A Tenderfoot Cowboys At The Angelika

Everywhere you turn they’re saying how bad the economy is. But you couldn’t tell it by the crowds this weekend at Mockingbird Station, where the shops were jammed and, in the DART lot across from the Angelika theater complex, there wasn’t a single parking space. Give at least some credit to the 2008 AFI Dallas International Film Festival, which screened the much-touted Tracing Cowboys there Saturday afternoon. Jump to find out why, unfortunately, it’s got to be one of the most overrated flicks in the festival.

As a big fan of road films and of contemporary westerns, I had high hopes for Cowboys, the tale of an Englishman named Ethan who wants to be a country-western singer. The film apparently is a favorite of the festival organizers, and it’s even up for a coveted Target award.

But, jeez, haven’t the makers ever heard of a plot–or a script?

Cowboys turned out to be 98 minutes of confusing flashbacks and unintelligible meanderings, as Ethan played by Sacha Grunpeter–a youngish-Kinky Friedman lookalike–searches for his girlfriend, played by the beautiful Megan Charlotte Edwards, who’s run away from Ethan to a seaside village in Mexico.

It’s not clear why she’s run away, what she ever saw in Ethan, why he thinks he can be a C&W star … or why anyone besides the filmmakers would care about any of this.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Cowboys is that Grunpeter died tragically in a vehicle accident before it was finished. Shades of James Dean and the Hollywood myth-making machine. Unfortunately, Grunpeter was no James Dean–and Tracing Cowboys is no Giant or Rebel Without A Cause.

Judge for yourself, though, when the film screens at the Angelika again today at 4 p.m. and tomorrow at 10 a.m.