unwiredben

One of the first things people notice when they visit my house is my huge shelves of DVDs. I've collected quite a few since I bought my first disc back in 1999, and with my pending move to Brooklyn, I've got to get rid of a large number of them. I've got my collection divided into those I keep, those I put online for sale (mostly via my bencombee account on half.com), and those that aren't worth putting online because they don't fetch very much.  Right now, there's about 250 discs in that "don't fetch much" collection.

Here's where you come in.  If you live here in the Austin area and think you might want to pick up some discs, let me know via email or comments and I can setup an appointment for you to come over and graze.  I'm charging $1 a DVD or $10 for a dozen,  There's a lot of crap, but there are also a lot of good movies that just happen to be have really big print runs.  What I don't sell will probably be sold bulk to a place like Cheapo where you'd have to pay $5 for the same movie.

My taste in films favors a lot of comedies and indie films, with a smattering of action and sci-fi.  You've probably heard of a good chunk of what I've got for sale, and just think, you could own it for less than it costs to rent it from a chain video store.

I may make a list for online peeps, but not until my local friends get a chance to check things out.

Three films tonight, ranging from great to irritating to offensive.

First, the great "Goliath" by the Zellner Brothers. This plays again during SXSW on Wednesday night at the Convention Center and during the day on Saturday at the Paramount, and if you're in Austin, you should try to go to a show. It's a character study of a guy who loses his wife, then finds his cat missing. He gets frustrated, tries to find the cat, gets demoted at work, and misplaces his anger on other people. At times sad, but often very funny, I really enjoyed this film.

Second, appropriately, was the well-promoted "Second Skin", a documentary about MMORPG players. It covered a lot of topics, ranging from romance, addiction, family life, suicide, gold farming, and enabling the handicapped. It really reached too far, and it felt really long even though it was only 90 minutes. They should have cut some of the material and expanded on one topic, instead of trying to be the "everything" documentary on online gaming.

Third was the midnight screening of "Otis", a horror film about a kidnapper that tortures women that tried to be a comedy and a satire. I only put it on my schedule because one of the stars was Illeana Douglas, who I loved in "Grace of my Heart" and the TV show "Action!". It didn't succeed; it had a bad streak of misogyny in the first half, followed by a revenge sequence that tried to be wacky but was way too obvious. The acting by most of the cast was good, but the material repeated itself and didn't work in any way that would provoke laughter. At an abstract level, you can say that the second half was like the situation in Iraq with the family doing awful things based on bad intelligence, but the whole setup doesn't play into that storyline at all. Don't see this. Luckily, it won't have a theatrical run, being slated for a direct-to-video release.

Tomorrow: lots of panels, a film about kids who are wizards, a film about war profiteers, and Harold and Kumar. Maybe even a party or two.

I just found this article about the future of movie theaters and there's a particularly useful bit of info:

At Alamo Drafthouse, an 11-year-old Austin-based chain with seven locations, every other row of seats has been replaced with café tables, and customers can write orders for pizza and microbrews on slips that are silently picked up by black-clad waiters. The company is in negotiations to open theaters in large markets like New York and Los Angeles by late next year, with the goal of having 200 screens by 2012.

Very exciting! Now, the NYC location, if it happens, will probably be more like Lake Creek than the Ritz, but that's still better than the usual movie experience. Very cool!

scottbateman is a cartoonist and animator who is pretty active here on the LJ. I first got into him a couple of years ago when he was doing a lot of political cartoons, then I started following his Sketchbook of Shame postings and watching his experiment in daily Flash animation, the Bateman365 project. He even animated a voice recording I made for one of the 365 entries.

He's got a new self-published DVD out called "Scott Bateman: Re-animator" featuring about 30 different animations made in the last year. I got my disc in the mail today and watched a few this evening, and they looked and sounded very ncie. While you can watch them online, they're beautifully recreated at high resolution here, and you get a unique hand-drawn cover by Scott with the disc. I highly recommend getting one for yourself and maybe one to give to a special person by going to http://www.batemania.com/2007dvd.html. It's only $15. If you like "Flight of the Conchords", there's a great story about Andrea Rosen flubbing an audition for them, and another bit features the actress that plays Mel on the show animated as a tower-building and kitten-hating femme-bot. There's also a few cool Scottmanimated music videos on the disc, including one by Sarah Shannon, the former singer for Velocity Girl.

