Festival News

Texas film festival in Garland will spotlight Western-ish classics

The Last Picture Show

Courtesy photo

A film festival dedicated entirely to Texas films is coming this fall: Called "It Came From Texas Film Festival," it'll go down in Garland at the Plaza Theatre, 521 W. State St., celebrating films made either wholly or in part within the Lone Star State.

The fest will run for a weekend, kicking off on Friday, September 13 and continuing through Sunday, September 15. This will be the second edition, and is sponsored by the City of Garland and Garland Cultural Arts.

Festival director Kelly Kitchens says in a statement that the 2024 version will focus on films that lean into the Western genre.

"There’s no better place than Texas to pay homage to one of the foundational genres of cinema, the Western and all the variations of the Western outside Cowboys and Indians," Kitchens says.

They're featuring three Oscar-winning Texas films that she dubs "Western-adjacent": Tender Mercies (1983), The Last Picture Show (1971), and Giant (1956).

Other cornerstones of the festival will include:

Garland High School IB Short Films: Short films made in Texas by students enrolled in Garland High School’s Reel Owl Cinema (ROC) film program, a unique four-year high school narrative International Baccalaureate (IB) film program, which has been producing films at Garland High School since 2005.

The Mocky Horror Picture Show: Interactive comedy troupe will close out the fest with a live skewering of Rock Baby – Rock It, a fun 1957 film showcasing Texas' versions (or the Dollar Store equivalents) of Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and more. Mocky Horror comedians Liz Barksdale, Danny Gallagher, and Albie Robles will riff in the theater for a live audience with jokes, special edits and effects, and sketches. Timed prompts appear on the screen with instructions for the audience to do or say things at the right time so you can mock the movie with them. The comedians also provide props for the audience to use during the screening.

Tickets are now on sale on prekindle. An all-access pass is currently $55, and will go up to $65 on August 1.

The schedule is as follows:

Friday, September 13

Horton Foote: The Road to Home. The 2020 documentary starring award-winning Texas writer Horton Foote, through his own eyes and voice at the end of his life. Director Anne Rapp will be in attendance.
Tender Mercies. The 1983 film — directed by Bruce Beresford, written by Horton Foote, and starring Robert Duvall as a middle-aged country singer who gets a new wife, reaches out to his long-lost daughter, and tries to put his life back together — was filmed in Palmer, Waxahachie, and Arlington.

Saturday, September 14

The Last Picture Show. Iconic 1971 film — directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd, about a group of high schoolers coming of age in a dying Texas town — was filmed in Archer City and Holliday, Texas.
Children of Giant. The 2015 documentary directed by Hector Galan and filmed in Marfa, unearths emotions stirred up before, during, and after the month-long production of George Stevens's 1956 feature film, Giant.
Student films from Garland High School’s ‘Reel Owl Cinema.’
Giant. Filmed in Marfa and Valentine, this epic 1956 film about a cattle rancher and his family starred James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson, and was directed by George Stevens, who won an Oscar for Best Director.

Sunday, September 15

Mocky Horror Picture Show, live riffing of Rock Baby - Rock It, a 1957 campy classic that follows Dallas teenagers as they resist attempts by underworld types to take over their rock 'n' roll club, directed by Murray Douglas Sporup and filmed in Dallas.
Student films from Garland High School’s ‘Reel Owl Cinema.’

movies festivals

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film

Festival News

Texas film festival in Garland will spotlight Western-ish classics

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Holiday week is not slowing down this round of Dallas restaurant news

Fun family-owned Big Mike's Bar and Grill from TV star debuts in Plano

3 global retailers to make Texas debut in Dallas' Knox St. development