Festivus: March 15, 2010

It's Day 4 of SXSW, and Scott and me have turned in (relatively) early to catch our collective breaths following a tumultuous weekend, but here are some of the recent highlights...

Sunday:

After delicious breakfast tacos at Austin Java and a brief stop at some kind of kite festival, we attended a long, rambling (but relatively interesting and not entirely unentertaining) documentary called Dirty Pictures about (A) the scientist who inadvertently popularized Ecstasy, (B) his wife, (C) their son, (D) a bunch of scientists studying the positive (and negative) effects of psychedelic substances, (E) a DEA agent who turned his back on the War on Drugs, (F) the meaning of life, (G) cacti and (H) all the weird and wonderful things you can do and see at Burning Man.

After that, we expected to attend a Steven Soderbergh documentary about Spalding Gray, but were ultimately thwarted by the size (and befuddled staff) of a small-ish venue crammed with a distinctly "out-of-town" (i.e., New York and L.A.) crowd of obnoxiously entitled festival-goers...so instead, we bowled a few games at the swanky HighBall and swilled cocktails a few stools down from Wiley Wiggins of Dazed and Confused fame.

Determined not to bother the perfectly friendly Mr. Wiggins, I actually wound up being rather brusque in my request for a photo, and so Wiley -- if you happen to read this -- what I meant to say was, (A) nice to meet you and (B) we're actually two degrees of separation, since my film, Apocalypse Bop, played at a terrible film festival in Austin a few years ago along with the fantastic Plastic Utopia, the magnum opus of the Zellner Brothers, who later gave you a starring role in their bizarre 2001 faux-foreign war film, Frontier.

Anyway, as Scott and I were enjoying our brush with greatness, we noticed a massive line snaking past the window of the HighBall and realized we probably weren't going to get seats for Saturday Night, either (i.e., James Franco's documentary about the eponymous comedy mastodon)...

...so instead, we dropped into a packed screening of the completely amateurish and disjointed Elektra Luxx, a -- comedy? -- about a retired porn star featuring a surprisingly high-profile (and thoroughly wasted) ensemble including Carla Gugino, Timothy Olyphant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Malin Akerman, Alicia Silverstone and Vincent "Pete from Mad Men" Kartheiser as a guy trapped naked in an elevator for reasons I can't begin to remember.

Fortunately, the film and/or the projector broke down halfway through the flick, allowing Scott and me to sneak out and grab some ZZZZs before hitting a more satisyfing pair of screenings on Monday about the dead cult comedian Bill Hicks and the live cult band The Magnetic Fields...

...but it's too late to post those reviews right now, so stay tuned for more SXSW updates, coming soon!