SXSW and shorts.

The festival rolls on, but the winners have already been announced. Eugene Hernandez has the details at indieWIRE as well as solid bits on 2929 Entertainment and the UT Film Institute, but briefly, the top audience award winners are the narrative feature Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (Kill the Bird's excited) and the doc A League of Ordinary Gentlemen (Eric Campos reviews it for Film Threat); the juries have gone for the narrative Luck (Scott Weinberg's interviewed director Peter Wellington for eFilmCritic) and the doc A Hard Straight (Weinberg, interview).

For Bryan Curtis, writing in Slate, SXSW "seems to have a singular purpose this year: advancing the art of lefty muckraking." But there's one film that stands out for him, a "magnificent piece of agitprop: Death and Texas, a mockumentary about pro football and the death penalty." I'm intrigued. Here's the site. Also in Slate: William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg on Bush and Kerry's ads.

Short shorts:

• Fox employee an online pirate? The Smoking Gun.
• "La-dee-dah." Woody Allen says it comes straight from Diane Keaton. Bruce Weber has the dirty lowdown for the New York Times, quoting Ms Keaton herself: "I never said that in my life. He's out of his mind."
• The Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry show rolls on. For Ray Pride, Gondry does a little more of the talking this time.
• And via Movie City News, a brief but terrific interview for the AP with Spike Lee.

Posted by dwhudson at March 17, 2004 3:43 PM