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School is about to start, so the free summer movies for kids are winding down -- most programs have stopped except for Alamo, I believe. However, there are still some good free movies and other interesting events this week around Austin.

• If you're reading this on Tuesday, there may still be time to head down to Hampton Library on Convict Hill Road for a free screening of Muppet Treasure Island at 6 pm. Tim Curry as Long John Silver rivals Johnny Depp as Captain Jack, I promise you.
• Alamo Summer Movie Camp is showing Heavyweights this week, and you can still catch the movie on Wed. and Thurs. at 11 am at the South Lamar location. One of the writers on this summer-camp film was Judd Apatow, who wrote and directed Knocked Up. (More films after the jump.)

The Austin Film Festival crew is doing it again -- calling out into the wilderness for your comedy shorts. You've got until August 16th to submit.

To be crowned the Funniest Filmmaker in Austin, download the entry form and drop it off with your film at the new AFF offices. (No entry fee!) The finalists will be screened at the Cap City Comedy Club on August 20th (semifinals) and 27th (finals). Both nights will feature live comedy as well as the short films.

The winner gets two all access badges to the festival in October and their film will screen at the festival. These days that's one of the easier ways to get into a major film festival, so local filmmakers should be jumping at the chance.

Check it out now at the Austin Film Festival site.

Filmmaker, stuntman and Austinite Gary Kent started his career by fighting his way through many low-budget biker and exploitation films. He acted and was a stuntman in Richard Rush's The Savage Seven (1968), Psych-Out (1968) and Freebie and the Bean (1974), as well as Peter Bogdanovich's classic thriller Targets (1968). He also was in The Girls from Thunder Strip (dir. David L. Hewitt, 1966), which will screen at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar for Weird Wednesday on August 15 with Kent in attendance. Kent was stunt coordinator for Hell's Angels on Wheels (dir. Rush, 1967). He was also the production manager for Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and the second unit/assistant director for Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971).

With all the work Kent was getting at this time, it's surprising that he found time to write and direct The Pyramid (1975). This highly personal, mystical and metaphysical low-budget movie was shot in Dallas primarily with local talent.

The Pyramid tells the story of young TV news cameraman Chris Lowe (pre-videotape -- he carries around a 16mm camera) and his disillusionment with the politics and petty bullshit of his profession. This disillusionment goes hand-in-hand with his personal development as a "sensitive male," which he nurtures through yoga and discussing metaphysics, psychic phenomena and mysticism with his reporter friends and his girlfriend. Chris plays guitar and is not afraid to cry or show emotions. He attends his girlfriend's confrontational therapy encounter group. He's a modern non-racist Southern man (circa 1975) whose close friend and work partner is L.A. Ray, the African-American news reporter at the TV station. (More after the jump.)

Austin is celebrating Home Movie Day this Sunday, August 12, at the Carver Museum's Boyd Vance Theater. From 2 to 6 pm, you can watch other people's home movies, which sounds like a wonderfully voyeuristic experience. You can also bring your own home movies -- which must be on film, not video -- and if the film is in good condition, everyone could be watching what happened that Easter on your grandmother's birthday when you secretly taped a piece of paper with her age onto the back of her blouse. Not that anyone I know would have ever behaved like that. In addition, film experts will be around to offer advice on caring for home movies on film. Admission to the event is free.

I have two shoeboxes full of Super 8 film from my parents and grandparents (luckily, I borrowed my grandparents' film shortly before the post-Katrina floods swamped their house). I had it all transferred to DV, but I've always wanted to watch some of the movies on a projector again. It's not quite the same on TV as it was when we were kids, trying to keep the flimsy screen from falling, and learning the great responsibility of running the projector. The above photo is a screenshot taken from a family home movie at Christmas, I think in 1973, at my aforementioned grandparents' house. At least the groovy outfits are interesting.

If you're interested in learning more about Home Movie Day, News 8 Austin has posted an interview with the event's founder, Snowden Becker.

I've been out of town for a long weekend in the New Orleans area, where they really could use more indie/arthouse theaters, although that's not exactly a priority post-Katrina. Still, my youngest brother is terribly envious of the diversity of film choices we have in Austin, which is why I hope he doesn't see the following list. He's not going to be in a good mood until he gets to see Superbad, and that doesn't reach theaters for another 10 days. If he were here, these are the movies and film-related events I'd be telling him about:

• The Paramount is showing Rules of the Game tonight and Wednesday, and I would love to see this Jean Renoir movie again, especially since it's a restored print. I can't go (I actually have to see Daddy Day Camp tomorrow) but you should all go for me and tell me how wonderful it is. Other Paramount movies in the Summer Classic series this week include a David Lean double-bill of Brief Encounter and Summertime on Thurs. and Sunday, Fellini's La Strada on Sunday, and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast on Monday.
• The "Sing-Along" version of Hairspray will be showing for the rest of the week at Barton Creek Cinemark (the one that's not in the mall). I still need to see the non-sing-along version myself, although I am wary after what happened with The Producers. (more films after the jump)

Film festivals are at once immensely gratifying and endlessly irritating. They provide the means to see new and obscure films months before they hit mainstream theaters or home video, but they do so at the cost of one's sanity, personal life, and financial resources. This past March during South by SouthWest I forced myself to maintain a somewhat normal schedule at the cost of movies I really would have liked to see. (Damn those midnight showings!)

