Is it just us, or is the Austin Film Festival doing some kind of an elaborate dance of the seven veils? It seems every week there's some new tantalizing goody revealed about the upcoming fest. This week's tasty bit: AFF announced today ten titles from this year's lineup, including three intriguing-sounding documentaries about black comedy (Robert Townsend's Why We Laugh), screenwriting (Peter Hanson's Tales From the Script), and the 2008 national party conventions (Barry Levinson's Poliwood). But what we're most excited about is  Austinites' first chance – finally! – to see local filmmaker Bob Byington's super-buzzy Harmony and Me.

AFF won't announce the full festival lineup until mid-September – what a tease – but in the meantime, you can read the descriptions of all ten titles after the jump.

The Austin Film Festival announced this week the last of its three heavy-hitter awardees this year: Steven Zaillian, who will receive the Distinguished Screenwriter Award at this year's festival and conference (Oct. 22-29). Zaillian has worked with Scorsese, Spielberg, and Ridley Scott, to name a few, and has also had a sideline gig in directing (we think his debut, Searching for Bobby Fischer, is perfectly wonderful). He's been nominated for the Oscar three times and won for his script for Schindler's List. The festival doesn't happen till October, but AFF has a vigorous, all-year round presence in town. Case in point: their ongoing Conversations in Film program, sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Next month, writer/director and Longview native John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) takes the stage to talk shop and then screen A Perfect World, the 1993 Clint Eastwood/Kevin Costner film he wrote (only his second produced credit). We're betting Hancock have something to say about his new movie, too – that's The Blind Side (starring Sandra Bullock and Kathy Bates), and it opens in theatres Nov. 20. Hancock is also writing the script for The Goree Girls, based on the true story of a Texas prisoners forming an country & western group in the Forties (Jennifer Aniston is attached to star). Go here for all things AFF (including ticket info for the Hancock talk).

In case you haven't noticed yet, as you religiously follow my weekly blog posts about free browser games, I enjoy games as interactive art. Last week's meta-fest was certainly proof of that. This week comes a game that feels more like a short film that you get to explore.

That game is Fathom, designed by Adam Saltsman of Adam Atomic. His simple website has a bevy of complimentary games from the scatological to the frustratingly addictive. You might also want to check out some of his iPhone games and his downloadable Wii game Cave Story, if you're more into paying for your playing.

Anyway, Fathom starts off like a very easy version of Mega Man until you reach the mechanical villain at the end of the hallway. Shoot all you like, as far as I can tell there's no defeating it. Before you know it you're plunged into a dark and peaceful underwater system of tunnels with only the fish as your friends. The deeper you go, the darker it gets (that's what the flashlight is for). You're only choice is to explore. Hint: pay attention to anything out of the ordinary as it will likely come into play.

The ending is strangely eerie despite the simple graphics and short play time.

Click here to play.

Enjoy.

The media has had a field day trying to suss out how much of Nick Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi's "hybrid documentary" Paper Heart is truth and and how much is fiction – specifically, whether the film's depiction of a blossoming romance between stars Yi and Michael Cera (Superbad) is rooted in reality or not. Honestly, we find that question far less engaging than the ones Yi poses in "man on the street" interviews all across America, in her often comical quest to figure out love – up to and including if it exists at all. In the documentary-like portions of the film, Yi's like a pint-sized Michael Moore: less bullish, more giggly, but just as game. Full-contact, first-person filmmaking isn't the only tradition Paper Heart, which opens in Austin on Friday, is working in; click on the photo gallery for more of Paper Heart's cinematic simpaticos.

"This is definitely a movie for cinema-lovers and Nazi-haters alike," said Eli Roth, by way of introducing Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which had its Austin debut as part of Saturday night's Cinemapocalypse event at the Alamo Ritz. We bailed at eight in the morning, after surprise guest Robert Forster (Alligator, Jackie Brown) turned up around four to screen William Lustig's 1983 Death Wish-y Vigilante, skipping out on the final two films in what turned out to be a six-film, dusk-til-dawn affair. Having survived our share of Butt-Numb-a-Thons, we're no stranger to long-haul movie marathons, but it's still a surreal feeling to walk out of the perpetually twilit Alamo only to be confronted by a.) a dead-empty, daylight-blasted Sixth Street straight out of The Omega Man, and, b.) zero crack-zombies and/or technicolor-yawning shot bar fratboy hoards. [Spoiler alert!] The Alamo's Minister of Propaganda, Tim League, in a stroke of ballyhoo genius not seen since Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (thankfully), unfurled a quartet of streaming Nazi party banners at precisely the moment in Inglourious Basterds when the film's firestorm of Jewish and allied vengeance brings the Third Reich to a flaming conclusion. Whoa. Nazi-conflagratin' fun, indeed.

