Sure, Val Kilmer was here in Austin for the showing of MacGruber earlier this week before heading to Houston. But there was more excitement as Bella herself — actress Kristen Stewart —showed up to promote The Runaways, the Joan Jett biopic that officially closing the South by Southwest Film Festival.
After the screening, Stewart awkwardly answered questions. During the Q&A session she roamed the stage a bit aimlessly while she talked about taking the role of Jett. She didn't seem comfortable mentioning the Twilight saga more than once. When she did, the air was sucked out of the room and she never mentioned the tween series again.
Afterwards, she headed to a party for cast and crew at Moonshine. I tried to crash it, but couldn't get in. But Perez Hilton was there and tweeted, “I'm at the same party as Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning at Moonshine in Austin. Should I go up and say hello???? Ha! #SXSW”
To which he later replied, “Just met them both. #Done”.
Stewart and Fanning also stopped by Stubbs to take in the music scene. They watched from the VIP section as Broken Social Scene performed.
Jett was not at the screening and was sorry she couldn't make it, according to Cherie Currie, the lead singer of the trailblazing 1970s band, The Runaways. Seeing Currie in person made not getting into the after party all the more tolerable.
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.
Kristen Stewart
Kristen Stewart
