Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting > Archives > 2005 > October > 25 > Entry
Film festival snapshots
If it’s between the bearded one or the blonde one — which it was — I’m taking the blonde.
I picked Claire Danes to interview instead of Jason Schwartzman on Friday at the Four Seasons Hotel as part of the press push for the actors’ movie “Shopgirl”, a watery romance that opened the Austin Film Festival on Thursday night at the Paramount Theatre.
But when I arrived I was told Danes, who looked fresh and hale the night before, was too ill for interviews. So I took Schwartzman, the hairy, diminutive star of Wes Anderson’s best film “Rushmore.” Our chat was brisk and relaxed, despite his jarring admission that in his next film he plays Louis XVI, who got his head chopped off in 1793.
Then the publicist introduced me to Schwartzman’s mother Talia Shire — Adrian in the “Rocky” films, sister of Francis Ford Coppola — and we immediately hit it off, chatting over coffee for the next 90 minutes. Life, death, illness, spirituality, depression, the artist’s temperament, gurus, Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, Kierkergaard, love, tai-chi, yoga, “The Denial of Death,” Viktor Frankl — we covered miles of brain terrain, leaving me spent. It was wonderful. I walked her to her driver and she did the kiss on both cheeks thing. She said she would e-mail titles of books she recommends. Then she told me to be very careful in Vietnam next week. I said I would.
That night at the festival I went to the Judd Apatow retrospective. Fellow festival guests Harold Ramis and James Franco were there, as were fans of Apatow’s defunct TV show “Freaks & Geeks” (which co-starred Franco) and his movie “The 40 Year-Old Virgin.”
Outtakes from the movie were funny and revealing — the insecure Apatow shoots every scene with numerous punch lines — but the unaired pilot of Apatow’s failed sitcom “North Hollywood” killed. The biggest laugh-getter was when the son of Tom Hanks appears and the main character can’t get over how much he looks like Hanks, wondering, “What, did Tom Hanks have sex with himself?”
Festival parties over the weekend mostly fizzled, and not even the Driskill Hotel bar, the traditional hot spot during the annual event, generated much heat. Thursday’s opening night shindig at Thistle Cafe was filled with unfamiliar, heavily made-up faces, though Schwartzman, Mike Judge and Buck Henry circulated and partook of gratis booze.
Ramis presented a rowdy screening of “Ghostbusters” on Saturday night to a whooping crowd that sang along to the theme song. The dismal after-party was held at 219 West, which teemed with blockhead jocks in way too good a mood after that Longhorns thing. I don’t hate sports, I just hate the fans.
Two festival movies that were spectacular in their first 40 minutes before I had to go: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” with Robert Downey Jr. never better, and “The Matador,” with Pierce Brosnan burning with acid malevolence. See them when they come.
Meet Becky. She is ill-behaved, ravenous, incontinent, brilliant. She drinks wine, she eats geckos. She might be the devil.
Latest band I like: The Hold Steady, a thrashy, propellant outfit that could be the only rock group to put “Tusken Raiders” in its lyrics. The singer bleat-blurts his words like Mike Muir of Suicidal Tendencies. He sounds hungover.
I have been consumed by books lately, including two non-fiction tomes about Mormonism: “Under the Banner of God” and “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise,” both riveting and damning; E.L. Doctorow’s limpid, almost jaunty Civil War novel “The March”; Cormac McCarthy’s beautiful “No Country for Old Men”; a revisit of the ending of “The Great Gatsby”; and Martin McDonagh’s scabrous play “The Pillowman.” Looking forward to J. M. Coetzee’s new novel “Slow Man” and Mary Roach’s “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,” both of which teeter atop my three-story book pile.
One book I’m not reading is Rick Moody’s “The Diviners” for various reasons, one of them being Stephen Metcalf’s review in the Oct. 2 New York Times Book Review. It’s my favorite review in a while. I especially savored this passage, which addresses my own peeves:
“Moody’s prose is filled with these strange acoustics, with tics and flourishes and gassy perseverations, some of which predominate for a few pages only to disappear a few pages later. One habit persists, though. A squeegee isn’t simply a squeegee; it’s ‘the device known as the squeegee.’ Twizzlers aren’t Twizzlers; they’re ‘the licorice called the Twizzler.’ And so kiddie baseball is ‘the system known as Little League’ and some money ‘the U.S. legal tender bills’ and the advent of the Internet ‘the age of so-called electronic mail.’ (Isn’t it so-called ‘e-mail’?) This is a cheeky locution common to the McSweeney’s set, and its usual intent is to show how a scrim of snotty irony can separate us from even the most transactional language.”
And with that I leave for a while, back to Asia for the (presumed) splendors of Vietnam.
Comments
By Stephen Moser
November 1, 2005 01:59 AM | Link to this
“I dont hate sports, I just hate the fans.” ROFLMAO. My favorite new quote. I think you’re brilliant.