Part of the remit of Fantastic Fest is to shock: And it's hard to imagine that anything this year will push more buttons than Serbia's The Life and Death of A Porno Gang.

Buried was buried. The claustrophobic thriller, starring Ryan Reynolds and a cell phone, was written off as an unfilmable movie. Yet somehow it got filmed. "What we had was a guy and a box, and yet you're still here," director Rodrigo Cortes said at Thursday's Fantastic Fest gala screening at the Paramount. "I wonder what you didn't understand."

Had any of the Fantastic Fest faithful worried that the festival would lose its essential geeky fantastic-ness by moving the big premieres to the grown-up Paramount Theatre, no worries: Tim League is not afraid to rock a Viking loincloth at a historic landmark.

“If somehow Rudy and Rocky had a baby it still wouldn't be as big an underdog as our little show.” Lone Star creator Kyle Killen takes to the internet to drum up support for his underseen show. Well, it’s working, isn’t it?

Update: A full but largely uncontroversial agenda followed its natural course at City Council this morning, with the consent agenda and presentations from the three finalists tasked to develop form-based code zoning along Airport Boulevard taking up most the morning.

The inaugural year of the Fantastic Arcade arm of the rapidly growing film fest is looking good. The number of notable indie developers in attendance is pretty astounding. Get a taste of what's offered by playing Garden Gnome Carnage, but, trust me, that's just a drop in the bucket. The bucket of awesome gameness.

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to lead this week's Notes with this juicy nugget of truth: I did not watch a single football game this weekend. I saw parts of several games but did not watch one in its entirety until Monday night's New Orleans-San Francisco match-up. And that was a pretty fun game, wasn't it? Indeed.

You never forget your first Tetsuo. Director Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 industrial classic The Iron Man was a cold, hard slap across the face of film and music. Nearly two decades after the sequel, Body Hammer, he returns to his searing indictment of modernity and destructive capitalism.

Looking to start your engines, Fantastic Fest attendees? Kick it into gear with Redline, the deranged turbocharged anime from Madhouse Studio. If Jack Kirby had been the artistic director for F-Zero GX, you'd get this a nitro-boosted sci-fi speedster that proves that hand-drawn animation can still burn off CGI.