[Sorry about the tardiness. It was a busy week!]

Day 5: Tuesday, March 11

Jeff and I had to check out of his hotel this morning, and I’d already made arrangements to head back to Casa de Greg for the duration of my stay. There would prove to be complications in this, but as they are not the kind of complications that would amuse you, I omit them.

I left my bag with the front desk and walked across the street to the Convention Center, where I wrote for a while and then caught a screening of a documentary called “Frontrunners.” It’s a very amusing story about the student body election at Stuyvesant, the most competitive public high school in New York (it’s for gifted students), where some of the kids take their politics VERY seriously. Sometimes these docs have universal themes that can be extrapolated; this one is pretty much only about these kids at this school, but that’s fine. We got a kick out of it anyway.

“We” consisted of me, Eugene, and Melanie, and while Eugene then wandered off to meet some alleged other friends who were allegedly in town for the alleged SXSW Music Festival, Melanie and I went to the Alamo Ritz to meet Kim for another movie. (We eschew the kids and their rock ‘n’ roll.) This movie was called “Yeast,” and I was very eager to see it for the simple fact that it was written and directed by the wife of the guy who made one of my least favorite movies from last year, “Frownland.” I was genuinely eager to see what her style would be.

“Yeast” is yet another mumbly thing about twentysomethings who can neither communicate nor shut up, this time starring the filmmaker herself, Mary Bronstein, as a woman whose roommate and friend are maddeningly immature, irresponsible, and idiotic. I note that Kim described the movie from the opposite point of view: “a mumblecore chick-flick about Rachel, a maddeningly annoying control-freak dealing with her fractured relationships with two friends.” Yeah, the main character becomes annoying in the second half, but her two friends are complete morons the entire time. By the end of the movie, I hated all three characters. Hated, hated, hated them. I note that this is the exact same reaction I had to the main character of “Frownland,” so if the Bronsteins seek to be in the business of creating fictional characters that make the audience want to strangle them (the characters), then they are off to a good start.

Next I met up with Jeff, who gave me a ride in his rental car over to Greg’s apartment so I could drop off my bag. This is where the aforementioned unamusing complications occurred.

Soon thereafter I found several others of our group lounging in Childress and Weinberg’s hotel room. Weinberg and Erik Davis were live-blogging the SXSW film awards ceremony. (The awards and “closing night” party are on Tuesday, even though the festival continues through Saturday. It has never been adequately explained to me why this is.) How could they live-blog the ceremony from the hotel room? By sending Goss as an unpaid Cinematical intern to the ceremony and having him text-message the results as they were announced. At one point Davis and Weinberg went outside for a cigarette and delegated me to monitor the text messages in their absence, thereby removing themselves from the process entirely. I admire their managerial skills.

The awards were not especially noteworthy except for one point: “Explicit Ills” won the audience award. The way the audience voting works is they hand out ballots at each screening, and you indicate your score for the film on a scale of 1 to 5. The film with the highest average vote wins. (They take the average rather than the cumulative because different films play to different sizes of audiences.)

Well, you may recall that at the first screening of “Explicit Ills,” people connected to the film comprised literally 80 percent of the audience, and I’m guessing every single one of them gave it a 5. Neil Miller at Film School Rejects points out something I didn’t know: that by the time they’d handed out ballots to everyone in the film’s entourage, there were none left for the 30 or so regular people who made it in to the theater. So not only was the theater packed with ringers, but those ringers were the only ones voting. I’m not saying this was all part of some evil master plan to win the audience award, but it’s definitely an unfortunate outcome. Between this and Hillary Clinton’s inexplicable primary wins, I’ve pretty much lost all faith in democracy.

Most of the gang went to see a documentary about World of Warcraft next, while Childress and I returned to the Alamo Ritz for “Nights and Weekends,” the latest from mumblecore godfather Joe Swanberg and his regular muse, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig was in “Yeast,” too, as one of the annoying friends, and it’s a testament to her skill as an actress that I was able to hate her SO MUCH in that film while loving her a lot in “Nights and Weekends.” These mumblecore things are typically light on plot, so one’s enjoyment of them depends on one’s interest in the characters and their situations. I was quite taken by this film’s emotional depth and its honest, funny characters. I don’t think all viewers will consider it their cup of tea, but those who do will find the tea has a rich aroma and a pleasant, bittersweet taste, with the tea bag of acting steeped for just the right length of time in the hot water of directing, and a nice dollop of the honey of cinematography added for flavor.

“Nights and Weekends” let out at around 10:30, and Childress and I walked over to the film festival closing night party, which was scheduled to blend into the music festival opening night party at around 11. I was once again stopped at the entry point by a security guard who made me drink the rest of my water, after which he gestured to a garbage can for me to throw the bottle away. But then he failed to continue watching me, and I put the empty bottle back in my bag like I intended to. Snider 2, Texas 0.

This party always involves live music, and we arrived just as Moby was finishing his set. If you have never seen Moby perform, what he does is he plays records. He is very good at it. I mean, I can play CDs OK, but records are trickier because you have to choose 33 or 45 rpm, and then you have to put the needle in just the right place and make sure it doesn’t skip. So it’s really cool to see a professional record player.

Weinberg, Davis, Kim, Melanie, and all the gang were already at the party, which was in the backyard of a bar called Stubbs. This is the only joint event of the film and music festivals, so people from both worlds were there, intermingling and trying to understand one another’s languages.

Promptly at 11, they stopped letting people into the backyard party. I knew this because Eugene texted me and said he was being denied entry. I told him it was because the “film” party was over and the “music” party was going to start inside the bar, and that if he went to the bar’s actual indoor entrance, they’d let him in. Seems like the people telling him he couldn’t get into the backyard could have told him this, but whatever. Their primary concern was looking for water bottles.

Eugene successfully entered Stubbs, then went out the back door into the backyard, which you’ll recall is where he wanted to go in the first place. We were all still out there, though a feeble attempt was being made by party officials to funnel us inside. For some reason most of us decided that rather than stay at the party, we should go watch “Dance of the Dead” again at midnight.

I believe this was a first for me, seeing the same film twice in the same festival. It wasn’t that it was the best movie we’d ever seen, though we certainly did like it a lot. It was more that it was the only thing playing that we had any interest in, and we wanted to eat at the Alamo Ritz, and we’d become friendly with some of the cast and crew, and heck, why not? You run your life, we’ll run ours.

A reported 175 people were turned away from the packed screening; we should probably feel bad for whoever the first six of them were, since we essentially took their seats. No free beer for the audience this time, but they did repeat the trick of firing the confetti at the film’s climax. Really, more theaters should do this with more movies. It doesn’t even have to be an explosive climax. Just fire the confetti.

It was 1:30 a.m. when the film ended, and it seemed like a good idea for us all to go back to the hotel room and hang out for a few hours. Again, why not? Apart from needing sleep, I mean. Kim and Melanie hung out with us for a while before saying their farewells — they were leaving the next morning — and departing. Then a few guys associated with “Dance of the Dead” showed up and the merriment continued while Childress — whose ride to the airport was picking him up at 6 a.m. — slept in bed, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him. I don’t know if Childress has always had this skill or if he learned it when he started sharing hotel rooms with Weinberg at film festivals, but it’s definitely a handy talent to have.

It was around 4 when I crashed on Weinberg’s bed while Weinberg stayed up writing and doing whatever it is Weinberg does (I don’t ask, and neither should you). At 6, when Childress left, I moved over to his bed and slept for real. It was probably a quintessential SXSW day: some good movies, some raucous adventure, a party, and not nearly enough sleep.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 11:00 pm 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.