For the last couple of months, everyone in the office has had their eyes open and their ears to the ground seeking out Japanese oddities to fuel the upcoming Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash. Lars just dropped an atom bomb that shredded my entire inbox this afternoon. Behold the Wii game splendor that is MUSCLE MARCH:

Now I don’t own a Wii currently, but there is only a sinewy strand of self-discipline holding me in my office chair and away from a new console at Fry’s so I can download this odditiy.

If you think this is the evolution of humor, the pinnacle of what modern man can achieve on this planet, then please join us for the maiden voyage of Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash on Monday the 25th. This year’s show is roided-out with an intensity much akin to the biceps of Muscle March.

Check it out folks! I just finished editing the 2010 Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash show and trailer. The show is under wraps until Monday, January 25, but you can get a taste by watching the embedded trailer below:

After the opening show on the 25th, join us at Domy Books (913 E Cesar Chavez) for giveaways, drinks and music.

Tickets and info here.

I’m a big fan of David Edelstein.  He’s smart, perceptive and usually steers me in the right direction.  I’m pleased with myself when my personal tastes align with his.  He just posted an article on some of the year-end releases with oscar potential and issued a rave about the Fantastic Fest Audience Award Winner A TOWN CALLED PANIC:

“The Belgian animated feature, A Town Called Panic, plays as if one day its directors, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, smoked very strong hashish and stumbled on a chest of old plastic toys—a little cowboy and an Indian in a headdress, a horse, some cows and pigs and a farmer (and his wife), and piles of other bric-a-brac—and free-associated a demented scenario against cutout scenery about roommates Cowboy and Indian wanting 50 bricks for a barbecue for Horse’s birthday and accidentally ordering 50 million and wrecking their house and rebuilding it but having the walls stolen every night by sea creatures and chasing them underwater and getting captured by mad scientists and on and on ad absurdum … and hilarium. The blurty voices and jerky animation recall South Park (which I mean as a high compliment), but the film has a transcendent silliness all its own. Kids might not go for it; all the subtitled French babble could be bewildering. The rest of us will want whatever Aubier and Patar were smoking.”

If you have been following the Alamo at all in the past month or so, you’ve heard us talk (and talk, and talk) about this new Nicolas Cage movie THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL – NEW ORLEANS. All of us who have seen it just can’t stop thinking about the insane hustler Cage plays, and the nonstop fun and intrigue that this film offers. We fought to get this film released in Austin, and we are proud to open it at the Ritz tomorrow night.

Once you see it, you’ll know what we’re talking about. But don’t just take our word for it. Check out what the nation’s critics have to say:

Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle says: “I think I had more fun watching Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (twice) than I did at any other movie this year.”

Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe writes that Cage “and Herzog give us what too few movies have the gumption to show: two lunatics howling at the moon.”

A.O. Scott of The New York Times focuses on how Cage’s insanity matches director Werner Herzog’s madness.

Eugene Novikov of Cinematical says, “In terms of individual scenes, The Bad Lieutenant has several of the year’s highlights.”

Roger Ebert writes “”Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans” is not about plot, but about seasoning. Like New Orleans cuisine, it finds that you can put almost anything in a pot if you add the right spices and peppers and simmer it long enough.”

Pete Hammond of BoxOffice calls the film “a vividly acted and directed movie that stretches the boundaries of its genre and keeps you in its ever-unpredictable grip throughout.”

To purchase your tickets, check out our show page here.

You are not going to want to miss this surreal gem, an action packed, mind-blowing adventure into insanity. And you can quote me on that.

Last week I had the opportunity to check out the new opus ME AND ORSON WELLES by local film hero Richard Linklater. While I was rather disappointed to miss the chance to sing a High School Musical duet with Zac Efron at the Highball after-party (I had been practicing Start of Something New), I was elated to witness one of the greatest acting performances I’ve seen in a long time. Newcomer Christian McKay bursts on to the screen with an incredible tour-de-force performance as a very young Orson Welles in the throes of producing his now-legendary stage production of JULIUS CAESAR. Brash, bold, brilliant, arrogant and truly childish, the gigantic personality of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs was brought to life with such realism that I often lost the sense that I was watching a modern film and felt I was instead viewing archival footage of Welles holding court.

ME AND ORSON WELLES opens Friday at the Alamo South Lamar.  We’re hoping that this one falls into the category of “the little film that could.” There’s very little national-level promotion and the lead is a total unknown, but if you A) want to see one of the most electrifying performances of the year, B) love Shakespeare or Orson Welles or C) fantasize about singing duets with Zac Efron (the “me” of ORSON WELLES AND ME), then this is your sure-bet movie ticket this weekend.

Tickets and info here.

It doesn’t hit the Alamo screens until January 8, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up about an incredible new animated film with which we have fallen in love.  And we’re not the only ones, A TOWN CALLED PANIC, the delightfully surreal Belgian stop-motion animation was also the audience award winner at this year’s Fantastic Fest, and the film was also listed on the short-list for academy award consideration for best animated film. You can take a sneak peak at the Alamo promo for the film here:

From Todd Brown at Twitchfilm:
Will Horse find true love? Will Steven fix his tractor? What will it take to stop the underwater pond dwellers from stealing the walls of Cowboy, Indian and Horse’s house? Yes, boys and girls, it’s the feature version of A TOWN CALLED PANIC, the demented cult Belgian animation sensation. And, yes, it is truly a sight to behold – a very odd sight that will confuse some while leaving others on the floor gasping for breath from laughing so hard.

