Driving an iconic London black cab literally from sea to shining sea, Fry stops to chat with personages famous (Morgan Freeman, Ted Turner) and mostly not, all while unearthing some truly fascinating American stories. He makes all the requisite stops at famous landmarks like Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon, but also mixes in less familiar sights like a body farm in Tennessee, hunting sasquatches in Oregon, a Nevada whorehouse, the most notorious prison in Louisiana and many others.

Even with the gorgeously shot scenery and the educational fun, the best part of the series is easily Fry himself. For those unfamiliar with him, a few minutes into the show will be more than enough to demonstrate why his combination of intelligence, politeness and warmth has made the the man so beloved on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see an example of his bewilderment, frustration and admiration for America in this clip, taken from an Auburn-Alabama football game:

And here’s a trailer for the series:

1) “Safety Not Guaranteed”: Have you ever had one of those experiences where you see a movie and then when it’s over, you kind of start sobbing and aren’t really sure why? Please tell me I’m not the only one. It’s really only happened to me a couple times before (during “WALL-E” and “V for Vendetta,” and I’m not sure what that says about me). But it happened again at the end of “Safety Not Guaranteed,” a hybrid comedy-drama-romance-fantasy flick that I fell head over heels for, and it was a particular shame given that they were filming my screening to show audience response for an upcoming trailer. So if you see a sobbing dork on the left side of the screen, that would be me. This movie, which stars Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson and Mark Duplass (who, along with his brother Jay, had co-directed and co-written the very funny SXSW entry “The Do-Deca Pentathlon”), sprung to life from a real classified ad that read “WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. Safety not guaranteed.” I think what was so overwhelmingly wonderful about the movie was how it blended whimsy and sex jokes with dark emotions and a strong, irrepressible streak of hope. Although I couldn’t find a trailer for the movie online, here’s a brief interview with director Colin Trevorrow from Sundance, where the flick won a screenwriting award earlier this year. FilmDistrict snapped up distribution, so I hope it will be getting a release date soon.

2) Free Shows in Cool Places: I’ve never had a SXSW wristband or badge, but I love getting to see some free music. I think Auditorium Shores in March is a lovely place to spend an evening, but I haven’t found the best live music to be there. Instead I’ve found music I’ve loved at much smaller places. Like the Whole Foods rooftop. Can we just have ACL there next year? It’s so pretty! And you can buy beer and wine downstairs and bring it upstairs, which is amazing. Also amazing was the live show put on by one of my favorite bands of the past couple years, the Las Vegas-based Imagine Dragons. After accidentally stumbling (literally) across one of their live shows in Vegas back in January 2010, I’ve been avidly following their career and am thrilled they’ve been signed to Interscope. I hope to hear more big things from them in the future. Here they are doing an acoustic version of “It’s Time.”

South Congress is a good place to be during SXSW – plenty of food options, opportunities to create your own shopping montages and the free shows over at South by San Jose. And if the crowd at the stage behind Jo’s gets to be too much, you can pop next door to the Hotel San Jose, where things are always chill. Over at SXSJ, I caught one act I can’t wait to hear more of, LP, and her huge gorgeous voice. Check out “Into the Wild,” and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be sad you never learned to whistle.

3) Randomness: When you’re winging it, you start to appreciate the utter randomness of SXSW. Whether it’s celeb-spotting, celeb-spotting by proxy (“My friend just saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt on East Sixth!”), a new favorite food trailer (sweet potato fries with truffle mayo at The Peached Tortilla) or a last-minute invite to a party, SXSW never quite ends up where you think it will. For me, it ended up front row at Timbaland at the Perez Hilton party. Sup.

So thanks, SXSW! I’ll try to remember to hydrate next year if you promise to keep being awesome.

Their current slate of workshops offers something for all ages. Check it out:

Creative Writing Summer Camp
Three-week summer workshops are led by Austin’s best writers: award-winning poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists. Students write poetry and prose and learn to revise and edit their work for publication. The camp culminates in the publication of beautiful, library-quality anthologies and two public readings (one of these is followed by a book signing for student authors). Each student receives a copy of the published anthology, which is also donated to the Austin Public Library system and sold at BookPeople. Various locations around Austin, with a new location at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Westlake. Read the Austin American-Statesman’s inside look at Badgerdog’s Creative Writing Summer Camp.

