AFF 2011, Day Three: Free Wine and Tex Mex P*rn
My very, very full day started early Saturday morning with the Molly Shannon taping of KLRU's Overheard with Evan Smith. She was running late, but was delightful when she arrived. It was totally worth getting up at 7 am for. Choice bit of trivia that she told the audience before the cameras were running: when she was a waitress working in LA (before her big break on SNL), Johnny Depp would eat at her restaurant and leave extremely generous tips. She said he told her that his mom had once been a waitress.
After the taping, I hightailed it over to the Bob Bullock Museum where I left my car in the garage for the day and waded through the book festival on Congress towards the Driskill. The first Austin Film Festival item on my schedule for Saturday was the panel led by Elizabeth Hunter and Pamela Gray on "The Heroine's Journey: Writing and Selling the Female-Driven Screenplay." The room quickly filled up; some people were even standing in the back or sitting on the floor behind the chairs.
The panel was fascinating despite the somewhat tentative moderation by Cindy McReary. Pamela Grey shared stories about notes she received on her screenplay for A Walk on the Moon (which is soon to be added to my Netflix queue), and both she and Elizabeth Hunter agreed that the more interesting stories right now are being told on TV. I'd recommend AFF put this panel in a larger room next year!
After lunch, I partook of the free wine tasting offered on the mezzanine, and I ran into my friend Caitlin Moore (film editor for Austinist). We discussed our schedules for the fest, then I grabbed a seat in the "Inside the TV Writers Room" panel room. I'm guessing that this panel was running late because of the awards, but I'm not sure that was the reason. They eventually started even though a cameraman hadn't showed up yet. Monte Williams moderated, with Sterling Anderson, Noah Hawley and Nancy Pimenthal filling out the roster.
This panel didn't really capture my attention; I would follow a little bit of the discussion and then think about something else. I left before it finished to start on my walk back over to the Bob Bullock, where the "Where I'm From" Texas shorts would be showing.
The 11 short films in this program were the finalists from Texas Monthly's short film contest, and after the program, editor Jake Silverstein and AFF Competition Programmer Stephen Belyeu announced the winners (see the top photo of this post). The second runner-up was Robert Gonzales' I Heart S.A., full of animation and 10 seconds of Tex-Mex p*rn (stills of yummy Tex-Mex plates). First runner-up was 75-year-old John Raven's Lyndon's Hills, a humorous look at Johnson City/Stonewall/the Texas Hill Country. The winner of the night was El Valle, by San Antonian Rick Gonzales. I'll do a separate post later with more about all the shorts in this program and my thoughts on them.
My last film of the day was at the Arbor -- Okay, Enough, Goodbye, a strange Lebanese flick about a man who finds it difficult to live without companionship. It made me laugh, quite often. The scene where he stuffs his face after his mom has left him, with muezzins providing background noise, made me want to close my eyes and focus on the music of the calls to worship. I also adored the scenes when the man takes his boy neighbor Wahid to an abandoned fun park. The structure of the film was unusual, with breaks in the movie informing the viewer about Tripoli facts, and homemade videos of several characters each confiding something to the camera.
As I left the Arbor, the badge line for Shame was all the way around the building to the back (across from the Fire Bowl). That didn't bode well! I was glad to be headed home.