Thru 2/23, St Idiots Collective's You Are Pretty is about sex workers' struggles to find love within the harsh environs of a legal brothel. The yap about YAP is the megawatt heft behind it—the production is chock full of local luminaries. [tickets] // Thru 2/17, roving new kids NxNW Theatre are staging "wickedly funny" Five Women Wearing the Same Dress downtown at the Hideout. The titular characters do a little cussin' here, a little pot smokin' there, and cover topics with plenty of chops (religion, sexuality, AIDS). [tickets] ...

One big, serious film; one adventure doc; a couple soft life-changers; a Steve Carell comedy. All in all, a fine mix for the first real weekend of fall. Reservation Road: Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix star as a man who hits a boy with his car, and the father of that boy. Ruffalo's character feels the guilt grow as Phoenix slowly freaks out. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox are winning the World Series and the......

The start of the fall season on network television used to be a bigger deal before cable's summer original fare became so juicy and good. We admit we still get a little excited when we read about original ideas heading our way on the big networks. The crop of new shows starting this fall seems like more of the same (sadly), but there are some that don't follow type and deserve recommendation. Pushing Daisies, ABC,......

The complete schedule for the 14th annual Austin Film Festival has been announced, and it looks pretty amazing. 79 feature films and 98 shorts will screen over the course of eight days at various locations in Austin, beginning on October 11th with Brett Morgen’s much hyped docudrama Chicago 10, starring Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber and Jeffrey Wright. Jason Reitman's brilliant new comedy Juno (starring Ellen Page, Michael......

Austinite and UT grad Kelley Caleb Hunt was just selected as the winner of a national online storytelling contest, after submitting the hilarious video narrative above about his experience applying for an "international vegetable courier" gig. The contest--sponsored by TNT cable network, MySpace, and NYC nonprofit storytelling group The Moth--was judged by a panel that included actress Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) and author/humorist Andy Borowitz (The Borowitz Report). As the winning storytelling, Hunt......

Standing before thousands of screaming geeks at this weekend's 2006 San Diego Comic Con International, Quentin Tarantino announced the cast "Death Proof," one-half of a double-feature collaborative project entitled "Grindhouse" that he'll be working on with Austin director Robert Rodriquez. From wiki: A "grindhouse" is an American term for a theater that showed exploitation films; it is also used as an adjective to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres. While just......

M O N D A Y [3] film · "Bamako Chic"'s creator Maureen Gosling, a former Austin resident, is back in town hosting a special fundraising screening of "Blossoms of Fire" - her 16mm documentary film about the people of Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico - at Austin Studios. (7pm, map) music · 54 Seconds play Lucky Lounge (10pm) in-store · Billy Joe Shaver at Waterloo Records (5pm) film · aGLIFF runs through Saturday - check their......

If you are looking for a quiet night at home on the couch this week, you’ve got a large selection of new releases from which to pick. All of the following were released today (listed in order from best to worst, as we see fit) and are available at most of your major rental houses around town, but might we suggest Vulcan Video, Waterloo, I Luv Video, or Pedazo Chunk. Layer Cake: Guy Ritchie’s......

Even though the summer concert season is rapidly coming to an end, there were several major concert announcements this past week. The bad news is that Austin isn’t getting a lot of love these days, as most of these shows are an hour away. If you won’t be roasting yourself at ACL, My Chemical Romance will be playing in San Antonio on September 24th at Sunset Station. This great bill also includes the Alkaline......

No new releases to speak of this week. The only thing worth checking out is a Chimaira e-card which features three new tracks from Chimaira's upcoming self-titled album due August 9th on Roadrunner Records. The new tracks, "Nothing Remains," "Save Ourselves," and "Inside the Horror" showcase Chimaira's darker sound. Pre-orders made through Tower Records will be autographed by the band. Chimaira is currently on tour with The Sounds of the Underground and will be......

It's the night before Austinist embarks on our Spring Road Trip to the Coachella Music Festival in the California desert, and we've all but finalized our itinerary and list of distractions to keep our eyes off the road. Here's what we're taking along for the ride out and back: All those recent copies of New Yorker, The Nation, The Believer, Harper's, Saveur, Paste, and maybe even the piles of SXSW schwag that have been......