Since I won't be in town next week, I decided to make last night my last visit to the soon-to-be-gone Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. They're shutting down next Wednesday, and while they will open a new location at the historic Ritz theater on Sixth Street later this summer, it won't be the same. The downtown location has lots of good memories for me -- it's where we did our Show With No Name live shows, it's where I saw the first friends-and-family screening of "Dear Pillow", and it's where I saw through many great SXSW films and Q&As.

It was a good evening, starting with the AV Geeks show "Why We're Fat", a collection of industrial films made by food marketing groups featuring everything from industrial baking of white bread to recipes for potato chips courtesy of some very stereotypical leprechauns. It was a fun show, especially the audience-participation bit at the start where we all got to read a frame from an old filmstrip.

After that was the last downtown Open Screen Night. I'd not been to one before, but I liked what I saw. Basically, anyone can bring something to show, but the audience can gong it off-screen after two minutes. The selections ranged from senior film projects to music videos to a bunch of prank videos that started off one way, then cut into some sort of scene with lots of wee people dancing. There was a submission called "Thar She Blows" then ended up being a scene from a particularly adult movie; it was removed after the two minute mark, but a particularly loud and drunk woman kept requesting it over and over from the back of the room. Ultimately the winner of the evening was a production called "Choose Your Own Death" which was a DVD about a psycho killer where you kept having to choose what would happen next in the scene. If you got to the end of a set of choices and were killed, a floating "DEAD" would appear up on the screen. I preferred the "Pipe World Parables" film where a guy used techniques learned from old Nintendo games to save the day; the production values were low, but it was pretty creative.

I decided not to stay for the Weird Wednesday; 270 minutes of film programming was enough for one night. As I left, I said goodbye to the old place, but I look forward to more interesting Alamo programming this fall.

Last night, I headed down to the Alamo downtown for a double feature. At 7pm, Austin mayor Will Wynn was doing his own version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation, then at 9pm, the Master Pancake guys were doing a take on the horrible 2004 disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow".

Wynn was a good speaker. About half of the presentation was pretty familiar to people who've see Gore's film version. There was an intro video clip by the Blue Man Group, plenty of pictures of ice and forests, and the dramatic "what's flooded if the seawater rises" shots. However, Wynn had customized the presentation for the Austin audience, and there was a lot of detail about Austin's own energy use (primarily transportation and home/office use), our energy production (roughly 40% coal, 30% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 10% alternative), and what plans the city has in place. Austin will make a big different because it's the country's fastest growing big city, having jumped from around 22th to 14th in size in the last decade, and it's also the most advanced in several areas, such as solar rebates and alternative energy production. The city has joined about 500 others in the US to endorse the Kyoto accords, and we've got some radical plans to give residents better information about energy consumption, such as allowing you to look at a property's power bill history so you can compare efficiency when looking for a house or apartment. For more information, you can view the highlights of the Austin Climate Protection Plan.

Wynn did a Q&A after, and there were some great questions. One audience member asked why we weren't mandating better nozzles at gas pumps to reduce vapor emissions. Apparently, we can't as cities are forbidden from imposing those rules until they actually violate the Clean Air Act, and while Austin has gotten close, we've taken active measures to avoid actually violating it, which means we can't use some remedies to make things better. Another question was about how its unsafe for bike to many locations in town; Wynn talked about his committee with Lance Armstrong to identify better bike paths and also said they were working on a route planning website that would use accident and traffic information to help riders plan safer routes.

The entertainment part of the night was another Master Pancake show. The guys came on stage at the start in Al Gore and GW masks, and they had a pretty good and loose skit about Bush's new "realization" about global warming featuring a smoke machine as "Foggy", the new administration spokesfog. Their jokes during the film were good; it's great to make fun of a movie that is so bad yet takes itself so seriously. With Jake Gyllenhaal playing a starring role, there was plenty of "Donnie Darko" and "Brokeback Mountain" references, but I chuckled the loudest at the jabs at KUT's Larry Monroe made when a certain character that has a resemblance to the DJ came on screen. It's too bad this was a one time show; it was a much better match for them than last month's "Pretty Woman".

