Film Premieres: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Lot of films at SXSW being screened for the first time, and who knows what, precisely, all those state-of-the-art projectors will bring? Except that some of the works among the dozens and dozens – some of them will be downright brilliant.

Which is why the lines to get in can be pretty damned long.

Which is why it's best to be, all boyscoutwise, prepared.

Which is why the Chronicle's own Josh Kupecki – a frequent film reviewer for this media powerhouse of ours and a generally good guy to know, all smart & acerbic & so on – Kupecki says to me, "Brenner, it's almost time for me to stand in a lot of lines. Can you recommend a book about this size" – he holds up a trade paperback of middling thickness – "to keep me occupied?"

Why, the retroactive hipness of this Kupecki! Planning to read a book instead of staring into and incessantly poking & prodding some personal-device screen like the rest of the queueing mobility!

What an honor to get to recommend something to this fine broth of a man, I feel. And so I'd better make sure the book is 1) approximately the physical dimensions he specified, and 2) neither so dense nor dry that it's gonna tax his brain, and 3) a story that can keep a potentially distracted human fully engaged with its action, its dialogue, its wit, and alla that fine well-wrought narrative stuff.

Takes me no more than ten seconds to realize the perfect book for Josh Kupecki. Which may be the perfect book for anyone waiting in any line, and just a damned enjoyable book under any circumstances.

The book I'm talking about is the art-scene/cop-thriller novel Some Dead Genius by Lenny Kleinfeld.

And I happen to have reviewed the thing right here.

So, good reading to you, Josh – and to all those playing along at home – and may your SXSW movie lines, celebrity photo-op lines, get-a-free-cocktail lines … may all your lines of any ilk flow as smoothly as the Colorado River will for perhaps another decade and a half.