Movie Time

Texas-made films grab center stage at Sundance Film Festival, including Houstonand Linsanity

One of the hottest tickets to this year’s Sundance is the documentary premiereof Linsanity, featuring Jeremy Lin.
Triple5Light
In the 12-entry category for World Dramatic, Houston, a dark psychological dramafeaturing a German executive recruiter and alcoholic who comes to Houston torecruit an energy executive will premiere Jan. 22.
FilmGuide.Sundance.org
Pit Stop, by director and screenwriter Yen Tan, tells the parallel stories oftwo working class gay men in a small Texas town who come together after eachsuffering struggles and heartbreak in other relationships.
FilmGuide.Sundance.org
Computer Chess, the fourth feature length film by Austin director AndrewBujalski, is an existential comedy about a computer convention in 1980 and themen who taught machines to play chess.
FilmGuide.Sundance.org
Sure to be controversial will be A Teacher, a psychological drama about a highschool teacher who has an affair with one of her students.
ATeacherFilm.com

PARK CITY, Utah — It is shaping up to be a banner year for Texas-centered films and filmmakers as the Sundance Film Festival kicks off Thursday and runs through January 27. More than a dozen films with Texas ties will be screened in the two drama categories, two documentary categories, the short film category and the edgy NEXT category.

One of the hottest tickets is the documentary premiere of Linsanity, featuring Jeremy Lin, the Harvard basketball player who came from a humble background and was undrafted by the NBA only to have an unbelievable run as an NBA player (he now plays for the Houston Rockets of course). A portion of the film was shot in Houston.

One of the hottest tickets is the documentary premiere of Linsanity, featuring Jeremy Lin.

The documentary, which was filmed by Lin's close friend Evan Leong, begins when Lin was a college student with no pro prospects, long before his magical run with the New York Knicks last season. The film premieres on Saturday with not a ticket to be had.

In the 12-entry category for World Dramatic, Houston, a dark psychological drama featuring a German executive recruiter and alcoholic who comes to Houston to recruit an energy executive will premiere Jan. 22. The film was — no surprise given its title — filmed in Houston and El Campo, as well as in Germany by German director and screenwriter, Bastian Gunther.

It is part-time Austin resident Gunther's first U.S. film.

Austin-based director Richard Linklater will show his latest movie, Before Midnight, a follow-up to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, on Sunday night.

Linklater will also co-host a party saluting 10 Texas films that will be shown at the festival, including Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey as a charismatic outlaw who recruits two boys to aid his clean getaway, and Prince Avalanche, which writer/director David Gordon Green adapted from the Icelandic film Either Way and clandestinely shot in Austin.

Bold works

Sundance’s NEXT group features "pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling" and usually made on a modest budget. Computer Chess, Pit Stop, and A Teacher are three of the 10 submissions.

Sure to be controversial, A Teacher is a psychological drama about a high school teacher who has an affair with one of her students. This film was shot entirely in Austin and marks the first Sundance entry for film director and screenwriter, Hannah Fidell.

Sure to be controversial, A Teacher is a psychological drama about a high school teacher who has an affair with one of her students.

Computer Chess, the fourth feature length film by Austin director Andrew Bujalski is an existential comedy about a computer convention in 1980 and the men who taught machines to play chess.

Pit Stop, by director and screenwriter Yen Tan, tells the parallel stories of two working class gay men in a small Texas town who come together after each suffering struggles and heartbreak in other relationships.

Tan's script for Pit Stop was selected out of hundreds of entries to participate in the Outfest Screenwriting Lab in 2009 and the project was awarded a $7,000 grant from the Austin Film Society’s Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund. The producers utilized crowd-funding from usaprojects.org to raise another $32,000 for the project.

Tan immigrated to Dallas from Malaysia in 1996 and currently lives in Austin where he is also the go-to person for graphic design of movie posters for independent films. Tan was assisted in co-writing duties by Dallasite David Lowery.

Buzzed-about film

Filmmaker Lowery is a busy guy. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a film he wrote and directed, is one of one of the most buzzed-about films of the 16 submissions in the U.S. Dramatic category. It tells the story of an outlaw who escapes from prison and sets out across the Texas hills to reunite with his wife and the daughter he has never met.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is one of one of the most buzzed-about films of the 16 submissions in the U.S. Dramatic category.

