SXSW Preview
Photo Credit: Greg Peters/Rogue Pictures
The Saturday Night Live sketch about a poor man’s MacGuyer (Will Forte) is extended to a full 90 minutes. But fear not: Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe are here to assist the eponymous hero. Val Kilmer plays the heavy.
Photo Credit: Greg Peters/Rogue Pictures
A working print of Kick-Ass played at last year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, the Cannes of nerd cinema, and won the night. Matthew Vaughn ( Layer Cake) directs; Aaron Johnson plays a comics fan who decides to be a superhero; Chloe Moretz, a sidekick, allegedly steals the show.
Dan Smith / Lionsgate
Yes, plural. For those left wanting by Predator, Predator 2, and Predator’s various death dances with Alien, producer Robert Rodriguez will screen a “first look”—in movie-speak, a few tantalizing minutes. Then he and director Nimród Antal will be grilled by the fanboys about the rest of it.
Everett Collection
Finally, someone has taken on the most vexing artistic question of the century: What went wrong with the new Star Wars movies? The outraged hordes sent in YouTube rants about Lucas, and the filmmakers, led by director Alexandre O. Philippe, shaped the results into a kind of open-source film. It’s the story of how an Internet troll becomes a Jedi Knight.
Novelist Stieg Larsson posthumously published three mega-selling mystery novels, the last of which will be released in America in May. This first film adaptation, from Sweden, did “boffo B.O. in Scandinavia,” according to Variety. See it before the inevitable American remake.
Knut Koivisto
As one publicist put it, Mr. Nice does for marijuana what Johnny Depp’s Blow did for cocaine. For you stoners out there, that means it tries to make the machinations of a drug lord (Rhys Ifans) into an engaging feature. One of Chloë Sevigny’s two films at SXSW.
Robert Duvall and Bill Murray are coming to Austin, which is some kind of occasion. Their movie is about a Tennessee hermit (Duvall, with a beard that would impress Leo Tolstoy) who leaves his woodsy isolation and throws himself a pre-funeral. (He wants to be awake when his friends deliver the eulogies.) Additional Southernness provided by Sissy Spacek.
Sony Pictures Classics
It won a grand jury prize at Sundance. Jennifer Lawrence is an Ozarks teenager who lost her dad; he split under cloudly cirumstances involving their house and a bail bond.
A documentary about Ian Fraser Kilmister, lead singer of Motörhead, who goes by “Lemmy” so that he won’t be confused with a London Spectator correspondent. Feels like the artistic rejoinder to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Lemmy and his bandmates will play live in Austin on March 17.
Paul Inder
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed mind trips like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, has a new movie about a guy with a bullet in his head. And it (the movie) is funny! Danny Boon, a French comedian, stars.
Sony Pictures Classics
You wake up. You pull back the covers. You find that your testicles have been removed. Welcome to Barry Munday, which is reported to have an Office Space-y vibe. Patrick Wilson is the victim of the jewel heist. Chloë Sevigny, Cybill Shepherd, and Billy Dee Williams help clean up the mess.
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