The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

I've seen a lot of documentaries in the past few years about the decline of small towns and rural areas, how the population has dwindled and local businesses have closed shop and so forth. So it was strange to watch the opening sequences in the documentary Crawford, where the small Texas town starts to flourish when George W. Bush (then-governor, now President) buys a ranch in the area.

Crawford examines the effects on the town and its residents from the day Bush bought the Prairie Chapel Ranch in 1999 through 2007. At first, everyone in the town couldn't have been happier, especially once Bush became U.S. President. Businesses thrived as tourists and media flocked to the town, the local school band traveled to Washington, DC to perform at the inauguration, and the minister of the Baptist church felt confident that any day now, the First Family might join his congregation. However, a lot of things can change in half a decade, and Cindy Sheehan's 2005 protest in Crawford triggers even more radical effects.

Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) announced its jury prizes, the Target Filmmaker Awards, on Thursday night. These awards don't merely bring the filmmakers good publicity and critical acclaim -- each winning filmmaker receives a $50,000 cash prize. The Best Narrative Feature winner was August Evening, a Spanish-language drama about an undocumented older worker's relationship with his widowed daughter-in-law. The film is writer-director Chris Eska's feature debut. Texans might be interested to know that August Evening received Texas Film Production Fund grants in 2005 and 2006 (as did last year's winner, Gretchen ... LA must like those Austin filmmakers). August Evening landed a distribution deal this week with Maya Entertainment.

Billy the Kid (pictured at right) took home the Best Documentary Feature prize. The film, which follows a teenage boy in Maine, also won the documentary jury prize at SXSW this year. Monika Bartyzel caught a screening at Hot Docs and said, "Watching this documentary is an exercise in restraint -- the restraint not to write down everything that Billy says." The film is directed by first-timer Jennifer Venditti, and has stirred up some controversy lately for potentially exploiting its subject. LAFF has not yet announced its audience awards but will wait until Sunday, the festival's closing night.

I'll admit that I am a jaded enough movie-goer that very few bits of news manage to make me giddy with anticipation, but the Paul Thomas Anderson fansite Cigarettes and Red Vines has made me giddy as a fanboy on the opening day of ComiCon. The site posted a "spoilerish " photo (it's only fair to warn you) from the set of his latest movie There Will Be Blood -- one of the first photos to emerge since the production was announced. The film is based on the Upton Sinclair book Oil!, and is the story of the early days of the oil business starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a prospector in rural Texas. Anderson wrote the screenplay for the film, and there is talk of release in October of this year, which would put it right in the wheelhouse for Oscar contention, if it's as good as we hope it will be.

Usually whenever Anderson's name is mentioned, it's in connection to the other directors who just don't produce the amount of films they should (other nominees include Wes Anderson, David Fincher, David O. Russell, and Spike Jonze.) Considering the amount of truly awful movies I see, I'm just grateful Anderson's making one at all. The few he has made so far are among my favorites, so I really can't complain. Throw Daniel Day-Lewis into the mix and it's like Christmas in July -- or I guess in this case, October.

According to John Horn of the L.A. Times, the film critics of Dallas/Ft. Worth are the best at predicting the Oscars. Yes, the DFA Film Critics Association frequently chooses as its own pick for best picture the same film that goes on to win best picture at the Academy Awards. And when I say frequently, I mean that the group has done this in four of the past five years. Last year they didn't pick Crash (not that anybody saw that coming save for Chicago, right?). Horn doesn't mention that they also didn't match in 2000.

This year, the DFAFCA has picked United 93 as their favorite film of 2006, so as long as Crash was just a fluke, it probably should get the Oscar. Horn doesn't analyze any of the other categories nor how Dallas/Ft. Worth correlates with the Oscars in them, so I took a look myself. In the major categories the group is as scattered with the hits and misses as any group. The actress has matched only twice in six years; the actor three times.

But it is a good bet this time the group's picks for actor and actress will be honored in February. Like nearly every other group in the country, it went with Mirren and Whitaker. Supporting actor and actress were a bit more interesting, going to Jackie Earle Haley and Cate Blanchett (for Notes on a Scandal), respectively. Though the comeback kid Haley did well with NY and SF critics, I'm pretty sure that this is Blanchett's first critic group mention (she is nominated for the Satellite and the Golden Globe). As far as how the DFWFCA rates compared to the supporting Oscars, it has matched only one actor and one actress in six years.

