As you may already know, FSR Associate Editor Brian Gibson and I are on our way, via the wonders of the automobile and the United States Highway system, to Austin, Texas for the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival. Along the way, we will be stalking celebrities, sneaking into movie premieres and kicking it with our friends from Slashfilm, First Showing, i09, The Movie Blog and many others.
But before we get into all the nitty gritty, BBQ sauce flavored goodness of SXSW, here is a little preview of how we will be structuring our coverage. First and foremost, every single ounce of SXSW juice will be linked on the SXSW HOMEPAGE. If you keep that in mind, you should be alright. Here are some of the features that we’ve got planned:
Daily Blog
Similar to the way I chronicled the shenanigans in the snow from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I will be keeping a daily journal of everything that happens from day 1 (which is today, oddly enough) until the day we make our triumphant return back to Columbus, Ohio (which is 18.5 hours away from Austin, in case you were curious). I will do my best to sober up and use those little restaurant wipes to clean off the remnants of good ole’ southern cooking long enough to lay down some retrospective prose every evening. No one is safe… All will be revealed (sort of).
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews
At Sundance I saw something like 30 films and reviewed just about every single one of them — but at SXSW we’ve got a two man team ready to see as many as 60-70 films and drop something like 6-7 reviews on you before the week is out. Alright, that isn’t necessarily true — we do intend to review every single film that we see before the week is out, so assuming we get into these screenings (using our ninja skills and our unmatched wit) we should have a big fat list of reviews when it is all said and done, giving you a good list of films that should be on your “Must See” and “Avoid Like the Plague” lists for the remainder of the year.
Interviews
We are in the process of having restraining orders lifted and court-room testimonies erased so that we can get some 1:1 time with some of the stars of SXSW. And no, we are not trying to interview Harry Knowles (although, we hope to meet the guy). We have been email-molesting publicists for the likes of Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? director Morgan Spurlock, talk show host Phil Donohue, Rocket Science and Assassination of a High School President star Reece Thompson and of course, John Cho and Kal Penn from Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay to see if we can get them in a room, alone, for some question and answer. So be on the lookout, you never know who we are going to get under the mic.
Photos of People and Things
Keep a close eye on our new, official FSR Flickr photostream. As my mother would probably remind me (if I was lame and still lived with her), “You didn’t buy all that fancy camera equipment to let it collect dust.” So thanks to my mom’s wisdom, we should have plenty of pictures and candid shots of UT girls for your viewing pleasure.
T-T-Twitter
Despite the fact that we find something inherently dirty about the name Twitter, we’ve found the services provided by the quick-blogging service to be extremely useful. We will be using our FSR Twitter page to make quick updates from the field, so if Paris Hilton shows up and announces that she will be playing Kirk’s girlfriend in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek film (which wouldn’t really surprise me at this point), we will get it to you quick — perhaps even quicker than other media outlets. How cool is that?
So there you have it — when it comes to SXSW, we’ve got you covered — that is, until we get there and get too drunk to power up our laptops. If the latter should happen, please accept this advance apology — as you can see, we really did have big plans…
Remember to check back to our SXSW Homepage!
