Maybe we're spoiled, maybe we're jaded, maybe we're just coming down from our Fantastic Fest high, but we gotta say AFF "Comedy Vanguard" selection Psycho Sleepover is crazy bad. Not so-bad-it's-good bad, just, you know, the other kind. Granted, horror comedies are one of the trickiest balancing acts a filmmaker can attempt. Do it right and you have An American Werewolf in London. Do it wrong and you end up with An American Werewolf in Paris, or even worse, Vampire in Brooklyn. (Screw it up enough and you get to be the next John Landis and receive a life sentence in Hollywood jail, and who wants that?) But seriously, Psycho Sleepover – from the creative team behind last year's way better Street Team Massacre – is a horror comedy in PR only. Horrible things occur, sure, and the late-night audience that packed the Alamo Ritz to watch them did emit a few sozzled laughs, but still, Shaun of the Dead this ain't. During the post-film Q&A, director(s) Adam Deyoe and Eric Gosselin said, "This is kind of our rebuttal to [Amy Holden Jones 1982 pseudo-feminist genre entry] Slumber Party Massacre," which has got to be a real mind-warper for femme-film theorists and genre enthusiasts alike. Riven clear to the bone with wall-to-wall bad acting, bad camerawork, and just plain badness overall (but, sadly, not like this), it's hard to tell what was intentionally satirical and what was simply larkish fuck-uppery. The story – virginal Rachel Castillo has psycho boyfriend, kills psycho boyfriend, and five years later attends an all-girl sleepover only to find herself surrounded by yet more zany cutthroats – feels as though it's trying to parody everything from the sacred to the profane but the end result is painfully unfunny and somewhat less horrifying than an episode of Shining Time Station. Now that's scary.

The Austin Film Festival’s annual barbecue on the grounds of the French Legation Friday evening was again one of the highlights of the weeklong event. It’s a lovely gathering of the out-of-towners, festival filmmakers, and members of the local film community. The beer and wine flowed freely (though I would have loved it even more if festival sponsor Absolut had participated in the event), and the cloudy residue from our once-quarterly rainfall (it’s been a little parched here in case you’re not up on Austin’s annual rainfall totals) earlier in the week cleared out and made for perfect, sunshiny BBQ weather. The schmooze was lively, but catching up with old friends and connecting with new ones got in the way of getting my feed on. The food was all gone by the time I made my way to the chow line, sending me out to my first film of the fest with a hunger in my belly. Fortunately, Robert Townsend’s Phantom Punch was a great distraction. The film is a biographical portrait of former heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston. Townsend is most commonly thought of as a comedy director due to his breakthrough films as a director, Hollywood Shuffle and Eddie Murphy Raw.

I spent my morning at the Austin Film Festival conference chaperoning eight budding screenwriters – all girls – from the Austin Bat Cave, and we couldn’t have stumbled upon a better panel for rockin’ girl power than the Concept to Creation panel, in which screenwriter (and UT alum) Shauna Cross discussed the process of turning her YA rollergirl novel Derby Doll into the movie Whip It! with producer Kirsten Smith (a longtime AFF panelist who wrote Legally Blonde, among other self-proclaimed “girl” movies). I’ve been to a lot of these panels over the years, and this is the first one that made “networking” not sound like a dirty word. The pair recollected how they first started collaborating – by becoming friends first (and aided by a lot of mojitos, apparently). Cross recalled her first ever pitch, a thrown-in-the-deep-end meeting at CAA (a building not exactly affectionately known as the Death Star), pitching to a bunch of guys in “Men in Black suits.” Smith jumped in to say that Cross knocked the pitch out of the park, and that was pretty much the tenor of the panel – playful ribbing of each other (they each are dragging their feet on followups to their young adult novels; after Smith grilled Cross on how far she’d gotten – “I have a premise” – Cross shot back: “What do you have?”), tempered by a sincere singing of praises of the others’ talents – as writers, champions, and friends. Not at all a bad example to set for eight middle school girls wondering if there’s any room for them in the Hollywood’s boys’ club.

For those who wanted an insider's perspective on the bizarre world of Hollywood ratings negotiations, writer/director Jake Kasdan (Zero Effect, Walk Hard) was happy to oblige with a bit of MPAA-related absurdity at this afternoon's Writing Comedies: PG-13 vs. R panel at the Driskill Hotel: "Two 'fucks,'" he explained, "is the limit for a PG-13 movie. PG movies, obviously, can't have any 'fucks' at all. And three 'fucks' is cause for an immediate upgrade from PG-13 to R. But this rule only pertains to 'fuck' when it's being used as an expletive, not as a verb. Even one verbal 'fuck' - meaning participation in the sex act - will earn your film an R rating, no questions asked."

Breaking into the TV business may not be impossible but it’s hard. Real hard. It’s made even harder by the seemingly divergent advice given to the eager writers who showed up for Friday morning's AFF panel on TV Development to hear advice from two men who’ve found work in the biz.

