Everything I saw at SXSW this year.

Hi again, Tumblr. SXSW fully took over my life the past nine days, but I’m back. Sore and tired, but who wants to read someone complaining about the week-plus of fun things they were watching, doing, and writing about? Instead, here is just a list of all of those things, mostly for myself so I will remember it all, but also for you so you can be jealous. I will probably write something with more context to it later.

MOVIES:
The Cabin In The Woods (A)
The Babymakers (N/A — walked out after ten minutes)
Safety Not Guaranteed (B)
America’s Parking Lot (B+)
King Kelly (C+)
Lost & Sound (C+)
Wonder Women! The Untold Story Of American Superheroines (B-)
Electrick Children (B)
The Last Fall (C-)
Bernie(A-)

PANELS/TAPINGS/TALKING PERFORMANCES:
Kelly Carlin’s A Carlin Home Companion
Curing A Rage Headache panel with Sady Doyle and J. Smooth
Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast taping with Jeffrey Tambor
Bob’s Burgers comedy showcase with Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal

MUSIC:
Jay-Z at ACL Live
Michael Kiwanuka at Radio Day Stage
Dessa at Scoot Inn
Foy Vance at Central Presbyterian Church
M. Ward at Central Presbyterian Church
The Low Anthem at ACL Live
Alejandro Escovedo at ACL Live
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at ACL Live
Blaqstarr at Cedar Door
B.O.B at Cedar Door
The Heavy at Cedar Door
Counting Crows at Auditorium Shores
Alice Smith at Vice
Hollywood Holt at 1100 E. 5th St.
El-P at 1100 E. 5th St.
Tom Morello at Swan Dive
Graffiti6 at Peckerhead’s
Rhett Miller at Peckerhead’s
Sleigh Bells at ACL Live
Nas (w/DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and AZ) at ACL Live
Nikka Costa at Buca

That’s everything, I think. Best surprises included America’s Parking Lot, Kelly Carlin, Graffiti6, Bernie, and the fact that Nikka Costa wasso fucking good. Best expected things were Kristen Schaal,The Cabin In The Woods, Bruce Springsteen, Rhett Miller, and Dessa.

Now to spend all day writing about it so I can justify my presence and earn some money. Drop me an “ask” if I missed anything this week that didn’t happen in the streets of Austin. I hear Mike Daisey is James Frey now? And the guy who made the Invisible Children video decided to respond to his critics by literally pulling his dick out and waving it at them? Anything else I should know about?

ETA: Oh! And I scored a sweet pair of Oliberte shoes at the Style X event on Friday at a great price, which is good because I’ve wanted some since I first learned about the company, but balked at how much they cost. As an editor I know put it, it’s a good time to be Dan Solomon, y’all.

Bridesmaids. →

Kat and I caught a press screening of Bridesmaids the other night, and it is pretty fucking funny. After leaving the theater, Kat said, “A lot of the time when I’m coming out of a movie, I’m trying to figure out who it was made for. This one was for me.” It’s not, as Bust points out, a romantic comedy — those aren’t usually very funny, and Bridesmaids is at least as weird and gross as The Hangover. (weird + gross = funny.)

One thing that stood out to me in the Bust review linked above, though, was a comment on what I thought was the funniest scene in the movie — the sure-to-be-famous food poisoning sequence. (Note: the clip in the link cuts off before the action really starts.)

There is a scene in particular where Lil and her bridesmaids get food poisoning that left me cringing, mostly because seeing people vomit makes me wanna vomit too. Is this an example of female comedy trying to keep up or out-gross the boys? There are critics and viewers who will argue that.

And maybe it’s just because I am a dude who thinks that gross-out stuff can be funny, but I actually thought the food poisoning scene was kind of groundbreaking. Because whatever else that scene is about, it is absolutely not about giving anybody a boner. And seeing it like that, you realize just how rare it is to see women in a movie who are decidedly not sexy even a little bit. That’s not a new comment or anything, but it’s definitely in sharp relief in Bridesmaids.

If the movie were otherwise bad, it wouldn’t be worth discussing much. But — aside from being probably 15 minutes too long — it’s really funny and satisfying. And since that — combined with the fact that no studio thought to counter-program it till The Hangover 2 opens in two weeks — means that Bridesmaids is probably gonna be a monster hit, I expect we’ll see people considering this more seriously. And that’s cool, because it’s a conversation that’s been needed for a long time. With our without the puking and pooping.

I saw Atlas Shrugged Part One tonight.

Don’t worry, I bought a ticket for something else instead, so I didn’t contribute to its box office (because I’m a parasite!). I just wanted to see it as early as possible, so the amount of time I’d have left in my life to make fun of it would be as great as possible.

It’s bad! Obviously, it’s bad. The acting is bad, the direction is bad, the script is holy fuck bad — but I did find it interesting, if only because I am deeply interested in the culture war, “this-side-thinks-this” aspect of American politics, and it was an interesting glimpse at how the “other side” sees me and my friends. Which is to say: We’re fat! And greedy! And we hate their hard work for reasons that we will never bother to articulate! And we’re very stupid.

Everything about the movie is incredibly ham-handed and obvious. No character exhibits any emotion or articulates any observation that isn’t a direct comment on the producers/parasites dichotomy that Randians favor. A broken-down factory in the, um, desert part of Wisconsin is broken down because the owners insisted on paying everyone according to their needs, rather than their work; the corrupt, lazy, stupid railroad tycoon gets mad at his sister the hard-working, beautiful, brilliant railroad tycoon for changing his plans because he thinks their money should go to the crappy, inefficient company that “really needs it”; the heroic male steel tycoon’s Hollywood-fat*, banal wife all but wears a sign around her neck that reads “parasite” and her idiot brother chastises him for being inconsiderate to the poor like a big dummy. Etc, etc, etc.

But all of that is interesting to me, because it helps me understand why the culture war in this country is so heated. If that’s what they really think our every argument is really about — stifling human achievement for the fun of it — then geez, no wonder they’re so pissed all the time! And if they don’t actually have those battles to fight, because no one in the real world is making those arguments, then I guess it makes sense that they’d be trying to take apart Medicare and Planned Parenthood and NPR, just to have something to do.

So, yes — I learned something from Atlas Shrugged Part One. I learned what the conservative interpretation of my viewpoint might look like as a strawman argument delivered by the Brother Seamus from The Big Lebowski or a recurring character from SVU. (I also learned that toasting “to a successful business partnership” when you mean “to fucking,” in this world, isn’t being subtle — that they’re actually the same thing.) It’s interesting, and maybe even useful, to see what people who don’t like you see when they look at you. At least it helps you understand why they’re so pissed.

Also, if you were wondering: Yes, the movie is about trains and steel mills, and no, it doesn’t take place in the present day. It takes place five years in the future! Apparently in the next five years, the movie’s opening voice-over explains, shit’s gonna get so crazy that gasoline will be nearly non-existent and trains will be the only way to transport things again. Gasoline will still somehow be affordable enough that using it to power bulldozers and various other construction equipment, as well as apparently airplanes(!!), is no different from in the real-world year of 2011. Never stop shrugging, Atlas!

*Hollywood-fat, adj; a beautiful, thin-to-average-sized woman with thicker arms than her “normal” co-stars.