Just got back from the Virginia Film Festival’s announcement press conference and, well, wow. Looks like a banner year. Let’s get the big names out of the way. Oh, and tickets go on sale tomorrow, October 7.
Oliver Stone chats with UVA’s Larry Sabato after a screening of JFK. (Sabato is writing a book about the assassinated prez.)
Stone may or may not be at a 15th anniversary screening of his The People Vs. Larry Flynt. Who will be there? The, er, First Amendment crusader Larry Flynt himself. Naturally, that one’s presented by the TJ Center for Free Expression.
Festival head honcho Jody Kielbasa also announced a program that he’s been working on for a year, for which they had projectors refurbished, and so on and so forth. All of it was to screen a series of classics from the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which archives culturally significant films. TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz introduces those, and…
Local husband-and-wife powerhouse film duo Sissy Spacek and Jack Fisk present the movie where they met on set: Terrence Malick’s Badlands as part of that series.
Opening night film (last year’s Black Swan) is The Descendents, described as, "Alexander Payne’s story of a rather uninvolved dad (George Clooney) forced by a tragic accident into a new level of engagement that sends him toward discoveries he never could have imagined."
Stars and big ticket stuff aside, there’s a host of great-looking independent films, some of which I’ve been dying to see. Those include…
A film by a director who is as controversial as his films are, Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier.
…and…
Butter, from director Jim Field Smith, which Kielbasa described as a send-up of Michele Bachman starring Jennifer Garner.
The Festival’s site will be live later tonight so you can click around and find out more. So yeah, you get the idea. Oliver Stone and Larry Flynt are coming to Charlottesville.