AUSTIN, Texas, Mar. 11, 2005 — One of the things I thought I'd do when I retired was learn more about film. See a lot of them. Pay attention to how they are made. Maybe learn to write a screenplay. Well, I have seen a lot more films than I used to see. I've been up on a lot of the Oscar-nominated films and I've made a pretty good pass at the local film festivals. SXSW Film starts today.

First, though, I have to get myself up, get ready and take my sister to the airport.

Dad is way early. No surprise there. I should wait until 9:15 or even a little later to head to the airport but we are off by 9. I unload my sister's stuff and get her going at the curbside. I leave my dad to see that someone gets her a wheelchair and gets her to the gate. Because of security there is no sitting around seeing people off anymore. I feel bad about that and worried about my sister but what can you do. I drive around once and he has left her in the care of the airport personnel to get a wheelchair to the gate.

On the drive to the airport we passed one of those billboards that says, "With a Stroke, Time Lost is Brain Lost." My sister says, "At least I didn't lose too much of my brain." Really she didn't. She's very lucky. Having said that she is also disabled and is lucky to have survived all the operations, infections and then broken bones from falls and infections.

I drive back to my house and Dad decides to go to the seniors recreation at his church. He will only be a little late.

I sit down and mull over some stuff from the film festival WEB page and some things I'm considering for a trip this summer. We want to go downtown, deliver something, eat lunch, pick up our Film Fest badges. But...I'll feel better when my sister's plane takes off for Dallas.

When I think the plane is off, we go run an errand and then eat a sandwich at Sweetish Hill, capturing a picnic table in full sun. It is one of the few days of the year when you feel you really want to sit in the sun. We go for it for a few minutes. It's spring! It's sunny but cool. I saw my first bluebonnets today, in a ditch deep in East Austin near at down at the heels strip center on the way to the airport. It seems almost a shame to hide in the dark and watch movies, a pale mole, while the sunny spring unfolds.

We go closer to downtown, park, walk to the convention center, stand in line to get film badges with unidentifiable pictures of ourselves on them. I guess the films don't get crashed so much. No radio chips in film badges, apparently. We go downstairs and get a big heavy bag of stuff each. It is full of ads, coupons, a stack of magazines, CD case samples, a DVD of something. We get invitations to parties that will be too crowded and loud and, if we try to attend, will probably send us to some quieter place nearby where we will pay for drinks.

We go home and take care of sorting the mail. I make a run for the bank. FFP takes a trip to the shoe repair shop. The maid comes by and does a little. Soon it's time to go to our first movie.

We've chosen to go to the Arbor and see two foreign films. Well, the first one was Australian. These days anything English-speaking is a home boy movie. It's that small a world, mate.

The Arbor, during SXSW Film doesn't necessarily draw huge crowds. Out-of-towners have trouble finding their way here if they have a car. It's near impossible without one. Besides other people were downtown drinking and waiting to see a Wilson brothers thing. There were people at these movies. But the crowds were sparse.

The Australian movie is set mostly in a ski resort where the young girl who centers the movie flees after she starts a seduction of her mother's boyfriend. Sommersault is the name of the movie. For no particular reason. Except maybe that the word evokes childhood and yet turning the world upside down. The boyfriend pleads 'nothing happened.' The boyfriend knows the score. The girl is shocked at her mother's disgust and the predictable "don't come near mes." She can't wait it out. She doesn't see what is forever about mothers and what isn't. She runs away to the ski resort. Predictably, she is taken advantage of and tries new things and new emotional bonds. Not so predictably, she finds a place to live, a job that isn't prostitution (although sexual feelings and encounters are a big part of what ensues). I thought it had a few slow moments. But no more than, say, Ray. I thought it tried too hard to have visual metaphor, to cover obligatory movie points and to try out all the filmmaker's arts. But no more than, say, Aviator. The girl was star-worthy beautiful, a good actress. Halle Berry in Monster's Ball has nothing on her except a black father (in real life). Some of the other acting was good or even great. The scenery worked. At first FFP was circumspect. As we walked over to the Firebowl Cafe he conceded the girl's beauty and some good acting. But the more he thought about it, the better he thought it was. I thought it worked on a lot of levels when I walked out and it grew on me a little. Not that I couldn't find fault. But still, a 'better than most Hollywood' effort.

We gorged on beer (me) and wine (FFP) and big bowls of food at Firebowl. While I wielded my chopsticks and FFP his fork he mentioned he had some ideas for painting that he really wanted to pursue. I told him he should do it. That we should set aside time to do creative things, times when we had to write or paint or learn to create but not just consume. I laughed. I had signed us both up with film badges precisely so we could consume about ten days of watch and listen. Funny time to talk about not consuming. I pointed out that I had my journal and he had his columns. But really they are it. They are warmups, scales. I guess when I retired I planned to read, study, watch, listen, travel. Consume the world. I was fuzzy on placing any mark on it. Still am.

Then Edukators. This subtitled German flick was set in Berlin. Supposedly. I didn't recognize anything. They didn't film iconic buildings. The film was improbable and drug a little near the end as if they just kept filming, trying to find an ending. But by then they were transported to the mountains somewhere and the scenery was nice and time suspended and the actors acted. The ending they landed on was vaguely dissatisfying and yet, after thought, worked. And not just as I initially accused, to allow a facile cut between two doors being rapped on. In the parking lot a young couple discussed the time (near eleven, I believe) and where they'd go next. Then the young man said, "I started to say: they aren't going to fall in the water and start making out, are they?" [Actually they did that twice, the pretty girl and the Ethan-Hawke-like boy.] Yeah that was facile, pat, predictable. But I liked a lot about this movie.

We went home. I read a bit and finished watching the DVD that came in our bags. Something called A Killer Within. A movie trying to be one of those crime shows that reenacts different possibilities only one of the suspects was the only one doing the investigation. A bad DVD (literally, it stalled and skipped in my player) it was also less than the crime shows there is a surfeit of lying in wait at all times on the DVR. If there tactic was to get me to watch the movie, they succeeded but if they wanted me to think well of their company and its potential, they failed.

Sleep.