Entering Its Second Year, AFI Dallas Avoids the Sophomore Slump

With such an expansive roster, there's no easy way to sum up the schedule—which is not without its significant points of intrigue. Chief among them: the Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner-produced What Just Happened?, director Barry Levinson's adaptation of producer Art Linson's giddy, grizzly 2003 book in which the Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Untouchables and Fight Club producer recounted the horrors of working in the movie business. What Just Happened? bowed in January at Sundance, where it received a ruthlessly cold Utah reception—in fact, the film, which stars not only De Niro but also Bruce Willis and Sean Penn and Catherine Keener, remains unsold to distributors. But Cain says the version screening here is a different cut than the Sundance version—so, for that matter, is former Dallasite David Gordon Green's moody, transitional adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's novel Snow Angels, a Sundance entry in 2007.

"We'll all be seeing it for the first time, and Todd is interested in seeing what the audience response is," Cain says. "I hope that's what we wind up showing more and more often, films that come out of Sundance looking for their next step. It allows filmmakers the chance to see what worked and what didn't, so they can come here and say, 'Let's see what it does now.'" Also playing the fest is another 2007 Sundancer: the sweet, small Son of Rambow, which is significantly kinder to the audience than the similarly themed Be Kind Rewind.

Another can't-miss Sundancer coming though Dallas is The Black List, in which former Fort Worth Star-Telegram and New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell interviews the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Chris Rock, Colin Powell, Sean Combs, Louis Gossett Jr., Bill T. Jones and many others about what it means to be black in America—simple as that, hard as it is to believe no one's ever even attempted such a thing. Mitchell is never seen nor heard from, as he and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders let their subjects talk for a few minutes before moving on in what only seems on the surface like a thumbnail glimpse into celebrity. Expanded interviews will be available in a book, due out before year's end.

Truth is, one of the best bigger films in the fest is Nicholas Stoller's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which had a raucous debut at SXSW and which opens wide April 18. It was written by and stars Jason Segal, a regular in Judd Apatow's stable going back to Freaks and Geeks. What easily could have played like a Ben Stiller romantic comedy is significantly smarter and sharper—precisely because it knows its audience won't tolerate the lazy same-ol' from a guy who, till now, has been the dude passing around the bong in the backseat.

Also coming to Dallas fresh from Austin (and Toronto and Sundance) is The Visitor, writer-director Tom McCarthy's beautiful film about the invisible people living in the margins and shadows. McCarthy, an actor recently seen as fabulist Scott Templeton on The Wire, returns to Dallas eight years after starring in the locally made Certain Guys. Says McCarthy about life on the festival circuit: "The exciting thing about these festivals is you have people who really like to go to movies, who aren't just looking to movies as an escape but also looking to movies for motivation, inspiration or just to be moved and enlightened."

AFI Dallas' opening-night film is Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me, in which the first-time writer-director stars as a woman desperate to have a child before she turns 40 (though Hunt herself turns 45 this year, never mind that). It's a confident debut, though an odd hybrid: a sitcom pilot rendered as melodrama starring the likes of Matthew Broderick (as her husband and, seriously, an irresistible man-child), Colin Firth (as the single-dad love interest) and Bette Midler (as the famous mother who gave up for adoption Hunt's character when she was a year old). In short, it's the kind of film a mother, which is to say my mother, would love.

The closing-night offering, Battle in Seattle, is far more successful; it's a sort of tear-gas-drenched version of Crash, a gritty evocation of a tumultuous moment all but erased from recent memory. It too marks an actor's debut as writer and director, in this case Queen of the Damned's Stuart Townsend, who directs girlfriend Charlize Theron, as well as Woody Harrelson and Andre Benjamin and Lost's Michelle Rodriguez. The film is a multilayered and unexpectedly thrilling retelling of the 1999 riots that engulfed Seattle during the World Trade Organization's meetings, which were cut short by protesters who ranged from righteous activists to hell-raising anarchists. Shot documentary-style by the brilliant cinematographer Barry Aykroyd (United 93), Townsend has little patience for both the cops who willy-nilly attacked peaceful protesters and for some of the protesters themselves whose reckless antics wound up stifling necessary debate amongst those who came to Seattle demanding the WTO treat poor countries with the same deference shown its richer members.