Film Flam

It's nearly fall now, so it must be festival season. Let's have some fun with acronyms: aGLIFF, FF, and AFF are all crammed into two months' time. Best to start strategizing now. Handily, all three fests have been teasing us with titles for some time now... The 24th annual Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival touches down first, running Sept. 6-11. We'll preview the fest in next week's issue, but for now we'll say we're especially excited about Trigger, which co-stars pretty much every cool Canadian indie actor out there (Molly Parker, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar) and is directed by another Canadian, Bruce McDonald (Pontypool)... Last week, Fantastic Fest (Sept. 22-29) dropped its second wave of film programming. Highlights include the U.S. premiere of FF favorite Spanish son Nacho Vigalondo's Extraterrestrial, the regional premiere of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, archival screenings of Hong Kong grindhouse classics, and a Ti West (The Innkeepers) retrospective sponsored by the Austin Film Society... The Austin Film Festival (Oct. 20-27) has dangled 10 titles from its upcoming lineup. On the menu? World premieres of Freak Dance, from the Upright Citizens Brigade gang, and Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, a documentary about the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship; Jay and Mark Duplass' latest awkward comedy, Jeff Who Lives at Home; Lynne Ramsay's (Morvern Callar) long-awaited third film We Need To Talk About Kevin; and the U.S. premiere of British zombie comedy Harold's Going Stiff. The complete lineup will be announced in mid-September... For more completist coverage of this fall's film festival programming, see the Picture in Picture blog at austinchronicle.com/pip... And in a spot of non-film-fest-related news, Computer Chess needs humans. Andrew Bujalski's fourth feature – about a tournament of chess players and computer programmers in 1980 – is looking for extras. Interested? Email your contact information and a photo to computerchessmovie@gmail.com.

---

Direct tips/comments/complaints to filmflam@austinchronicle.com.