SXSW

“I have the feeling that if I died in the middle of the night they’d just roll me out and roll the next one in,” says Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) in That Evening Sun. “And nobody would even notice.”

MINE: Taken By Katrina is a story about the pets who lived in the path of Hurricane Katrina, but it’s also about the owners who chose (or were forced) to evacuate without them and the families who eventually adopted them into their homes.

Carla Gugino. Connie Britton. Marley Shelton. Cameron Richardson. Emmanuelle Chriqui. Rya Kihlstedt. And Sebastian Gutierrez, the pied-piper who got them all to strip down to their underwear. They all sit down with Cole Abaius to discuss the brilliance of their latest film.

A funky riff on the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey opens Black, a new French film and the second craziest movie of this year’s SXSW Film Festival. And the weirdness doesn’t end there.

What does it take to make a good, honest comedy driven by a cast completely comprised by women? For one, it needs to take its female characters seriously. Take for example, Sebastian Gutierrez’s new film Women in Trouble.

Although it wasn’t mentioned to the Paramount Theater’s packed house last night, the screening was a ‘work in progress’ cut of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell. But if audience reaction last night is a true indicator, the vast majority of them loved the film. Work in progress or not.

There is a reason that we cover so many film festivals during the year. We want to be there where it all begins, where the careers of tomorrow’s great filmmakers and actors begin. And this year at SXSW, we are seeing some really great beginnings for some very talented artists.

Universal previewed three full scenes last night from Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming follow-up to Borat with video introductions from the man himself. If you’re a Borat fan and were worried that Cohen had lost the anonymity necessary to dupe stereotypical Americans with humorous results, rest assured Bruno is fucking hilarious.

We dragged some hotel chairs together, flipped on a camera, and tricked the director and producer of MINE into thinking we were legitimate journalists in order to bring you a fantastic discussion of ethical and legal gray areas in the wake of a natural disaster.