Nov. 9-13 in Houston

Ethan Hawke and Texas premieres of Oscar contenders The Artist and Coriolanusheadline Cinema Arts Festival Houston

Ethan Hawke
"The Artist" is expected to be an Oscar contender
Coriolanus, starring Ralph Fiennes, is also eagerly anticipated.

Multi-talented actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke and screenings of several films that are likely favorites for this year's Academy Awards are among the highlights of the third annual Cinema Arts Festival Houston, officials announced Monday night at The Grove.

Hawke, an actor on stage and screen (Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, Training Day, Gattaca), director of the movie Chelsea Walls and the stage play Things We Want, and author of well-received novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, will receive the festival's Levantine Cinema Arts Award.

The award honors a leading actor, director or other creative artist who has stretched the boundaries of cinematic expression. Last year's honoree was Isabella Rossellini.

"We wanted to give it to an artist who has embraced all art forms in his career. Ethan embodies that," Cinema Arts Festival Houston artistic director Richard Herskowitz told CultureMap.

"We wanted to give it to an artist who has embraced all art forms in his career. Ethan embodies that," Cinema Arts Festival Houston artistic director Richard Herskowitz told CultureMap. "He exactly fits the bill of what we are looking for — a young actor who sees no boundaries at all. Film is simply the starting point for him."

Hawke, 40, will present his latest film, The Woman in the Fifth, on Nov. 12 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Brown Auditorium, and talk about his career in a question-and-answer session with CultureMap contributor, film teacher and critic Joe Leydon afterwards.

The next day, Hawkeʼs good friend, director Richard Linklater, will join him for a 10th anniversary screening of their 2001 collaboration, Tape, at Edwards Greenway Grand Palace.

The festival, which is unique because it combines elements of an art fair with a traditional film fest, also plans a full slate of interactive installations and live performances with films in several locations across Houston Nov. 9-13.

"We have constantly built up the live performance element,"Herskowitz said. "The original vision was to make this a festival where all the arts participate. I feel like it's getting closer and closer to what that original dream was."

Among the live installations:

The Donald Sosin Ensemble, featuring vocalist Joanna Seaton and student players from Rice Universityʼs Shepherd School of Music, will perform live to accompany the recently rediscovered silent classic, Upstream (1927), at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Nov. 13.
In collaboration with the Aurora Picture Show, filmmaker, video artist and documentarian Braden King will present his new feature film, Here, on Nov. 11 at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace, as well as a live hybrid film-concert Here [The Story Sleeps] at Talento Bilingue de Houston on Nov. 12.
Miwa Matreyek will present her latest performance – "Myth and Infrastructure" – at Talento Bilingue de Houston on Nov. 11. Meyek performs in a multimedia production using projected animation she has created.
As previously reported, the festival will kick off Nov. 9 with the regional premiere of Downtown Express, featuring a performance by the film's star, Russian-American violinist Philippe Quint.

Three upcoming releases with Oscar potential will be screened at the festival:

The Artist, a silent movie filmed in black-and-white about a relationship between a star whose popularity is on the wane with the advent of talkies and a young-actress-on-the-rise, has won rave reviews at major international film festivals.
Coriolanus, starring and directed by Ralph Fiennes, is a 2011 adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy about a banished hero of Rome who allies with a sworn enemy to take his revenge on the city.
David Cronenbergʼs A Dangerous Method is based on the turbulent relationships between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), the troubled but beautiful young woman who comes between them.

In another new element this year, the festival is bringing three major international directors — Patricio Guzmán (Chile), Zhu Wen (China), and Mahmoud Kaabour (Lebanon) — to present their latest films.

Closing night (Nov. 13) promises two blockbusters: The world premiere of Art Car: The Movie at Miller Outdoor Theater and Pina, a 3-D movie by director Wim Wenders about dance great Pina Bosch, at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace.

One reason for the strong lineup: Although in only its third year, the festival has earned a reputation as a "go-to" place for new or unusual movies. "We've got more clout," Herskowitz said.

A full schedule as can be found on the Cinema Arts Festival Houston website.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

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.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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