The first annual Marfa Film Festival looks like a great excuse for a road trip. They haven’t announced the lineup yet–but does it really matter? A weekend of “wide-open plain, distant mountains… incomparably starry sky” and outdoor screenings? I’m sold.

Two Academy Award Best Picture nominees were recently shot in and around Marfa (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), and the town of 2,000 has recently become something of a hip tourist destination. I can see why.

I’m not sure what’s worse–publishing fake quotes from a critic who doesn’t exist, or completely distorting actual quotes from a brilliant, real-life critic.

While I was putting together a list of new DVD releases today, I came across the website for Chaos, a recent horror flick that Roger Ebert gave zero stars, and a thorough tongue-lashing. And yet, right there on the homepage, there’s a quote attributed to Ebert that reads “Affected me strongly… the movie works.”

On the one hand, I get it. The filmmakers feel that Ebert admitted (briefly) that their film was good, and they want to attach his name to their marketing effort, even if it means pulling his words completely out of context. He is, after all, probably the most well-known, well-respected film critic in North America. But personally, if an indie film like this were MY baby, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable bending the truth quite that much. Especially for a film that is most certainly never going to reach (and was probably never intended to reach) a popular audience. Why bother sinking to those sleazy, dishonest depths? Does a horror audience really care what Ebert thinks?

In any event, it’s got me wondering how critics can combat this trend. And the only strategy I can come up with is to write pre-ellipsized reviews with any potentially positive words cut out. “Awful… revolting… a waste of time.”

The Alamo Drafthouse is the kind of place where you might walk out of a Saturday matinée of Spiderwick Chronicles and step right into the middle of an impromptu basketball game being played in the lobby.

In this photo, Alamo co-owner Tim League tosses a granny shot at the temporary net, which was set up for last night’s sneak screening of Semi-Pro. In order to get into the screening, all attendees were required to wear “Flint Tropics” basketball uniforms–which actually ended up being really hilarious.

Austinist writer and all-around badass Tom Thornton had a quick chat with star Will Ferrell, who was in town for the screening (and who was incredibly impressed that we all actually wore uniforms). The interview will run this week on Austinist, along with some photos.

UPDATE: Here is Tom’s quick interview with Ferrell, and here are a whole bunch of great photos from the event, including a “Team Photo” of Will with the entire audience (I’m kinda right behind him, wearing glasses).

**Note: this is the first in a long-planned series where I explore Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” archive looking for great movies. Very recently, Netflix removed the time limits for all subscribers, so we can watch as many movies as we want, through the internet. And I do.

Last month, I mentioned that I was re-watching some Stanley Kubrick films in an effort to better understand their links to There Will Be Blood. Well, it turns out that two of Kubrick’s masterpieces, The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey are both available for instant viewing on Netlifx.

There has never been a doubt in my mind that The Shining is a brilliant film. Though it may not be the best adaptation of the book (Stephen King famously criticized it for ignoring what he felt were important themes in the original story), when considered on its own, it’s still a fantastic bit of suspense horror.

On the other hand, I’ve never completely appreciated Kubrick’s 2001 until my most recent viewing. I hadn’t seen it in a very long time, and the costumed ape characters in the “Dawn of Man” scene certainly seem hokey 40 years on. But outside of that single, obvious weakness, 2001 played like the best, most rewarding noise album. And in fact, what I noticed most (when considering 2001 as a relative of TWBB) was the soundtrack. In There Will Be Blood, Johnny Greenwood’s score is often the opposite of music–it’s dissonant, moody noise, meant to annoy and enrage as much as provide musical roadsigns. 2001 treats its soundtrack much the same way. In fact, most of the soundtrack isn’t even music; it’s repeated bleeps, high-pitched hiss and carefully placed silence. In this way, it’s one of the most challenging (but ultimately rewarding) soundtracks in popular cinema.

John Cage once said, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If it’s still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” And I’ve found this to be completely accurate. Some of the most rewarding musical and cinematic experiences are the ones that require patience to appreciate, and outright work to enjoy. 2001 fits this description exactly, demanding the viewer’s patience, sometimes without offering any recognizable reward. And yet, if you simply let it unfold without demanding immediate satisfaction, you’ll find all manner of things to love. The exact same thing can be said for There Will Be Blood.

At the time of this writing, The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey are both available for instant viewing on Netflix.

On Tuesday, the folks over at SXSW announced their Feature Film lineup for 2008 (the shorts lineup will be announced next week). The whole list looks pretty great, but I’ve made notes on a few titles that jumped out at me on the first pass.

