The Best of Open Screen Night: Year Two

The Best of Open Screen Night: Year 2

TwoNoteSolo.com, $15

In a town like Austin you'd be hard put to produce a movie without finding a small arthouse theatre or film collective somewhere willing to screen it. It's part of the character of our city that every creative endeavor – good, bad, or indifferent – deserves its moment. Take Two Note Solo's monthly Open Screen Night at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, for example, a free-form mini festival of sorts that will show just about anything, from sketch comedy to home videos to found footage, as long as it arrives in the form of a videotape (this month's is tonight, Thursday, July 28, 9:45pm). The quality of the films on their new DVD, representing the audience-selected best of the lot from the festival's second year, is, as one could probably guess, inconsistent. A few of the entries, such as Dax Martinez-Vargas and Barry Flanagan's "ELO NYC," show a good spirit, while others, notably "Dick the Pig," are nauseating and near impossible to sit through. (May the Earth spin a thousand times around the sun before we're forced to watch another policeman eat a doughnut on film.) Most of the clips, however, fall comfortably into the category of the merely tolerable – the embarrassing-for-all-involved "Travis" and the animated musical tale of "Dildocchio" being prime examples – which makes me wonder about the movies that didn't win a spot on this DVD.

Upcoming

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 4 (HBO): When writer-producer Larry David walked away from Seinfeld in the mid-Nineties, he had no intention of working again in TV, thinking instead about a future in movies or even a return to stand-up comedy. HBO came calling, though, and now four seasons in, his Curb Your Enthusiasm remains one of the best and funniest shows on television. Come the end of August, HBO is releasing the two-DVD set of the show's most recent season, which took the byzantine approach to interwoven storylines that David helped bring to the sitcom episode and extended it over an entire season. Two major and continuous plotlines (including the hilarious and improbable coming-out of David himself as a Broadway musical star) provide a backdrop for the impossibly petty and entirely insignificant humor that defines the show. Even more than Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm finds the comedic absurdity in nothing and everything. This is TV comedy at its best, and one doesn't need to search too far to recognize its influence.