Black Sheep was one of the films I most regret not seeing, so it's nice to see the film coming back to Austin during its theatrical run. The Alamo Drafthouse web site says it will begin running on August 31st, and it may hit some other local theaters. If you need a plot synopsis, Bloody Disgusting describes it this way: "An experiment in genetic engineering turns harmless sheep into blood-thirsty killers that terrorize a rural town in New Zealand." It sounds a lot like the animal version of Undead, which had a great sense of humor but ultimately got bogged down in homage to other zombie flicks and its own plot intricacies.

We're big fans of The Simpsons TV show around here, or at least the earlier seasons. Somewhere around Season 7 or 8 the episodes became less interesting to us, and we have a horror of "New Simpsons." So we approached The Simpsons Movie with trepidation, and decided the best way to ensure our enjoyment was to splurge on Alamo Drafthouse's multi-course Simpsons Feast. Afrer all, even if the movie turned out to suck, at least we'd be enjoying bacon-wrapped pork chops. My husband and I have never tried one of the full-fledged feasts at Alamo, although I've enjoyed some of the smaller movie-and-food events. It would be a challenge for us; the event didn't start until after 8:30, and we tend to be early diners, so we had snacks after work and tried to stay strong until the event. After all, there was that Ultimate Donut dessert to look forward to, even if it did sound a bit scary.

Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar was decorated beautifully for The Simpsons Movie. We didn't see a lot of it on our way into the theater, because the lobby was so crowded. Even on a Wednesday night, Alamo on South Lamar is very popular. But to set the mood, I'll show you the photos we took in the lobby after the movie. The counter where you can buy drinks, etc. was set up to look like a Kwik-E-Mart. Since Austin didn't get one of the Kwik-E-Marts transformed from 7-Eleven, we were happy to see an appromixation in the lobby (photo after the jump):

[Ed. Note: Please welcome our latest contributor to Slackerwood, Anne Heller, who's reporting on one of the Weird Wednesday screenings from July.]

Hooch (director/screenwriter: Edward Mann, 1977) is a very funny, authentic regional exploitation action-comedy starring Gil Gerard (a Southerner himself, later the star of the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) and an otherwise unknown cast. Shot in Cleveland and Rutherford counties in the Appalachian Mountain region of North Carolina (also at Earl Owensby Studios in Shelby, N.C.), Hooch is about a small county in the Appalachians and its many moonshine-brewing inhabitants, who are all struggling to make a living. The older "brewers" are pissed off at the success of handsome young upstart Eddie Joe (Gerard), who is charmingly stealing their regular customers.

Meanwhile, the owner of the country store (also a moonshiner) conspires with a trio of carpetbagging Mafioso who want to take over the moonshine business in that county as an extension of their Northern business ventures. The store owner's daughter seduces Eddie Joe, whose steady girl is actually a very childlike, prudish yet buxom youth choir director and Sunday School teacher at the local Baptist church. Her uncle, the local sheriff, has a vendetta against Eddie Joe because he's the only moonshiner in the county who refuses to bribe the lawman to look the other way. (More after the jump!)

Go read this blog entry from Tim League about the Stand by Me screening in Brownsville, Oregon during the Rolling Roadshow's national tour. The events surrounding the screening included a hands-free blueberry pie-eating contest, in which Tim participated as "The Glory Chomper." This is the funniest thing I've read all week. I'd include one of the many photos, but I need to check with Alamo before I go grabbing their images. Fortunately, they have an entire Flickr photo set devoted to the Stand by Me events.

In other Alamo food-related news, I am still recuperating from the Simpsons feast last night. It was truly amazing and I could barely move afterwards. I felt like Homer. I kind of still do. I tried to take some photos, which I hope to share with you all soon. Right now I don't think I could look at the photos, though. I suspect that "casserole of a thousand donuts" expanded to full size after I ate it.

Let's see what Austin has to offer in terms of special screenings and free movies this week. If I missed something, please let me know in the comments section.

• Thursday night, Austin Film Festival is hosting "Very Early Works," a collection of short films from local filmmakers who have gone on to bigger and better things. The evening includes short films from Steve Collins (Gretchen), Scott Rice (Perils in Nude Modeling and those funny, funny Script Cops shorts that served as AFF in-house trailers last year), the Zellner brothers (Redemptitude), Mike Akel (Chalk), Jeffrey Travis (Flatland). Plus there are shorts from filmmakers who aren't yet quite so well-known, like Toddy Burton and John Merriman. Some of the filmmakers will be around to discuss their shorts. "Very Early Works" is being held at Alamo Lake Creek, and you can buy tickets at the door.

  If you don't live in Austin, check out the "Eat My Shorts" posting on Cinematical Indie a while ago where I found early shorts online from some of these filmmakers as well as others from the "Mumblecore" movement (I also explain what I think that means). Read the entry and see those shorts for free.

• Alamo Lake Creek is starting a new weekly film series called Tromatic Thursdays, in which the theater brings us films from the prestigious Troma studios. This week's classic offering is Tromeo and Juliet, a timeless love story. The movie screens at 10 pm and admission is free. (More events after the jump.)