I finally got out to a few movies this week.

While out in California, I went to a late screening of "Shrek the Third"; it was amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. The story was lacking in parts, and I didn't like that Shrek and Fiona were apart for much of the film, but I'm still glad I saw it.

Tonight, I headed to the Lake Creek Alamo Drafthouse for a late show of "Waitress". I loved this film, and it saddens me that we'll never see any more work from Adrienne Shelly. In a sense, this film is a reaction to "Trust", the Hal Hartley film that starred Shelly in 1990. In that film, she played a teenager who finds out she's pregnant and who finds comfort in a weird stranger. That dynamic reappears here in the relationship between Keri Russell's pie-making waitress and Nathan Fillion's quirky ObGyn, but the story has a stronger feminist tone, along with some scenes that filled me with real joy. If you've seen the film, you'll know the sequence choreographed to a Cake song that just had me grinning, and I loved the ending.

I'll probably see "Knocked Up" very soon, another film about pregnancy but from a male perspective, and I've got plans to see the Hitchcock films at the Paramount on Sunday and the pinball documentary that's playing on Thursday, and I heard something about a big Joss Whedon event at the Alamo Downtown later this month that I might have to attend. It looks like there's a lot to see!

Apple's got the trailer for my second favorite SXSW narrative film, "Eagle vs. Shark".  You really should go see this when it hits theaters in June.

Thursday, I didn't do much during the day but stay home and work.  That evening, I picked up my friend Charlie from the airport, we had a delicious dinner at Hao Hao, then headed to the Alamo South Lamar for a few films:

The Pipe - a really funny short by my friend Dan Brown about a paramedic and security guard who have the overnight shift watching an air pipe that's part of a radio station stunt.

Murder Party - dark horror comedy about New York City hipsters/artists who throw a party where they'll kill the guest for their art.  It got too bloody and gruesome for me at times, but I really liked their approach and many of their jokes worked really well.

Severance - British horror film about an office retreat that turns into a flee-the-insane-soldiers hunt.  Again, I found a lot of it funny, but it also was very brutal at times.  I just don't go for gore or for lots of on-screen violence.

On Friday, Charlie and I did a quick Fry's Electronics run, then headed down to pick up Annelies.  We had lunch at Trudy's, found a primo parking spot on Congress, then headed over to the Convention Center to see Flatstock, the big concert poster convention.  After that was a day show where we caught the end of the band Aquaduct's performance when they covered the "Walker, Texas Ranger" theme song.

After that, we caught three films:

"Skillz Like This" - stylistic comedy about a dejected writer who discovers that he can rob banks and stores, and about how he and his friends deal with his new notoriety.  Funny and charming.

"Eagle vs. Shark" -- really cute New Zealand comedy with the Jermain from Flight of the Conchords and a cute female lead playing geeks that fall in love.  There's a lot of "Napoleon Dynamite" in the characters, but the female role was much better realized here, and it was always quite funny.  My favorite comedy of the fest, I think.

"Fay Grim" -- Hal Hartley's sequel to "Henry Fool" is a very different movie; Fay's character is the centerpiece of this complex tale of international espionage, and there's a pile of plot.  However, it worked very well for me, and I loved the bits that referenced the ambiguity of the previous film.  The many out-of-US locations were very well used, and I loved Hal's use of text in some of the scene changes.  Parker Posey does very fine work here.

I'm actually working today (on a conference call as I type), at least until mid-afternoon when I head down to conference center to observe the fun that's the music fest.

Yesterday was a light day for movies.  The only one Annelies and I saw was "The Chances of the World Changing", a PBS documentary about a guy who rescued over 1000 turtles, including many endangered or almost-extinct species, and was keeping them in his New York City penthouse.  He wants to start a research center to preserve species of turtle for eventual reintroduction into the wild, but his plans keep falling through and he gets more and more depressed over a five-year timespan.  I liked the doc, but it suffered from being about 20 minutes too long.  Maybe they'll edit it more before it airs on the POV program on PBS.