Spring Break Workshops
Over one, two, or three days (March 13-15), writers will delve into what makes fiction tick and wade through the unstill waters of poetry to create their own new work. These workshops, led by professional, award-winning writers, will include multi-genre readings. Writers are grouped according to age. Location: Griffin School (5001 Evans Ave, Austin 78751) Open to students in grades 3-12. All writers will have the opportunity to publish their writing on our online journal, Unbound. And check out what the Austinist had to say about our spring break programs.

You can also check Badgerdog’s blog to get a behind-the-scenes look at their programs, including meeting their instructors.

If you decide to take a Badgerdog class, please let us know how it goes!

(photo: tonyhall/flickr)

The premise is simple enough. Two guys (Tom Hardy and Chris Pine), who are also best friends, inadvertently fall for the same girl (Reese Witherspoon). But because these best friends are also CIA agents, the stakes are raised to be both hilarious and, at times, life-threatening. Reese Witherspoon brings a sex appeal to her character of Lauren that we haven’t seen in her work since “Walk the Line.” Of course, she kind of has to as the romantic foil for both Tom Hardy’s Tuck and Chris Pine’s FDR, because the three of them together are probably the best looking trio of leads in a movie ever.

What works best in “This Means War” are the things that appeal to both sexes — the humor, the characters and their relationships to each other, particularly in the sweet bromance between Tuck and FDR. What doesn’t work, aside from a video store meet-cute scene that seems almost anachronistic, are the big action set pieces, which is pretty surprising considering that the movie is helmed by director McG. One-time music video auteur McG made his directorial debut with two silly “Charlie’s Angels” flicks that were more fun than they had any right to be. Despite having more plot holes than a pair of fishnets, “Charlie’s Angels” created big action set pieces that were exciting to watch, which is why the ho-hum spy action of “This Means War,” and in particular the opening sequence that felt like a deleted scene from “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” felt disappointing. By the time the spy action centers around FDR’s and Tuck’s attempts to sabotage each other’s chances with Lauren, the excitement definitely picks up, but I can’t help feeling like the intro and the rest of the spy storyline was a missed opportunity for greatness.

Overall, “This Means War” is pretty much the best Valentine Hollywood has given us yet — hot people falling in love, kicking ass and, the most romantic of all, making us laugh.

As a married lady of childbearing age, I’ve seen kids on the horizon for a while now. But after watching “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” I may be putting those plans on hold for a while longer. By turns fascinating, mysterious, thrilling and haunting, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” may just be the best form of cinematic birth control out there.

The movie, a festival favorite that opens today in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and the Regal Arbor, is based on the award-winning novel by Lionel Shriver, directed by Lynne Ramsay and stars Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and newcomer Ezra Miller. The story follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) throughout, vascilating between the present and flashbacks to different points in her marriage to Franklin (Reilly) and the rearing of their son, Kevin, who is played by Miller as a teenager and by several younger child actors early on. From the beginning, Eva senses that Kevin is different, and the mother-son bond never forms. Franklin thinks it is all in her head, but as the film unfolds, we see that Eva’s unease was definitely founded, and she finds herself facing situations we could never imagine while also trying to find answers within herself to questions of parental responsibility and love.

Ezra Miller, as well as the younger actors playing Kevin at various points in childhood, gets under your skin and makes you uncomfortable throughout, giving Kevin a chilling air of unpredictability and menace. But this movie absolutely belongs to Tilda Swinton, who gives the best performance by an actress I’ve seen all year, and I am utterly stunned that she did not receive an Oscar nomination. If I had an Oscar ballot, she would be taking home the prize. She has won many awards so far for her haunted, stricken portrayal of Eva, including being voted Best Actress by the Austin Film Critics Society.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” isn’t an easy film to watch, but because it forces you to face the unthinkable, it will stick with you long after its 119 minutes.

On Tuesday night, a packed house gathered at the Moody Theater for the best attended KLRU Spark at the Moody speaker series so far. This event was titled “Can Women Change Politics? The Life and Politics of Ann Richards” and as speakers featured actress Holland Taylor, who wrote and starred in a one-woman show depicting Governor Richards’ life; political writer Wayne Slater, who covered Governor Richards’ campaign, administration and subsequent years; and documentarian Paul Steckler, who moderated the event.

