Here’s a reasonably decent short from Ian Albinson for the opening of the SXSW Title Design Finalists Screening, which happened two nights ago at the Vimeo theater in the Austin Convention Center. He should have included more studio-era titles than just the obvious ones. (Wasn’t Gone With The Wind‘s huge horizontal title crawl fairly revolutionary for its time?) And the music by RJD2 doesn’t make it.

The Beaver “is not a mainstream movie,” director-costar Jodie Foster has told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway. “It does have mainstream actors, but that’s not this film.” One guesses/presumes she’s partly alluding to a third-act moment in which Mel Gibson‘s character forges a kind of bond with James Franco‘s in 127 Hours.

Foster has everyone’s admiration for standing by Gibson. “I know that he’s got troubles,” she says, “and he’s not saintly and [has] a big mouth, and he’ll do gross things your nephew would do. [But] when you love somebody you don’t just walk away from them when they’re struggling.”

“The performance he gave in this movie, I will always be grateful for. He brought a lifetime of pain to the character that we’ve been talking about for years, that I knew was part of his psyche and who he is. It’s part of him that is beautiful and that I want people to know, too. I can’t ever regret that.”

In his just-up “Rundown” column, MSN’s James Rocchi has singled out five South by Southwest films that he considers the “best of the fest — so far.” I haven’t seen two of them — Ben Wheatley‘s Kill List and Joe Cornish‘s Attack The Block. And I half-agree with Rocchi’s choice of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop — an agreeable, smoothly assembled profile-of-a-celebrity-comedian piece. But my eyeballs popped out of my head on coiled springs — boiinnnggg! — when I saw that Spencer Susser‘s Hesher and Evan Glodell‘s Bellflower were ranked third and fourth.

Joseph Gordon Levitt in Spencer Susser’s Hesher.

I saw Bellflower almost two months ago at Sundance, and my general reaction was split between pique, boredom and watch-checking agony. There’s nothing going on in this film of any interest or intrigue whatsoever…nothing. It’s a portrait of backwater hell and grungeballs and lackadaisical scrotum-scratching. No story tension, a handmade flamethrower, no pizazz, no humor (or at least not the kind I was able to laugh or even smirk at), crappy-looking photography (which Rocchi calls “darkly gorgeous”), no job or vision or income, godawful wardrobes, no rooting interest, no emotional involvement.

It farts out a stunningly lame story about two low-rent 30something guys nursing some asinine notion of a coming apocalypse and one of them, a slacker beardo played by Glodell, getting lucky with a nice girl and beginning some kind of serious relationship and then the ex-boyfriend wheedles his way back in, etc.

Rocchi calls Bellflower “one of the most strong and stylish critiques of the idiocy and confusion in young manhood since Fight Club” — not a chance.

Hesher does have a startling, amusing-at-times Joseph Gordon Levitt performance as a hair-trigger hippie Rasputin slash animal-house provocateur. And a very fierce and touching one from the tweener-aged Devin Brochu. And there’s some nicely twisted humor going on in the story of Levitt moving uninvited into Brochu’s San Fernando Valley home and gradually rousing him and his depressed dad (Rainn Wilson) out of a stupor-like depression over the death of Brochu’s mom. But Levitt’s numerous provocations seem to be more about fart-lighting improv and acting on whatever extreme-scuzzball instinct has popped into his (or Susser’s) head. It all kinda sorta of pays off at the end, but you have to endure a motherlode of WTF? consternation before this finally happens.

I also enjoyed/respected the performances by Natalie Portman, a financially struggling checkout girl whom Brochu befriends, and Piper Laurie, playing Brochu’s ailing grandmother and,as it turns out, the one character who seems to “get” Hesher/Levitt most of all. And Wilson’s catatonic dad (who delivers his second agonized-crying scene of the festival, after the one in Super) feels like truth every moment he’s on-screen.

Hesher is not shit — it has its own vision and personality and delivers a form of anarchic-idiot behavior that I’ve never quite seen or contemplated before — but to call it one of the five best of SXSW 2011? Better than Super and Source Code? Or Robbie Pickering‘s Natural Selection and/or Tristan Patterson‘s Dragonslayer, which won the top SXSW awards last night? Highly disputable.

Cindy Meehl‘s wise and winning Buck, winner of the 2011 Sundance Audience Award for Best Documentary, played yesterday afternoon at South by Southwest. It seems at first like a straightforward portrait of Buck Brannaman, a renowned horse-trainer who was the real-life inspiration for The Horse Whisperer (both the book and the film). But it gradually becomes more of a meditative heart-warmer about healing and parenting.

Like Brannaman himself, with whom I had an agreeable chat after yesterday’s screening, Buck has a spiritual, settled-down vibe.

At first I had a notion that Buck was just a nice emotional atmosphere film that didn’t have any wider echoes or implications, but I gradually began to see that it’s as much about healing humans as horses.

As it reveals more and more about Brannaman’s work and personal life, Buck passes along lessons about getting past childhood trauma and correcting parental errors and ways to heal…all that good stuff. The fact that youngish horses are the recipients of said therapy doesn’t obscure the fact that many if not most of Brannaman’s teachings apply to troubled kids and teens also, and for that matter (in theory at least) troubled adults.