I worked in the afternoon, then headed out for dinner at Stalite with Patrick, Tiffany, and Annelies.  It was quite good, and the one veggie entree was a fancy portabella mushroom lasagna with gnocci.  The desserts were pretty good, although I liked the presentation more than the flavor.  There were lots of good conversations.

Then, Patrick and Tiffany and I headed out to the music fest.  First band was Austin's local Oh No! Oh My! who played good music that constantly reminded me of other popular bands (Arcade Fire, Frank Ferdinand, Modest Mouse).  After that was Pony Up, a young female quartet from Montreal who did a song I kept hearing on Pandora that I liked called "Matthew Modine".  I really liked their show, but the acoustics at Flamingo Cantina were quite poor, and they never played their "hit".

The next performance was Lily Allen at Stubb's.  The show was at capacity, but Patrick and Tiffany had gotten into line earlier, so I was able to get in with them as the gradually let in more people.   We only saw the first half, but it was a lot of fun, with Lily claiming to be drunk and cursing out the show sponsor, NME, calling them obscene names and saying she wouldn't have played here if she'd known they were behind it.

The last music of the night was an Irish singer/songwriter named Damien Dempsey.  This was a really nice set with him performing with a full band in an intimate club setting.  I really liked a soulful song about the evil of European colonialization with a proper Irish rant at the end.  The show was helped by a number of Irish fans in the audience that were able to sing along with the faster songs.

SXSW is half-over!  It was another good day of festival going.  I started out by heading downtown to meet Annelies and her mom as Las Manitas Avenue Cafe for a plate of migas, then I took a much needed nap before heading to lunch and our first film, the documentary "Manufacturing Dissent", a critical look at Michael Moore.  It was quite even-handed and the filmmakers were conflicted about Moore -- they liked the energy that he brings to the left, but had big problems with how he bent the truth in his documentaries and always tended to push things that helped him personally over those that benefited the cause.  I really liked it, and I think it's a good piece for any fans of Moore's work.

We then hid at a coffee shop for an hour waiting for the rain to pass before heading downtown to party hop.  The interactive closing party at The Foundation was a snooze, but the film closing party at Maggie Mae's was a bit better.  It actually had food, and Fox (the sponsor), handed out gift bags with a "Family Guy" mousepad, a "The Winner" t-shirt, and a "Simpsons" noise box that reproduced the sayings of Homer.

We closed the day with the world premiere of the film "A Lawyer Walks into a Bar" at the Paramount.  It's a doc about six people taking the California bar exam, and it was great.  The audience was filled with lawyers and law students, giving the screening a real strong energy.  The material was handled with a humorous tone that worked really well, and the characters all had things that made them sympathetic to the audience.  The look was very polished too, and there were both winners and losers at the end.  Definitely a good film that should be seen by anyone who wants to learn more about how our system of law works.

Tomorrow: a movie about a guy who has over a thousand turtles in his apartment.

Five hours ago, I ate two vegan tacos from the Nuclear Taco tent at SXSW Interactive.  I didn't quite know what to expect, so I got one "hot" and one "nuclear".  I found them both to be very, very spicy, but after an ice cream bar to cleanse my palette, I thought I would be OK.

Nope.

Annelies and I rushed over to the Ritz Lounge to catch the Heather Gold Show, a live talk show where she was bringing people on stage to talk about "continuous partial attention", a state where you don't focus on one thing, but instead divide your attention among several task all the time.  It was an interesting talk with some good jokes, but it was plagued by mike problems that made it hard to hear the panelists over the background noise.

It went on for almost two hours, and by the end, I felt I needed to go to the bathroom.  On my way back, my stomach started turning upside down, a little pocket of pain in my belly, and I knew something had to be done.  Ani quickly caught on to my plight, and we headed back towards the convention center.  I didn't think I'd make it, so we ducked into the lobby of the Residence Inn and I ran to the bathroom.  I came out about fifteen minutes later, and she went to get my car from the garage to take me to her mom's house to rest.  I left there about 11, feeling well enough to drive, but still really poor.

