Wrap Your Legs Around These Velvet Rims and Strap Your Hands Across My Engine 31

I infer from the official graphic there will be trampolines. I am pro-trampoline.​

Tomorrow morning I will fly to Louisville, Kentucky to help cover the final, three-day "industry weekend" of the Humana Festival for New American Plays. I'll be doing this as part of Engine 31, a pop-up newsroom.  (Sasha Anawalt, the "motherfucker who found[ed] this place -- Sir"*, answers your eminently reasonable questions about what that is and who pays for it here; thank you for asking.)  I'm excited to be a part of it, and to see and work with my old friends Sasha, Michael Phillips, Rebecca Haithcoat and Doug McLennan.  And nearly as excited to meet the other seven journalists who're part of this thing.  Follow along at Engine 31, and/or via Twitter @enginethirtyone.

I am reliably informed there will also be some basketball thing happening.

*Sasha is not actually an actual motherfucker; she is in fact delightful. I am merely quoting Jessica Chastain's character from the movie Zero Dark Thirty here, as is only sensible and appropriate when discussing a theater festival. Engine 31 contributor Michael Phillips, whose name I used as an FCC-permitted substitute for "motherfucker" on the radio once, but who is also not one, usually, called ZDT the best film of 2012, so context.

Another Tango in Paris After That Supposedly Last One: Simon Killer, reviewed.

Brady Corbet & Mati Diop in Simon KIller.​

My review of Simon Killer, writer/director Antonio Campos's second feature film, is in the Village Voice today. Total Recall joke deleted, but the Blow-Up and Taxi Driver and Rushmore allusions (and the Rush Hour 3 joke!) remain. Film critics are terrible people. Read it here.

That said, I'm about to see one of my favorite specimens of that loathsome breed, Mr. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Filmspotting. Tomorrow I'm off to Louisville, Kentucky, where Phillips and I will both be covering the final weekend of the Humana Festival of New American Plays as part of Engine 31 -- theater journalism's equivalent of The Avengers, basically. More on that a little later.