Backporch Beer - WE'VE CLOSED! THANKS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE!

Austin Film Festival Day 6

In many ways film festivals are a way for artists, be they actors or directors, to have films shown that allow them to break from their typecasting. The Austin Film Festival is no different and Winter Passing is part of that. Adam Rapp (brother of Anthony ‘Tony’ Rapp who makes a guest appearance) directs Zooey Deschanel, Ed Harris, Will Ferrell, and Amelia Warner in this somber but eventually sentimental film. Where a standard movie, say one of my favorites Jerry Maguire, might start at 5 on the happy scale and end at 10, this starts at 2 and ends at 8. It’s hard to say more without spoiling key scenes, but it can be very hard at times. This story about the daughter of famous authors who left home at 18 and didn’t return for her mother’s funeral three years later is still worth seeing, though.

Fans may feel differently but ATHF‘s creator Jay Edwards movie Stomp! Shout! Scream! is like most of the genre it tries to imitate. A girl band in the ’60s doing a self-managed tour through the Southeast has car problems in a town north of Florida at the same time a swamp creature washes up on shore and kills several beach-goers. There are a few ATHF-ish scenes that garner a chuckle, but the screenplay adheres too much to it’s beach party, swamp monster genre and becomes pedestrian.