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If you live in Central Texas and get KLRU-TV (the local PBS affiliate), you can catch the new season of SXSW Presents tonight at 9 pm. Each week, you can see a good documentary or feature that deserves more attention/a wider release. Most of them played SXSW in previous years.

Tonight's film is Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, a documentary that I reviewed during SXSW in 2005.

The next two films on the schedule have an Austin slant and I can't recommend them enough: Last Days of the San Jose on Oct. 10 and Viva Les Amis on Oct. 17.

After each film, a panel of learned and interesting filmmakers and local film community people will discuss the film briefly. This means me! I'll be appearing on the show in the panels for Dreams of Sparrows, playing Oct. 24, and Barbecue: A Texas Love Story, date TBD. You know I'll remind you again as we get closer.

Full schedule is available in this week's Austin Chronicle.

Fantastic Fest ended on Thursday night. aGLIFF (Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival) started on Friday night. I'm simply thankful they didn't overlap, as I have covered/am covering both for Cinematical. None of my aGLIFF reviews have gone live yet -- expect to see one or two on Tuesday, and a few more throughout the week. Hopefully I'll have time to post a few notes and observations here as well.

I promised you Fantastic Fest photos, and then the Cinematical editors asked if I would publish the photos there. They pay me, so check out my Fantastic Fest photoblog entry for the best pictures I took. There are still a few left that I'll probably post to Flickr soon -- I'll be sure to let you know.

All my Fantastic Fest reviews for Cinematical are published, so here's the list:

• Gamerz
• Frostbite
• Tideland
• The Hamster Cage
• Bug
• Starfish Hotel
• Blood Tea and Red String
• The Woods
  

I'm reviewing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Fantastic Fest's opening-night film, but that review won't go live until the movie releases in theaters this Friday.

I also saw Pan's Labyrinth, Shiva, The Host, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, and Severance, all of which I'd like to review either here or at Celluloid Eyes. And who knows? Perhaps someday I will.

Fantastic Fest 2006 is over, but you can check out my pictures and add your own over at the Fantastic Fest Flickr group. (Flickr is free and monkey-easy to use.) Above you see Darren Aronofsky and the omnipresent Harry Knowles after last night's screening of The Fountain, which I quite enjoyed. I'm still recovering but there will be more coverage of this year's FF films and events in the coming week right here on Slackerwood.

Ameliorating somewhat my lingering feelings of selfish bitterness at having to forgo Funky Forest in favor of Apocalypto, tonight's super-secret screening at Fantastic Fest at least had the advantage of being an actual genre movie: Pan's Labyrinth. Everyone in the audience seemed to know that we'd be seeing P.L. before they walked into the theater, and emcee Harry Knowles acknowledged that fact by calling it the worst-kept secret of the Fest. Knowles also delivered an amusing in-character version of an e-mail message from director Guillermo Del Toro who was unable to attend.

Eating and drinking at Alamo Drafthouse while watching movies, especially horror movies, can lead to some very weird moments. I ordered a chocolate shake during Bug, and it was the first time I'd had a shake at Alamo. The shake is one of the best I've had in Austin, rich and chocolate-y, and is served with a wide straw like the kind you get with bubble tea. It was dark in the theater when I got the shake, so I didn't get a close look -- I mean, shakes are shakes, right?

Turns out that Alamo's shakes are topped with these little chocolate/hazelnut candies, like M&Ms but smaller -- the size and shape of a sunflower seed, I think. I found this out by sucking a couple of them up in a straw ... at the precise moment in Bug when Michael Shannon's character held up his fingers, pinched together to trap a miniscule bug, and said, "Aphids!" Fortunately I quickly realized that aphids don't taste like hazelnut, or I would have sprayed shake all over Chris and Blake.

In other Fantastic Fest news, I've seen two films so far in which someone is impaled on a garden gnome, two in which someone gets stuck in a bear trap, and a surprising number of horror films with strong female leads who do more than merely scream a lot.