Featuring an all-star cast of Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck and Ben Foster, the film opens in the “A” venue — the 1,100 seat Eccles Theater — on the first weekend of the festival. Ain't Them Bodies Saints follows Lowery's debut feature, St. Nick, which premiered at SXSW, in 2009 and was released commercially in 2011.

The movie will also be shown in Houston on Jan. 31 at the Sundance Cinemas as part of the Sundance Film Festival USA series held in 10 cities. Lowery and producer Toby Halbrooks will be in Houston to introduce the film and participate in an audience question-and-answer session moderated by CultureMap editor-in-chief Clifford Pugh. Tickets are on sale on the Sundance Cinemas website.

Shorts competition

In the 65 films that will screen in the Shorts Competition, Texans directors get the nod in Black Metal, The Cub, and Thank You. Black Metal, made in Austin, is a nine-minute film focused on the actions of a fan of the lead singer of a black metal band.

The Cub, filmed by Austin director Riley Stearns, is a short five-minute film, that examines the relationship of a wolf and its cubs.

Thank You, a 12-minute animated film by Austin directors Pendleton Ward and Tom Herpich, focuses on a snow golem that is attacked in the forest by a pack of wolves, who accidentally leave a cub behind after their retreat. The golem’s life is thrown into chaos as he attempts to reunite the cub with its family.

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Movie Review

Fun final act isn't enough to make Clayface DC's next great movie

Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie in Clayface

Photo by Parisa Taghizadeh

Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie are patient and doctor in Clayface.

The history of DC Comics in movies has been hit-and-miss, especially when it comes to anything not directly involving Batman or Superman. Over the years, films have been headlined by heroes like Catwoman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Shazam, the Flash, and more, and while some succeeded, none left a lasting mark on moviegoers’ imaginations.

Much like they did with Joker, the powers-that-be behind DC Studios productions are trying to entice viewers with a no-holds-barred story in Clayface. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an A-list movie actor with both critical and commercial appeal. Unfortunately, a night of celebration for his recent Oscar nomination leads to him sleeping with Theresa (Ruby Sear), the girlfriend of Markos Szabo (David Dencik), a prominent mobster in Gotham City. Markos then enacts revenge by taking a razor to Matt’s face.

Desperate to find a way to look like his old self again, Matt seeks out Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who’s conducting cutting-edge nanotechnology research that can heal any kind of damage. While the solution works on Matt, it also has the side effect of his body doing unintended things, even morphing into those with whom he comes into contact. After initially struggling with his new body, Matt decides to use his powers to enact revenge on those who’ve done him wrong.

Directed by James Watkins (Speak No Evil) and written by Mike Flanagan (The Life of Chuck) and Hossein Amini, the film is only intermittently entertaining as it tries to sell its ridiculous premise. Right from the start, it seems like the filmmakers have been given a limited budget, as everything from the sets to the CGI to the stilted dialogue feels cheap. For a film coming from a major studio, the whole thing comes off as schlocky and undercooked.

Watkins and his team try to make up for that shoddiness by delivering R-rated thrills like nudity and body horror, but those elements can only distract for so long. Much of the film is spent dealing with Matt’s trauma, and the downbeat nature of his body issues combined with very little action makes the movie not very fun to watch. The film also tries to make hay with more than a doctor-patient bond between Caitlyn — who has a boyfriend on the police force — and Matt, but like the most of the film, it never connects.

It’s not until the final third of the movie that the filmmakers land on the tone they should have been using the whole time. Matt’s ability to transform himself, while illogical and confounding, provides multiple over-the-top, funny moments and some legitimately creative kills. Instead of taking forever to set up Matt/Clayface’s origin story, Watkins and his team should have just cut to the chase and let him loose to see what the character could truly do.

This is the first big role for Welsh actor Harries, and while he’s not exactly magnetic, he proves himself worthy of the lead role. Ackie is also fine, but after several years of trying to advance up the Hollywood ladder, she may be running out of time to show she’s a star. The supporting cast has a couple of familiar faces, but it’s mostly lesser-known actors who do nothing to indicate they deserve bigger showcases.

It’s difficult to imagine any non-DC Comics fans having a strong attachment to the character of Clayface, and the film fails to make the case that he should be a continuing character. The poor quality of almost everything that appears on screen is indicative of the kind of effort and money that was put into the film, and sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

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Clayface opens in theaters on October 23.

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