Film Flam

The end-of-year accolades keep streaming in, and there's more to look forward to in 2012.

In addition to the usual suspects – Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter continue to enjoy heavy play on year-end best-of lists – You Hurt My Feelings came in at #2 on Indiewire's Top 10 list of the Best Undistributed Films of 2011. The Steve Collins film, which reunited his Gretchen cast Courtney Davis, John Merriman, and Macon Blair, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival this summer and screened at October's Austin Film Festival. Meanwhile Emily Hagins' My Sucky Teen Romance made IndieGoGo's year-end list of Best Creative Campaigns.

**

Good news about Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin's feature film Now, Forager, about mushroom hunters in New York (and just about the swellest film title we've heard in a while): Following its AFS Narratives-in-Progress screening in September, the film was invited to screen at the Gotham in Progress film market in Wroclaw, Poland, where it was awarded a Special Jury Recognition and $20,000 in titles and credits services. The film is set to premiere at the Rotterdam film festival in the new year.

**

You'd be hard-pressed to find a guy more plugged-in to the Texas film and television industry than Joe O'Connell; I've certainly been an avid reader of his columns, which have appeared for the last dozen years in places like this here Austin Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman. For the last six years, Joe has been filing reports for The Dallas Morning News, but he hung his hat up this month in order to focus on his fiction writing. Good news for fiction, bad news for those of us who've enjoyed having his ear to the ground.

**

Clue: This Austin comedy institution is on a first-name basis with Alex Trebek.

Who is John Erler?

Right on the money. The Master Pancake funnyman recently taped an episode of Jeopardy!, which we're told airs March 15, 2012.

On that note, Happy New Year, everybody. See you on the other side.