Oh, what times we live in, that we can enjoy foul-mouthed documentaries like The Aristocrats and F**k. I grew up equating "documentary" with "National Geographic," so any nonfiction film that uses four-letter words or would shock my mom, automatically makes me smile a little. As a result, I was slightly biased toward Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project from the moment the film's subject uttered his first profanities during a stand-up routine.

Rickles reportedly has been reluctant to have his live performances recorded until now, but let director John Landis shoot part of his Vegas show. The documentary uses the footage from Rickles' stand-up act as a springboard for a biography and filmography of Rickles, a superficial discussion about intentionally offensive comedy, and a general reflection upon Las Vegas and how it's changed in the past 40 years or so.

Austin Film Festival doesn't only show movies, but also includes a screenwriters' conference. This year, the lineup included Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and have written and directed the upcoming sequel, currently known as Harold and Kumar 2. (First they were going to Amsterdam, then they were escaping from Guantanamo Bay. Maybe next they'll be searching for a crystal skull bong.)

Hurwitz and Schlossberg sat down with moderator Josh Weiner and an audience of conference attendees to discuss both the Harold and Kumar movies, and used clips from the first movie to share various lessons they learned in screenwriting.

The first clip shown was the scene in which Harold (John Cho) encounters Maria (Paula Garces) in the elevator, both in his fantasy world and in reality. Hurwitz said the scene was pivotal to the movie because it introduced Maria as a romantic interest, which provided something for the audience to connect with in a movie that otherwise has a fairly slight storyline. In fact, the impact of the scene ultimately caused the ending to be reshot.

So if Borat Sagdiyev had been a British vegetarian who thought all chain stores were an embodiment of The Man -- nah, that's a totally unfair way to describe America Unchained, which screened at Austin Film Festival. The narrator of this documentary is far less over-the-top than Borat, but he's still engaging enough to save the film from terminal earnestness.

British comedy writer/performer Dave Gorman is our tour guide on this film. He tells us that the last time he took a tour of the United States, he was booked in big-chain hotels and ended up eating primarily in chain restaurants. He decides that this time he wants to see the "real" America, so he plans to drive from L.A. to New York (coast to coast) without giving any money to "The Man" -- no buying from any kind of chain, be it a hotel, fast-food restaurant or most difficult of all, a gas station. Gorman and his original director/camera operator set off from California in a car they didn't buy from a chain, either ... a 1975 Torino station wagon, which looks like the family car from my childhood when we took long road trips ourselves (not unlike the Griswolds in the first Vacation movie).

Earlier this year, Under the Same Moon (originally titled La Misma Luna) was bought at Sundance by Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company for a surprisingly high amount of money. It's understandable because underneath the film's unsubtle messages about undocumented Mexican workers working to survive in the U.S., it's essentially an old-fashioned family melodrama. I caught the film at Austin Film Festival this year, and it's currently scheduled to hit theaters in March 2008.

Rosario (Kate del Castillo) is a young immigrant from Mexico living and working in Los Angeles to support her nine-year-old son Carlitos (Adrian Alonso), who lives with Rosario's mother in Mexico. He hasn't seen his mother in four years and misses her terribly. Meanwhile, Rosario is trying to scrape up enough money for a lawyer to help her bring Carlitos to America legally. When his grandmother dies, Carlitos decides to cross the border himself and travel to Los Angeles to find his mother, because he's scared she'll forget about him. He encounters an unlikely lot of helpers and companions during his attempt, including American college students (America Ferrera and Jesse Garcia) who want to make extra money smuggling children over the border, and Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), a migrant worker who has no desire to deal with a small child on his hands.

I grew up in the New Orleans area, so I can't resist movies set in that location, especially documentaries. The only problem is that I worry about seeing anything involving the term "post-Katrina" in a theater, because I'm always worried I'll end up in tears or enraged in public. Fortunately, Don't Eat the Baby: Adventures at Post-Katrina Mardi Gras kept me more amused than sad, but at the same time managed to accurately represent the problems that South Louisianians faced in the six months after the hurricane and ensuing floods.

Don't Eat the Baby focuses on the ways in which New Orleanians dealt with Mardi Gras in 2006. The city was devastated, with much of its population forced to live elsewhere, and for many people it seemed inappropriate to spend money and other resources on a big celebration. Still, the large parade organizations (called krewes) wanted to roll, the mayor and other politicians hoped that the festivities would draw tourism and thus bring needed revenue to local businesses, and many New Orleanians simply wanted to take a little time to forget about the bad things in their lives, and celebrate as they have done every year.

I'm not a comic-book reader, so I didn't know much about the subject of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist before seeing the documentary at Austin Film Festival. I knew he was the creator of The Spirit, a comic-book series that Frank Miller is adapting into a feature film ... and that's about all I knew. Fortunately, the documentary filled in many of the blanks for me about Eisner and provided some interesting details about the artist's life.

Eisner is credited for being one of the pioneers in the comic-book form -- as the film's title indicates, he believed in making the comics sequential, giving them an ongoing storyline, which was not standard back in the 1930s when he started work as an artist. His character The Spirit was not a traditional superhero with crazy superpowers, but an ordinary guy in the smallest of masks, who happened to fight crime. During WWII and afterwards, Eisner created military instructional manuals that were drawn in a comic-book style to make them interesting and easy to understand. Later in life, he created more dramatic, personal comic books (A Contract with God) that he dubbed "graphic novels," and paved the way for this type of work to be taken seriously.