Other news: "Cat Dancers" was quite good, a documentary about a couple that was one of the first to train and perform with exotic cats.  It ended up being a pretty tragic story, but there were also some laughs.  We wanted to see "Smiley Face", but my sick stomach prevented that.  Annelies' mom saw "Knocked Up", the new Judd Apatow film, and said it was great; I'll catch it in June when it plays wide.

I started out this morning early, getting down to the convention center by 9AM to go to the green room to prep for my panel, "Designing for Convergent Devices".  I was surprised by the large turn out of geeks at the early hour of 10AM after the DST switch.  The panel went quite well; we ran over a few minutes and there were a few tech glitches that we were able to overcome through flash drives and laptop sharing, but I got to show the SXSW app and talk about our design issues, and we had a good discussion.

Films today were hit and miss:  my first outing was a batch of shorts by two of Austin's film-making brother teams, the Zellner's and the Duplass's.  It was all done wrestling style in front of a packed Alamo South screening room, with firecrackers, man thongs, glittery boas, and a girl with a placard all participating in the fun.  After that, I got an amazing parking spot on Congress and zoomed over to the convention center for the documentary "Does Your Soul Have a Cold?" about depression in Japan.  It just depressed me and made me frequently check my phone to see when it would be over.

After that was a quick dinner at Rio Grande, the Mex place that took over the Real World Austin house, the a sprint to the line at the Paramount for "Hannah Takes the Stairs" where Annelies was waiting for me.  This is the new film by Joe Swanburg, and it continued his successful run of honest relationship-based films with a really great cast of collaborators.

Following the film, we got drinks and free t-shirts in black Chinese take-out boxes at the IFC party at Light Bar, then headed away from downtown amid heavy rain and thunder.

Tomorrow: panels in the morning and afternoon, followed by The Heather Gold Show at the Ritz at 7PM, and maybe "Smiley Face" at the Paramount at 10 if we're up to it.

This morning, I saw "The King of Kong", a really great documentary about Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebie, two men competing for the world record score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.  It was a wonderful story, full of struggle between good and "questionable".  Steve was there for the QA along with the doc crew, and the audience gave him a standing ovation for his achievement.

The afternoon film was "TWISTED: A Balloonamentary", a look at balloon twisters, their gatherings, and their life stories.  I really liked the amazing sculptures that they made, but the film itself was a bit too scattered, shallowly covering a lot of people instead of focusing on a few stories.  I did find myself crying a lot at the end (a key figure in the twisting world died while the film was being shot), but it was mostly sympathetic tears.

After that was a short, "Scenic Highway", about Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Fun fact: the capitol building there doubled as the UT tower in a film shot in the 70's about the Charles Whitman shootings.  That played with the feature documentary "Fish Kill Flea" about a flea market in New York that closes -- it was OK, but not really very memorable, IMO.

I had dinner at Noodle-ism with my fellow panelists so we could get ready for the morning's session on designing for convergent devices, then Annelies ran into Patrick and Tiffany and I joined up with the three to hang out before they went to see "Big Rig".

Tomorrow: panel in the morning, films all afternoon and evening.  Yeah!

Today was Annelies' first day as a SXSW attendee, and fun was had by all.

Registration took about 90 minutes -- a half hour of standing in line for the panelist desk, followed by getting the big bags and then searching for my contact to get some film passes as part of the trade agreement for doing the Palm app.

We then dropped off a pass at Annelies's mom's house, looked through the bags, filled up a recycling bin with useless magazines and flyers, and headed down to the Alamo South Lamar for the evening's films.

First was the Canadian feature "Monkey Warfare" with Don McKellar (yeah!).  It's about a couple who scavenge garage sales and dumpsters for relics to sell online.  They try to lead an anonymous existence, but Don meets up with a young pot dealer who he turns on to radical movements of the 60's.  There's some nice relationships explored here, and it turned out quite nicely.

