Greetings humans, Monki here with my second helping of SXSW goodness.

I'm taking a much more laid back approach to SXSW this year...after year and year I found myself trying to go to as many movies as humanly possible, and I think that sort of degraded the experience a little bit. After a while movies started blending together and I'd completely forget about films entirely. Not exactly the SXSW experience I would like to get.

This year I've been relaxing, see a couple movies, hit a couple of parties, having a lot of fun...and fun is exactly what SXSW is all about. This isn't your snooty festival with tons and tons of celebrities...this is a celebration of excellent film, and so far that reputation has been well received.

I caught two films on the second day of the festival, the documentary American Teen, which Quint said was excellent when he saw at Sundance, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the feel good movie of the year.

AMERICAN TEEN

I'm not one of those guys who looks back on high school with much fondness. Like many geeks of my time, I didn't seem to fit in to any particular crowd and would bounce around from the theater geeks, the tech geeks, the writing geeks, the media geeks...all "geeky" passions though. I never was in to sports...I enjoy watching, but never went out for football or track (imagine that, a movie geek who isn't in to playing sports), but all in all, high school wasn't the greatest time of my life. It was no John Hughes movie, there was no girl that I had a huge crush on that I poured my heart out to at any point while outside of her front door, there was no girl from South Africa that came to our school, made friends with the female elite and proceeded to destroy the caste society...it was pretty lame.

I've been away from that environment for almost a decade now and I had forgotten some of the more rotten aspects of the high school experience...American Teen pulled back the curtain of rose-colored memory and unleashes a wave of forgotten pain.

High school sucked.

American Teen follows four high school seniors in small-town Indiana as they make their way through their final year of high school. We follow Colin, the basketball star of the school, Hannah, the liberal artsy chick who wants (and needs) to get the hell out of Indiana, Megan, the Queen Bee of her high school and Jake, the kid who would rather play Legend of Zelda than try to make a social life of any worth.

We follow these kids through their ups and downs over the course of the entire year. Breakups, hookups, college decisions...it's all in there. Good lord is some of the shit painful too.

We watch repeatedly as Jake, the nerd, tries to set himself up in a relationship..."I've got a date in three weeks from Saturday"...the poor kid...when he finally does manage to get himself into a really-for-real date, he ends up torpedoing himself. I don't know a whole lot about females, but I do know a line like "Wow, we both suck at life," is less likely to get you laid than pretty much anything else.
Megan, the rich popular girl, says she is a good person and then absolutely comes across as a raging bitch in this film. One of her best friends (a guy) starts liking another girl, so she then goes on an offensive that would rival shock and awe. The doc shows that Megan has gone through some rough times with her family, and pressure from her father to get in to Notre Dame can't be easy, but this girl is pretty god damn evil.

Colin, the star basketball player, comes across as one of the most honest characters in the film. His family can't afford to pay for college, so the only way he'll be able to move on is via a sports scholarship. He has a rough year but through the support of his family, including his Elvis-impersonating father, he does come across pretty untarnished in this one.

My favorite character, Hannah, is an artsy spirit trapped in this small town. She lives with her grandmother and enjoys art, music and movies. We watch her break down when a boyfriend leaves her...we see her beam when she finds another love match, and we cheer like hell when she confronts her parents about wanting to move to San Francisco to get away from the people that are keeping her back.

Nanette Burstein, the director of this film (and The Kid Stays in the Picture) does an excellent job of keeping the story moving. There is so much for her to work with here and she has completed a wonderful documentary. At no point did the film drag and there was always a plot hook to pull you back in if you ever got bored with whoever was on screen. I can't recommend this one enough...especially to those who remember high school as this beautiful field of flowers and rainbows...

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

I had a blast with this movie. Harold and Kumar are this generation's Cheech and Chong.

I really wasn't a huge fan of the first movie...there were some great parts, but overall it was kind of "meh" for me.
This film just hits you over and over with the funny, from start to finish. Kal Penn and John Cho have seriously set themselves up as the next comedy duo to storm the planet...and Neil Patrick Harris is a god amongst men. Seriously, The NPH could pull more ass than I can even imagine...on either side, male or female. He almost had sex with a chick on stage after the movie was over.

This film basks in it's insanity. From Guantanamo Bay and it's cockmeat sandwiches to the bottomless party in Miami to the cyclops to the unicorn to the whorehouse to the KKK...it's all over the place. The cameos are great too...Christopher Meloni makes another crazy-ass appearance, Ed Helms drops in for a minute, Beverly D'Angelo shows up as well as Missi Pyle (one of my favorite character actresses) and George Bush.

I don't want to get in to the plot too much...really, does it matter anyway? This is a incredibly fun film that you need to see with about 8 of your closest friends the weekend it comes out. Then you need to watch it about two dozen times at home under various forms of inebriation when it hits DVD.

I'm checking out another documentary today called Full Battle Rattle and then following it up with Simon Pegg's Run Fatboy Run, so until next time, back up the tree I go!

-Monki