While I understand that each speaker event in the Spark series has a question for a title (the final installment on April 24 is “How Do You Get to Sesame Street? Education in America”), I think this wasn’t quite the right question, not to mention a question we’re a little disappointed is still being asked. Women have been proving for years that they can change politics, and women from as conservative a state as Texas no less, like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, former Texas comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, current comptroller Susan Combs, landmark Roe V. Wade attorney Sarah Weddington and, of course, the late great Barbara Jordan. And Ann Richards definitely proved it. So perhaps a better question for a title might have been “Wasn’t Ann Richards Awesome?” Because she totally was.

For someone who served only one term as governor, Ann Richards still looms larger than life nearly six years after her death and two decades after her tenure in the governor’s mansion. Compare that to Governor Rick Perry’s 12-year-long gubernatorial monopoly, and it’s pretty impressive that she cast a shadow that long with only a third of the time in office. While Richards wasn’t the first female governor of the Lone Star State (that glass ceiling was shattered by Ma Ferguson back in the 1920s), she was the first of the modern era and the last great Democrat to rouse such magnitudes of statewide support before our state turned unflinchingly red.

Over the course of 90 minutes, beginning with a talk among the speakers and ending with a Q&A, Taylor, Slater and Steckler created a vivid, loving portrait of Richards as both a woman and a leader.

Taylor had only met Richards once during her life, but she was so affected by her death that she wanted to share the former Texas governor with the rest of the country with her one-woman play. “I was heartbroken when she died,” she said. “I was sad for America.”

“She expressed democratic values by acting not for the most of us, but for the least of us,” Slater said, while recounting stories of time spent with her while covering her administration and campaign. One story he told involved the beginning of her campaign for governor, during which reporters asked her how she was going to get fundraising as a woman, and she replied, “We’ll have shoe sales.”

As Steckler boiled it down, “No matter what she did or didn’t do, she left a legacy by appointing 3,000 women, people of different races and people of different sexualities to posts around the state. She changed the face of who governed Texas. That’s the best legacy anyone could have.”

I think this is a pretty good legacy too:

In “I Love You Phillip Morris,” Jim Carrey (in easily his best performance since “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) plays Steven Russell, a cop who ultimately divorces his wife (Leslie Mann) and comes out of the closet. To fund his lavish lifestyle, he soon becomes a con artist, and when those exploits land him in a Texas prison, he falls deeply in love with his cellmate, the titular Phillip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor, who imbues Morris with the perfect mix of sensitivity and sweetness. Their love for each other is so strong that Russell falls into one long strand of cons, scams and frauds after another to ensure that he can always be near the man he loves. “I Love You Phillip Morris” succeeds as both a comedy and a touching love story, but what truly elevates this movie to the next level are the performances of Carrey and McGregor. And to top it all off, as outlandish as the story is, it’s even more amazing that it is actually true and took place right here in Texas, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

Of what I’ve seen, Meryl Streep probably has the showiest role playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” She is just as fantastic in the role as you’d expect, but the film is unsatisfying if you’re at all expecting to see a Margaret Thatcher biopic. Even the nickname that spawned the film’s title is only obliquely referenced during exposition in a news report about the former prime minister. We never see her earning it. For a woman who literally shattered one of the biggest glass ceilings in the Western world and had an enduring reputation as a ball-buster, there are remarkably few scenes of any glass being shattered or balls being busted. The tumultuous events (union strikes, the Falklands, the IRA, the Cold War) that Great Britain endured during the 11 1/2 years of Thatcher’s tenure at 10 Downing Street are all handled in only a superficial way. Instead, most of the screen time focuses on the frame story of her later years as she hallucinates conversations with her husband (Jim Broadbent), who has been dead for eight years. At the end, Thatcher minimizes everything she’s accomplished (good or bad) into whether or not she made her children and her husband happy. And while I’m ashamed to say that I’m exactly the sort of sap that gets weepy because of something like that, the sort of romantic who hopes that if I do outlive my husband I’ll at least find comfort in hallucinating his presence, I also couldn’t help but feel like a biopic of a male leader would never boil down to that same conclusion. One of her children has a supporting role, and the other is never seen on screen, but I felt like judgments were being given on her commitment as a mother both by the filmmakers and by the audience throughout the movie. In all the celluloid representations of JFK we’ve seen, I don’t remember anyone ever asking afterward, “But was he a good father?” The fact that the double-standard exists stinks, but at the same time, the movie can’t have it both ways.

