SXSW Diary

Day Three

Not much today. I was a little movied out. I hit the trade show and managed to track down the guy I asked to write my introduction at last year’s SXSW. Fortunately, he remembered agreeing to this, so I later dropped off a copy of the manuscript for him. (I won’t name him, though, in case it falls through the cracks.) Then I saw Mail-Order Bride, an amusing mockumentary. A schlub agrees to have a film crew follow him as he procures himself a mail-order bride, but complications ensue when the filmmaker falls in love with her. I doubt this will ever surface again, but I got a few laughs out of it.

Day Four

Just a couple of SXSW movies today. Actually, that's an exaggeration, since the first one was $5.15/Hr, Richard Linklater's unaired pilot for an HBO series we'll never see. It wasn't bad, wasn't great - it's a workplace comedy set in a Denny's-type restaurant. The post-show Q & A was much more entertaining, as Linklater and his co-creator were both pretty openly bitter about the fate of the show; apparently everyone at HBO loved it except the top guy, who couldn't fathom why people would want to watch a show about minimum wage workers. The reasoning seemed to be that HBO's audience wants shows about rich people.

After that I saw Napoleon Dynamite, one of this year's Sundance buzz movies. To which I say, "Feh." It's a relentlessly "quirky" high school movie, sort of like Rushmore Takes the Short Bus. Stylistically, it's a thrift shop of the tackiest and kitchiest America has had to offer for the past 30 years - it's chock full of bad haircuts, bad clothes, orange vans, wood-paneled basements and all the worst music you'd hoped to never hear again. The lead kid gives a fearlessly dorky performance, there are quite a few laughs and in the end, I think the movie's heart was in the right place (although this is debatable, and I’m still debating it). But it just annoyed the shit out of me.