The group does fairly well with best director, picking four of the last six Oscar-winners. Their pick this year is Martin Scorsese (as it was in '04).

The rest of the awards, which are more or less with the majority, can be read here.

Central Texas bloggers are, for once, all talking about the same thing: Idiocracy. Austin, Dallas and Houston were three of the seven cities in which the Mike Judge movie opened last Friday, and local film bloggers grabbed the rare opportunity to write about a movie before the New Yorkers could. In addition to the film itself, alot of bloggers are also writing about how disgusted they are with Twentieth Century Fox's limited release and non-publicity accompanying the release. Here are a few reactions from Austin and Dallas film bloggers:

• Austin Movie Blog: Sarah Lindner calls Idiocracy "not half-bad." She notes, "The main thing that bothered me, though, is that you can tell the movie is unloved. While I liked Idiocracy's inventive vision of the future, the film looks cheap and rushed, especially some special effects."
• Dumb Distraction: Micah quotes his wife: "Funnier than Beerfest." He speculates on the reasons for the limited release: "When did a little thing like bad taste prevent a studio from releasing a film?" He also experiences some very Idiocracy-like moments on the drive home.
• Matt Dentler's Blog: Matt thinks Idiocracy is definitely flawed, and that the jokes get old after a while. However, he observes that the opening sequence is "so clever it could exist as its own short film (or could be virally sent around the Web or YouTube as a guerilla marketing campaign)."

More news on a different filmmaker currently in Austin: Blake at Cinema Strikes Back alerts us to a local news clip about Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's segment of Grind House. You can see Tarantino and Kurt Russell quite clearly over at the Texas Chili Parlor, but not that kickass car.

I'd been looking forward to seeing Mike Judge's latest film Idiocracy for some time, perhaps especially because I live in Austin, where the film was shot. I'm not wild about the film's star, Luke Wilson, but costar Dax Shepherd was the best part of Zathura, and besides, I do like Judge's style of humor. (I once worked in a high-tech office where I created an departmental intranet site with an Office Space theme. Those "TPS reports" jokes never got old.)

So you can imagine I was disappointed when Erik reported a couple of weeks ago that Fox had postponed the film indefinitely. Fortunately, this week's Austin Chronicle has some news confirming the "limited release," which isn't the usual NYC-and-LA routine. Starting next Friday, Sept. 1, Idiocracy will play in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and LA. For once, Texans get to see a movie before New Yorkers. Does this mean that we're going to be very lucky and unearth a hidden comedy classic before the rest of the country, or really sorry to suffer through a clunker? We'll find out next weekend. In the meantime, I can't find a single trailer, promotional Web page, or photos for the film beyond some blurred images of the poster and those two stills that everyone on the Web keeps using over and over.

Texas, the first feature from 29-year-old Italian director Fausto Paravidino, is clearly a very personal film. Paravidino co-wrote the screenplay with two of his stars, and, as Enrico the narrator, he himself also appears on screen. His movie has the feel of something for which public exposure is a bonus, not the goal; it exists because it has to, not because there is an audience to wow. That is not to say, however, that Paravidino isn't sure of himself as a filmmaker. Indeed, Texas practically explodes off the screen with a thrilling, inescapable confidence that expresses itself not in showy, attention-getting tricks but rather in a willingness to be wildly unconventional without regard for the reaction of viewers. The movie is crazed mix of tones, jumping from almost slapstick humor to complete solemnity at the drop of the hat, and combining one-joke, one-dimensional characters with fully-developed, tragic figures in virtually every scene. And yet, thrillingly, it works. Of the six New Directors/New Film offerings I've seen so far, Texas is easily the most assured, most accomplished of the bunch.

