Slackery News Tidbits, January 14

Austin film news has been cropping up all week, getting bigger and better as the week progresses. Here are the highlights:

• The biggest news: SXSW Film just announced a half-dozen more titles for this year's festival (two months away!) -- no Austin connections (update! see comments below) but certainly all interesting. Jodie Foster's movie The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson and scripted by Austinite Kyle Killen, will have its world premiere, as will Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, a documentary about the comedian's tour during his recent break from television; Ti West's latest movie, The Innkeepers, about amateur ghost hunters trying to prove a hotel is haunted; It's About You, a documentary on John Mellencamp; and Square Grouper, a movie set in the 1970s about pot smuggling in Miami. The latest movie from Greg Mottola (Adventureland) will also be shown at SXSW -- Paul, a movie about a hitchhiking alien, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. If those aren't enough details, visit the SXSW Film site for more.
• Austin Film Society has just announced the next film in their new, cool Best of the Fests series: local filmmaker Geoff Marslett's animated film Mars, which we mentioned in our 2010 in Review feature earlier this week. Jenn reviewed it after its debut at SXSW last year. Now you have a chance to catch this movie at Alamo Village on Feb. 16. Better still, it'll be shown along with Lucas Martell's delightful animated short Pigeon: Impossible, which you can watch online but looks even better in a theater.
• Speaking of Austin filmmaking: The City of Austin has issued a call for entries in its Faces of Austin multimedia program. Selected short films will be shown on the widescreen video displays in the City Hall atrium. The shorts will also be made available online, and some of them will screen at the opening of the city's People's Gallery exhibit on Feb. 18. The deadline for submitting your short film is January 28. You can watch the previous Faces of Austin selections on the City of Austin YouTube channel.
• We mentioned filmmaker Clay Liford (Earthling, My Mom Smokes Weed) in Jenn's look at Chris Doubek -- Liford just moved to Austin from Dallas. He shared some news with us about his latest feature, Wuss: "Don't know if you also want to mention that my new feature, Wuss, is just completed and will be hitting fests soon. We're really hoping for SXSW. The film stars Nate Rubin from My Mom Smokes Weed and Tony Hale from Arrested Development." Fingers crossed that when SXSW announces its full film lineup in early February, we see a Wuss.
• If you haven't been to one of the Lord of the Rings all-day feasts at Alamo Drafthouse, check out this photo gallery on io9 with mouth-watering details on the food served during the trilogy screening. Chef John Bullington also shares a recipe for coney stew. Someday I'm gonna go to one of these things, I swear, and drag my Tolkien-loving sister with me.
• A Huffington Post article on movies that "push the envelope" cites local filmmaker Bob Byington and his movies Harmony and Me and RSO, as well as the Austin-shot feature Kabluey from Scott Prendergast. I'm amused that the author never seems to realize that all the films he's talking about were made in Austin. 
• In an excerpt from the book The Film That Changed My Life at USA Today, filmmaker Kevin Smith discusses at length the movie that inspired him to make movies: Richard Linklater's iconic Austin film Slacker.
• Finally, since we're discussing SXSW so much today -- remember after the 2010 film fest, many of us were speculating on what SXSW could do to get more film venues downtown? I kept suggesting the State, and everyone rolled their eyes and told me that a) it would never be re-opened in time and b) it would cause major line snafus with the next-door Paramount. Well, I can't speak for b), but we may very well find out. Austin 360 reports that the State is not at all finished its renovation, but it could be in good enough shape to be used as a SXSW Film venue. So I could be right after all, so there.