Here’s the story of how I botched my interview with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel.

I usually don’t do celebrity interviews, not because I’m too good for that kind of fluff, but because I’m lazy. (Side note: I am also too good for that kind of fluff.) The interviewing part is easy; transcribing the recording afterward is tedious and time-consuming. So at every film festival, when every publicist contacts every journalist offering interview opportunities with every actor in attendance, I always decline. It’s just not my thing. There are many writers whose thing it is, and they are welcome to it.

But the publicists for “I Love You, Man” flattered the higher-ups at Film.com by offering a one-on-one (well, one-on-two) interview with Rudd and Segel, saying that such an opportunity had only been offered to a few websites. And I like Rudd and Segel, and I knew my Film.com overlords would be delighted to have an interview, and the time didn’t conflict with anything, so I said sure, why not?

I was told via e-mail that I’d have 15 minutes with the duo, starting at 11:45 a.m. at Austin’s Four Seasons hotel. (Actually, I was told Four Season’s, but I knew what they meant.) They assumed I could find the Four Seasons hotel on my own, which is a reasonable assumption. Before I left for Austin, I googled it, saw where it was on the map, and made a mental note: It’s on 2nd Street (or so I thought), between the convention center and Congress Avenue. No problem. I’m basically familiar with that part of downtown.

Continue reading…

At Cinematical, I wrote about my experience seeing the hilariously bad “Troll 2″ for the first time, in response to the South By Southwest screening that followed “Best Worst Movie,” a documentary about the film’s cult following. Now Rosella Drudi, the Italian woman who wrote the “Troll 2″ screenplay (and wife of the director), has posted a comment on my article in which she says … well, honestly, I have no idea what she’s saying. But remember, this is how well she speaks English now, 20 years after she wrote “Troll 2.” I’m starting to understand why the film’s dialogue is so nonsensical.

They are much content of the involuntary happened one of this old film turned in 1989 to Park City in Utah.E’ one of the first history that I have written, today is to 100 scenarios. I do not understand because horror demential comic and intentionally ironic on the sense of the life and against the fanatical vegetarians us, or be considered mistaken, defective and involuntarily comic. Because it is not wanted to be understood that l’ idea originates them is a comic and ironic history. Perhaps because l’ European irony is difficult to understand for the Americans. I do not know. The title it Troll2 is not true, the just one title it of the film is Goblin, the title it of the script is Goblin. The MGM America, has changed to the title it with Troll2, not I and not even the director of the film. The MGM America has declared that Troll2 is the continuation of Troll, but is not true. I have not never seen that film and I do not know it. I have sold my history to Eduard Serlui for the society ” Eureka film” Serlui made to realize the film to the Italian society ” Filmirage” like executive producer. I hope finally that the truth comes mnemonic. You could not know it. The actors of the Troll2 film ” Goblin” they were not actors. They have been chosen to Park City, nobody of they was a true actor professional. The director, Claudio Fragasso has asked to it to recite in that way ” strip comic” and funny, in order to make to laugh the public. Troll2 is a fable for children a crazy horror, much comic. The film did not have to be prohibited, nothing censorship, therefore nothing blood that I have replaced with the chlorophyll, using the green color of the goblin, North European Celtic legend, like monster vegetarians many fanatics us of the salutista, macrobiotico food. I have used the goblin like vampiri, using the amburger (tipical american food) of meat to the place dell’ Saint water, of the , like the mortadella of the famous sandwich ” Bologna” this is the true name of ours mortadella, a company for my Italian identity, a way in order to laugh to us on, but you could not know it. They are much content that a film thus small, turned in sun 4 weeks and only cost 50 or 60 million old Italian lires, in 1989, today is a phenomenon, are content that the cast of the actors, particularly Michael and George, today make transactions also with gadget of they the production, and te documentari director ,ex baby goblin actor, thanks to my small history and the personages from me invented and the food from invented me. Rossella Drudi

At Cinematical, I’ve written about the footage we saw of the upcoming “Bruno” film (Sacha Baron Cohen’s followup to “Borat”), and about the screening of “Troll 2″ I attended Saturday night. The latter article also explains why I won’t be covering that film in Eric’s Bad Movies — not because it’s not bad, but because its badness is so self-evident that mocking it is redundant.

