Opening night of this Lone Star Film Festival under its new management saw changes off the bat. The first film of the fest was screened at Four Day Weekend Theater instead of the usual AMC Palace. Programming director Charles Rice told me it was for the Four Day’s greater capacity. I understand, but I missed the AMC’s superior projection and sound, not to mention the more comfortable seats.
Anyway, the opening movie bore the title When I Live My Life Over Again, though the day it screened, its makers signed a distribution deal with Amplify Releasing and Starz, which changed its name to One More Time. I’m not a fan of either title; the newer one sounds like it’s trying to copy the similar music dramas Once and Begin Again. Amber Heard plays an unsuccessful New York City musician who gets evicted from her apartment and reluctantly moves into the Hamptons McMansion owned by her dad (Christopher Walken), a once-famous jazz crooner who has been a crappy father to her. Despite its layering and subtlety, the movie itself is scattered and meandering. Heard sings well enough, but the main thing is watching her in a part that downplays her hotness and allows her to be hard-edged and disenchanted. She seems much more comfortable doing this than headlining the horror flicks and action thrillers that she has been doing. (For further evidence, check Magic Mike XXL.) This movie seems to offer her a more promising career direction.
The scheduling at this year’s festival is going to make it impossible for me to catch very many short films, since they’re all slated for either mealtimes or in conflict with something else. I could skip meals, but I always felt that passing out from hunger during a screening is disrespectful. I did manage to catch Teddy Cecil’s Helio, a 20-minute science-fiction dystopian thriller that plays like a successful audition for whatever the next Hunger Games-style YA series is. Then there was Huay-Bing Law’s From Tonga, a tantalizing and frustrating short about the Tongan football players at Euless’ Trinity High School. I want more information about these guys and about Tongan culture. I could stand to see a full-length feature on them.
The first feature I saw was Kamel Allaway’s Sea Horse, another dystopian film that reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but with women instead of men. Nicola Carreon plays one of three women trying to make their way through a postdiluvian world where most of the population have been washed away. Their journey is dictated by her discovery of a journal that points the way toward a surviving community in the south. Cinematographer Adam Cohen takes some gorgeous footage of the verdant landscape that the women travel through (the movie was filmed in Seward, Ak.), and the sparse narrative and steady rhythm pulls you in. I think the moment of transcendence at the end could have been more convincing, but this held my interest.
Lee Grivas died of an overdose at age 28 shortly after shooting the footage for his documentary Hooked, so it’s only now, eight years after it was shot, that the movie is coming to life. (Grivas’ ex-girlfriend, the actress Christina Applegate, serves as an executive producer.) The movie follows his friend Caleb Moody, an L.A.-based furniture mover who takes a job as a commercial fisherman in the Bering Strait. Caleb struggles to cope with the intense hours and workload and thinks about giving up before seeing the thing through. That’s pretty much it, there aren’t any big twists in the story. I found it worthwhile to observe the gory details of fishermen’s work, but I can see how others might not. It doesn’t compare well to Leviathan, a similar documentary that played at LSFF two years ago.
Star power arrived in the form of Sean Mewshaw’s Tumbledown, an insistently low-temperature dramedy starring Rebecca Hall as the widow of a folk-rock genius who made a single perfect album before dying in a hunting accident, and Jason Sudeikis as a Hofstra pop-culture professor who wants to write her husband’s biography. I like watching the lively and astringent Hall, but Sudeikis’ comic skills are too often kept on a leash, and the project that unites these two characters never acquires the urgency that it’s supposed to.
The last two movies on Saturday both came from A24 Films, a newish independent label that’s rapidly acquiring a halo among cinephiles. Altogether, LSFF has three features from this studio’s 2016 slate. (The third is Krisha, which shows tomorrow.) A24 is a good outfit to hitch your wagon to, but I’d have been more thrilled to see the studio’s heavily hyped The Witch, whose trailer looks amazing and which would have continued the festival’s tradition of showing innovative horror movies. Oh, well.
Mojave is the work of longtime screenwriter William Monahan, and it not only looks bad but is also way overwritten. (Oh, the Shakespeare and Shaw references that its lowlife characters make!) Too bad, because there’s a nifty cat-and-mouse game at this movie’s heart, especially since the mouse has a cobra’s venomous fangs. Garrett Hedlund plays a famous Hollywood actor who meets a murderous psychopath (Oscar Isaac) — or possibly his own monstrously selfish id — in the desert and is then stalked all the way back to L.A. by him after the actor accidentally kills a cop while trying to protect himself. You won’t be surprised to find out that Isaac can play a garrulous homicidal hippie drifter, but Monahan keeps contriving reasons to prolong the action so that his villain can keep talking. If you hated Entourage, you might be gratified to find Mark Wahlberg here playing a large-living dick of a Hollywood producer who gets killed amid all the action.
The evening ended with The Adderall Diaries, which tries to be entirely too many things, though it does wind up being a better S&M movie than Fifty Shades of Grey. Pamela Romanowsky adapted this from Stephen Elliott’s book, and James Franco portrays Elliott as an abused kid-turned-memoirist who suffers a huge public setback after his supposedly dead father (Ed Harris) turns up at a book reading to proclaim his son’s account a pack of lies. The movie can’t decide whether it wants to be about Stephen’s drug addiction or his attempts to rebuild his reputation in the publishing world or his coverage of the murder trial of a software tycoon (Christian Slater), and the central plot about his dad trying to reconcile with him keeps turning in the same circles. Still, the thing is well-acted, and we see Stephen’s appetite for masochistic sex springing from his childhood humiliations, and there’s a disturbing scene when he encourages his girlfriend (Amber Heard again) to take out her own history of abuse on him. Romanowsky is relatively new to filmmaking; I think if she finds some focus, she might make some waves.
