Slackery News Tidbits, April 19

Rise and shine, and let's see what the Austin film world has brought us this morning!

• The Austin-shot, Robert Rodriguez-written and co-directed movie Machete now has a release date: September 3, aka Labor Day weekend. Austin Movie Blog has more details about the movie that had its germination in a fake trailer featured in the movie Grindhouse. We're hoping Machete will fare better in theaters (and get better release treatment) than another Fox film shot in Austin that opened on the same weekend in 2006, Idiocracy.
• Dallas International Film Festival wrapped this weekend, and several Austin-connected films were included in the festival's awards. American: The Bill Hicks Story, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, picked up the Texas Filmmaker Award -- the two filmmakers are British, but Hicks was from Houston and many of the interviewees were Texan. Austin filmmaker Amy Grappell picked up yet another award -- Best Short Film -- for her documentary Quadrangle, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. And finally, Bob Byington's locally shot comedy Harmony and Me, which I reviewed at AFF last year, won a Special Jury Prize.
• The Texas Legislature won a "Muzzle Award" last week from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. What does this have to do with film? The award, which is meant to "draw national attention to abridgments of free speech and press," was granted for the part of the film-incentives law that denies incentives to films that portray Texas or Texans in a negative light. The Texas Film Commission cited that part of the law last year when announcing it would not give incentives to Waco, a film about the Branch Davidians, if the production should apply. (via Joe O'Connell's blog)
• An Austin film buff made The New York Times last week. Brad Bourland was profiled for his ambitious project The Movie List, where he's been working (for ten years!) to rank nearly 10,000 films from the twentieth century. Wow.
• Want to do something nice for local filmmakers this week? Austin production company Collection Agency Films has made a short children's film that they'd like to see on Sesame Street. Aniboom is holding a contest where the winning film will appear on the long-running children's show. Watch the video yourself, then vote for the film. (Yes, you have to sign up, but this time it's for a good cause.) You have until April 26.