Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2006 > September > 18
Monday, September 18, 2006
Free movie tonight
You can get a sneak peek at “The Boynton Beach Club” tonight at 7 at the Arbor. The film is from Susan Seidelman (responsible for Madonna’s only redeeming film moment, “Desperately Seeking Susan”), and this event is presented by the Austin Film Society.
Here’s a description of the film from AFS: “Lois (Dyan Cannon), Harry (Joseph Bologna), Marilyn (Brenda Vaccaro), Sandy (Sally Kellerman) and Jack (Len Cariou) live in an ‘Active Adult’ community in Boynton Beach, Fla. Their lives intersect when they meet at a local bereavement group where they’ve gone to find emotional support after the loss of a loved one. But soon they each find themselves on a journey they could have never predicted when they re-enter the ‘dating scene’ after many decades - only to find that it’s a whole new world out there.
The film is free, but you do have to RSVP to the film society’s Natalie Schuessler if you want to attend. Her e-mail is natalie@austinfilm.org.
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A Latina in Hollywood: Ara Celi tells all
Actress Ara Celi will be the guest speaker at the general meeting of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers at 7 p.m. Sept. 27 at Nuevo Leon Restaurant, 1501 E. Sixth St. Everyone is welcome to the free event.
Celi, a Texas native with Salma Hayek looks, can be seen in “From Dusk Till Dawn 3,” “American Beauty,” “Go Fish” and “Bruce Almighty.” She’s been Emmy-nominated for her TV work, which includes playing Raquel Santos on “All My Children” and guest roles on “Nip/Tuck” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She’ll talk about her experiences as a Latina actress in Hollywood.
Celi in TV’s “Buffy”:
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Au revoir, Ontario
Dragging myself wearily to my desk back home in Austin, I can sit down and catch up on all the versions of the Toronto Film Festival I didn’t get a chance to see.
I gather the gossip of distribution deals and supposed next-big-things that are now dead in the water. I wade through photo albums of people I wish I’d been able to interview (Pedro Almodóvar, Will Ferrell) and those (Brad Pitt, J-Lo) whose frenzy-inducing presence I was happy to miss.
(Occasionally, I stumble across gossip I actually heard while in Toronto, like the silly bit — silly for both the actor and the folks who made a headline out of it — about Sean Penn getting a hotel in trouble for refusing to put out his cigarette.)
I get the final-for-now word on controversies: Yes, the Bush-bashing “Death of a President” got some of the backlash it asked for, but it also won the Fipresci Critics’ Prize; its cousin “The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair” scored a distribution deal with Netflix.
Best of all, though, I now can look forward to many of the movies I didn’t get to see.
It can be hard to pass up the chance to wait in line for an hour to be the first to see something — “Borat,” say, or “Volver” — that will open soon enough at home. But why fly to another country, if not in search of new, unexpected treasures?
Instead of satisfying my curiosity about “The Fountain,” which will screen soon in Austin’s Fantastic Fest, I made time for an engrossing doc, “Manufactured Landscapes,” about a photographer who finds beauty in ecological destruction. Instead of seeing Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which I’ve been thrilled about since he described it to me during an interview for “Hellboy,” I soaked up the cryptic but entrancing “Syndromes and a Century,” by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
And now, within the next couple of weeks, I — and you, dear reader! — will get to weigh in on titles that people strained to catch just days ago: “All the King’s Men,” “Shortbus,” “The People Vs. John Lennon” all have local press screenings this week, and more will follow. And chances are that SXSW’s Matt Dentler is already corralling a couple of gems I missed. Which gives me almost enough time to get caught up on sleep and all the real-life stuff I put on hold during this movie-packed week and a half.
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