The Circuit

Austin's Fantastic Fest has announced the first pot of films for their fourth event.  Fest director Tim League, along with programmers Harry Knowles (Ain't It Cool News), Todd Brown (Twitchfilm.net), Blake Ethridge (Cinema is Dope), Zack Carlson and Lars Nilsen (Alamo Drafthouse Cinema) "scoured the globe for the strangest, the most heart-pounding and the most challenging new genre films."

Though only four years old, Fantastic has made name by screening first-looks of such films as Mel Gibson's "Apolocalypto," and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."

While League won't yet say what sneaks he's planning this year, the list of films so far is a thorough cross-section of recent genre films.  The program includes fest circuit favorites such as Aleksei Balabanov's "Cargo 200," Tomas Alfredson's vampire flick "Let the Right One In," and Aristomenis Tsirbas' animated sci-fi "Terra" (pictured).

DJ Caruso is expected to attend, bringing his Shia LaBeouf thriller "Eagle Eye" to screen. 

The fest's opening night party is dubbed the Air Sex World Final.  (Imagine an air guitar contest, then replace the imaginary guitar with an imaginary person.) 

There will also be a dance party in a mile-deep cave, and a boat party after a screening on "Donkey Punch," which if you've seen the film may not sound like much fun.


Feature films:

"Art of the Devil 3" (2008, Thailand, director: Ronin Team)

"Cargo 200" (2007, Russia, director: Aleksei Balabanov)

"Dark Floors" (2008, Finland, director: Pete Riski)

"Doctor Infierno" (2008, Spain, director: Paco Limon)

"Donkey Punch" (2008, United Kingdom, director: Oliver Blackburn)

"Eagle Eye" (2008, USA, director: D.J. Caruso)
   
"Estomago" (2007, Brazil, director: Marcos Jorge)

"Ex Drummer" (2007, Belgium, director: Koen Mortier)

"Fighter" (2008, Denmark, director: Natasha Arthy)

"Gachi Boy: Wrestling with a Memory" (2008, Japan, director: Norihiro Koizumi)

"How to Get Rid of the Others" (2007, Denmark, director: Anders Rønnow Klarlund)

"I Think We’re Alone Now" (2007, USA, director: Sean Donnelly)

"Jack Brooks Monster Slayer" (2007, Canada, director: Jon Knautz)

"Let the Right One In" (2008, Sweden, director: Tomas Alfredson)

"Muay Thai Chaiya" (2007, Thailand, director: Kongkiat Khomsiri)

"The Short Films of Nacho Vigalondo" (various, Spain, director: Nacho Vigalondo)

"South of Heaven" (2007, USA, director: Jonathan Vara)

"Spine Tingler - The William Castle Story" (2007, USA, director: Jeffrey Schwarz)

"The Substitute" (2007, Denmark, director: Ole Bornedal)

"Terra" (2008, Canada, director: Aristomenis Tsirbas)

"The Tingler" (1959, USA, director: William Castle)

"Tokyo Gore Police"  (2008, Japan, director: Yoshihiro Nishimura)

by Maria Alvarez Rilla
News broke Friday night that Nacho Vigalondo's "Time Crimes" has taken top honors at Austin's Fantastic Fest, scooping the AMD Best Feature plaudit and an Audience Award silver medal.

He's an adopted Basque: the Spanish helmer's been working mano a mano for years with the spruce, gentlemanly Bilbao producer Eduardo Carnero. They won a best short Academy Award nom with "7:35 in the Morning" in 2005. Now they're making waves with Vigalondo's long feature debut.

"Time Crimes" has been a Spanish-language blogsphere smash since the get-go, thanks to its helmer's cult status as a director and a blogger.

As a sci-fi and jigsaw aficionada, I loved the wit of this time-paradox jigsaw. Basque thesp Karra Elejalde ("Airbag", "Mutant Action") is breathtaking as a time-traveller-caring-hubby Hector, and Barbara Goenaga ("Sylvia's Gift") is simply wonderful as a perturbing bike riding nymph.

An enthusiastic Harry Knowles review followed "Crimes" Austin's world premier. To Vigalondo's delight, Peter Martin at Twitchfilm misspelled Vigalondo as "Vigilando" (watching). "It's the perfect name for my hidden identity as a superhero," he blogged. We agree.

Sitges starts Thursday. "Time Crimes" competes. We will be Vigilando, Nacho.

Full list of Fantastic Fest winners here.

Watch Nacho at Fantastic Fest:

by Marjorie Baumgarten / Marginalia
The secret closing-night film of Fantastic Fest 3 in Austin, Texas, on Thursday night turned out to be the first public screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood." In "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," it's not the gold that destroys men's souls but greed; in "There Will Be Blood," the commodity that drives the greed is oil.

Anderson was in attendance and answered a few questions following the screening. The film, which is based on Upton Sinclair's Oil!, really only uses "about the first 150 pages of the novel," according to Anderson. "The book goes on to Hollywood and Washington" and was just too expansive for his purposes, though he said that those opening chapters contained Sinclair's clear descriptions of the workings of the derricks and the precipitous moods that hung over communities that were about to sell their land to the oil prospectors. Anderson's usual mix of stunning landscape shots and long takes blend with his close-up scrutiny of the hidden meanings of faces and comportment.

