Alex Winter Is Headed To The Drafthouse
You read that right. The man sometimes known as Bill S. Preston Esquire, Alex Winter, is making a trip to our fair city and providing you with not one but TWO opportunities to see his movies on an Alamo screen July 1st and 2nd. Sure, you know him from The Lost Boys and the Bill and Ted films, but Alex has gone on to do so much more. He's directed commercials, music videos, a film that played the Director's Fortnight at Cannes and provided Cartoon Network with two of its highest-rated movies ever, Ben 10 and its sequel. And, now he's got a new movie fresh out of SXSW that he wants to share with YOU. But, we couldn't let Alex come out to the Alamo and NOT have him show the movie that started it all...so, he's sticking around for that too! Check the details below.
DOWNLOADED - July 1st at Slaughter
"Mesmerizing" - The Hollywood Reporter
We've all used Napster, whether you were a college aged kid looking to save on cash or a bored worker finding idle time to download the latest jams, we've all been guilty. At its peak Napster had nearly 60 million users and long after things shut it down, it was too late. The face of the music business had been forever changed. Record companies didn't understand it and they had no idea how to deal with it. But when Metallica got involved and made a very public battlecry against it, the world stopped and took notice.
Director Alex Winter filmed interviews with Napster founders Shawn Fanning, John Fanning and Sean Parker; musicians including DJ Spooky, who did the music for the film; and record-label bosses and legal experts. The unraveling of Napster - described as 'culture's Vietnam' - is an ephochal story from the dawn of the digital age told with pace and verve. So join in on the discussion and re-live one of the turning points in our culture with director Alex Winter LIVE, IN-PERSON for a post-show Q&A.
GET YOUR TICKETS FOR DOWNLOADED HERE
BANGARANG! presents FREAKED - July 2nd at the Ritz in rare 35mm!
Butt ugly. But funny.
The manic writing-directing comedy team of Tom Stern (MTV's The Idiot Box) and Alex Winter (Bill and Ted) make their feature debut with 1993s Freaked. How do you explain Freaked to the uninitiated?
Ricky Coogan (Winter) is a brat-pack sleazebag who gets hired by a conglomerate to travel to South America to clean up the company’s image and endorse a product known to destroy lives. There, Coogan gets sidetracked to a Freak Show run by Elijah C. Skuggs (the phenomenally insane Randy Quaid) who has been using this toxic waste to create FREAKS.
He turned Mr. T into a bearded lady, Keanu Reeves into a dog boy and Bobcat Goldthwait into a sock, and when he gets a hold of Ricky Coogan he turns him into his crowned jewel of FREAKS.
This slapstick black comedy is a virtual car crash of anarchic, mind-blowing weirdness and pop culture references with a horror/sci-fi sideshow backdrop. It's a mutated freak of pure excellence straight out of the '90s with totally radical practical effects, stop-motion sequences and a whole lot of Butthole Surfers. It's like reading a Mad Magazine from the '90s in a Monty Python voice really fast while blood spurts out of your face.
Deemed too weird by the studio, the film was dumped by the wayside and left for dead until one day a photo of Mr. T in a dress made it onto our Drafthouse tumblr and Alex Winter saw it and asked if we were showing it. We weren't at the time…BUT NOW WE ARE, and Ricky Coogan himself, Mr. Alex Winter, is coming out to give you a “Hi there and how are you?” during a post-show Q&A. PREPARE TO GET FREAKED! BANGARANG!
