Day 4: Monday, March 10

Today was chilly and rainy — wholly unacceptable weather for Austin. Something called Zappos.com was promoting itself by handing out free plastic rain ponchos, so we saw a lot of people walking around in them all day, their hoods up and their bodies covered with a white plastic sheet. These ponchos have the unfortunate (and presumably unintentional) effect of making the wearer look like a Klansman. Evidently Zappos.com did not think its cunning plan all the way through.

My first movie of the day, at 11 a.m., was at the Paramount Theatre, a large venue anyway and one that’s particularly difficult to fill when you’re showing a documentary at 11 a.m. on a rainy Monday. A publicist for the film I was seeing was out on the sidewalk handing out fliers, inviting one and all to attend. It was downright evangelical!

The movie was “Crawford,” about the tiny Texas town that became famous when George W. Bush chose it at his adopted hometown right before he ran for president in 2000 — just in time to show voters how folksy and rugged and ranchy the Connecticut-bred, Yale-educated man-of-the-people is. It’s an interesting look at how intense scrutiny — every time Bush is in Crawford, it’s on TV — can affect a small, rural town.

Eugene and I were at that film, and we joined Goss and Melanie at the Alamo Ritz next for “‘Bama Girl,” a documentary about a black girl running for homecoming queen at the University of Alabama. She wouldn’t be the first black queen in the school’s history (she’d be the fifth), but she would be the first one to be elected without being endorsed by “the Machine,” a secret cabal of fraternity and sorority higher-ups who control all the school’s elections.

The young woman who introduced the film referred to the Alamo as “a movie house and a house of restaurant,” a construction that amused us to no end. She also inadvertently referred to the servers as “servants” before quickly correcting herself. I don’t know which I prefer, the unpolished introduction by an enthusiastic festival staffer, or Matt Dentler’s smooth intro that always begins, “The minute I saw this film, I knew we had to get it for South By Southwest.” (We love you, Matt! In fact, the minute we saw you, we knew we had to get you for South By Southwest!)

It stopped raining at some point in the afternoon, and after I’d spent some time writing and walking around, I figured I might as well get in line for the evening’s big premiere of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” This is the new film from uber-producer Judd Apatow, written by Jason Segal (who was one of the friends in “Knocked Up”) and starring him and Kristen Bell (aka Veronica Mars). It was at the Paramount at 7:00; experience suggested that someone from our group should be in line by 5:45 or so if we wanted to get good seats. Usually we make Jason or Goss or even Eugene be the line-waiter, but I thought I’d take one for the team. Surely I would not have done this if it had still been raining, Klan poncho or no.

Melanie joined me soon, and then Eugene shortly thereafter. He had just seen “Explicit Ills,” the movie whose premiere audience had consisted almost entirely of people who worked on it. Eugene reported that the director, Mark Webber, referenced the Cinematical piece I’d written about that incident and apologized to the Cinematical crew for not getting in. Of course, we DID get in; it was all the people after us who got screwed. But hey, it’s cool that Webber read my article and gave Cinematical a shout-out, even if it was sarcastic (which I think it was).

We also got news that The Hollywood Reporter and Variety had published their reviews of “The Promotion” from last night — and they both hated it.  Mind you, neither publication actually sent a critic to SXSW. Since “The Promotion” is a studio film being released theatrically soon anyway, they’d had a press screening back in L.A. to coincide with the SXSW premiere, and that’s where the HR and Variety critics saw it. HR’s Kirk Honeycutt said it “must be one of the unfunniest comedies ever.”

We were all flabbergasted. As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, it’s rare that EVERYONE in our group loves a film equally. I can understand someone not liking it — comedy is subjective, after all — but “one of the unfunniest comedies ever”? Come on. Weinberg was particularly outraged (his job is to be more outraged than anyone else), and he immediately began compiling a list of 101 terrible comedies that Kirk Honeycutt apparently hasn’t seen if he’s calling “The Promotion” one of the worst ever made.

Speaking of Weinberg, he and Jason and Greg and many others were just coming from the “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” pre-show party. Some of the cast had been there, and so had, apparently, a lot of bartenders and liquor bottles. Attending the party (which I hadn’t heard about) entitled you to sit in the special roped-off section of the Paramount, so that was pretty awesome for those guys.