Letters from the Other Side brings up one of the perennial questions about documentary filmmaking: how much should you involve yourself in your subjects' lives, and to what extent? Should you run the risk of potentially affecting the outcome of your film, or is it more important to help people you encounter while shooting? Some filmmakers make a serious attempt not to have much effect on the stories unfolding around them, and don't employ voice-overs or let themselves be heard in their film. Others, meanwhile, are themselves a big part of their stories, the best-known example being Michael Moore. Heather Courtney, director of Letters from the Other Side, obviously decided to help—in fact, the stories in the documentary hinge on Courtney's ability to deliver video "letters" back and forth between women in small Mexican towns and their male relatives working in the United States.

Letters from the Other Side eloquently manages to present stories that show the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. and the unexpected side effects of recent American trade laws and border-tightening regulations. Courtney's documentary examines three family situations: Eugenia, whose husband left for the U.S. years ago when she was pregnant with their youngest daughter, and whose three sons have followed their dad to find work; Maria, a farmer whose two older sons crossed the border, and who is worried that as she and her husband grow old, no one will be left to work their own land; and Carmela and Laura, whose husbands died on their journey to the U.S. in a smuggling truck.

Karina already discussed a good half-dozen films she plans to see during SXSW this year, including the big-name opening-night film A Prairie Home Companion. My favorite films at SXSW have always been the smaller ones, the movies you figure you had better catch now because who knows, you may not have an opportunity to see them again. I am particularly fond of low-budget documentary features, and I love the animated shorts. On the other hand, it's also exciting to see a preview of a wider-release film before all your friends do, and start spreading the buzz.

I've spent entirely too much time this week tinkering with my SXSW schedule to balance the small films with the big premieres. This is silly because after the first day or two, various forces of nature and filmmaking will probably cause me to change the schedule all over again. A huge "must-see" buzz will focus around some film I hadn't planned to screen, or I'll find that I may be too weak and wimpy to see three films a day for more than a couple of days in a row.

Glory Road is such a formulaic and forgettable sports movie that I keep forgetting it was about the Texas Western College basketball championship season of 1966 and not about the University of Texas football championship season of 2005. Admittedly the screening I attended took place the day before the big football game, and the orange that the Texas Western team wore was strikingly similar in shade to UT's burnt orange. And they were both big upsets.

However, the Texas Western upset was considered notable in sports history because the college was the first to start five black basketball players on the court at once. As the movie tells us, NCAA teams at the time would never have more than one or two black players on the court; the Kentucky Wildcats team that Texas Western played in the tournament had no black players at all.

Even if you know very little about basketball, you know how Glory Road will end. For one thing, Disney has been advertising this movie as an inspiring story about an underdog team that wins the NCAA tournament title. The movie is structured so that the winning game is the climactic scene of the movie, even though we have been told the result. This is not a spoiler unless you've been living in a cave.

• In the unsubstantiated rumor mill, I went to a party recently only to bump into an animator working in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Cinematical recently mused on the whereabouts of Bob Sabiston, who was integral in putting together the complex animations of Waking Life. Well, drunk as my animator snitch was, he said not only did Sabiston jump ship, but he took a whole crowd with him, and now Linklater's left with half a staff. Hey, that rhymed.
• Local rag The Austin Chronicle has all the updates on upcoming film The Cassidy Kids. In producer mode, Bryan Poyser takes a shot at a sequel to Dear Pillow, about a 1980 murder solved by a rag-tag group of kids. Also making news: the Independent Feature Project (IFP) gets a chapter in Austin; vampires start filming the low-budget Insatiable in June; and if you love Star Wars but fear the light-saber, you can drive to Taylor, Texas to see the show for a mere 4 bucks. Robert Rodriguez's The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl premieres 5 days early for Austinites, on June 5th. The rest of the nation has to wait until the 10th. Ha.
• Matt Dentler wants to know: with all this film-musical-film craziness going on (he just saw The Producers in Austin, the musical based on Mel Brooks' film, which is about to be turned into yet another film) will Hollywood ever get around to making original musicals again? Note: Moulin Rouge does not count.
• The Austin Film Society starts up it's Essential Cinema Series this June with Shattering the Narrative: European Cinema 1960-1972. Showing at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, it'll kick off on June 7th with Breathless, and close appropriately with Satryicon on July 27th.