Austin Film Festival 06–Tenacious D In "The Pick Of Destiny"/Matando Cabos

This was the last night of the festival and, I gotta say, I was a little bit disappointed in the overall quality of the movies. The Austin Film Festival has always been kind of the bastard step child of the Austin festival scenes and it’s pretty easy to see why. Not only are they just not getting the films that a festival like South By Southwest gets, but they’re not as organized as other festivals. There are theatres where, instead of being in lines, we’re just kind of in a mob outside the door. Then a little girl comes up and almost shouts that the badges can go in, but most of us don’t hear her. Five seconds later, she’s letting ticketed people in.

I don’t know. I had fun at the festival, but it seems to be kind of coming apart at the seams. After 13 years, you would think that there would be some sort of organization going on. Maybe they can get it together soon. We’ll see.

And I really wish that they would stop being such big rivals of SXSW. There’s room in this town for both of them. It helps that they’re at completely different times of year and focus on different aspects of film.

But, before we close this festival out, they left me with one really awesome, rawkin’ movie:

TENACIOUS D IN “THE PICK OF DESTINY”

After seeing previews for this one, I was a little worried. They just looked lame. I think I laughed once during the preview I saw and it wasn’t a very hearty laugh.

I’m so glad that I was proven wrong!

Jack Black and Kyle Gass have been rockin’ the stage for about 15 years now as Tenacious D. But how did they find each other? How did such musical genius get together to make such amazing and life-changing music?

This is their story.

It opens with just about the funniest scene of the entire festival with a young JB (Troy Gentile who also played the same role in Nacho Libre) singing at his Christian family (including Meat Loaf as his dad–perfect!) about the glories of fuckin’ rocknroll! When he goes up to his room, Meat follows him and sings right back at him about the evils of rock.

And the movie is pure awesome from there. In their search for The Pick Of Destiny (a piece of Satan’s tooth that a wizard fashioned into a lute pick for a blacksmith who saves his life), JB and KG run across a lot of different characters played by, of course, members of their inner circle. Ben Stiller, Tim Robbins (who’s fuckin’ awesome!), Amy Poehler…all of them pretty funny. Watch for Colin Hanks, David Koechner, David Krumholtz and Jason Segel (from “Freaks And Geeks”) somewhere in here, too. I didn’t see them, but they’re in the credits, so they must be there somewhere.

All of my friends agrees that, while this was no Citizen Kane, it was a whole lot of fun and showed us the RAWK is for fuckin’ awesome people who can do cock push-ups…like Ronnie James Dio.

MATANDO CABOS

Instead of ending on that note, my friend and I decided that we had to see one more movie before it was all over. Matando Cabos was that movie…mainly because we couldn’t make it to the IMAX in time for Nightmare Detectives.

Cabos (Pedro Armendariz, Jr.) is a mob boss in Mexico. When he catches his daughter (the beautiful Ana Claudia Talancon from the not so beautiful Sueno) fucking one of his lower level employees, Jaque (Tony Dalton who looks like a really, really young Willem Dafoe), he goes ballistic, falls on a golf ball and knocks himself unconscious. Jaque and his buddy Mudo (Kristoff) “kidnap” Cabos in order to take care of him and apologize for what happened. They don’t want to hurt him, but they don’t want him hurting them, either.

Botcha (Raul Mendez) on the other hand, wants to hurt Cabos. He hates him for the way he treated his father, an old childhood friend who is now Cabos’ janitor. He and Nico (Gustavo Sanchez Parra) kidnap Cabos for ransom. What they don’t know is that they’ve accidentally kidnapped Botcha’s dad who stole the unconscious man’s clothes and was about to steal his car.

The two kidnappings intertwine for the next hour and a half while the audience is left wondering which movie director Alejandro Lozana and writers Dalton and Kristoff are going to ape next or which direction they’re going to go next. This movie is a pastiche of other gangster movies like Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Pulp Fiction. It starts off with one style (they cut away occasionally to give the back stories of characters) and then goes to a different, more mundane style. And there’s a song that Jaque sings to his girl to win her back, but it’s really silly compared to the rest of the film.

There were some good things about it, though. I kind of like the annoying bird across the hall and the ex-Mexican wrestler (Joaquin Cosio) and his creepy-funny bodyguard (Silverio Palacios). And, in fact, it was a decent movie. I just kind of felt like I had seen it all before, and not too long ago.