In full disclosure, I’m moderately horrified by the way everyone has been saying that the Lisbeth Salander character of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and the rest of the Millennium Trilogy is this awesome powerhouse female character when basically she is a male fantasy who is hypersexualized to the point of fetishization (even to the point of rape/attempted rape) by every single male character she encounters. And for the entire first book and some of the second, the writer at least once every page, if not many more times, refers to her “childlike figure,” “anorexic look” and “doll-like limbs.” It’s gross. She is constantly repulsed by how men just find her so irresistible, so when the Blomkvist character (played by Daniel Craig in the new David Fincher version of the bestselling Swedish trilogy of books and films) doesn’t immediately try to seduce her, she’s all like, “Hmm, why isn’t this guy seducing me or trying to rape me or treating me like an object? I know! I’ll seduce him!” So yeah, it’s cool that she can hack computers and can kick ass when necessary, but basically, with all her unearned irresistibility shoved down our throats in the first book, on the page, she is more or less Bella Swan with a dragon tattoo. In the Swedish films, Noomi Rapace portrayed Salander as more of a woman taking control of her life, while Rooney Mara (with an assist from Fincher) brings a wholly different interpretation to the role, amplifying the little-girl-lost aspects of Salander and turning her affair with Craig’s Blomkvist into more of a teenage infatuation than the straight-up lust-driven tone Rapace’s Salander projected. Mara does completely disappear into the role, which is a feat in its own right, but I can’t wrap my head around why a character solely defined by how men treat her is a feminist icon.

However hilarious Kristen Wiig is as a performer in “Bridesmaids,” her character Annie Walker‘s never-ending “poor-me” syndrome grates and actually detracts from the fun. Let’s be honest, Annie kind of sucks, right? It’s a testament to Wiig’s affability (and the rest of the cast’s performances) that we stick with Annie’s journey throughout the movie.

Could it be possible that one of the most interesting female characters this awards season is actually Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary from “Young Adult”? Mavis may actually be the least likable protagonist, male or female, to hit the silver screen in some time, but for all her myriad failings, she at least feels like flesh and blood. She’s not perfect, far from it, in fact, but at least we see her making choices and acting on them, however misguided and delusional they may be. She makes decisions entirely on what she thinks is best, paying no mind to societal constraints.

In the supporting category, one of the ladies from “The Help” will probably walk away with the prize, but Shailene Woodley did fine work in Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” as Alex, George Clooney’s character’s teenage daughter. In what could have easily been a wise-beyond-her-years cookie-cutter daughter role, Woodley imbues her character with palpably authentic teen angst and conflicted feelings about her parents, particularly her mother, while spending most of the movie in a bikini, no less.

Despite my disappointment with the female characters Hollywood served up this year, I’ll still be tuning in this Sunday to see who takes home that golden orb, but I’m already more excited about 2012′s Oscar bait, when hopefully we will be treated to some more well-rounded female characters. And if not, at the very least, we always have Pixar, whose geniuses managed to make a wordless futuristic robot really feel like a woman and are sure to get it right again with their first feature led by a female protagonist in this summer’s “Brave”:

Released in the UK in 2009, “Nativity!” stars the perennially perfect Martin Freeman (“The Office,” “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). No one does adorable sad-sacks better than him. He is basically the British Charlie Brown. In “Nativity!”, Freeman stars as adorable sad-sack Paul Maddens, a primary school teacher whose Christmas spirit (and heart) is broken because his girlfriend (the luminous Ashley Jensen, best known stateside for “Ugly Betty” and “Extras”) dumped him on Christmas five years prior and is now charged with putting on the school’s nativity play, very much against his will. While that setup could in fact easily be turned into a crappy American cable movie, in the hands of these British filmmakers, it turns into something funny and sweet that marries sharp satire with tear-inducing warmth. I mean, the villain, a rival Nativity-play producer at a ritzy private school, is named Gordon Shakespeare, which is just awesome. And he is played by the great Jason Watkins (Herrick from “Being Human”). The kids are also delightful, and the original songs from the Nativity production will be playing in your head even days later. And there are donkeys!

