Day 7: Thursday, March 15

My last full day in Austin began with Greg and me running some errands, jump-starting a friend’s car, and finding a copy of Entertainment Weekly to keep me from going through withdrawal. You’d think this task would be easily accomplished by popping into a Barnes & Noble or some such, but finding a bookstore in Austin proved difficult. We passed shopping center after shopping center featuring such names as Chili’s, PetCo, Target, Office Deport, and Old Navy, yet with none of the accompanying Barnes & Nobles that one normally finds in those locales. Seriously, have you ever seen an Applebee’s where there wasn’t a Barnes & Noble within a quarter mile? (Corollary: There is always a Denny’s within walking distance of a Motel 6.)

We finally found a bookseller and then we made our way downtown, where traffic and parking were ridiculous, and to the Paramount Theatre for a 2 p.m. screening of “638 Ways to Kill Castro.” This is a tongue-in-cheek documentary about the various assassination plots against the Cuban dictator, and why all of them thus far have failed. I liked the light tone and the stock footage used to illustrate some of the would-be assassins’ stories. Also, I like the idea of Castro dying.

The whole gang was there except for Eugene and Erik, who both left on Wednesday. We scattered a bit during the break then returned to the Paramount for “A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…,” another fun documentary, this time about America’s fascination with lawyers, and specifically following a handful of recent grads as they study for the bar exam. It comes from the director of “Word Wars,” the doc about Scrabble tournaments from a couple years ago that we all enjoyed.

And the movies just kept a-comin’! With only a slight break, we were at the convention center for “Helvetica,” a documentary about the world’s most ubiquitous font. Yes, fonts! How nerdy is the SXSW movie crowd? “Helvetica” was the first sold-out film I’d been to since “Knocked Up.”

It’s actually a pretty interesting movie about the Helvetica font specifically, and how its simplicity, neutrality and basicness make it appropriate for all sorts of things. I was surprised to realize how many corporations use it in their logos: American Airlines, Target, JC Penney, Jeep, American Apparel, the IRS tax forms, and countless others. Graphic designers in the film talk about the principles of design, and how it has evolved over the decades. It’s quite geekily fascinating.

Weinberg and I hung out after that, killing time and getting a little work done before our next appointment. We had to go to the Dobie again, and while our first plan was to take the bus, laziness finally won out and we took a cab instead.

I am glad we did, because our driver was a piece of work. He was a white, 40-ish, long-haired Texan who was blasting — I mean BLASTING — a CD when we got in the car. It was a country song about doin’ it to you like a Texan should, whatever that means. (A subsequent Googling reveals it to be “Good Texan” by Stevie Ray Vaughan.) When the song ended, he said, “Gotta hear that again!” and replayed it, even louder than before. Midway through the second time he said, “Is it too loud for you guys?” Amused by how obviously stoned he was, we replied that it was not, and encouraged him to do whatever pleased him.

We met Greg at the Dobie, where we saw “Cashback,” a very good British comedy with melancholy fringes about a young man who gets dumped by a girl, develops insomnia, and takes a job working the graveyard shift at a supermarket. It’s like an artfully shot “Clerks.”

Greg had his car there, which was useful because he had to dash to the other side of town next for our last movie of the day and my last movie of the festival: a midnight screening of “Severance,” in which several office workers go on a “team building retreat” and are killed by maniacs in the woods. Its blend of comedy and horror is not always successful, but it’s a solid and gory entry in the genre.

And that’s it. Seven days, 30 movies, not enough sleep, and lots of fun stories. My thanks to the festival organizers and publicity personnel who keep things running smoothly, and my love to the friends new and old that I got to spend time with. It’s a testament to a thing’s funness when you find yourself saying, “This sure is fun!,” as if you can’t believe what a good time you’re having. And that’s the conversation that many of us had over and over again during the week. Eugene says he’ll definitely back next year, which is what I said after my first experience last year. Jason says he wants to move here. Weinberg DID move here.

I worry that as SXSW grows, it will of necessity become slightly more rigid and controlled. That’s what has happened to Sundance, to the point where many people don’t enjoy it as much as they used to. I hope SXSW can stay the way it is: well-organized but loose and free-spirited. As long as it does, I’ll be back every year.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under SXSW Film Festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.