SXSW isn't a marathon, my colleague Kate X Messer recently joked: It's a death march. As the official print sponsor of the festival, the Chronicle gets hit by the South by tsunami around early February, and we don't come up for air until the end of March. But just when we think we're about to collapse from the strain and the sensory overload, along comes that blessed pick-me-up, the Austin Chronicle's SXSW Film Bash. Last night's party at La Zona Rosa, which featured Austin band the Black and White Years, was a blast. Don't believe us? Click on the photo for our gallery of smiling, happy, sloshy faces.

"I always wanted to make a movie about bugs," producer/director Jessica Oreck explained after the first SXSW Film Festival screening of her debut documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on Sunday. Growing up in Louisiana and Colorado ("There's less bugs in Colorado," she lamented), "My parents say that before I could walk, I was always catching cockroaches." These days, her collection includes spiders, millipedes, praying mantises, stick insects, hissing cockroaches and even a rhinoceros beetle. Since Japanese culture shares her obsession with everything with six, eight, or 750 legs, this film was "this perfect project," especially since it allowed her to meet noted author, philosopher, and fellow entomologist Dr. Takeshi Yoro. The only downside was that Japan has so many gorgeous insects. She admitted to wondering, "Everything, I'd say, can I smuggle this back?" Fortunately, she added, cameraman Sean Williams talked her round. So where did the title come from? Williams gave the credit to a poet friend of theirs. When they told him about their film about bugs in Japan, "he presumed it was a monster movie." Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo screens again Tuesday, March 17, 12pm and Saturday, March 21, 3pm, at the Alamo Ritz.

Nate Silver might be the ideal dinner guest: A political expert with an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball careers. Silver (read Wells Dunbar's interview with him here) delivered the SXSW Interactive keynote address on Sunday. He's revered amongst election wonks because of his number-crunching website fivethirtyeight.com. For people scared off by concepts like "regression analysis", "inferential process" and "rolling trendlines," he's the guy that predicted last November's election in March. For sports fans, he's the guy that created the PECOTA predictive algorithm (the bane of fantasy baseball leagues everywhere.) However, conference attendees now probably know him as the guy that admitted he wished he'd studied more programming, so he he could do more site maintenance himself. Politics and baseball, as he pointed out, both have long seasons. Baseball fans, however, don't tend to write a player off because of one foul ball. Policy wonks, he said, tend to thank him when he reminds them that "one poll coming out in June or July means almost nothing."

For starters, let's just say it's much, much worse than we previously assumed. All of it: writing, publishing, journalism, the relationship of a writer of words to a world where words are increasingly devalued or re-valued in new and arcane ways that nobody quite understands yet. Hard times for the literati: incoming. Those of us looking for some comfort from Austinite-by-way-of-Italy and Wired magazine's "Visionary-in-residence", former thrower of the best SXSW interactive parties ever, and the man behind Mirrorshades, author-futurist Bruce Sterling, didn't find much to smile (or even scowl) about at his annual SXSWi pow-wow. For one thing, Sterling looked physically older, tired, and sounded, despite some audience-tweaking snarkasm, downright melancholic. This was not the relatively optimistic Hacker Crackdow cyberpunk Sterling, and listening to what he came to say was a sobering and borderline unnerving experience. (Although, it must be noted, Sterling continues to remind us how important it is to be optimistic and proactive, especially in times of severe economic crises.) According to Sterling, it's not a good time to be a writer or even tangentially aligned to the literary arts. The SRO audience -- Web 2.0 Twitterers and pomo journos alike -- exited Conference Hall A wearing the glazed expressions of people who were just informed they have boarded the wrong train and are not, in fact, heading off to some sort of digital Walden Pond but are instead scheduled to disembark at the literary equivalent of Treblinka. So not good. With that in mind, we've culled the least disturbing topics from Sterling's talk and broken them down into what will be three different raw, mostly unexpurgated-Sterling blog posts, of which this is the first. Brace yourself.

Robert Rodriguez will shoot the futuristic thriller Nerveracker this June in Austin, he confirmed during a talk atg the South By Southwest Film Festival on Monday. The title was reviously reported as a plural Nerverrackers. The story is set in 2085 and revolves around Joe Tezca, part of an elite group sent to stop a crime wave in a usually utopian world. “I sold the title 10 years ago to the Weinsteins,” Rodriguez said. “Ten years later I finally have a script.”

There's not much that'll get my tired carcass out to midnight screenings anymore, however last night's SXSW screening of Sam Raimi's work-in-progress print of his new horror film Drag Me to Hell is definitely one of those things. Fans of Darkman and his Evil Dead films have been seriously geeking out over the great director's return (after a near-20 year absence) to the horror genre that kicked his career into gear. Not that movies such as the Spider-Man trilogy and A Simple Plan are chopped liver, nor are most of his other producing and writing credits – but horror fans have longed for the kind of Raimi film that might slice body parts into literal chopped livers, and then maybe dice ’em into mincemeat. The wait is almost over. Raimi definitely delivers the goods with Drag Me to Hell, which is currently scheduled to be released in late May. The story is

Austin filmmaker Michael Orion Scott already premiered Over the Hills and Far Away, his moving documentary about autism and its impact on a local family, at the Sundance Film Festival in January, which is when we profiled him in our pages. Here's what Marc Savlov had to say about the film: "Over the Hills and Far Away is a documentary that opens a door to new perceptions of what it means to be autistic, what it means to be the parents of an autistic child, and what Western medical practice too often fails to include in its prescription for wellness of all kinds: the power of the spirit." Go here to read the Chron's interview with Scott. Over the Hills and Far Away screens at SXSW Film tomorrow (March 17), 11am, at the Paramount; Thursday, March 19, 1:30pm, at the Alamo South Lamar; and Friday, March 20, 7pm, at the Austin Convention Center.

When the lights came up on this program – introduced as unusually heavy on the comedy – an audience member asked if she’d misheard the intro. Let’s just say the humor found in the (intentionally) humorous shorts was not of the ha-ha variety, more like grins generated by the dark mundanity of dysfunctionality. As in an unfulfilled woman’s ill-fated attempt to right herself by going into therapy with a therapist crazier than she is ("Countertransference"), or an unmarried twentysomething’s attempt to please his aging and out-of-it mom by faking a date ("Winter Lilacs"), or director Amylee Belotti’s hilarious, quick and dirty road map to her malfunctioning nuclear family ("Hi Mom"). Then there was "Cochran"'s droll portrait of a moribund working stiff whose life takes a grotesque turn after a serious injury and "That's My Majesty," a silent film about a princess who comes to the Big Apple to crown her people’s new queen. Getting the picture?

Monday, March 16, 1:30pm, Alamo South Lamar; Wednesday, March 18, 11am, Alamo South Lamar

We first meet Robert King in 1993, he's a precocious 23-year-old, for whom the biggest problem in war-torn Sarajevo is his inability to sell his news photos. From this auspicious start, King develops into one of the world's premiere war photogs; his graphic work (and it is graphic) in warzones like Albania, Rwanda, and Kosovo graces international newspapers and magazines. But while his lens brings clarity to chaos, the conflict within King still writhes. Assembled from nerve-rattling documentary footage spanning back 15 years, director Richard Parry (who shot much of the Sarajevo footage) reveals a moving, haunting, and blackly comic window into the dark heart of human conflict, both internal and external. Or "post traumatic stress syndrome on acid," as King calls it. "The wars didn't fuck me up – I was fucked up before I even went," he says. "That's why I was so good at it."

Monday, March 16, 12pm, Alamo Ritz; Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm, ACC