Cinematical has posted my reviews of Tideland, Frostbite (my favorite film so far), The Hamster Cage, and Gamerz. More reviews are coming soon, but in the meantime, here are some quick summaries:

The Fantastic Fest screening schedule is kicking my ass, but I've taken a few decent photos for your perusal and here are a few super-mini-capsules up to tide you over until the next lightning round.

More pleasant surprises: Simon Says appears to be very, very bad in the first ten minutes but if you can jump on board it's one of the most entertaining flicks at the Fest. Crispin Glover wigs out for about ninety minutes as twin psycho killers Simon and Stanley, and the rest of the cast blunders around the movie like the cast of Scooby Doo 90210, minus the dog. Q&A with the filmmakers was both revealing and amusing.

The Host was probably the film I was looking forward to the most; you could probably have guessed that the co-founder of a site called Stomp Tokyo was ready to dig the token giant monster movie. The Host delivers on the giant monster action (think Graboids, not Godzilla) but it is a fundamentally different picture than the one I expected based on the trailers. I'm not as head over heels in love with it as emcee Matt Dentler professes himself to be, but it is a damn fine creature feature.

A late-night showing of Severance was probably the biggest and most pleasant surprise for me of the week thus far. An uncannily smart script combines with professional production and a talented cast to assemble the most satisfying horror film I've seen this year. It's being compared to Shaun of the Dead (mostly, I suspect, for its British origins) but for my money it's a better movie.

That's all I've got time for tonight but you can expect more thorough capsules of these and other Fantastic Fest flicks later this week.

The days are flying by faster than I can write about them -- with a noon to midnight screening schedule every day and a baby at home to care for overnight (my penance to my wife for leaving her with the nipper during the festival days), there's precious little time for writing. Here's a quick catch-up round of capsule reviews of what I've seen so far. I've mostly dispensed with plot synopses, but hopefully I'll be able to write about each film more thoroughly after the festival ends.

So the super-secret added-at-the-last-minute screening was Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, with Gibson and the film's star in attendance. I feel so burned at having missed Funky Forest and so mystified that this historical action drama was presented at a genre festival that there's no way I could write objectively about it at this point. Suffice it to say my attitude towards surprise screenings has not improved. Fantastic Fest as a whole, however, is great. More tomorrow (later today) when I've had some sleep.

First of all, my weekly News from Slackerwood entry is now available at Cinematical, in case you're interested in non-Fantastic Fest events going on in Austin. It's hard for me to remember that other film stuff is going on this week, because I'm so involved in seeing FF movies, but there are plenty of good options for this week. After FF ends, I'll dive immediately into aGLIFF, which has some great selections this year. (And after that, I'm going to spend a week reading or vegetating in some non-cinematic fashion.)

In case you hadn't noticed, Slackerwood now has a second contributor: Chris Holland. You may remember Chris from such websites as Stomp Tokyo and Blue Glow; he also posts to the Austin Film Festival blog. I'm very happy he's agreed to post here, so we'll have more and better content on the site.

We're currently in Day Three of Fantastic Fest. So far, FF has been a lot of fun and not tiring. I've seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Blood Tea and Red String, Tideland, Gamerz, and Frostbite. I'm about to go to Severance, and then hope to get into the super-secret special screening after that. Unlike Chris, I think the secret screenings are fun -- they provide a great topic of conversation with other festgoers ("Do you think it's 300?" "I bet it's The Prestige.") and also add a little excitement, like a wrapped present you get that's a funny shape and could be anything. Since I don't have a VIP pass, I may not get into the movie, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. However (speaking of fingers), if it turns out to be Saw 3, I will probably not stay. One thing I have learned from FF this year is that I don't like movies with long slow gory torture scenes. But I still haven't learned not to eat during horror movies. A word to the wise: Tideland is also a movie during which you don't want to eat. Trust me.

As with the inaugural event, Fantastic Fest is a test of the moviegoer's will and tolerance for sleep deprivation. There's no arguing that the second year of Austin's genre film blowout is bigger and badder, but some of the changes may not be as welcome as they were intended to be. More about that, however, after quick reviews of some of the flicks thus far. In this roundup of first-day films: Oculus, Haze, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and the Full Moon Travelling Roadshow.