their "pick" as a bloc doesn't outright win, they can play the spoiler and tip things another direction. Actors are a big contingent, but how does the age split go across the board?

The painful...Read More

Gypsy, In the Heights, The Little Mermaid, South Pacific and Young Frankenstein: The Musical

I can vouch for the bolded choices, and I've listened to all five. Read between the bold. I've been a bad Broadway enthusiast this year, so I should have five or six things that have better albums than Mermaid. I'll work on including that in the will-never-be-finished piece I've been working on

By the numbers:

2 revivals
2 movie adaptations
1 Disney
1 Mel Brooks
1 Patti Lupone show
1 completely original show
17 is how many times iTunes says I've listened to...Read More

My first Butt Numb a Thon experience was last year. My first Fantastic Fest was this year. From all indications, this year's BNAT will be the unholy combination of the two, and there are few other things that I find myself anticipating or thinking about in my idle time. I'm hoping the full-course Che is in the mix, since I know the Roadshow thing is NY/LA only (which is ridiculous).

The pedigree of Guillermo del Toro's DVDs continues unabated with this past summer's Hellboy 2. Like others including Jeff, I'm a more ravenous fan of Guillermo's "art" films from Cronos to Espinazo del Diablo to Pan's Labyrinth, but I enjoy his "studio" movies much more than their counterparts from other directors and studios. If his "art" films are filet mignon and fine wine, the studio stuff is high-end pizza and my favorite beer, and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that.

The aspect unique to Hellboy 2 as compared to the first installment and Blade II is that it's still pizza, but...Read More

It's difficult for anyone outside of festival programmers and the hardest of hardcore festival-going writers to have seen all of the movies that end up on the Oscar shortlist, posted by Indiewire and everyone in creation by the time you read this. This year I've seen more of them than usual for me, a full one-third of them. I should be seeing a couple of them soon since they're still showing in town.

The one movie that's missing that I presume will be everyone's "it got robbed" this year is Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary, which I couldn't get into at SXSW and haven't...Read More

There are already a lot of reviews of this one out there, so I'll keep this brief. I think director Danny Boyle put it best when he introduced the film at this year's Austin Film Festival saying "I never expected to be this thrilled by a script about Who Wants to be a Millionaire." The truth is, it is and is not about that show that has long become passe in the States. What it is really designed to get at is the very real diametric difference between classes that is so invisible to people worldwide in so-called industrial nations. The movie's plot...Read More

The Anchorage daily News reports that oh, around 90,000 ballots are still not part of their final count. This means any statewide race, including indicted Senator Ted Stevens', is still up for grabs. No offense to Alaska, but does your state government not know how to count?

This movie has never looked this good. I didn't even watch the Blu-ray release as I am still stuck in the land of standard-def, but I'll be damned if this transfer isn't amazing. Had I not been interested in the special features, I considered the brilliant cross-platform release that is the Blu-ray (they packed the movie-only standard def DVD in as a third disc). I'm going to spend a good deal of time with the feature itself before getting to the spread of special features.

One of the greatest sequences in animated history

One of the more striking features...Read More

I thought I'd disappear and pop back up around election day. I worked on a piece about the transforming Texan electoral map and everything. Then I got struck down by appendicitis and am only now out of the hospital. Expect a flurry of posts this week, as I'm on a week of bed rest that will be spent entirely in catching up on backlogged pieces, writeups, and reviews. I'm also going to write a followup to a review I did earlier this year of a doc (the only one out) about President-elect Obama, so watch for that.

Change has been a big word this year just like re-form was in O Brother Where Art Thou's election bits. The greatest concern I have going forward is that the polls will bite us in the ass and no one will show up out of complacency. The next greatest concern I have for us as a country is who all of our Democratic candidates being swept in on this mandate really are.

I wonder who some of these "Democratic" candidates on down-ticket races really are, because at least in Texas, we have plenty of Republicans, Libertarians, and Ron Paul supporters who beat actual...Read More

I'm not a gigantic horror fan, but I just couldn't get behind Saw 5 even if I were. Here are five better ways to spend your hard-earned cash on something scary this weekend.

1) Let the Right One In
(NY & LA only)

I reviewed this one at Fantastic Fest. A Swedish vampire movie so good, everyone I know who has seen it has already decried the remake not only as unnecessary, but impossible to do anything at all better than the original did. Keep an eye on it as it expands out to those of us not in the Capitol...Read More

The best film I saw at this year's Austin Film Festival turns out to be one of the best movies I've seen all year. Synecdoche, New York is a cinematic experience that I expect to stick with me for some time to come. During a post-show Q&A with director Charlie Kaufman, only one question really stuck out to me, because it hit at what I think this film does well. It was a pretty closed-ended question about whether he had ever considered making a time travel movie. Kaufman answered that he had seriously intended as a child to build a time machine and...Read More

Today's been monumentally unproductive thanks to the fact that nearly back-to-back festivals and the changing of the weather have teamed up on me and knocked me out for a day or two. Tomorrow looks to be more of a long-nap-day rather than a sleep-all-day, so the bits of progress I've made on a number of pieces will finally culminate in their completion as well as the furious pounding-out of others sitting on a to-do list.

I'm going to be caught up to the present on AFF, almost finish off Fantastic Fest, and get started on some Home Front reviews. It'll be like Christmas...Read More

I have to admit a soft spot for "dog movies" (good ones), especially ones featuring a dog named Lucy (the name of my wonderful Beagle). Setting that aside as much as I'm able, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday night's screening of Wendy and Lucy, a rare indie that rewards a patient viewer with a soaked-in emotional journey without much (if any) pretense or indulgent, inefficient filmmaking.

My Beagle, Lucy

During the Q&A for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire the other night, he mentioned something Godard once said, which roughly paraphrased is that all you need for a movie is money, a...Read More

Early voting started yesterday in Texas and Florida, and according to the Austin American Statesman, the TX Secretary of State's office is vastly underprepared for Election Day. There were denials on KUT (local NPR affiliate) as early as this morning from the Sec. State's office, but if the vastly under-estimated number of ballots during the Democratic Primary in March is any indicator, 4 November will be...interesting.

Everyone vote early, especially in Florida.

I have to race back downtown to catch Slumdog Millionaire, so this will be posted in two parts. Enjoy.

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H-E: One of the things that struck me the most last night in your introduction was about the paternal relationship and how that's something that the two of you connected with, you and Josh. How do you think it is that it comes off to people who aren't really addressing that relationship or have avoided that--

James Cromwell: The father and the son relationship? Very few people I know have not addressed it at some point. For some it's more difficult than others...it...Read More

I've disappeared for a couple days ramping up for the 15th annual Austin Film Festival, and last night kicked it off with a bang. The opening night film, Oliver Stone's W., played like gangbusters and the followup at the historic Paramount Theatre (Max Payne) left even the fanboys in the audience wanting. I'll have more on Max Payne shortly. James Cromwell introduced the film last night and in so doing announced a just-added "Conversation with" Q&A for this morning.

Shortly after the Q&A concluded,...Read More