It's good to know that less than 24 hours after all hell broke loose, weather-wise, Austin's weirdness remains at an all time high, cinematically, at least. Seriously: Last night we watched a clearly messed-with and un-nice Mother Nature uproot a three-story oak not 15 feet from our living room window while hail the size and density of Idaho very nearly punched holes clean through our ceiling. And tonight? Tonight we get to watch a hickoid necrophile with a serious case of the Oedipals deconstruct femininity and the mother-son relationship in an entirely non-theoretical fashion. Not literally, of course, although we're pretty sure that could be arranged via a quick trip to either Elysium or Bastrop. Nah, we're talking about the Alamo Ritz's Terror Thursday screening of Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby's 1974 Ed Gein-inspired psychobilly freakout Deranged. Ormsby owns a special place in our heart. He scripted Bob "A Christmas Story" Clark's 1972 zombies-versus-pretentious-hippies-in-vertically-striped-flares epic, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, which was the first drive-in movie we ever saw in an actual drive-in, back when speaker posts (and flares) were all the rage. We were all of ten years old when some seriously misguided and/or sadistic relatives took us the re-release and thereby insured our future in horror film geekery. Needless to say, we've dug hell out of zombies and flares ever since (funny how they both keep coming back, isn't it?), although at the time we're pretty sure we ended up cowering in the back seat, shrieking like a ten year old. Go figure.

Henri Mazza was working late at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar when all meteorological hell broke last night. Naturally curious, Henri and his production assistant, Caitlin Stevens, along with about 20 moviegoers straggling out of the late show of Iron Man, decided to check out the storm from the, er, safety of the glass-lined lobby. We'll let Henri tell the rest: "We don’t know if it was hail hitting the windows, wind, air pressure, or what, but three big panels exploded at the same time. Fortunately we had smarter staff than I in there telling people to get away from the windows, and the small crowd of Iron Man audience members was spread around, moving away from the glass and back towards the main hallway. I was still in the lobby by Mondo Tees when it shattered, though, and apparently it’s just dumb luck that no one was hurt – this morning there was glass embedded in the mural on the wall opposite, and a shard of the window took out one of our ordering computers at the lobby bar." Dumb luck, 1; Hailstorm, 0 Well, maybe more of a draw.

Agnes Varnum was kind enough to alert us to two wildly different, but distinctly cool-sounding screenings that the Austin Film Society's putting on in the very new future. First up to bat is the Paramount premiere of Rick Linklater's Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, his feature documentary about beloved UT men's baseball coach Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in NCAA history. The show's on June 3, and proceeds will benefit in part the Boys and Girls Club. The second is a Rolling Roadshow sneak of the Duplass Brothers' Baghead out at Hamilton Pool – certain to up the creep-out factor to the comedy/horror hybrid. The Duplasses will be on hand for the event, where there'll be campfire snacks available for purchase. Want s'more? (Sorry, we couldn't resist.) Advance tickets for the June 12 show are available here, along with details about the limited number of 4-course dinner VIP tickets available. Incidentally, Baghead will open in Austin theatres on June 13, in advance of New York and L.A. Because that's the kind of trendsetting town we call home …

My apologies to the fine folks at 2K Sports in taking so long to post my review of their baseball sim MLB 2K8, but honestly it has taken me this long to try and figure out their new pitching mechanism. This glitch-ridden and almost unusable new mechanic makes playing this game as frustrating as your worst workday of the year. After a month or so of trying to get this new technique down and throwing countless "meatballs" I simply gave up and reverted to last year's pitching scheme. The new system is supposed to mimic how the actual pitch is thrown but has a serious learning curve and flat out doesn't work most of the time. Unless I am a complete idiot (which is debatable), I would have to imagine that most other gamers have had the same experience with this piece of crap "improvement." The new fielding mechanism isn't much better and the new batting system only works on the power swing and doesn't even respond to the contact swing. Lame!

I wandered into the Movie Store on Saturday night with an itchy, already defeated feeling. I didn't know what I wanted, and walking into a video store without knowing what you want is like the inverse of going to the grocery store hungry. Instead of everything looking good, nothing looks good. Unless, of course, you wander in to find the Movie Store is unloading its entire VHS inventory, for super-cheap, and instead of having to make one decision, you can make ten instead.** At $3 per tape, I felt a little bit kid-in-a-candy-store... and at five tapes for $10, I figured it'd be like throwing money away to stop at four... and with those kind of savings, why not really make a go of it? (I might gently lean toward compulsiveness. I'm also seriously regretting not adding The Pirate Movie to the pile.)

The tables are turning on local documentarian (and SXSW 08 alum) David Modigliani, who'll be in Crawford this weekend scouting locations for his upcoming Rolling Roadshow screening of Crawford, his intimate portrait of a town turned upside down by Dubya. So it's not entirely coincidental that Modigliani will be there this weekend – in case you hadn't heard, a certain First Daughter is getting hitched. Naturally, the national media's setting up camp in Crawford – and a few of 'em are turning the camera on Modigliani ("a taste of my own medicine," he told me). MSNBC will air a live interview with him at 9:40am on Saturday; while Inside Edition will run a segment on the film on Monday. The New York Times also plans to run a story in Monday's edition.

The Los Angeles Film Festival has been awfully good to Austinites in recent years – Steve Collins' Gretchen won Best Dramatic Feature in 2006, Chris Eska's August Evening in 2007 – and now in 2008, we've got two shots at taking home the top prize. The just-released lineup features two homegrown films (happily, not in competition with each other): PJ Raval's Trinidad (codirected with Jay Hodges and exec-produced by Matt Dentler), examines Trinidad, Colorado, "the sex change capital of America," and will premiere in the Documentary Competition, while "fractured romance" I'll Come Running (from Chron contributing writer and friend Spencer Parsons) will premiere in the Narrative Competition.

Austin-based animator Brad Neely has had Warner Bros. on his back (for screening Harry Potter with his own fast-and-loose-with-the-facts narration) and the viral masses at his feet (for his giddily nonsensical Founding Father rap, "Cox & Combes' Washington": "he had a pocketful of horses/ fucked the shit out of bears"). So what's he gonna do next? Own the entire month of May, that's what. Every Monday in May, Superdeluxe.com will premiere a new installment of Neely's new opus China, IL, and all four episodes put together will premiere TV-side on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block on Sunday, May 25 at 10:45pm. The first episode, titled "Romeo + Romeo," started streaming yesterday. It's three minutes of high-speed, ejaculate-obsessed nutterness that turns weirdly tender when man/child Baby Cakes makes up a song about a dead women he's besotted with: "Boom boom yeah / got so much in common / except that I'm a person still." He says boom boom yeah, I say boom boom yeah.

John Pierson was clearly delighted. It took three years but now the guest he had most wanted to book was finally in the house. Since beginning his Master Class at UT three years ago, Pierson has tried to get South Park's co-creator Matt Stone to visit with his Austin students. But the timing has never been right due to the congruence of UT's spring semester and Comedy Central's spring season. The stars aligned, however, in 2008 and Stone was able to hop on a flight right after completing work on the 12th season of South Park and make an appearance in Pierson's final class of the semester. Stone and his creative partner in South Park, Trey Parker, never work more than a week ahead on each episode of the show. This is part of what makes it impossible for the two to get away from L.A. while the season is in progress. Stone confesses they "get bored" pretty quickly, and that's part of why they like having only a week to produce a show. Mostly, though, it's "procrastination" that takes them down to the wire.