SXSW film festival day 7: a pair of Iraq war films

... and a view from above downtown Austin.

by John P. Meyer

Yep, the music folks have arrived, all right.

I can't say it was a fun day of film viewing, but then I did make my own bed.

I decided to take in back-to-back cinematic treatments of the war in Iraq, one of which (Body of War) was a very personal documentary about the aftereffects of war on an individual soldier. The other movie - Stop-Loss - took a more community-wide (and, of course, fictionalized) view of the conflict, with the community being a make-believe Texas town called Brazos. I'll have write-ups on both these movies tomorrow.

SXSW Dispatch #7

View from the Austin Convention Center balcony

Something changed today in downtown Austin. My first clue was that the traffic flowing in towards the Convention Center was stacked up for blocks around. The second indicator was the loud music wafting out of the pavilion across the street. See, it's music festival time, and with that part of SXSW overlapping with the tail end of film, havoc ensues on the streets of downtown.

I took a break between bad-war-gone-worse movies and hung out on the 4th floor balcony of the Convention Center to type up some notes, and decided I'd give you something a little different by way of a video diary entry tonight. No talk - just views of the late afternoon sun and an aural glimpse of the live music that's suddenly bursting forth all over town.