The Animation Show
Don Hertzfeldt is not a banana. Nor is he the queen of France. Nonetheless, the 30-year-old animator and proprietor of Bitter Films Inc. is unlikely bitter about his status as the Groucho Sartre of American animation.
He’s already been nominated for one Academy Award (Best Short Film, Animated, for 2000’s “Rejected”) and “Everything Is Going to Be Okay,” his new 17-minute tour de farce that incorporates his trademark gallows humor, wavering stick-figure characters, and jaundiced appreciation of (and horror toward) the soul-crushing mill wheel of modern life, is short-listed for this year’s Oscar.
Which, if all goes according to plan, he should be clutching in his sweaty palms when he and fellow animator Mike Judge shanghai the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, March 4, 5:30 and 8pm, to present the third installment of the Animation Show, which brings together the best and brightest – as opposed to Spike & Mike’s breast and blightest, a distinction of no little importance – of animation from around our bizarrely cartoonish (as in Kafka doing Nancy & Sluggo, we mean) globe. Tickets are $12; more at www.animationshow.com.
Alamo Academy Awards Parties
Before the yuks, however, there’s a certain Lost Angeles ritual to succumb to, namely that selfsame statuette free-for-all. And nothing says, “Your script is total ass, dude,” better than staying in and sitting on the couch in your Pringles-and-mai-tai-slurried skivvies, hurling invective at the tube and whinnying about how JB and KG totally got shafted worse than Richard Roundtree in that one MacGyver episode.
So, go, Lumpy Jonas, to where the red carpet awaits your tread, the couture is black leather and/or Adidas track suits (dookie ropes and Kangols optional), the preshow always includes making fun of Jack Valenti and all presenters past, and the alcohol flows like the bitter tears of Petra von Kant. Go to the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, Alamo South Lamar, or Alamo Village, and root for Guillermo. (God knows we will.)
As an added bonus to the cinefoodies, the South Lamar location will be cooking up a Red Carpet Feast with “food and wine pairings.” Advance reservations for that are highly recommended; see www.originalalamo.com.
Third Coast Presents ‘Mardi Gras: Made in China’
Sated? Good. Now’s your chance to take the inspiring film work of Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro and run with it, thanks to Third Coast Activist Research Center’s upcoming screening of director David Redmon‘s optimistically grim globalization doc, Mardi Gras: Made in China, which explores the freighted sociopolitical connections between the (nearly all female) Chinese factory workers who manufacture those same strings of beads that have the power to evaporate a co-ed’s tank top at 20 paces but can’t seem to pay the bare essentials in the Big Red. Redmon and producer Ashley Sabin will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 7pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, $7 general/$5.50 student. Of interest: The pair’s Kamp Katrina will play SXSW Film 07.
This article appears in February 23 • 2007.