Stories, Stories, & More Stories

AFI Dallas is naturally heavy on Texas natives. Even more interesting to me than their stories on film, however, are the stories being told everywhere else. Of course, it's BECAUSE stories are told everywhere else that films get made at all.

We all have stories complete with peculiar moments, near misses, and chance meets. Sure, some stories are better than others and I can think of a few that I wish I had never heard (one in particular about a penile implant gone horribly wrong) but when I think of all the witnesses there are to remarkable, terrible, and magnificent things in this world, I wonder how anyone can NOT want to write?

Jack Valenti,former president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was scheduled to speak at the Nasher Sculpture Center on Friday. He didn't appear. The official word on March 23rd was that Valenti had a family emergency. He sure did. The 85 year old had a stroke and is hospitalized at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore. We're told the prognosis is good. Of course, we were told he had a "family emergency".

But that's not the story I want to tell. You see, Valenti was an aide to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and was aboard Air Force One in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That's him peeking over the flowers as LBJ is being sworn is as president of the United States. Look at his career and then look at the photo. What a story.

As an eight year old boy, Bill Paxton was in Worth with his father and brother at the Hotel Texas on the morning of November 22, 1963 when the president was there. Paxton, seen in the upper right hand corner of the photo, says he was lifted on the shoulders of a man he didn't even know because the man offered a kid a chance to get a better look at John F Kennedy speaking in the parking lot. Look at his career and then look at the photo. What a story.

So what, you say? Everyone has a Kennedy story? That's right. Everyone has a story.

A Little Hollywood in Big D

Although I've never had any desire to live in Los Angeles (there will be Texas bluebonnets in heaven, you know), I must admit that a little taste of Hollywood creates a merciless hunger for more. What must it be like to bump into filmmakers at grocery stores, pharmacies, and coffee shops like ordinary people?

Texas is aggressively working to bring the film industry in the Lone Star State and in the DFW metroplex to its full potential and AFI Dallas International is helping make giant leaps toward doing that. We also have very active film commissions statewide and locally including Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. There's even a film commission in Amarillo and El Paso. El Paso! Do you know what is in El Paso? NOTHING. Well, nothing but room to shoot twenty eight films in the area including portions of The Day After Tomorrow and Man on Fire. And you thought El Paso was just for Mexican border and desert films, didn't you?

While AFI Dallas may not fill all 60,000 seats in its 190 films and events, as Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News said, "we're the new kid on the festival block" and Texas is serious about bringing the film industry to where the deer and the antelope have big hair and drive Chevrolet pickup trucks.

AFI Dallas
Film Screening Guide
Free Classics Showing at Victory Plaza
Texas Film Commission

20 Top Over Rated Films

People have vastly differing views on films. Some would even call certain irreconcilable differences "deal-breakers" but this list of the 20 Most Over-rated Films strikes me as -- well, ludicrous. It evaluates films, many of them icons and Oscar magnets, by the subjectivity of today. Here's what Premiere Magazine considers to be the top over-rated films of all time.

(1) Gone With the Wind (1939)
(2) 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968)
(3) The Red Shoes (1948)
(4) Easy Rider (1969)
(5) An American in Paris (1951)
(6) The Wizard of Oz (1939)
(7) Nashville (1975)
(8) Mystic River (2003)
(9) Moonstruck (1987)
(10) Monster's Ball (2001)
(11) A Beautiful Mind (2001)
(12) Jules and Jim (1962)
(13) Forrest Gump (1994)
(14) Good Will Hunting (1997)
(15) Chariots of Fire (1981)
(16) Field of Dreams (1989)
(17) Fantasia (1940)
(18) Clerks (1994)
(19) Chicago (2002)
(20) American Beauty (1999)

Does anyone else find it bizarre to compare Fantasia to a modern day screensaver? To say Easy Rider didn't age well? Call the Wizard of Oz garish because of its candy coated art direction and insulin shock inducing Technicolor? Not that any of it isn't true but this list labels films over-rated based on the evolution of technology, culture, art, and even human priorities and values.

Now, I'm not willing to fall on my sword for these films. Certainly all films are sifted through the eyes of the viewer. But was Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night over-rated because it looks like a modern day screensaver? Was a typewriter over-rated because it didn't age well and was eventually displaced by higher technology? Is baroque palace architecture over-rated because it's garish?

Certainly, all films have flaws. But sometimes, I think film critics simply enjoy taking on an air of superiority and spreading their cinematic expertise like the tail feathers of a horny peacock. Other times, I think they're just stupid.