butt-numb-a-thon

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My eyes, ears and brains are frazzled after this weekend… but in a good way!

Some readers will remember five years ago, when I attended Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 in Austin, Texas. What the heck is a “Butt-Numb-A-Thon”? It’s an annual 24-hour long “film festival” in Austin, Texas, hosted by founder/grand poobah of AintItCool.com Harry Knowles. A full day of movies (some vintage, some new) and all kinds of ingenius insanity interspersed throughout! Definitely something that one would be grateful to experience even once in a lifetime. Five years later and I’m still very fond of the memories of Butt-Numb-A-Thon. As well as still haunted and horrified by Feels So Good and Farewell Uncle Tom, but I digress…

Anyhoo, Kristen and I applied for this year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, and we each made a video for the optional “extra credit”. We were quite proud of our respective applications… but Alas! We didn’t ...

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For those who don’t know what that is, it’s an annual 24-hour long film festival hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. Some consider it to be the most sought-after cinematic event in the country. I got to attend Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 last year and twelve months later there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the whole crazy experience.

Well, for those of us who won’t be able to go to this year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, here’s something to assuage our pain. It’s the trailer for Stunt Rock, which is shown every year at Butt-Numb-A-Thon to get the party started…

Is that not the most outrageously cool trailer ever made? 🙂...

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I’m gonna go ahead and knock the rest of this thing out of the ballpark, ‘cuz the next few days are going to be crazy busy and I’ve put off doing this long enough. So here’s the rest of the photos from Texas (here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2).

One of the things that I’d wanted to do while I was in Texas was visit my brother-in-law Jonathan, who’s a seminary student at Baylor University in Waco. On Friday, the day after I went to the Alamo, Deborah and I hopped in my rented Jeep and took off for Austin, where we’d catch I-35 north.

Here’s Austin as we were entering town…

Here’s Deborah. The last time we’d seen each other, it was at Star Wars Celebration III in Indianapolis two and a half years earlier.

This was taken while we were on Congressional Avenue, with the ...

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Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News and me on the night before Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9

So here it is: my review of Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9, the annual 24-hour long film festival hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, which was held at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz in Austin, Texas this past weekend on December 8th through 9th. It might be worth noting that according to the yearbook that we all received, I was the attendee who was from the most obscure town anywhere: a miniscule spot-on-the-mind somewhere in North Carolina, as opposed to being from Austin or Los Angeles or Atlanta.

This was also my first Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

First film festival ever for that matter.

Heck, this was my first time in Texas, period.

I left my friend Deborah’s house around 10 a.m. and was in Austin about 30 minutes later. I parked at the Hilton ...

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I got home just after midnight, local time (though my body is still on Central Time). Have a few things on this end waiting for me but expect a wazoo-load of stories and pictures in the next few days, and a full report on what happened at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 🙂...

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And my butt is, literally, numb after watching movies for 24 hours straight 🙂

I’m going to file a more complete report later on, maybe even after I get back tomorrow, about what went down. But for those who are curious: we didn’t see Cloverfield or I Am Legend or the new Rambo movie (although Sylvester Stallone did send two new clips from it that we got to watch and one of them is pretty violent even for a Rambo flick). However we did get to see Sweeney Todd… and I’m going to have tons of stuff to rave about that after it’s had a chance to settle in. We also got to see a couple of movies that won’t be coming out ’til late next year.

Around 8 or so this morning came one of the most diabolically evil things that I have ever witnessed in my entire ...

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Still can’t get the pics to load at the moment (our digital camera is more used to hooking up to a Windows XP machine and it’s nothin’ but Macs here) but I’ll be showing the cream of the crop from the bunch when I get back. In the meantime, I can report that it was another action-packed day here in Texas…

My friend Deborah and I got in my rented Jeep about 10 this morning and headed to Austin. She got us on Congressional Avenue and I got some awesome photos of the Texas State Capitol. Then we headed over to the University of Texas at Austin campus, and Deborah got a pic of me standing in front of “The Tower”. And yes, this is the building from which Charles Whitman shot and killed all those people. Which isn’t really why I wanted to see it: it’s always struck ...

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Hee-hee-hee… not bad eh? I didn’t have much time to do a perfect job on it, but ever since I found out that I’m going to the Butt-Numb-A-Thon film festival in Austin, Texas this year, I’ve had it in mind to do a spoof of Preacher: Gone to Texas (a really good graphic novel that I discovered some years ago). Just ‘cuz it sounds cool to say “gone to Texas” like that, and this’ll be my first time ever going there.

I’m not staying in some swanky hotel in Austin, either. I’ll be staying with some friends who live outside of town, in an area notorious for scorpion infestations and whatnot. They tell me that I’m going to love Texas barbecue… which is not pork at all but beef. “Porkless barbecue ribs” ummm sounds like blasphemy to me. But you know, “when in Rome…”

Expect posts on this blog ...

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Tonight Harry Knowles unveiled the official poster for Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 and it looks frickin’ awesome!! Check it out…

Still can’t believe that I’m finally getting to go to Butt-Numb-A-Thon this year. After everything that has happened going as far back as the summer of 2006, and especially the past several months… I can’t help but feel like maybe this is a sign that things are looking up. You just gotta have faith, folks. As a highly respected philosopher once put it: “faith manages” (and props to whoever can spot where that came from :-P).

I had a crazy thought the other night: might one of the big movies that we’ll see premiered at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 possibly be… Cloverfield?!? Dunno. I’m still hoping that we’ll get to see Mother, Jugs & Speed ‘cuz that’s the absolutely perfect movie for a Butt-Numb-A-Thon crowd. Even more than those two though, I’m praying ...

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I’ve been able to share the good news with enough people on this end, so I might as well post it here too (especially since I promised that I would on the post about yesterday’s wedding/car crash)…

Yesterday morning, around 4:30 a.m., I discovered that I made the list to attend this year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin, Texas!

What is Butt-Numb-A-Thon? It’s an annual film festival in Austin, sponsored by the website Ain’t It Cool News and hosted by site creator Harry Knowles (and here is it’s entry on Wikipedia). It’s a 24-hour long (sometimes a bit more) movie event, and this will be the ninth one ever since Harry started it in 1999. The whole thing is a neat fund-raiser that supports stuff for children. Butt-Numb-A-Thon used to be held at the now-legendary original Alamo Drafthouse. This will be the first one held at the new Alamo Drafthouse ...

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