At Film.com, I’ve posted two dispatches of mini-reviews — you know, of the movies I’ve been seeing here at this film festival, where people occasionally watch films. Here’s dispatch #1, and dispatch #2. (I should have chosen a word other than “dispatch,” since that’s what I’m using here on my blog. But it’s a little late for should-haves.)

Also, unrelated but I don’t have anywhere else to mention it, this week’s edition of Eric’s Time Capsule at Film.com is about “The China Syndrome,” released 30 years ago today.

And now, more anecdotes.

Continue reading…

While my custom has been to post lengthy daily diary entries about my South By Southwest exploits, this year will probably be a little different, with less emphasis on where I ate lunch and more emphasis on what terrible misfortunes befell me. I may also talk about some of the movies, if space permits.

The fun began on Thursday, when I flew from Portland to Austin and discovered during my layover in Denver that my laptop, a second-hand iBook that I only use when I travel, had gone teats up. It was stuck on a screen that says “You need to restart your computer”; restarting it simply brought it back to that screen again. I called my brother Jeff, who did some googling and found that when other people have encountered this it has been due to problems with one of these two things:

a) the software; or,

b) the hardware.

We were glad to have it narrowed down.

Continue reading…

Will Goss posted these photos on Facebook, and I have stolen them to show to you. They are from my last day at SXSW, the one where we got stuck a few miles from downtown and had to wait for a bus and I sat in a shopping cart.

Here’s one with Eugene and Weinberg. Why Eugene is pushing the cart, I don’t know. I don’t remember this part specifically. I must have been very engaged in my reading.

Day 8: Friday, March 14

We figured that a good way to spend our last day at the festival would be to go watch “Doomsday” at a multiplex somewhere. It opened in wide release today without having been screened for critics, and it had to do with a deadly virus and a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and what the heck, why not? It’s not like we were already at a film festival or anything.

I suggested last night that we catch today’s noon showing, as this would enable me to be back downtown in time for a 3:30 SXSW film I wanted to see. But Weinberg insisted noon would be far too early, considering we were about to stay up too late watching movies, so we planned on the 2:30 showing instead. Indeed, noon came quite early after our 4 a.m. bedtime. Honestly, even 2:30 was pushing it. Also honestly, why were we in such a hurry to see “Doomsday”? We make no sense.

Weinberg, Eugene, Goss, and I took a cab to a multiplex a few miles south of downtown. We did indeed watch “Doomsday.” This happened without incident.

Continue reading…

Day 7: Thursday, March 13

I made up for seeing only one full movie (and parts of two others) yesterday by seeing six of ‘em today. Yes, SIX! And three of them had to do with Iraq! Wheeeee!

I began my day with a heaping helping of nerdery, thanks to “Second Skin,” the aforementioned documentary about World of Warcraft players. It is very interesting to me that there are 50 million WOW players, and I don’t know a single one of them. Or at least if I do, they have kept their WOW involvement secret from me. The film does a nice job of showing us the lives of several players without making fun of them or treating them like jokes. Of course, I still think they’re all losers worthy of ridicule, but I think that about a lot of people. You can’t blame the movie for that.

After “Second Skin” is when my Iraq marathon began. Initially my plan was to see one film and be done with it, in and out, easy-peasy. But I realized after the first one that I should probably stick around for the second one, and then that led to the third one, and even though my resources were drained and I really wanted to do something else, I was stuck and had no choice but wait until it was all over, no matter how lengthy or costly it became. When it was all over, I questioned whether I should have ever started in the first place. I’m sure you know the feeling.

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

[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.

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…