Indie Picks: At The Movies This Weekend

Ryan Gosling in "Drive" (FilmDistrict)

With 75,000 people expected to fill Zilker Park this weekend for the 10th Annual Austin City Limits Music Festival, there's a lot of interesting counterprogramming going on at local theaters. Drive is actually one of the widest releases of the weekend, but don't let the screen count fool you. This is not your average action film, rather it's a noir-inspired tale filled with lots of double crossing and bad decisions. We imagine most mainstream audiences will be left puzzled, but for adventurous film lovers, it's easily your best choice for a trip to the theater. Next week, we'll be featuring some previews and reviews from Fantastic Fest, so Indie Picks will be taking a week off.



Drive (Alamo Ritz, Alamo Lake Creek, Regal Westgate, Regal Gateway, Cinemark Southpark Meadows)
Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his moody stunt driver drama, and it's easy to see why. Inspired by Bullitt and lots of ultra-pulpy noir, Drive is evocative of some great American films from the 70s. It has a style and attitude that isn't seen often these days, with an audacious leading man who is just as powerful being a surrogate father as he is when he's beating the brains out of a bad guy in an elevator.

For some, Drive may simply be too violent. It has a tendency to go a little over the top when the body count begins and there are a couple of shots that are extraneous, but stick with it. This film shows restraint in all the right places. There is an economy to the dialogue and storyline that pay homage to the original novella on which it is based.

While it's unlikely that this one will garner any Oscar buzz, the performances are all unexpectedly spot-on. Ryan Gosling makes you root for a guy with a questionable moral compass. Carey Mulligan makes you identify with a single mother who could so easily fall for the wrong guy. And then there's Albert Brooks - the comic genius takes a dark turn here playing one of the nastiest villains in recent memory.

Even if mainstream audiences don't quite know what to make of this film, we're here to call it one of the year's best.

Magic Trip (Alamo South Lamar)
Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney's documentary lets you take a ride on one of the strangest cross-country trips of all time. In 1964, author Ken Kesey and his group of "merry pranksters" boarded a brightly colored bus to venture to the World's Fair. Over 100 hours of 16mm footage was captured by the passengers during that journey, and the directors worked tirelessly with the UCLA Film Archive to restore the original footage and document this unique moment in American history.

While the film is probably not going to appeal much beyond people who are already fans of Kesey and/or Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," this is well-crafted doc that can be enjoyed by anybody, even if you're a lifelong teetotaler.