Once I found that image, I searched until I found the tutorial for creating it, which ultimately came from Apartment Therapy. And then, it was off to Hobby Lobby. For less than $15, I picked up a 16×20 blank canvas and a package of 100 white Christmas lights (with white light casing and wire too for maximum camouflage). For an extra $10, I picked up a plug-in dimmer to have more control over the brightness of the lights.

Following the Apartment Therapy tutorial, I started by sketching out some dots with a pencil on the reverse side of the canvas. I loved the three-cluster design of the original image, so I tried to copy that. Once I got in there with the lights though, I realized that sketching out the design ends up being pretty fruitless, since you have to yield placement to however much distance there is between each light. The tutorial suggested poking through the canvas (which is surprisingly tough) with an awl. Since I didn’t have one of those, I used a small screwdriver instead to make the beginnings of the hole. Then it came down to simply jamming the individual light through that hole you started. And then doing it over and over again to create 100 holes filled with 100 lights. The tutorial also recommended securing each light with craft glue, but I didn’t have that and am impatient so I just left it. By criss-crossing the light strand and placing each light at maximum distance from the next one, I was able to make it pretty secure from behind.

So when all 100 lights were done, this is what it looked like:

Kind of boring/ugly, but when I plugged in the lights, it began to get pretty:

And prettier:

And really pretty:

I love the way each light throws such pretty shadows against the canvas. I suggest setting the canvas on a dresser or table that will camouflage the electrical cord trailing down from the bottom that needs to be plugged in and also provide enough space for the wiring behind the canvas. Here is a side view of what mine looks like on the reverse side (not too messy, but not pretty either):

Apartment Therapy also suggested painting the canvas first, which could be a nice way to avoid the boring white daytime look. Maybe try a pretty blush color or a nice deep blue to look like stars on a night sky.

While the idea of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost living together may sound like the setup for a joke, this show (and I’m patently ignoring the existence of the American SyFy Channel remake) is smarter, funnier, sexier and scarier than “Twilight” or “True Blood” could ever even dream of being. With a distinctly British sensibility, “Being Human”‘s title tackles exactly what the characters’ main dilemma is – how supernatural beings work to unearth, and stay connected to, the humanity buried within them. The main key to these characters’ humanity lies in their friendship with each other, through which George the werewolf (Russell Tovey), Annie the ghost (Lenora Crichlow) and Mitchell the vampire (Aidan Turner) have forged their own family, one that supports them and constantly encourages them to live on the right side of morality. The trio ends up fighting all manner of creatures and evils over the three seasons, but no evil is ever as great as their own interior demons, which results in much more affecting and compelling drama than manufactured love triangles and straw-man villains. And if you require your vampire addictions to have eye candy and romance, “Being Human” has both those too (especially in the Irish-accented, tormented and lethal Mitchell). Although in this show, the romance always feels earned.

The BBC commissioned a fourth season that should be airing next spring and hopefully added to Netflix Instant soon after. In the meantime, catch up on all 24 episodes, so you’ll be ready.

Held at the Palmer Event Center off Barton Springs Road and themed The Magic of Christmas, A Christmas Affair spans three days and offers shoppers a chance to check out the goods of more than 200 merchants. Some of the merchants hail from all across the country, but many are homegrown, including one of our favorite local artisans, Paloma’s Nest.

Created by artist Caroline Colom Vasquez, Paloma’s Nest became an Etsy sensation several years ago and was featured in The New York Times. The Austin-based company has since expanded into an e-commerce site of its own as well as its first brick-and-mortar store, which is located on South Congress. The Paloma’s Nest collection has become best known for its trademark Ring Bearer Bowls, which became the darling of wedding blogs the world over, but also includes a number of beautiful, simple and customizable family heirlooms perfect for commemorating life events large and small.

So it’s no surprise that Paloma’s Nest has announced a 2011 holiday collection that includes many pieces we’ve added to our own holiday shopping lists, including these lovely creations:

Paloma’s Nest, which was recently featured as an InStyle Magazine Best of the Web pick, will be at booth 710 during A Christmas Affair. Tickets to the event cost $12 for one day or $25 for all three days.