Buck Brannaman, Buck director Cindy Meehl during our interview following yesterday afternoon’s screening.

Feeling unloved and ganged-up-upon and pressured isn’t a good thing for any man or beast. We all just need to chill and feel safe and unthreatened, and to not be so afraid of making a mistake that we can’t move. What I got from the film is that if all afraid, angry and unhappy people had someone like Brannaman to calm them down and steer them in healthier, more positive directions, the world would be a much calmer and better place.

The irony and ultimate lesson of Buck is that Brannaman was himself raised by a highly abusive and alcoholic dad. He and his older brother were adopted by foster parents when it became evident what they’d been going through, and that plus getting into horse training and discovering an exceptional empathy and communion with horses led to Buck’s becoming centered and secure and ending the abuse cycle. Brannaman is happily married and by all appearances a good dad.

Buck will open theatrically in June via Sundance Selects, and then become available via on Demand and cable and DVD/Bluray.

Meehl is from Redding, Connecticut, which is just a town or two away from my high-school stomping grounds in Wilton. So that was another soother.

It was 6:45 am in Austin, and instead of posting yesterday afternoon’s material before having to schlep down to the Austin Convention Center to snag a front-of-the-line pass for tonight’s screening of The Beaver, I watched the first 10-plus minutes of Sebastian Guiterrez‘s Girl Walks Into A Bar, which is now playing entirely free on YouTube. That indicates something, right?

For a film driven by a series of stories about people conning, scheming and playing each other, it didn’t seem half bad. Good but not-quite-Mamet-level repartee. Taut, brittle. Or at least, the opening scene with Carla Gugino and Zachary Quinto felt that way; ditto the pool-playing scene that followed.

Girl Walks Into A Bar was watched by more than 250,000 people last weekend, which is “more viewers than some of the ten biggest grossers from the 3.11.11 weekend,” according to the Wiki page.

“Gutierrez claimed at the South by Southwest Film Festival premiere of Elektra Luxx that Girl Walks Into a Bar is the first major motion picture with a cast of notable stars created exclusively for Web distribution.

“‘We want to prove that web distribution is a viable medium for theatrical quality movies which rely on story, characters and dialogue as opposed to special effects,” he said in a release. “For many reasons the theatrical indie landscape has changed drastically in the last few years, leaving many potential breakout hits without an audience. We are excited to break the rules of feature films by letting people watch our movie for free online.”

“Shangri-La Entertainment has entered into an agreement with YouTube and Lexus to present Girl Walks Into a Bar free, exclusively in the YouTube Screening Room, a platform designed to showcase top films from around the world, premiering March 11, 2011 at http://www.youtube.com/screeningroom. The presentation marks the first time a major motion picture was created exclusively for web distribution.

“With Girl Walks Into a Bar, the cast and crew came together to create something different – a high quality, really fun character-driven film that we could present to audiences for free using a new distribution model,” said Gutierrez. “We found great partners in Lexus and YouTube to support the film while providing us with the stage to draw the largest audience possible.”

The bottom line is that audiences generally don’t respect “free.” Obviously 250,000 viewers indicates interest and possibly good word-of-mouth, but there has to be some level of cost or difficulty in seeing a film, or it probably isn’t worth it. That, at least, is the thinking in my circles. Take The Beaver, for instance. A lot of time and effort have gone into being here in Austin for tonight’s showing, and more effort is still required.

Yesterday’s recording was a mess. First we couldn’t find a time that worked for Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and myself. Then the usual recording software didn’t work due to a Skype upgrade. And I forgot to bring my headphones to Austin so I was speaking from my cell as I walked down 6th and Congress and Lamar, etc. We discussed South by Southwest attractions and how some people wait until their 70s or 80s to announce that they’re gay or like to cross-dress. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

We all get things wrong, and we all have our pet ways of acknowledging error. Whenever I’ve screwed up over the last 30 years or so I’ve been saying “I made a mistake” the way Michael Caine says it in this scene from Get Carter (’71). The other Caine/Carter line I do reasonably well is “I would like…to stroke you.” I’m nowhere near Coogan and Brydon, of course, but who is?

The Win Win guys — director-cowriter Tom McCarthy, Alex Shafer, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, co-writer Joe Tiboni — took a bow after last night’s SXSW showing at the Paramount. Here, again, is my all-but-entirely positive 1.22 Sundance review. SXSW publicist Rebecca Feferman is at left in the red sweater. It opens on 3.18.

The other day Marshall Fine called Win Win “a delight…a movie that’s smart and emotionally honest about juggling the problems life sends you. It’s already at the top of my list as one of the year’s best.”

I ignored Rob Yulfo‘s 127 Hours Road Runner cartoon when it appeared two or three days ago because it’s way too late in the cycle. But when The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit linked to this, he got it wrong in the sub-copy by writing “beep beep.” The sound made by this legendary Chuck Jones creation is “meep meep.” Listen to it again — the “b” consonant has never been there.

I purposely never saw The Switch because of the mostly negative buzz, but this deleted scene, taken from the extras menu on the just-out DVD/Bluray, is rather well-written. (The script is by Allen Loeb.) And Todd Louiso, as always, is perfect.