Welcome to The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar, a weekly look at what's happening beyond the multiplexes all around North America. If you know of something indie-related happening near you -- a local festival, a series of classic restored films, lectures, workshops, etc. -- send the info to me at Eric.Snider(at)weblogsinc(dot)com and I'll add it to the list. (Please put "Cinematical" somewhere in the subject line so I can easily separate you from the spam.)


Atlanta: The Urban Mediamakers Film Festival, running today through Sunday, is a combination of under-the-radar movie screenings and workshops for independent film professionals -- though if you're just a film lover and you only want to see the movies, that's fine, too.

Austin: Is it nothing but festivals in this town?! South By Southwest, Fantastic Fest, and now the more intuitively named Austin Film Festival... don't you crazy Texas kids have jobs? Just kidding. You kids are great, with your film festivals, and your hipster music scenes, and your Alamo Drafthouses. AFF began last night and runs through Oct. 18, with a few dozen features, documentaries, and shorts. Of note: The centerpiece film is Juno, which people have been going crazy about since it premiered at Telluride last month.

After the jump, more fests and events in L.A., NYC, Philly, Portland, and elsewhere....

The screening of Chalk I attended was the only sold-out movie I encountered at Austin Film Festival, and it was on a Tuesday night after the conference had ended. I heard that the previous night's showing of the feature film sold out as well -- and this was at the Arbor's largest screen. Was it because the movie won AFF's narrative feature award? Or was there some sort of word-of-mouth building in town among Austin educators, since teachers were the focus of this film? Before the movie started, Chalk's director Mike Akel asked how many teachers were in the audience, and I saw a large show of hands. It probably didn't hurt that Chalk was filmed in Austin, either.

Chalk uses that mock-documentary style found in The Office to focus on a group of high-school teachers (and one former teacher, now a vice principal) struggling to deal with their jobs in the course of a school year. There's the brand-new teacher, Mr. Lowrey (Troy Schremmer), who can't maintain control of his classroom; a comically ambitious, extroverted teacher, Mr. Stroope (co-writer Chris Mass); the short-haired, strident gym teacher, Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer); and continually overworked vice-principal Mrs. Reddell (Shannon Haragan). The situations are usually played for laughs, but there are a few touching moments, particularly with Mr. Lowrey as he tries to connect with his students. Since they occasionally look right in the camera and talk to us, we know who has a little crush on whom, who's about to lose their mind, and who wants to strangle certain other teachers.

As I've mentioned before, Austin Film Festival has a screenwriters conference to accompany its weeklong program of films. In fact, the event used to be better known for its writing panels and sessions than for the films that screened. I'm not a screenwriter so I don't attend many panels anymore, but this year I decided to sit in on on the "Writing Family Films" panel.

Why did I choose a panel on children's and family films? I could have gone with some friends to a session down the hall about comedy writing, featuring Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, which I'm told was quite entertaining. I don't have any kids, and I've never written anything that was aimed toward a younger audience. But I've always enjoyed watching quality children's films (although I often feel like the only unaccompanied adult in the theater), and I wanted to hear more about the ways in which writers approach material intended for kids.

The panelists (in the order pictured above) were Bob Dolman, who wrote the screenplay for Willow and adapted and directed How to Eat Fried Worms; Susannah Grant, who worked on the scripts for Pocohontas, Ever After (a favorite of mine) and the upcoming Charlotte's Web; and Mike Rich, who wrote Finding Forrester, The Rookie, and The Nativity Story. University of Texas screenwriting instructor Stuart Kelban moderated the session. The small conference room at the Stephen F. Austin hotel was well-filled with writers and other film-industry people.

I don't normally see films with titles like Come Early Morning unless vampires are involved. However, I was intrigued about the feature directorial debut of Joey Lauren Adams, who also wrote the script, and I liked Ashley Judd so well in Bug that I thought the movie might be worthwhile. Unfortunately, Come Early Morning suffered from an amateurish script, predictable characterizations, and a lack of vampires.

Judd, as the main character Lucy, is playing almost the same exact character as in Bug, but with a little more money and a little less desperation. Lucy lives in a small Arkansas town and has a nasty habit of drinking too much at the local honky-tonk and waking up in hotel rooms with strange men. However, we know right away that she's an independent woman who doesn't want to rely on anyone -- she insists on paying for the hotel rooms herself. The title is probably derived from her habit of getting up before her bedmates in an attempt to sneak out of the hotels before she has to talk to them.

During the course of the film, Lucy starts to realize her life isn't the way she wants it to be. She takes steps to become closer to her dad, takes in a stray dog, and tries to start what might become more than a one-night stand with Cal (Jeffrey Donovan), a new guy in town. She also takes home the local honky-tonk's old jukebox, although she's not sure why, or what she'll do with it. (The old jukebox does provide the film with a fantastic soundtrack, including Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Billy Joe Shaver songs.) She's a contractor, complete with a hard hat, but she doesn't seem to get much satisfaction from the job.