The mayor proclaimed last week “Dallas Arts Week.” Perhaps the film community deserves its own dedication. With the Dallas International Film Festival just wrapping up and the Arab Film Festival Texas set to kick-off this weekend, a third festival, The USA Film Festival – the oldest and original North Texas film event – has just dropped its 2013 lineup.
With the release of the festival’s new schedule, the USA Film Festival has produced two seemingly solid slates of film in a row, mixing tributes linked to some major releases with local ties with a number of intriguing features and docs that you might otherwise not see.
Richardson’s David Gordon Green is one of the featured filmmakers; the director of the Pineapple Express will present his new film Prince Avalanche. That film, which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, was widely lauded and described as a comedy that falls in between Green’s more character-driven fair and the comedies he has made of late.
Also to be honored at this year’s USA Film Festival is Jeff Lipsky, whose latest film, Molly’s Theory of Relativity, didn’t fair as well as Green’s at Sundance. Lipsky is not so much an acquired taste as a flavor all to himself. His raw, naturalistic, emotional melodramas can feel impossibly indulgent or unfappably honest. From what I’ve seen of Lipsky, I lean toward the indulgent view, but his latest film finds an advocate in the New York Times’ Stephen Holden, who calls it a “surreal, post-Freudian gabfest,” which I suppose could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on where you stand.
Ah, what else? Well, encouragingly, there is much else at this year’s USA Film Festival. Stephen Tobolowsky will be in town presenting shorts, a program which doesn’t preclude the festival’s own annual shorts program, the winners of which qualify for Oscar consideration. Then there are some intriguing features, like Caesar Must Die, last year’s official Italian submission to the Academy Awards that has been bouncing around film fests and, rather scandalously, never found an American limited release. There’s Bluebird, which debuts this week at Tribeca and is the debut directorial effort from Lance Edmands, who edited Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and had some festival success with his NYU Tisch thesis film “Vactionland.”
There are also some intriguing documentaries. Greg Barker will be in town to present his doc about the Osama bin Laden capture, Manhunt, and the fest will screen Big Shot, a film about the Dallas guy who lied his way into becoming the owner of the New York Islanders. And for more local connections, SMU grad Amy Acker stars-in and will be in town for Josh Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing; Dallas-native Joey O’Bryan will present his Motorway, a Hong Kong thriller for which he wrote the script; and Drew Rist and Don Merritt will present their Dublin Dr. Pepper doc Bottled Up.
The full schedule is here. It reads a bit like Dallas International Film Festival light, that is, the same broad programming approach without the length or numbers of screenings, panels, parties, and spin-off events. Last year, I wrote that the USA Film Festival could do for a wholesale change of approach, to carve out a new niche to help bolster its identity in an increasingly crowded local — and national — festival market. This lineup doesn’t do that, but it does show that there are enough films to program another April film festival that doesn’t shirk quality or stuff the program with soon-to-be released features.
Image: From Jeff Lipsky’s Molly’s Theory of Relativity.
