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Maybe it’s because I’ve never toked up, and never really had an interest in it, but stoner comedies are something I’ve never really been drawn to. It is a genre that has held only a passing interest for me, mainly to try and understand what my friends are talking about when they riff on them.

So when I first saw the description of Humboldt County on the SXSW film schedule, I didn’t initially think I’d give the story of an overachieving medical student (Jeremy Strong) who inadvertently gets introduced to a community of pot growers sounded a spin. Schedules changed and it wound up being the first thing I would see at the festival, a fact that in retrospect I am thrilled came to be.

The movie isn’t a “stoner comedy”, but rather a comedy with depth, warmth and real human drama that I could relate to and understand. It was possibly the most unexpected surprise I had at the festival, and my hope is that the film gets picked up so that others can experience the same surprise that I did.

After taking the film in I got to sit down with Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, the co-authors and directors of Humboldt County. What I thought would be a simple talk about their movie turned into an enjoyable explosion of film geekiness in talking about the films that influenced them, some interesting discussion about the potential new meaning of “slacker”, and the surprising sexual allure of “Six Feet Under”’s Frances Conroy, amongst various topics.

Lucky for me, SXSW is one big glass half-full. If you are absent from some rocking concert, it's probably because you've discovered another one. And if you look around and there aren't too many people surrounding you at that show, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to pat yourself on the back for your singular ingenuity, rather than get wrapped up worrying... why?

One of the most enjoyable things about attending SXSW as a film fan is when a movie surprises you in a positive way. There are so many choices to pick through when the schedule is released, it is easy to get coaxed into staying in a comfort zone with genres that one is familiar with. Occasionally, though, someone or something pushes you into taking a chance on movie you might not otherwise see. When the film lives up to and exceeds expectations, the reward for the experience is sometimes richer than when I see I know I'm going to like.

Shuttle falls into that category. On the surface, it would seem to be garden variety as thrillers go. Jules (Cameron Goodman) and Mel (Peyton List) have arrived back in their hometown airport after a girls-only vacation. Having no one to pick them up given the late hour they board an airport shuttle just looking to get home. What they get is a second trip they never bargained for and one far more horrific than they could have imagined.

Ah, the things we do for music.

At Austin City Limits in September, we brave four days in the blazing sun, in the middle of a field, perpetually on the verge of heat exhaustion, cultivating insta-sweat stains on every thread of clothing.

Most people are familiar to some degree with the scientific concept known as "the observer effect": that the act simply of observing a phenomenon by necessity changes the phenomenon being observed. To a certain degree, that is a concern that I have to consider any time I watch a documentary film. It is nearly impossible to accurately gauge just how much, if any, affect a documentary filmmaker has had on his subjects in the process making the film.

Are they putting on a show for the cameras? Playing up to their anticipated audience? Or are they truly behaving as they would have without the camera and filmmaker in play? It sometimes makes me wonder if perhaps Schroedinger wasn't so much conducting a thought experiment as pitching a script.

Daniel Stamm's A Necessary Death, which screened at SXSW this year, plays extensively with this question in a fashion that elicits laughter, sorrow, anger and confusion with surprising ease. As much as I generally detest when a film is dscribed as "edgy", this film merits the description ably because of how unconventionally it approaches its subject and the process by which the film itself was made.

In A Necessary Death, Gilbert (Gilbert John) is preparing to begin work on his senior project to graduate from film school. He pitches an idea to his friends Michael (Michael Traynor) and Valerie (Valerie Hurt) for a most unusual documentary: Gilbert wants to find a subject who has decided to commit suicide and follow them through the entire process, from planning to execution (no pun intended). Michael and Valerie have differing reservations about the ethical implications of the project but agree to participate.

The white of my left eye is a blood red spider-web, my metabolic system has shut down after a four day diet consisting almost exclusively of street cart pizza, Texas beer, and granola bars, and only just recently has the thick cloud of white noise around my head begun to dissipate. Those decibels really take a toll.

Yes, SXSW 2008 is the real deal.

"the nerdcore could rise up, it could get elevated

oh and wouldn't all of those tough rappers hate it

if the nerdcore rose up and got elevated?

we consider the possibleness of this not overstated."

- MC Frontalot, from the song "Nerdcore Rising"

I find it humorous to consider that MC Frontalot may not have been able to foresee how prescient he was about the film that focuses on his first US tour when he wrote those lyrics. A packed house of enthusiastic fans at the Alamo South Lamar greeted the nerdcore rapper and director Nagin Farsad for the SXSW Premiere of the documentary Nerdcore Rising. The applause and laughter that came from the audience during and after the film showed that the viewers' expectations for the film were well met.

The nerdcore phenomenon (rappers singing about dorkier fare than most hip-hop artists) is something that I thought existed strictly within the video Weird Al did for "White and Nerdy." Seeing the film, I was surprised to find that the genre is bigger than I knew, with a fan base to match. Seeing the turnout Frontalot received at PAX (the Penny Arcade Expo, a gaming conference spawned from the popular webcomic Penny Arcade), I realized that this is something more than what some might dismiss as a novelty act. Frontalot is giving musical voice to a previously unrepresented body, and Farsad captures the enthusiasm behind that movement playfully in a fun documentary.

The day after the premiere, I had a chance to sit down with Frontalot and Farsad and talk a bit about the evolution of nerdcore.

Enrique Gomez: Is it a testament to my being entranced by nerdcore that I want Harmonix to add the bass guitar that Blak Lotus (Frontalot's bassist) plays as downloadable content for Rock Band so that I can play it on my Xbox 360

Perhaps Steve James and Peter Gilbert's most noted collaboration is the sports documentary Hoop Dreams from 1994. It's tale of two young men and their dreams of making it big playing basketball is poignant for how it captures lives in the present and depicts their hopes and struggles with adversity. It ranks in my mind not only as one of the greatest sports films ever made, but simply amongst the best films, period.

With their new work At the Death House Door, premiering on IFC May 29^th, James and Gilbert provide a look into the past work of a man I find to be living proof that God walks among us and works through us, and two others who do some of the most important work a journalist can do. Getting an opportunity to sit with all of them at SXSW to talk about this exceptional film augmented my already healthy respect for all of them in ways I could not have imagined.

Besides my ruthlessness, I'm fairly certain I qualified for this responsibility based on my own awe-inspiring musical career. For those of you who somehow hadn't heard, in college, I was, of course, the musical director for an all-female a cappella group. That's right. Boy, did we rock. We did a rendition of "Travelin' Soldier" that would make the Dixie Chicks cry. In a good way.