On the documentary front: American Teen, a doc about, um, American Teens, got a deafening amount of Sundance buzz, and was quickly picked up by Sony Classics. Ellen Spiro & Phil Donahue’s Oscar-shortlisted Body of War looks pretty great, and Spiro is an Austinite, which is cool. Speaking of Austinites, Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths also got a warm Sundance reception, which comes as no surprise–her Townes Van Zandt doc Be Here to Love Me was quite good. Morgan Spurlock’s Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden? is also bound to be fun, in a Spurlockian way. And I’m interested to see the Harlan Ellison doc Dreams With Sharp Teeth–Ellison is also speaking at the festival, which should be interesting if not downright awesome.

On the music front: Julian Schnabel’s concert doc Lou Reed’s Berlin will probably be awesome–and it seems kind of fitting that Schnabel directed this, since both artists seem to polarize critics. Grant Gee’s Toronto FF hit Joy Division is supposedly very good (and if I’m not mistaken, it was bought by the Weinstein Company, so you may see it in theatres or on DVD soon). Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light will probably start out brilliantly, then severely overstay its welcome. But for me, the most exciting music title is Wesley Willis’ Joyrides, a documentary portrait of the late great musician.

On the narrative front: The big screen adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke could be good, or could be awful. Mister Lonely, a movie about a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator co-starring Werner Herzog looks both bizarre and fantastic. Run Fat Boy Run isn’t normally the kind of comedy I go for, but it was written by Michael Ian Black and Simon Pegg, so it can’t be bad, can it? Kimberly Peirce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry called Stop-Loss loses major points for using a Drowning Pool song in the trailer, but will hopefully be good anyway. Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, the first in a trilogy of films about Genghis Khan, looks epic and bloody. According to Micheal Tully, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast is “one of the most exciting and electrifying feature film debuts you will see this year”–and if it’s anything like her husband Ronnie’s SXSW 07 fave Frownland, I’d tend to believe him. I’m also excited about David and Nathan Zellner’s Goliath, which screened at Austin Studios as a work-in-progress recently, and looks great.

Of course, this is just a first pass. And it already looks like my SXSW schedule is going to be impossible to keep up with.

Here are the autographed Jon Gries pajamas we gave away as part of our “Jon Gries Day” contest with the Alamo Drafthouse. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find sufficiently ugly, Lazloesque pajamas these days though–the kids just don’t wear ’em any more, so I settled on these ones. He also signed a Real Genius DVD, with the note, “I’m happy and sad for you”.

In case you don’t know, Jon is the fantastic character actor who plays Lazlo Hollyfeld, the closet-dwelling super brain in Real Genius and Uncle Rico, the steak throwing Tupperware salesman in Napoleon Dynamite, among many, many other awesome roles.

I only met Jon for quick minute while he signed the stuff, but he seemed like a really cool guy. Just as he was heading out to introduce the midnight showing of Terrorvision, a girl passed out on the stairs and he immediately stopped to help her, delaying the show for a good 15 minutes. Class act all the way.

I didn’t make it to the actual Real Genius screening (which sucks because it is, in my opinion, one of the most criminally underrated 80s geek comedies in existence), but apparently the Alamo folks blew a million bags of popcorn into the crowd during the finale. The theatre was still completely full of popcorn when I got there, and for a second I swore I could still hear an echo of “Everybody wants to rule the world”. Classic.

Salon Magazine’s Andrew O’Hehir recently interviewed legendary skateboarder-turned filmmaker Stacy Peralta about his new film Made in America (no, not this one), which, according to recent Sundance reviews, is very good.

It’s a sort of social history of Los Angeles gang culture, tracing the roots of teenage warfare all the way back to the 1930s, exploring the social and economic forces that have shaped the current state of things in inner-city LA. And if the interview is any indication of Stacy’s passion for and treatment of the subject, I’m excited to see it.

I still haven’t seen Peralta’s Riding Giants, but I really loved Dogtown and Z-Boys, and I’m interested to see how he tackles a more, er, issue-oriented film.

[Watch the interview]

UPDATE: Jim Rohner, Editor at Zoom In Online recently forwarded me some relevant links. The first is to Zoom-In’s Sundance review of Made in America, and the second is to an interview Stacy Peralta did with Ioncinema.com. The review link also includes a “Critical Clips” video, where audience members are asked for their reactions as they leave the screening. Neat idea.