You may have heard that Kyle Henry, local big-shot filmmaker and editor, is in the middle of his next big production, a series of shorts examining the emotional components of sex that Western society considers transgressive. Called FOURPLAY the project has already been garnering some buzz from the likes of independent film blogs like IndieWire and from the Austin Chronicle (we've even sent staff members to extra for the project). You can find out more, including an insight into Henry's creative processes and his collaboration with partner Carlos Trevino on the FOURPLAY blog. Since we can't show you any of the FOURPLAY footage, we might as well try to get behind the cerebellum that gave us Room. To do so we asked Kyle Henry to send us his Top Ten films so that we could, you know, get in the mood. Here's what he sent. 1) Barry Lyndon (Dir. Kubrick) - His least understood, most critical, most fabulous, most heartbreaking work. I'd also include Eyes Wide Shut too. Two great tragi-comedies about capitalism's ruinous effects on human being's souls. Although I find EWS' ending to be quite hopeful! 2) Sunday Bloody Sunday (Dir. John Schlesinger) - Everyone sees Midnight Cowboy, no one sees this film, which for me is his most mature, heartbreaking, subtle, non-judgmental work. For tour-de-force Hollywood smack-down, though, you should also check out his surreal adaptation of Day of The Locusts click the jump for the rest of Henry's list.

If last week's festival of inappropriateness didn't get your brain boiling then how about something a bit more meta? Oh yeah, "meta," the prefix that makes anything you're talking about an undergrad thesis. So, really, I'm taking the "waste of time" descriptor to a whole new level. You'll believe me when you play these games.

First off is another game from Anthony Lavelle. (You may remember another game of his called Shift [Here's my blog post if you don't remember (Aren't brackets in quotes so meta [So John Barth (Sorry, but everyone has a thesis.).]?).].) It's called Upgrade Complete and the objective is to earn enough points/money to upgrade and unlock everything from extra weapons to a cooler looking copyright logo (see picture at right). The game itself is dull, but the reward of spending your time upgrading every possible item and unlocking every achievement (spoiler alert) is a super-awesome screen that dubs you the best winner the game creator has ever seen and wishes you "Congratulations forever!" I think there's some commentary about gaming becoming a vehicle for bragging rights rather than being fun. Meta things usually make some sort of statement, right?

Similarly, there's John Cooney's Achievement Unlocked that rewards players for doing everything from simply moving to dying. Cooney's new game, This is the Only Level, is as meta as it sounds but it's actually relatively fun. You play an elephant with some serious ups who navigates the same level over and over again. Thankfully, each time there's a slight twist. Beware the insufferable music.

The mother of all meta games is the helpfully titled You Have to Burn the Rope. I'm not going to spoil the surprise of that one, but luckily the game should take you mere seconds to complete. Make sure you have your headphones on so you can listen to the song from Reachground during the credits that retells the epic story of your conquest. You can hear more Reachground songs, but nothing lives up to the meta song about a meta game.

It's complicated.

Enjoy.

Fantastic Fest has announced its second round of films, and boy, are zombies back in style. Not that they ever went out of style: just twenty minutes ago we were walking our fourpaws down Sixth Street and relishing the balmy aftergoo of our recent thundershowers when -- we kid you not -- a real, live (or not) zombie shambled past us. Seriously. We were standing in front of The Jackalope, minding our own business and admiring the apocalyptic weather when a threadbare cardigan-sporting returner with a foot-long strand of saliva swinging from his chin and a freakishly bloody abrasion on his noggin shuffled past, heading east, presumably, back to his burrow at the Texas State Cemetery. Who says Sixth Street is dangerous? We were completely unarmed and Mr. Creepy Deadfolk didn't even give us a snarl. (Frankly, we're a tad disappointed by that. And by god, we'll never leave the house without our digital camera/iPhone again.) But we digress. The real big news is that Fantastic Fest has, for the second time now (or third, if you count pre-Fantastic Fest Alamo appearances), lassoed zombie-flick godhead and only-reason-to-visit-Pittsburgh-ever director George A. Romero, who will be premiering his latest chompsocky nightmare, Survival of the Dead, along with, most likely, lots of scotch. (That would be a reference to his infamous "What's your favorite color?" answer from his Fantastic Fest Q&A session two years ago, in case you missed it.)

As part of its new-ish Reverse Shot Talkie series, Indiewire has posted a video of journalist Eric Hynes interviewing filmmaker Andrew Bujalski as the pair rummage through the Family Jewels, a Manhattan vintage store. It's a reference to the setting of Bujalski's latest film, Beeswax, which was shot in Austin and centers on a turf war over a co-owned secondhand store (North Loop's now-shuttered Storyville). In the video, Bujalski wanders through the aisles, talking about his three feature films and how he finally taught himself how to tie a necktie – off the Internet – in anticipation of his recent wedding to local author Karen Olsson. Beeswax opened in Manhattan on Friday. NY Times' lead critic (and new balcony warmer) A.O. Scott says this: "Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie." Cinema Guild is distributing Beeswax, which had its American premiere at SXSW 09. No word yet on when it'll make its way to Austin theatres.