To try and summarize something as manic as PANIC is a chump’s game, it can’t really be done, but here’s what you need to know. Primitively animated in stop motion using clay models of the plastic cowboy, indian and farmyard plastic toys we all had as kids, PANIC revolves around house-mates Cowboy, Indian and Horse as they go about their daily lives. Which in this case means dealing with the aftermath of an attempted birthday present gone wrong that results in fifty million bricks piled on the roof of the trio’s house, which then collapses under the weight of the bricks, which opens up a portal to a secret underwater civilization that covets the trio’s building skills and simply – and repeatedly – steals their home. There’s also a giant snowball throwing penguin-robot, parachuting cows, equine romance, parachuting cows and more, more, more. And also parachuting cows.

Series creators Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar are surely two of the most manic animators of our times, completely and utterly in touch with their inner children. No joke is too silly, no gag too bizarre for this pair. They’ve reined in their stream of consciousness urges slightly for the feature – PANIC started life as a series of five minute shorts for Belgian television – but just barely, oddity heaped upon oddity as though the two were engaged in a non-stop game of one-upmanship throughout the entire production cycle. Juvenile and absurd are perfectly good descriptors when talking about PANIC, though only if accompanied by ‘brilliant’ and ‘hysterical’. It’s time for the cult to cross the ocean. (Todd Brown)

This is the sale of the year, the sale you don’t want to miss, the sale you might cry about after you open presents and see a tie or some slacks. Why bother with the mall this season? If you’re like me and hate crowds of people desperate to acquire the last piece of ohh-la-la, come on over to the MONDO RUMMAGE SALE!! We’ll have loads of screen-printed shirts for $5-$10, $2 vintage decals, we’ll also have DVD’s, screen-printed posters and a whole lot more for 25% off! That’s right, make no mistake, don’t be fooled into going to the mall when you can have the very best right here at Mondo Tees!

Mondo Rummage Sale

Starting Thursday at midnight at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, we’ll be passing out free CHAOS REIGNS stickers to the first 200 people who A) come and see Antichrist and B) promise not to stick them on anything inside the theater.   We didn’t make these stickers, nor were they provided by the studio as a promotion for the film.  Nope, these freebies came from a much more pure source: true fandom.  Aaron Rainbolt, a regular customer and a fan of chaos, Lars Von Trier and his new magnum opus ANTICHRIST took it as his mandate from above to design and print these stickers on his own dime.

If that’s not a testimonial to the power of this new film, I don’t know what is.  There’s a growing community of Austinites that his head-over-heels loopy for this movie, and I’m now a sticker-carrying member of that clan.  As soon as I finish this blog post, I’m going out to the parking lot with a rag and some windex and am going to sport this sticker where it belongs: on the bumper of my truck.

ANTICHRIST opens at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz this weekend.  Love it or hate it, you are going to react to this film.  For the record, however, the haters are wrong.

Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST may be the most provocative and controversial film of the last 30 years. It is explicit, it is challenging, it is grotesque, it has been called offensive, misogynistic and dangerous…but it has also been called a masterpiece and perhaps the Danish auteur’s finest work.

Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won best Actress for the role at Cannes) and Willem Defoe star as an unnamed couple seeking comfort in their country home after the sudden death of their child. While in their forest retreat, as summed up by the unofficial slogan of Fantastic Fest ‘09, “chaos reigns.”

See this movie.

It opens at the Alamo Ritz this weekend. For those who can’t wait, we have added a midnight screening on Thursday, Nov 19. Tickets and info for all shows available here.

Praise for Antichrist:

“This is von Trier’s biggest accomplishment. He has created a world that is true to its own ghastly, shifting logic.” -Sukhdev Sandhu, Times [UK]

“Sure to shock, offend and astound in equal portions while proving hugely divisive over the nature of its content, ANTICHRIST is arguably the most visually striking of his career, certainly the most transgressive, and ample proof that cinema is still more than capable of shocking.” -Todd Brown, Twitch

“WHAT IS CERTAIN IS THAT SERIOUS FILM PEOPLE ON SEVERAL CONTINENTS WILL BE TALKING ABOUT VON TRIER’S LATEST AFFRONT, DEFENDING OR DERIDING IT, FINDING IT HARD TO IGNORE. SHORT OF A FLAT-OUT MASTERPIECE, WHAT MORE CAN MOVIES OFFER?” – Richard & Mary Corliss, Time Magazine

“A MUST SEE…SOME KIND OF MANIACAL MASTERWORK. SOME OF THE IMAGES CREATED BY VON TRIER CAN NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

“I Don’t think I breathed for the last half – out of shock, out of stress, out of disbelief. This is to say that von Trier had us all.” – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe

“…I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this impossible movie kept me hooked from start to finish.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience…
ANTICHRIST is powerfully made film. The performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are heroic and fearless. Von Trier’s visual command is striking. And if you can think beyond what he shows to what he implies, its depths are frightening. IT IS A REAL FILM. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me.” – Roger Ebert ,Chicago Sun-Times

I love this season for so many reasons: great weather, caroling, presents under the tree, pumpkin pies, leftover turkey sanwiches, etc.  But let us not forget the true meaning of the season: the arrival of the seasonal holiday beers.  I just got word from Jim Hughes, head beverage honcho over at the Alamo South Lamar.  He has just completed his seasonal beer tap rotation and the 2009 lineup is looking mighty strong.  On draft we are now online with Anchor Christmas 09, Sierra Nevada Celebration, Real Ale Coffee Porter, Anchor Old Foghorn, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Shiner Holiday Cheer, and in bottles we are carrying Sam Smith’s Winter Welcome, Deschutes Jubelale and Boulevard Nutcracker.

The real gem, however, is that we saved one keg of Anchor Christmas 2008 and today is the first day to tap into that rarity.  We have one keg only, about 100 pints (99 if you count the pint I’m savoring this afternoon after work), so come in this week and try it out or you will miss out for the season!  Next year, we’ll have 2008, 2009 and 2010 all on tap at the same time.  I’m getting excited for that day already!