Fake Out

Now in its fourth year, the Deep Ellum Film Festival distinguishes itself from other local fests by positioning itself as an event for filmmakers and about filmmaking. There will be weekend panels with industry folks, a 90-minute presentation of short films made by Arts Magnet students ("You're ready to make a movie as soon as you can hold a camera," Cain says), discussions with visiting writers and directors and producers after screenings (and, more likely, during the copious parties thrown during fest week). With the move to the Magnolia Theater, the fest has expanded by four days, which has allowed for more locally made films (35 shorts and features) and more room for risk.

Someone like editor Frank Mazzola can tell you all about the dangers of personal filmmaking: Two years ago, he rescued from the bargain-video bins a film called Wild Side, written and directed by his friend and colleague Donald Cammell, whose tiny filmography also includes 1970's Performance. With Wild Side, which stars Anne Heche as a whore pingponging between people she's screwing and screwing over, among them Christopher Walken and Joan Chen, Cammell was never allowed to make the movie he wanted; those who financed it took it from him and, in 1996, released something so tragically awful Cammell shot himself in the head. What Mazzola has constructed--an intentionally overwrought psychosexual drama, played for small and sick laughs--bears no relationship to the released version; to watch them side by side is to be struck by how men with wallets should never be allowed near the editing bay.

The festival will also celebrate the movies of Alan Rudolph, a maker of oddball films about everyday eccentrics: Willie Nelson's songwriter, Bruce Willis' suicidal car dealer, Jennifer Jason Leigh's dour Dorothy Parker, Emily Watson's daffy private eye. Rudolph will be here for a screening of films old (Choose Me, Breakfast of Champions) and recent (last year's Investigating Sex, with a cast of all-stars talking about talking about sex). "Alan is accessible; he will inspire people," Cain says. "He's the kind of person you have a beer with."

What follows is a scant selection of highlights from this year's fest--all features, given the limitations of space. Go to www.def2.org for a complete schedule of films, which will screen at the Magnolia Theater and, in some cases, the Lakewood Theater or Xpo Lounge.

---

American Gun Writer-director Alan Jacobs' film would make for a devastating double feature with Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine; guns don't kill people, turns out, but movies about guns who kill people may drive you suicidal. James Coburn, withered by age but no less sturdy than a hundred-year-old oak, plays a distant but loving father whose daughter (Virginia Madsen) is gunned down just upon her long-awaited return to the family farm. Coburn spends the rest of the film tracking down not his girl's murderer, but the maker of the gun used to end her life; he won't find answers, only ambivalence and antipathy from those for whom such violence has become mundane. The weapon itself becomes a character; we're privvy to its past "adventures," presented in black-and-white flashbacks. You know what Jacobs is saying--and, for God's sake, NRA cardholders were advisers on the movie--but you're nonetheless shaken by the way one man's horror is treated as, well, inevitable if not routine by everyone else. Ultimately, what Coburn seeks is always in the palm of his hand: not a weapon, but the decision to use it. November 19, 7:30 p.m., Magnolia. Alan Jacobs will attend. (RW)

Intacto Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's complex meditation on luck, fate and the torments of memory is a multilayered wonder that engages the intellect and stirs the senses. In his first feature film, the Spanish writer-director throws together a gambler obsessed with Dame Fortune, the sole survivor of a plane crash whose luck may be even more extraordinary, a curious police detective and a mysterious Holocaust victim whose guilt compels him to constantly test fate. Remarkable for its inventive visual style and its bold imaginative leaps, Fresnadillo's dazzling cinematic puzzle signals the arrival of a fine new talent on the international film scene. With Eusebio Poncela, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Monica Lopez and, as the shadowy linchpin of the piece, the great Max Von Sydow. November 19, 7 p.m., Magnolia. (Bill Gallo)

Interview with the Assassin Meet the man who really killed John Kennedy: Walter Ohlinger, a former Marine sniper who insists he was the grassy knoll gunman. "Killing someone's easy," Ohlinger says, "the trick is getting away," which he did until Ohlinger, dying of cancer, took his story to an out-of-work TV cameraman and spilled his guts. "You kill the most powerful man in the world, I'd say that makes you the most powerful, don't you think?" he offers by way of explanation. "I was ready for that." Ohlinger spends the entirety of Interview with the Assassin trying to prove to Ron Kobeleski he pulled the trigger, and by film's end we're not quite sure whether Ohlinger killed Kennedy, only that he's a bad mother capable of murder; if he didn't kill Kennedy, he killed someone. Or, you see, not. The feature-film debut of writer-director Neil Burger makes a rather lurid fiction feel like tangible fact; you're sucked into Ohlinger's tale, told through a shaky handheld lens that makes palpable and tangible the otherwise ludicrous story you've heard a dozen times before if you've ever spent time loitering outside the Sixth Floor Museum. Shot in L.A., Washington, D.C., and Dealey Plaza and starring Raymond Barry (The Ref, Training Day) as Ohlinger, Burger's movie plays like thrilling satire; either he's goofing on conspiracy theorists or handing them more ammo. Guess it depends on how much you wanna be suckered; there are, ya know, still people out there looking for the Blair Witch, too. November 15, 10 p.m., Magnolia. Director Neil Burger will attend. (RW)