And the movie? Funny! There has been some concern that the Judd Apatow comedy juggernaut will run out of steam, and it probably will eventually, but it doesn’t happen with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” It’s about a guy who takes a vacation to Hawaii after his TV-actress girlfriend dumps him, only to find that she and her new boyfriend are staying at the same hotel — an absurdly contrived situation, now that I spell it out for myself, but that thought didn’t occur to me while I was watching it. The movie deftly combines show business insider jokes, meta-references, situational comedy, and relationship humor. I think I laughed more frequently at “The Promotion,” but I laughed harder at “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” And of course some of the funniest lines are ones I can’t repeat here, not when my mother might be reading.

“Knocked Up” played in this same slot last year, and was immediately followed by the Austin Chronicle/SXSW party where Loudon Wainwright and Voxtrot performed and several “Knocked Up” cast members hung out. We still talk about the coolness of that party. Sometimes at night we dream about it. So naturally we wanted to attend it again this year, in the desperate hope that lightning would strike twice, but that it would be the good kind of lightning, the kind that makes you have fun at a party, not the kind that kills you.

But first Eugene and I needed to see “Battle in Seattle,” which was playing at the Paramount immediately after “Sarah Marshall.” I’m not sure why we “needed” to see it, but we did, or we thought we did. It’s about the riots that occurred at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, with fictional characters — cops and protesters alike — drawing us in to the drama and tragedy and tear gas.

The funny thing about this real-life incident is that I was alive and well and conscious and even working at a newspaper in 1999, and yet I have no memory of it whatsoever. I’m guessing I read the news stories, saw “World Trade Organization,” had no idea what that was or why people were protesting it, and stopped reading before I got to the good part, i.e., the part where cops were busting hippie skulls.

The film is kind of terrible. It makes almost no effort to explain the protesters’ grievances against the WTO, instead assuming that we will be on their side regardless. One of the characters even makes a joke about how the general public doesn’t know what the WTO is; all they know is that it’s bad. So, OK, ha ha, interesting comment, but it kinda undermines the WHOLE POINT OF YOUR MOVIE.

Also undermining the movie: the terrible, terrible dialogue. I quote some of the more generic examples:

“The press would have a field day!”

HE: “You know nothing about me!”
SHE: “I’ve been around men like you all my life.”

(Spoken to a pregnant woman.) “You want adventure? You just signed up for the greatest adventure of all!”

“You’re gonna turn downtown into a war zone!”

“How do you stop those who stop at nothing?”

So … yeah. “Battle in Seattle.” The minute I saw this film, I knew it was poo.

Eugene (who shared my sentiments) and I got out of there around 11:30 and headed over to the Austin Chronicle party to see if it was still swingin’. Security guards were checking bags outside to prevent people from bringing in any beverages, because if you bring in your own drinks, it decreases the likelihood that you’ll buy them inside.

I had a bottle of water, as always, so I drank what was left of it, and the guard gestured to a garbage can so I could dispose of the container. I asked if I could keep the empty bottle, as I don’t actually BUY bottled water; I get a new one every few weeks and just refill it. (People who drink bottled water exclusively are suckers who might as well be throwing their money into a fire.) The guard said no, I can’t bring a bottle into the venue, even an empty one. Why? Because I might fill it with booze and smuggle that booze out with me when I leave, and they don’t check bags when people exit, only when they enter. I pointed out, in a well-reasoned and rational argument, that this was a stupid rule. He said it’s a Texas state law — which is good to know, because it means every single other venue I’d been to in the last four days was violating this law, since no one had ever checked our bags before.

So I tossed the empty bottle into the garbage can, which was just inside the venue gate. Then, once we entered, I took the bottle back out of the garbage can (it was just lying on top of a bunch of other empty water bottles) and put it back in my bag, which I knew it was safe to do because the guard had just told us they don’t check bags when you exit. I considered my act of civil disobedience to be an excellent way of messing with Texas, which I’ve wanted to do ever since I saw a bumper sticker telling me not to.

The party was still packed with people, but all the food was gone and the band was not one we were interested in watching. We saw only one person we knew, a mildly (read: extraordinarily) inebriated Childress, who was getting around the rules about smuggling alcohol out of the venue by hiding it in his stomach and bloodstream. Stick it to the man, Childress! Then fall down!

With the party failing to dazzle us sufficiently, Eugene and I left and soon ran into Weinberg, Davis, and Goss, who were wandering the streets of Austin in search of food. The five of us wound up at Jimmy John’s, a sandwich shop that’s open late, where we ranted about the Hollywood Reporter review some more, concluding that if you think “The Promotion” is one of the unfunniest comedies ever made, you must not have seen anything with Larry The Cable Guy or Martin Lawrence. I mean, honestly.

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