Day 3: Sunday, March 9

It is cruel irony that Daylight Saving Time should begin — and that we should thus lose an hour of sleep one night — during a film festival that prides itself on keeping people out late. I got back to the hotel room a little after 2 a.m., which was now 3 a.m., and found it quite difficult to arise at 9 this morning. I got up at 10, made an executive decision to blow off the 11 a.m. movie, and took my time getting ready, stumbling around, bumping into things, and doing some writing (some of my best, no doubt).

It is funny to walk around Austin at almost noon on a Sunday and see people shuffling and yawning like it’s 6 a.m. on a Monday.

My first screening, at 1:30 p.m., was “Up With Me,” a verite-style drama about a kid from Spanish Harlem who gets a scholarship to a fancy prep school and is torn between his old world and his new one. Sounds awfully generic, but the naturalistic acting and photography give it an engaging sense of realism. It also practically reeks with the aroma of Spanish Harlem, and you can well imagine how great that is.

I next trudged to the Convention Center for a screening of “Super High Me,” a documentary in which a man smokes marijuana pretty much constantly for 30 days to see what effect it has on him. Of course, he already smokes a lot anyway, so first he has to spend a month NOT getting high, for comparison’s sake.

The subject of this experiment is a stand-up comedian named Doug Benson, who was there to introduce the film to a capacity crowd. It was, shall we say, a receptive audience. I don’t think I’d seen that many stoners assembled in one place since … well, since I’d stood outside earlier and glanced around downtown Austin.

Anyway, Benson pointed out that he blatantly stole his film’s premise and title from Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me.” Since Spurlock has a new documentary called “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?,” Benson said his own next film is going to be “Where Is Osama Bin Laden with My Weed?”

The movie is funny, if not particularly revelatory — except, maybe, for the fact that a month of being high 18 hours a day has virtually no impact on Benson’s health, lung capacity, sperm count, or overall mental acuity (his SAT scores actually go up a little). I was somewhat hindered by Benson’s self-professed status as a “pot comic.” I don’t usually care much for comedians whose acts consist almost entirely of jokes about one subject: black comics who only talk about the differences between black people and white people, fat comics who only talk about being fat, etc. Weed is funny, I get that, but come on.

Most of my SXSW pals were at that film, and the entire gang was at the next movie, scant moments later: “The Promotion.” I had no idea this film existed until I saw it on the SXSW schedule, but my interest was piqued by seeing it was a comedy starring John C. Reilly and featuring Jenna Fischer, Seann William Scott, and Fred Armisen. If I’d known up front that it had a cameo by Jason Bateman, I’d have been even more excited.

The Paramount Theatre was packed. This is usually the case for big-name premieres whether anyone knows anything about the movie or not, and Reilly has established a lot of comedy street cred in recent years with “Talladega Nights” and the little-seen but much-admired “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

I sat with my Austin pal Greg and his girlfriend in the center section, where I quickly realized there was going to be a problem: The man sitting directly in front of me had a giant head that blocked much of the screen. My other friends were toward the back and off to the side, where the sight lines are better, and while I hated to abandon Greg — whom I’d seen very little of since moving to my brother’s hotel after the first night — I also hated to only see the top half of the movie. So I moved, and Greg pretended to be horribly offended, and the circle of life continued.

My move proved to be fortuitous in more ways than one, as two seats down from me was Mary Jo Pehl, known to nerds the world over as Mrs. Pearl Forrester on the latter few seasons of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” (Of course, the REAL nerds know she had once appeared as that character prior to her full-time run, too, in episode #607, “Bloodlust.”) I said hello and told her I was a huge fan of the show, and that I actually interviewed her on the phone for my college paper back in 1997, not that she would remember, and indeed she did not. She was very nice and friendly, though.

And then “The Promotion”: the funniest film I’ve seen so far this year. Granted, the year is only 2 1/2 months old and hasn’t really had any good comedies, but still. It has Seann William Scott as a normal guy with a supermarket managerial job who vies for a promotion against John C. Reilly’s character, an impossibly nice Canadian. The film consistently goes against expectations for a movie like this — you actually root for both guys — and the script is loaded with running jokes and visual gags.

It proved to be one of the rare instances where all of us in the group loved a film. Usually there’s one guy who’s gonna be an orndorf about it (orndorf: n., from Brian Orndorf, eFilmCritic reviewer whose opinions are very frequently the opposite of everyone else’s). But there were no orndorfs among us this time, and we skipped merrily into the night chattering about the film’s hilarity.

Most of us planned to reconvene for a midnight movie, but in the meantime we split up to go find places to sit down and write. Eugene and I walked over to Halcyon, which appears to be both a coffeehouse and a bar, and possibly also a nightclub. And why not, really?

There was a long line for the midnight film, attributable to its being a horror flick and also to the director having arranged with the Alamo Drafthouse to give everyone in the audience a free beer. That kind of news travels fast around here.

The movie was “Dance of the Dead,” a horror comedy in which zombies arise on the night of the high school prom and a group of hapless teens must save the town. We had a terrific time with this movie. Some of the dialogue is corny and not all of the acting is good, but the zombie scenes: WOW. So much energy and excitement, so many creative kills, so many very impressive tricks and special effects (especially given the small budget). There’s a cemetery scene where the zombies are literally launching themselves out of the graves, and it’s one of the flat-out coolest things I’ve seen in a while. And at the film’s climax, which involves an explosion, they fired a cannon of confetti from the back of the theater to make us all part of the action. There are no confetti cannons at Sundance, I’ll tell you that.

[Read more about the "Dance of the Dead" premiere here.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:11 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.