On your work: Have fresh ideas, be unique, but make sure your characters are relatable.

On spec scripts: Sure, everyone wants to spec The Office because it’s popular. But beware — your script has to be better than anything the team of existing 10 to 12 writers can come with. Go with something that’s on the air, but maybe not flying so high on the radar (New Adventures of Old Christine, According to Jim, My Boys come to mind.) Write a stand-alone episode. Don’t take huge leaps with characters but still be unique. In short, spec a series you love. You’re likely to do your best work based on an understanding of the show, the characters, and it’s rules. As Stegemann said, writers are often good at mimicking the voices of the characters in their spec scripts, but not realizing their motives. When that happens, it shows.

Somewhere near 4am, I turned into an awful blowhard, didn't I? Congratulations, Josh:  You bring out the self-righteous, sanctimonious prig in me. (I bet you get that from all the girls.) It has, as ever, been an honor and a pleasure sparring with you. Win or lose – and let's not call this a landslide just yet; I'm about to mobilize the phone banks, maybe buy some airtime...plus there's that whole airport bathroom stall scandal I've been keeping in my back pocket – I look forward to shaking hands with you across the aisle at next week's Happy Hour. And then of course there's next weekend, when I'll be locking you in a room with me to watch 11 Hitchcock films in a row for our upcoming Halloween feature. Just you wait: Hitchcock will heal all our wounds.

That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. When somebody accuses me of being motivated by middle-class guilt first thing in the morning, that’s when I take my computer and go home. So I’m going to take my computer and go home. Metaphorically. I actually haven’t left my home in days. So, thanks to everyone who’s been reading. For those who've been voting, please continue to do. And for those who haven’t yet, please do. The polls will stay open until next Thursday, Oct. 23, at which time we invite you all to join us at SpiderHouse for the Austin Chronicle Film Fight happy hour, which begins at 7:30. We’ll have cheap drinks and cheaper conversation and the screening of a short film selected by whichever one of us has been declared the victor. And provided no one bothers to look into who exactly all those “voters” are, or why exactly the Austin Chronicle web server has been hacked into no fewer than four times over the past week, it looks like that victor may just be me. If elected, I promise to run a benevolent administration. And now, a little night music to wash away all the rancor:

If you saw the premiere of W as the Austin Film Festival got under way on Thursday--or even if you've just seen the film's trailer on television--you probably remember Jonna Juul-Hansen, who portrays Jan O'Neil, a real-life friend of Laura Bush who introduced Laura to George W. Bush back in the day. Juul-Hansen is--tell me if I'm wrong on this!--the only Austin actress with a speaking part in the film, which, naturally in this time of filming incentives, shot primarily in Louisiana. Her husband Lars offers the story of how she got the part: "Jonna drove from Austin to Shreveport in April for the audition and drove back two days later for the call back (with Oliver Stone). The casting director later told her that as soon as she had left the audition/interview Oliver Stone turned to the casting director and said 'I don't want to see anyone else for Jan O'Neil.' Of course it took almost 30 days after that call back to find out that she has booked the part. During that time she was on pins and needles. "Jonna started acting 20 years ago in San Francisco and moved to LA later. About 7 years ago we moved to Austin to raise our kids and she just got back into acting 2 years ago in Ben Taylor's Workshop. Her agent is Collier Talent and she's also going to be seen in Geoff Marsden's Mars playing the first lady opposite Kinky Friedman."

As if we needed any more evidence that the gloves were off but good, you attack my beloved This American Life? Christ, man, have you no shame? I’m not going to linger too long on this, for one, because this isn’t RADIO Fight (but wouldn’t Terry Gross versus Click and Clack make a delicious kind of death match?), but also because I’m not sure you’ve ever actually listened to the program, otherwise you wouldn’t have just knee-jerkedly confused its listenership – which I reckon probably is mostly middle-class and white – with its content, which is far-ranging and far more substantial than the musings of the occasional self-deprecating contributor. (And what’s so wrong with self-deprecation? David Rakoff and Jonathan Goldstein do a crackerjack job of it.) Quiet desperation isn’t limited to “the charmingly insecure chattering classes” – and I think This American Life does a fine job of limning desperation of all class, color, and creed – but neither should the desperation of those so-called chatterers be shunted aside as meaningless. Jaysus, we’re all in the gutter – if that isn’t cause for unification in commiseration, I don’t know what is. And yet, to go back (and read back to know exactly what Josh is talking about): “They're tiny little demons, but they'll eventually eat you alive with imperceptible bites.” I think that’s beautifully put, Josh, and it made me stop in my tracks. Which, embarrassingly, doesn’t happen all that often – the rising to the surface of a stirring idea, an elegantly worded thought, one that puts a temporary brake-stop to the constant consumption – thanks, Internet! – of words, facts, figures, images, polemics, parodies, and icanhascheezburger forwards. Let’s go back to movies, okay? I’m starting to worry we’re leaving bruises here.