Short Cuts

You Are Not Stamos Dept.: How is this year's South by Southwest Film Festival and Conference shaping up compared to previous years? "It's supercalifragilistic," said SXSW's Matt Dentler from outside last Sunday evening's overflowing non-SXSW midnight screening of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy. "Austin, Texas, has not built enough theatre seats for SXSW 2004 – passes have been selling like crazy, and we've been having to turn away people left and right. Besides sharing an elevator with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos the other day, just seeing how many people have been having a really great time this year has definitely been something of a highlight for me." So many people were having such a good time through the wee hours of Monday morning (Hellboy, by the way, didn't let out until roundabout 3:15am thanks to an engaging love fest from the rapt audience that kept director del Toro, star Ron Perlman, and creator Mike Mignola fielding questions for an additional half-hour) that, again according to Dentler, "several well-known panelists missed their 11am panels thanks to the post-Hellboy revelry." Suggestions for future Fests might include moving the new Hilton an extra 10 feet to the south to allow the prodigiously hungover a precious extra two or three seconds of bleary-eyed downtime or, conversely, staging panels from inside the panelists' own rooms. "Intense" has been the adjective best describing this year's Fest, with "fun overload" running a fast second and – overheard outside Jonathan Demme's conversation with Louis Black last weekend – "totally worth it despite the fact that [a theatre venue that shall remain nameless] fucking ran out of toilet paper." If you haven't been yet, silly you, you've already missed your chance to marvel at many of the roving packs of celebs and tottering filmmakers enjoying their first flush of free-drink-ticket victory, but you still have several days' worth of screenings left to hit, including another one of the horrifically disturbing J-horror smash The Grudge, this Thursday, March 18, at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (409 Colorado), as well as repeat showings of the popular anti-McDonald's beltbuster Super Size Me (Friday, March 19, 9:45pm, at the Paramount) and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Saturday, March 20, 3:45pm, at the Paramount). Passes are still on sale at Waterloo Video exclusively ($50 – cheap!). Now stop reading, and go watch a movie.