SXSW Diary 2008: Day 6
Day 6: Wednesday, March 12
Today was unusual, and I have very little to report. Finding myself grotesquely behind in my writing assignments, I had no choice but to forsake most of the films I’d planned to see today and devote myself fully to writing. It may sound odd to hear a writer complain that he has been forced to write, but the truth is that most writers spend about 90 percent of their time looking for excuses not to. That is probably why so many of them are driven to drink.
As it happens, today was going to be a light day anyway, as most of the films on the schedule either didn’t interest me or were movies I’d already seen. I did catch “At the Death House Door,” an impressively well made documentary about a man who was the chaplain at a Texas penitentiary for many years and as such ministered to 95 inmates on their final days before being executed. It invokes important questions not about the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment, but about the haphazard way it is administered in the United States.
This screening was at the Convention Center, and as I walked across the main pavilion afterward I saw people gathered around the Dell Lounge, a glass-encased room built by the people at Dell Computers. I do not know what the general purpose of the Dell Lounge is; one assumes it was built cheaply and flimsily, and that we won’t be able to get tech support when it collapses. But at this particular moment, everyone was gawking at the event occurring within the Lounge, which turned out to be Billy Bob Thornton being interviewed. So you can add that to your list of celebrity sightings.
I headed over to Weinberg’s hotel room now. Childress went home early this morning; Weinberg was in there working. He and I were in the same boat of needing to pile up stacks of words sufficient enough to appease our editors. We vowed to stay in the room and write write write write until 11 p.m., when we’d be allowed to go to a movie.
What this actually meant, of course, was that we would spend the next seven hours distracting one another. We would chit-chat for a few minutes, then say, “OK, back to work,” then get very studious for a few minutes, then talk again. Weinberg was particularly good at interrupting me, engaging me in conversation for a while, then saying, “Quit interrupting me!” And since he was coordinating Cinematical’s SXSW coverage, and since I was writing reviews for them, he had to frequently interrupt me to say, “Have you finished that review yet?,” when he knew full well that I had not, and that the reason I had not was that he kept interrupting me. Then he would ask again, this time in the Staten Island accent of our Cinematical boss Erik Davis, and I would respond with an impression of Weinberg’s Philadelphia voice. Both of our impressions are very good, though Weinberg refuses to admit how well I do him.
At 11 p.m., I went to the Alamo Ritz to catch at least the first part of “R.S.O.: Registered Sex Offender,” a mockumentary about a skeezy guy just released from prison. I was only partially interested in the feature; mainly I wanted to see the short that was preceding it, entitled “I Slammed My D*** in the Drawer.” The program said it was based on a true story, and the title and concept made me laugh. As it turns out, I could have watched it on Funny or Die, but eh, whatever. (Warning: It contains some salty language.)
Weinberg, Goss, and Jason were seeing a horror film called “Otis” at midnight in the Alamo Ritz’s other auditorium, and I left “R.S.O.” early to join them for that. (”R.S.O.” was fine, but I didn’t feel compelled to stick with it.) “Otis” seems like a bland semi-parody of “Captivity” or “Hostel,” and the first hour of it is just awful — over-acted, under-written, and half-baked. I don’t know what the last 30 minutes are like, because I left. I was really tired, and the movie was sucking. I’m told it gets into some very obvious Iraq War parody stuff later on. Oy vey.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Ouch is all I can say about that short. Ouch indeed. Ouch