Austin is home to some great festivals and other events. From SXSX to Fantastic Fest the town certainly has more than its share of pop culture events. Another event coming up is the Austin Comic Con which starts this Friday and goes through Sunday at the Austin Convention Center.

The event features speakers such as writer/director Tim McCanlies, Harry Knowles, Bionic folk Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner, Billy Dee Williams, Walter Koenig, comic art superstar Joe Madura and Buffy’s Clare Kramer and Nicholas Brendon. For more info, check out all the details in this full press release for the event.

Celebrity Q&A panels, Film Screenings, “Drink & Draw” and Costume Parade highlight Austin Comic Con This Week
Austin Film Festival Screenwriters Panel, Artist Panels, Masquerade Ball and AMC’s Walking Dead Episode Preview Also Set

NEW YORK and AUSTIN, Texas—November 10, 2010 – A wide variety of entertaining and informative panels and comic industry sessions are among the programming offerings scheduled at Wizard World Austin Comic Con, this Friday through Sunday at the Austin Convention Center. Featured panels include Austin-based heroes such as screenwriter and director Tim McCanlies, film critic and pop culture guru Harry Knowles and filmmaker-wunderkind Emily Hagins. Austin Comic Con is sponsored by Austin Books & Comics, Alamo Drafthouse, Austin Chronicle, 101X FM and Dragon’s Lair.

Day programming begins on Friday with the popular “Wizard Art School,” as noted Marvel and DC artist Greg Horn leads a discussion on digital art, beginning at 2 p.m. in Room 9. Indy art sensations Rob Guillory (Chew) and Kody Chamberlain (Sweets) discuss their breakout Image hits in “The Art of Chew and Sweets” at 3 p.m. in the same room. Also at 3, in Room 8, “The Incredible Hulk,” Lou Ferrigno, sits down for an exclusive Q&A about the classic show and his status as a pop culture icon. At 4, the Women of Wrestling take the stage, as Torrie Wilson, Amy Dumas, Lisa Marie Varon, Christy Hemme and Jackie Haas discuss their special role in the sport of wrestling, in Room 8.

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Late yesterday the SXSW Fim Festival, which runs from March 12-20 in Austin, TX, announced the full lineup of films that will be screening at this year’s event. And baby, it’s quite a list. Mixing big name films with intimate indie gems, the sheer number of films and the vast array of talented filmmakers is sure to be a hit with attendees and critics alike.

This lineup includes premieres of studio films such as Universal’s MacGruber, Lionsgate’s teen superhero actioneer Kick-Ass and smaller films like Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine. With so many films to watch, it will be very difficult to find time to seem them all during the events nine days. But hell, we’re going to try.

For more on the SXSW lineup and these films and everything related to the event, be sure to visit the official SXSW site. The complete press release announcing the lineup follows:

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival is thrilled to announce the complete features lineup for this year’s Festival, March 12 – 20, 2010 in Austin, Texas. Over the course of nine days, 119 features will screen at the festival, with 55 of those having their world premieres at SXSW 2010. These films were selected from a record 1,572 feature-length film submissions composed of 1,206 U.S. and 366 international feature-length films.

Among the major films added to the lineup are: Rogue’s MacGruber, from director Jorma Taccone, Jay & Mark Duplass’ Cyrus, Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice, Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart, Alexandre O. Philippe’s The People vs. George Lucas, Shane Meadows’ Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ American: The Bill Hicks Story, Mike Woolf’s Man on A Mission, Jacob Hatley’s Ain’t In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm, Mark Landsman’s Thunder Soul, Daniel Stamm’s Cotton, Chris D’Arienzo’s BARRY MUNDAY, and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways.

They join previously announced films such as Opening Night film Kick-Ass, as well as narrative features Cold Weather and Elektra Luxx, and documentaries Hubble 3D, Lemmy, SATURDAY NIGHT and The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights.

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With it’s common threads of obsession and neckwear, the Harry Knowles-hosted birthday bash was also host to a number of movie premieres and rare to find films this year. First was the coup of getting Avatar screened in 3-D, which garnered praise from most of the audience of guests and film critics. Knowles was also able to get a copy of Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese’s latest which has been pushed back until next year.

About this film, according to Anne Thompson’s blog, a viewer said: “It’s a version of Angel Heart without The Devil…I figured it out a third of the way through.” I still hold out that it’ll blow me away, much like it seemed to “Head Geek” Knowles, who called it a “brilliant movie.”

But apparently, the movie that overshadowed them all was Matthew Vaughn’s comic book adaptation Kick-Ass, which is about people (mostly kids) who put on superhero costumes, fight crime, get beat up, and a 10 year old that kills lots of people. Knowles compared it to John Woo’s Hard Boiled, only calling it “far more entertaining than that though, creating many iconic and thoroughly mind blowing sequences.”

Some of the other interesting movies to screen at the event were the Scorsese-suggested The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger’s classic about ballet; Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s newest, Micmacs, which is labeled as “satire on the world arms trade” and, finally a sneak peak at the Iron Man 2 trailer. The full list, and Knowles’ description of how all the films fit together, can be found on Ain’t It Cool’s website.

Film festivals are often a conumdrum for me because I sometimes wonder how they get started and, more to the point, who picks the films that get shown at them. My problem is that the films selected for many of the festivals don’t usually seem all that appealing (at least to me) and are often a collection of “art for art’s sake” films overwhelmed by their own sense of self-importance.

Fortunately, I don’t have this problem with the Fantastic Fest in Austin, which runs from September 24th to October 1st. The films selected for this festival represent an eclectic mix of genres and filmmakers and what I consider to be some of the most interesting, innovative and creative films being produced today. Sure, they’re not all potential Hollywood blockbusters, nor are they for everyone, but they are all pretty much guaranteed to be interesting, entertaining and in their own way, artistic and provocative. Plus, they’re just so darn fun to watch.

Besides, any festival that kicks off with Director Jared Hess’s (Napoleon Dynamite) film Gentlemen Broncos, starring Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords fame, is aces in my book.

Here’s the first list of the films announced today that will be showcased at this years Fantastic Fest:

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