Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

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A few weeks back, your pals at the Screengrab did a list of Comebacks We’d Like To See, and one of the ladies on my wish list was Natasha Lyonne, who shone as a wised-up, enjoyably weird young character actress in movies like Slums of Beverly Hills, American Pie and, well, Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby before (alleged) drug problems knocked her life and career off track.

So I was happy to see Lyonne in fine form as a market testing guru pushing ominous “self-warming” cookies (with some pretty unnerving side effects) in David Russo’s peculiar conspiracy thriller/monster movie/existential freak-out The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. Lyonne’s character, Tracy, is the sexy corporate fixation of the film’s appealing central protagonist, Dory (Marshall Allman), a spiritually confused naïf who flushes away his own corporate career with an ill-timed freak-out and winds up joining the invisible Morlocks responsible for cleaning the offices and toilets of the Eloi elite.

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Our 2009 SXSW Film Festival preview continues with a look at the most promising narrative features on the slate. (You can check out my documentary picks here and here.) I’ve left out the big ticket items that are due in theaters soon, like Adventureland and I Love You, Man. They don’t need my help.

BEESWAX

Mumblecore maven Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) returns with this legal thriller “for anyone who finds 'legal thriller' to be an oxymoron.” Real life twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher star as identical twins Jeanne, who is paraplegic, and Lauren, who isn’t. The pair find themselves dealing with a vague threat from Jeanne’s partner in a vintage clothing business, Amanda. New SXSW producer Janet Pierson has a supporting role, which is certainly an ingenious tactic by Bujalski.

(Screens March 14th at 2 pm, Paramount Theater)

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