West and Clear’s Lone Star Film Festival preview

by Steve Smith of West and Clear

Today begins the second annual Lone Star International Film Festival and with that in mind, I have one thing to say to you, Fort Worth:

Go, or I will send this Swedish vampire to your house to bite you.

How’s that for a sales pitch?

Admittedly, we at West and Clear are homers about this. We love us some Fort Worth and this is another great opportunity to show the out-of-towners that we have more to offer the world than Cowtown. The best thing you can do in that regard is to actually get up and go to a screening. Do it out of civic pride if you must, but you’ll probably find out that you will have some fun.

There will be some star power — Dustin Hoffman and Amy Adams will be in town. There will even be some local film going on — Teen-A-Go-Go — and a film about Fort Worth, They Came To Play.

There’s also another local film, Karma Police, which I might even possibly forgive for ripping off the concept from a Radiohead song. Directed and written by John Venable and starring Chamblee Ferguson, David Sullivan, John Wesley Shipp and Nicole Leigh Verdin, it’s about the world’s largest secret organization, the Karma Police, that ensure that good people are rewarded and not-so-good people are punished. Karma Police was shot and produced locally in Dallas/Fort Worth as a co-production by Red Productions, Film Cynix, and Film Frog. With the exception of two key actors from L.A., all of the the actors and crew were homegrown right here in DFW.

Some movies I am going to try and catch:

* One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, a documentary about Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur also includes Sam Shepard, Tom Waits, Robert Hunter, Patti Smith, Aram Saroyan, Donal Logue and S.E. Hinton with original music composed and performed by (check this out CarolN) Jay Farrar of Son Volt.

* Let the Right One In is a movie about Swedish vampires and, if you weren’t hooked at “Swedish vampires,” then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

* Sunshine Cleaning is an off-beat comedy about two sisters (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt) who go into the crime scene clean-up business as a get-rich-quick scheme. Obviously, this will be the feel good movie of ‘09. See it here first.

Hope to see you there.