It takes a lot to make me sympathize with  arms dealers, especially the ruthless and pure evil ones, but Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s relentlessly whimsical and quirky Micmacs very nearly succeeds. The movie opens promisingly enough, with a beautifully shot (by Tetsuo Nagata) prologue high in style and speed. As a child Bazil is effectively orphaned when his soldier father is killed in war and his mother driven mad by grief.

The bad luck continues for the adult Bazil (played by Dany Boon), when a stray bullet plants itself in his forehead in such a way as to be unremoveable. Bazil subsequently loses job and home and falls into a quaint period of homelessness that is a loving homage to Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, and acts, in retrospect, almost as an idyll before the high energy escapades to come.

The idyll comes to an end when Bazil is adopted into a motley “family” of strenuously eccentric misfits, a veritable Coney Island freak show of oddball skills and personalities who live peaceably in one of those hyper-elaborate Mad Max/Matrix/Terry Gilliamesque junkyard baroque / steampunk fantasias. It looks exactly as  though it was created over many months of hard labor by an army of movie set dressers, and no doubt was.

Soon enough Bazil learns that the land mine that killed his father and the bullet that shattered his head were produced by rival arms manufacturers whose gothic headquarters—holy cinematic coincidence!—just happen to be located across the street from each other. Thus he and the rest of the Micmac family—having, apparently, absolutely nothing else to do with their days but invent wind-up Rube Goldberg toys from junkyard bits and pieces—embark on a shaggy dog campaign of revenge… and this time, it’s personal.

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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.