Essential to the movie is the original score by Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist and BBC composer in residence. In addition to some uniquely haunting orchestral arrangements, there's this insistent string motif that sounds like the buzzing of an insect inside one's head, a sound that grows louder and more unavoidably distressing whenever soulless events are about to occur.

"There Will Be Blood" was indeed an unusual choice to close out this year's Fantastic Fest, as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema founder and host Tim League was the first to admit. Though the film hardly belongs to the science fiction, fantasy, animation, and crime genres that attendees had been snacking on all week, League attested in his introduction that the film is undeniably "fantastic." League met Anderson this summer when the Drafthouse's Rolling Roadshow hosted an outdoor screening of "Boogie Nights" in the L.A. area and the director made a surprise appearance. The two became fast friends, which led to the Fantastic Fest screening. However, it took Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles to point out during the Q&A that Plainview was the "best monster" he had seen all week. Anderson responded that Dracula was in his thoughts as he was writing the screenplay. "There Will Be Blood" indeed.

A quick text message from someone in the audience at the Fantastic Fest sneak screening of "There Will Be Blood":

There will be blood just ended. Easily one of the best movies of the year.

More coming...

Twitch has a review of Richard Kelly's reworked "Southland Tales." The first cut famously bombed at Cannes.  Todd Brown says the "Donnie Darko" director's new cut, secretly screened last night at Fantastic Fest, "is far from the mess it has been made out to be, a work that rewards as much as it challenges and succeeds in finding the human, emotional core lurking beneath all of its high concepts." 

Yet he predicts that "if Darren Aronofsky's 'The Fountain' was too obscure and cerebral for mainstream audiences then 'Southland Tales,' a more challenging film by far, is destined to die a quick and unpleasant death at the box office."

As hot as they are, festival sneak screenings now lead to the inevitable blog leaks… and long, long lines.  Gone are the days when Telluriders would line up to get the latest sneak announcements.  Now word gets out.  As quickly as the first “Juno” was uttered, text messages, IMs, emails, and then blogs spilt the screenings all over the mountain town.  The winding line outside Chuck Jones' Cinema foretold they’d be a lot of unhappy badge holders. 

Rumors circulated that the fest sold too many Patron badges.  But Telluride’s Gary Meyer (pictured at Telluride's Sheridan Opera House) told me they sold the same number as last year.  And overall they actually sold less badges than last year (that includes Festival and Acme levels).

Said Meyer: “We had more screenings than ever before, and the addition of The Backlot which should have taken pressure off of screenings.  But people want to be the first to see high profile movies… and they all rush to see those movies causing horrible over-crowding… The reality is that every year there are people turned away from certain shows. We wish it wasn’t the case. And I wish I could predict what will happen but I can only guess.”

And as Fantastic Fest opens under a rumor of a “There Will Be Blood” screening, you can expect a repeat of Telluride – where lesser badgers scowl at the VIPs being ushered in first.  Said one Fantastic goer: “There are humongous lines for all the secret screenings, which end up being some of the town's worst-kept secrets.”

One might think the answer is to not make them secret.  Simply make it a part of the festival, red carpet and all.  But a fest programmer explained: “More often than not, it's due to a distributors' desire to save the film's premiere status for a later opportunity. Either for a later festival or because they don't want to diminish the film's actual Hollywood or New York premiere."

"That said, the nature of events like film festivals lend themselves to that air of mystery and surprise. So, it's actually kind of fun instead of frustrating.”

Is a distributor angered when their sneak title is leaked?

“It depends... I think as long as there are no trade reviews, it's not a big deal. But as we know, blogs have changed everything.”

Indeed, the currency of blogs and fanboy sites is in their value as first-look trade reviews.  No one knows that better than Harry Knowles, who is one of the Fantastic Fest’s founder/programmers.  Bet on Hollywood watching his site this week and next for first-words on big films.

On the heels of its pickup, Fantastic Fest has announced that “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead” will open the event in seven days.  Romero, pictured with Asia Argento in Toronto, will be there (photo by Jason Gemnich/Wireimage.com).

Austin's Fantastic Fest is not to be confused with the other Fantastic Film Fest in Scandinavia that has a very similar name, same theme... and happens around the same time.

That other one just announced some very cool guests of honor.  Let's hope they fly to the right place.

Austin’s Fantastic Fest has opened a fun trailer competition, but only for filmmakers 16 and under. And it must have a superhero in it:

Youth filmmaking teams will embark on a mission to conceive, write, make the costumes, film and edit a short film featuring an original concept superhero. The film must explain the powers of the superhero and conclude with the aforementioned character turning to camera and saying "(Name of superhero) welcomes you to Fantastic Fest."

(Mike Jones)

Austin's Fantastic Fest will announce a bunch of "cool stuff" later this week, though the program for the third annual event is already impressive. Fantastic will run September 20-27 featuring the best in "new science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation, crime, Asian, and all around badass cinema," all from the collective programming brain of SXSW's Matt Dentler, Harry Knowles, Tim League and Kier-La Janisse (The Alamo Drafthouse), Todd Brown (Twitch), and Tim McCanlies (screenwriter of "Iron Giant"). Recently, Dentler scored Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's "Inside" (pictured) for Fantastic, about a very pregnant woman stalked by a deranged, aspiring mother with a knife. Check out the review here. "Inside" will also screen in Toronto's upcoming Midnight section. The Weinstein Company picked up the film in Berlin.  (Mike Jones)