Centered on the Braverman clan in Berkeley, California, the show stars TV favorites Lauren Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) and Peter Krause (“Sports Night,” “Six Feet Under”) as adult siblings Sarah and Adam Braverman, respectively, alongside their younger siblings Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Julia (Erika Christensen). Each of the four Braverman kids has their own kids now, but even if you don’t have kids yourself (and I don’t), you will recognize yourself in at least one of the relationships on this show, whether it is in Sarah’s rebellious daughter Amber (poignantly played by Mae Whitman, she of Ann “Her?” Veal fame from “Arrested Development”) struggling to connect with her mom or having a creatively eccentric grandmother like Braverman matriarch Camille (Bonnie Bedelia). From the inane strife that always accompanies family holidays to asking yourself how you could be related to so many crazy people, “Parenthood” effectively touches on truths universal to all families.

There isn’t a single main character on “Parenthood” I don’t adore, and the show is just unceasingly warm and touching. I’m sure a lot of that is due to showrunner Jason Katims, who previously served as the showrunner of the amazing “Friday Night Lights” and also wrote for the emotionally resonant “My So-Called Life.” From the pitch-perfect choice of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” as the theme song to the rich production design of every character’s home, “Parenthood” does exactly what good TV should do — create a space where you want to be for however long you’re watching, whether it’s one 40-minute episode or a day-long marathon.

The first two seasons of “Parenthood” were added to Netflix Instant last month, and the third season is currently airing on NBC and available on Hulu.

(courtesy Austin Film Festival/Jack Plunkett)

My favorite panel of AFF was, of course, “Script-to-Screen: Veronica Mars with Rob Thomas,” which delved into both behind-the-scenes trivia and the writing process behind bringing the best teen detective noir ever to grace the small screen. For my money, television doesn’t get much better than “Veronica Mars,” so hearing showrunner (and off-and-on-again Austinite) Rob Thomas (pictured above) tell how he came up with and developed the show’s central story, characters and perfectly plotted season arcs was a fangirl’s dream. (If you haven’t seen the show yet, it’s no longer available on Netflix Instant, but you can rent all three seasons on DVD. As we said before, Veronica Mars is a pint-sized, pop culture-spewing private investigator who packs a punch – and an oh-so-handy taser. First seasons of television shows only very, very, very rarely come as deftly plotted, suspenseful, funny, unflinchingly honest, swoon-inducing and addicting as the first season of “Veronica Mars.”) During the panel, Thomas played the pilot episode (including clips from both his cut and the network’s cut) while pausing often to share thoughts and stories. One of those stories included the casting process for the main male characters of Duncan Kane and Logan Echolls, and then it turned out that Jason Dohring, the actor who played Logan Echolls (the inciter of the aforementioned swoon), was actually in the room. Sigh.

As for the films, well, it’s easy to take shots at films with hundreds of millions of studio money behind them, but with more personal films, like the kinds that premiere at a festival geared toward writers, it feels wrong and mean-spirited to spend time pointing them out. So, rather than talking about films that were empirically good or bad, I’ll just share the five that I enjoyed watching the most, in chronological order. That being said, one of the bad things about living in the city where the festival is held is that life sometimes gets in the way of screenings you most want to see, which is why i missed both “The Artist” and “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Before I get to my chronological countdown of new movies, I have to give a special mention to Friday’s screening of 1990′s “Metropolitan,” a comedy of manners I adore and that was such a treat to see on the big screen followed by a Q&A with its brilliant and elusive writer/director, Whit Stillman.

1) When a film is charged with opening an entire festival, it has a lot of expectations, including setting the tone and level for the next week of films. “Butter” more than rose to the challenge. The only things I knew about “Butter” before setting foot into the Paramount on AFF’s opening night were that it starred Jennifer Garner and served as an allegory of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary set in the world of competitive butter carving. The film, which also starred Ty Burrell, Olivia Wilde, Hugh Jackman, Alicia Silverstone and Rob Corddry, turned out to be all that and much more as one of the most enjoyable salty-and-sweet comedies this side of “Bad Santa.” And I never would have pegged Rob Corddry as the kind of actor that could make me cry, but he brought so much warmth to his role as the foster father of aspiring butter carver (and Obama surrogate) Destiny. Writer Jason A. Micallef was in attendance and participated in a Q&A after the panel, in which he talked about his smart and funny script, which previously had been on the famous Black List of the best unproduced screenplays.

