Wi it matters

"Nerd alert" in Austin: SXSW Interactive searches for the Web's next big thing

Greetings from Austin! Over the next few days, I’m going to take you deep into what some would call ‘The Woodstock of Interactive Media’ – SXSW Interactive.

I’m sure some of you are saying to yourselves, "SXSW Interactive? What the heck is that? I thought SXSW was all about music."

It was.

SXSW was created in 1987 to fill the Austin bars left empty by University of Texas students who bolted town for spring break. In 1994, an interactive and film portion were added to the schedule. All three have since grown to worldwide acclaim.

Are you still a relative newcomer to Twitter? It broke here three years ago. It just took a little while until Oprah heard about it.

Today through Tuesday, parts of Austin will be overrun by nerds of all shapes and sizes. Arriving from all over the world, they will try to absorb as many cutting-edge ideas as they can. Although they speak their own language and dress in T-shirts with diagrams of the caffeine molecule, they pose no threat to our way of life. For the next five days, the future inventors of tools like Twitter and Facebook are here to find the next big thing, network with other geeks and maybe even hook up — all the while trying to out ironic each other.

I’m pretty excited about some of the panels and speakers this year. Depending on your level of interest in all things web, SXSWi has crafted a great lineup to suit everyone’s needs. There’s stuff for the uber-geeks, stuff for the geek at heart, stuff for Mad Men fans and even stuff for fans of old adult film stars.

Below are just some of the interesting panels that SXSWi 2010 has to offer

Danah Boyd’s Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity

Sound Unbound with DJ Spooky

Big Brother in Your Brain: Neuroscience & Marketing

Nina Hartley: Porn Star, Sex Educator, Social Networker (I’m not sure who she is (wink) but heck of a title if you ask me)

Rules of BrandFiction from Twittering MadMen(@BettyDraper and @Roger_Sterling!!)

Jaron Lanier Presentation

A conference of this magnitude wouldn’t be complete without some really big parties. With companies like Facebook, Digg and Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser, in town you know there are going to be some cool things happening.

Diggnation is taking over Stubbs Saturday night with a live performance from the NYC band The Walkmen. Sunday it's all about the Houston/California connection with the Kirtsy/Alltop party at Allen's Boots, co-sponsored by CultureMap. Later that night, PBS is also hosting a party at the Austin City Limits Studios. Monday brings another Houston/Culture Map party – Houston@SXSW.

I’m pretty excited about this one, It will be a chance to hang out with all my Houston geeks. After that is the Do512.com party featuring Mike Relm. Of course these are just a small sample of the bashes going on, you can find the official SXSW parties here.

The great thing about SXSWi is the wealth of content to soak up while you’re here. As soon as you arrive in Austin, the schedule you spent hours creating to fill your time gets thrown out the window. That amazing panel you just had to get to doesn’t seem nearly as important as the conversation you're having with a complete stranger or leaving early to watch the spectacle that is Dorkbot.

The point is, if you think you’re missing something, you aren’t. This conference is a share-and-share-alike environment. It's nerds talking to nerds in their own element. No one makes fun of them and they all understand each other. They are here to learn and use that knowledge to build the next big thing.

Sure, we might look funny and wear shirts with inside jokes on them but as Bill Gates once said "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

Follow Jason McElweenie on Twitter @deneyterrio.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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