As the 18^th annual Austin Film Festival takes over our town, bringing hundreds of screenings (and more than a few late night parties) through October 27^th, CultureMap contributors are busy trying to catch as many features, documentaries, shorts and panels as possible while also keeping up with festival news to help you navigate the lines (and, of course, plenty of celebrity gossip). Every day, we’ll be recapping our AFF highlights: films we’re begging you no to miss, tips for planning your week and the you-had-to-be-there moments you may have missed.

Day Five: Monday, October 24th

The good:

Austin High got a bit of a drubbing in our recap of its first AFF screening on Saturday, but in the eyes of a different viewer, it’s a different film – the production values in the picture seemed pretty impressive to me, with animated sequences, a follow-the-bouncing-ball karaoke singalong, recurring graphic titles to introduce new characters and even a cameo by Dog The Bounty Hunter (director Alan Deutsch is the producer and director on his reality show). They even went so far as to use different fonts for different characters’ subtitles as appropriate – not the sort of attention to detail that gets taken into account very often. The performances, particularly that of co-writer/producer/star Michael S. Wilson, are mostly strong, as well. The film does struggle a bit in finding an identity: as a movie ostensibly about an Austin high school for and by the town’s ample stoner population, and the encroaching gentrification and development fears that are all too real in the city, it spends a lot of time waffling. The scenes between Wilson, who plays Lady Bird High School’s stoner principal, and his overachieving 8^th grader (Taylor Stammen) are sincere and effective, the two carrying obvious chemistry. The scenes with Melinda Cohen’s evil Vice Principal Lambert, a new recruit out to destroy the party atmosphere at the school, are outright farce (“millions die from taking the pot!”, she exclaims to a student at one point). If the movie’s an absurdist farce, it doesn’t go far enough, and if it’s meant to have a heart, well, it’s hard to connect with a film that’ll toss its characterization in favor of an easy throwaway gag. With all that said, the jokes – at their best, anyway – are more than easy throwaways, and the film succeeds most when it’s using its more grounded elements to be really funny. Austin High aims to be something along the lines of Dazed and Confused meets Billy Madison; instead, it’s more like The Stoned Age meets Hot Shots Part Deux. But for a first-time director and a cast made up almost entirely of local talent, that’s still a very promising debut. [D.S.]

Pariah is the type of festival movie I like to call a "Day Ender." When you leave a Day Ender, you have the distinct feeling that nothing else you see that day could even come close to the experience you've just had and, barring any obligations to cover the remaining films on your day's schedule, you take some time off. Pariah is about Alike (Adepero Oduye), a teenage lesbian who hides her sexuality from her family and struggles to fully come to grips with it in her relationships outside of the home. What sets Pariah apart from similarly themed films is the organic nature of everything that happens, one never gets the feeling of watching actors deliver dialogue, real human beings on screen. The film never panders to any mainstream notion of how these sorts of stories should play out, writer/director Dee Rees is obviously working from a deeply personal place. Pariah delivers on every emotional level and in that sense is draining in the best way—it requires an investment and pays back in rich returns. [B.K.]

The Maiden and the Princess is an utterly charming short film written and directed by Aly Scher about a little girl trying to find her own story. Talulah Waymon-Harris plays Emmy, an adorable English schoolgirl who makes the fatal mistake of kissing another little girl on the playground. Her schoolmates taunt her and her parents sit her down on a very fancy sofa to express their shock and disapproval. Fortunately for Emmy, a rogue storyteller on The Grand High Council of Fairy Tale Rules and Standards decides to twist a hetero-normative tale into something much more delightful and helpful for the young protagonist. The film jumps back and forth between the real world, the fairy tale and the High Council's meeting room, where a group of gray faced men sit around wearing high collars and judging anything that isn't “traditional.” In the fairy tale world, the brunette Maiden (Lora Plattner) sings lovely songs of woe while she's taunted by her blonde siblings and spied upon by Emmy. This eighteen minute film has excellent production values, talented actors and a heartwarming ending – just like a Disney film. As Scher states on the website, “There was a Disney princess for every color of hair and every country, but no princess ever had a girlfriend.” Thanks to this film, now one does. [K.C.]

The bad:

It’s always exciting to see TV actors from beloved shows take on leading roles in features, and a festival like AFF is a good opportunity to do that. Maybe Hollywood hasn’t yet realized that Brian Dohring, Minka Kelley and Michael Hogan’s work on Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights and Battlestar: Galactica has proven them more than capable of carrying a movie, but a low-budget indie director probably has! So it’s a shame that Searching For Sonny, the feature debut of Fort Worth filmmaker Andrew Disney, is so confused about what it is. To put it bluntly, Dohring – probably the most intuitive and capable actor in the film – seems to think that he’s in a movie where characters will have human emotions and motivations, while the rest of the cast believes that they’re meant to go for full-on silliness for most of the picture. Dohring stars as Elliott Knight, a bright young man who made a series of bad decisions in high school in an attempt to woo back his first love, Eden (Kelley), and is now a 28 year old pizza delivery boy. After receiving a postcard from an old high school friend who’s gone missing, Elliott and two friends go on a quest to track down their pal. By playing this straight, though, Dohring feels like he’s in an entirely different movie than Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, who play his friends. The result is a movie that feels totally disjointed, and without strong enough jokes to make us not care that the thing makes no real sense. It’s clear that Dohring is more than capable of heading up a good movie – he just may not be up to the task of carrying a bad one all on his shoulders just yet. [D.S.]

The behind-the-scenes:

The Austin High Q&A was sort of like a victory lap for the local dudes who worked on and starred in the movie (seriously, there were like a dozen people on the stage after the screening and none of them were the women who appeared in the film.) Still, the best bit was when Brentley Heibron, who plays Austin High’s villainous city official “Tony Gennocide” (“pronounced Jenn-Oh-See-Day”), started heckling the assembled cast and crew from the audience, all while in character and wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “Drill Barton Springs!” It was even better than crew member Bob Crain explaining how he built the film’s numerous bongs. [D.S.]