The Screening Room

The Promotion, the comedy about two grocery store assistant managers (Seann William Scott, John C. Reilly) competing for the same manager job, enjoyed a raucous reception Sunday night at a packed Paramount Theater. The film marks the feature debut of Steve Conrad, best known as the writer of The Pursuit of Happyness. And it's a marked depature from Pursuit, with several moments of broad, laugh-out-loud comedy. If you think the idea of Reilly trying to fight Scott while wearing tap shoes sounds just absurd enough to be funny, you'll like the movie.
Afterward, Conrad and Scott took questions from the audience, during which Scott talked about his experience working in the plumbing department at Home Depot, where he spent most of his time hiding inside one of the shower floor models practicing for auditions. Sounds like it all worked out -- three months after he took the job he landed his big break in American Pie.
So far, The Promotion doesn't have a Dallas release date, but it seems a safe bet that you'll have the chance to see it closer to home before the year's out.

Helen Hunt, the writer, director and star of Then She Found Me took part in an interview with Associated Press movie critic Christy Lemeire on Sunday afternoon. The main focus: How many times people told her "no" when it came to making her movie, which she said she began work on 10 years ago. But with a room full of filmmakers in attendance, most of the questions dealt with actual moviemaking rather than the usual celeb questions you might expect. An early questioner asked Ms. Hunt why she decided to direct the movie in addition to writing it (she says she actually decided to star in it fairly late in the process).
"After the long process of writing the movie, I became more and more married to the movie," she said. "It got to a point where it would have taken longer to explain to someone how I wanted it directed than to direct it myself."
And what was the experience of running the show like for the first time director?
"Well, the Coen Brothers have the other Coen Brother," she said. "All I had was me."

Have you ever wondered what happens to all those little independent films that make the festival circuit, only to die off without reaching a wider audience? I did, which is why I stopped by the B-side Entertainment booth on Sunday in the festival's exhibition space.
B-side's mission is two fold: to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the thousands of independent films made each year and to help those filmmakers extend the lives of their films past the festival circuit.
"There are 20,000 films at 4,000 festivals each year, only a small portion of which actually make it to a theater near you," said B-side founder Chris Hyams. "We think that's pretty inefficient."

Richard Jenkins is in town, and if you don't know the name you know the face. He was dead dad Nathaniel Fisher on the hit HBO series Six Feet Under, and he has played in Coen Brothers films including The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty and the upcoming Burn After Reading. He's one of those familiar-looking guys who gets stopped on the streets by folks who think they knew him in college, or at their first job. He's also a hell of an actor whose latest film, The Visitor, feels like a career high point.

The marquee film at the Paramount on Saturday night was Helen Hunt's directorial debut, Then She Found Me. Why should you care? Well, for one, it will open the AFI Dallas Film Festival in a few weeks. And another reason is: it's a pretty good movie.
In addition to directing, Ms. Hunt adapted the screenplay and stars as a woman with a whole life's worth of drama coming at her at once. First her new husband decides married life isn't for him. Then her adopted mother dies. And if that weren't enough, she's contacted by the birth mother (a show-stealing Bette Midler) she never knew who all the sudden wants a relationship with her daughter.

Gun nut, drug nut, all-around nut: the late Hunter S. Thompson was hell on literary wheels. He rolls on with full force in Gonzo, a robust portrait directed by recent documentary Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and produced by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's HDNet Movies.