After that, we grabbed dinner at Souper Salad and returned to the Alamo for our next three films:

"Alive and Well" was a funny short starring Neil Flynn (the janitor on "Scrubs").  It's about a plane crash with a badminton team and one slightly crazy pilot that wants to immediately resort to cannibalism.

"American Zombie" was the standout film of the night.  A mock documentary about high-functioning zombies in Los Angeles, and very well done.  The gag with a zombie spritual meeting was a real highlight, and we got swag after the film: grey DEADSTRONG bracelets.

"The Trailer Park Boys Movie" made me angry that I'd stayed up until midnight to watch a very formula comedy that relied way to much on the audience being familiar with the characters from the Canadian TV show.  I only laughed a couple of times and mostly found it tedious.

About to go to sleep now.  Tomorrow: "King of Kong" about video game competitors, another doc about balloon animals, a doc about flea markets, and hopefully, a party or two.

I took a few pictures with my Treo at the "When the Magic's Gone" shoot yesterday.

This weekend, Annelies and I have been extras on the set of a short film called "When the Magic's Gone".  My friend Tiffany Sullivan is directing her first film based on a story that her husband Patrick had published in Revolution SF.  We've been over at the Draught House Pub both mornings to eat our share of yummy craft services food and take seats in the background, where we pretend to chat and drink water from beer bottles.  It's been lots of fun, and we're getting close to wrapping.  P & T have been up since 3AM both days, but we just had to be on set around 7:30AM both days, but Tiffany's looking really happy with how things are going.

I've seen four films in the theater in last month. Here's my quick take:

The Nightmare Before Christmas (in 3-D) - I'd not seen this before, so the story and jokes were quite fresh, and I found it quite inventive. The 3D effect, done using polarized glasses and a digital projector, worked very well; I had to remove the glasses a couple of times to relieve some eye-strain, but I never got any headaches. The music is top-notch here too.

Borat - very funny but also a bit disturbing. I do feel sorry for some of the participants in the film, but it also had some scenes that had me laughing hard.

Casino Royale - best Bond film in quite some time. Very light on gadgetry, much stronger on character motivation. I really liked Eva Green's accountant character, although I felt the last half-hour of the film dragged a bit.

For Your Consideration - this film will have no Oscar buzz. It just wasn't very funny, and there was little emotional connection with the narcissistic characters. Slate had a good article on director Christopher Guest's style of film making that talks about the problems with this film.

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny - from the pre-credits take on a "THX" intro through the rocking musical pieces and cool cameos, this film had me laughing, cheering, and throwing hand signs at the screen. I'd gotten a little sick of the D a few years ago when they were popping up everywhere, but having familiarity with the Tenacious D mythos made this film a real pleasure to watch. BTW, you do need to stick around to the end of the credits for one final joke.

I'm out in California this week; after a couple of very busy days at work, on Wednesday, my team celebrated hitting a milestone with a group lunch at a brewpub in Mountain View.  I took off at 6, did 18 holes at the mini-golf course, then went to the movies.  I decided to see "Clerks II", Kevin Smith's followup to the film that launched his carreer.  I liked "Clerks", and I've generally liked his later films, so I was hoping this would be entertaining.  It was.  I laughed a lot.  It resembled the first film a LOT.  Smith was never shy about showing his influences, and it looks like the major influence on this film is the original "Clerks".  Whole sequences seem to be rehashes of the first film, although with a different take.

What's good: Rosario Dawson is very cute.  I really liked her character and the chemisty between her and Brian O'Halloran's Dante.  I also liked the antagonistic relationship between Randall and the 19-year-old, very naive Elias.  The dance number and some of the cameos were a lot of fun, and the take down of the LOTR films had me rolling.

What's bad: the acting of both Dante and Randall.  It's consistent with the first film, but that doesn't keep it from being really painful at times.

What's cheesy: Jay and Silent Bob.  Smith's Silent Bob is constantly mugging to the camera, while Jason Mewes' Jay never has the frantic energy of his previous incarnations.

I think it's worth seeing if you liked the first film.  If you take offense easily, please stay away.