(Bruce Robinson and Johnny Depp, courtesy Austin Film Festival/Jack Plunkett)

2)The Austin Film Festival certainly draws famous actors and filmmakers to our city, but when Johnny Depp came to town, every person with a badge or a film pass flocked to the Paramount to see “The Rum Diary”on Friday night. The film was introduced by saying that no other actor can play comedy and fear at the same time as well as Depp, and he certainly proved that once again with his performance in “The Rum Diary,” which was adapted by writer/director Bruce Robinson from the novel by the late great Hunter S. Thompson. Set in Cuba in the 1950s and also starring Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Austinite Amber Heard and Giovanni Ribisi, “The Rum Diary” is good fun and the perfect marriage of director, actor and source material, as anyone who has seen either Robinson’s famously gin-soaked “Withnail and I” or Depp’s appropriately gonzo performance as Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” can probably guess. After the film, Depp and Robinson (along with famed film columnist Elvis Mitchell) provided the most hilariously entertaining Q&A of the entire festival.

3) Heading into AFF, the film I was definitely most excited about was Sundance hit “Like Crazy.” Starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as an American and Brit, respectively, who fall in love only to see their relationship torn apart by distance and visa problems, “Like Crazy” effectively creates that same feeling of love and longing that everyone can identify with. Beautifully shot and acted, the film was largely improvised from an outline from writer/director Drake Doremus, who said at the Q&A following the film that he wanted to write a story in which love was both the protagonist and the antagonist, because it caused Anna and Jacob to make decisions that ultimately hurt themselves and others. I’m not a fan of ambiguous endings, but I know that the heightened emotions of “Like Crazy” will stick with me for a long time.

4) Unfortunately, “Stuck Between Stations” was one of the few screenings I attended that didn’t have a filmmaker in attendance, and I enjoyed the film so much that I would have loved to hear more about its creation. Set all in one night, largely as a conversation between two twenty-somethings that kinda-sorta knew each other back in elementary and high school, “Stuck Between Stations” does an amazing job at creating one of those heady anything-is-possible nights when everything feels a little like a dream and you’re hesitant to do anything that might break the spell. (In that respect, it reminded me a bit of the also-great “In Search of a Midnight Kiss.”) In addition to bit parts with Josh Hartnett and Michael Imperiola, “Stuck Between Stations” stars Zoe Lister Jones and the film’s co-writer Sam Rosen as Becky and Casper, who are both a little bit lost. I was not a fan of Lister Jones’ tragically hip “Breaking Upwards,” but I thought she was great in this performance, although I think the MVP award has to go to Sam Rosen, who gave a three-dimensional, realistic portrayal of a soldier serving in Afghanistan that owed nothing to stereotype. In honor of the oft-unsung hero of “Friday Night Lights,” my husband and I have created the Saracen Award for QB 1′s specific brand of sweet, sad and earnest, and the character Rosen creates in Casper is a deserving recipient.

“Stuck Between Stations” Movie Trailer from Stuck Between Stations on Vimeo.

(Nick Kocher, Jason Dohring, and Brian McElhaney, courtesy Austin Film Festival/Tammy Perez)

5) With all that “Veronica Mars” and “FNL” love up there, I’m obviously a huge TV nerd. So is Andrew Disney, the NYU graduate who for his feature debut managed to assemble a cast that includes cast members from cult TV favorites “The Wire,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Heroes” and, yes, “Veronica Mars” and “Friday Night Lights.” You kind of want to punch him for having that kind of luck, but then he manages to win you over with his heavily stylized, self-labeled slacker noir “Searching for Sonny.” While I missed the Saturday premiere with actors Jason Dohring, Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney present, the Monday night screening included a Q&A with producer Red Sanders and writer/director Andrew Disney, who said he won over his stellar cast by sending them videos detailing the reasons why they should be in his movie. And it worked. Dohring stars as a twentysomething pizza boy who heads back to his hometown (which, although not named, is shot in Fort Worth) when one of his high school classmates (Masi Oka) goes missing. Between Logan Echolls, Colonel Tigh, Lyla Garrity and narrator Lester Freamon, you wouldn’t think anyone else would have room to shine, but Kocher and McElhaney of comedy duo Britanick Comedy (I suggest starting with the Joss Whedon-approved video “Teamwork”) demonstrate that they both have bright careers ahead.