We love the short subjects here at the Screengrab, especially once we've hit the wall about four or five days into SXSW. While it may take four hours or more to get through a double feature at the Paramount, we can burn through a couple of shorts in less than half an hour, which really frees up the drinking time. And we're especially grateful if they're conceived and executed as well as Thompson and A. Effect.

Mike Ott and Jason Tippet are both graduates of the California Institute for the Arts (Ott was actually Tippet's first film teacher), and both had their latest shorts accepted to this year's SXSW. Tippet's Thompson - his CalArts thesis film and the winner of the SXSW Jury Award for Best Reel Short (that is, any short film that doesn't fall into the Animated or Experimental categories) - is a micro-documentary about Newhall, California high school senior Matt Thompson and his buddy Ryan Adres. Some would describe them as troubled kids; Matt has been arrested twice, and Ryan was once expelled for calling in a bomb threat. (It was all a big misunderstanding, of course.) That's not how they come across in Tippet's short but sweet portrait of their friendship in the twilight of their teenage years, trying to deal with small town life after outgrowing the go-carts and other amusements of their youth. In the brief time we spend with them, both Thompson and Adres make indelible impressions.

A. Effect isn't a documentary, but it uses semi-improvised naturalism to sketch a couple of characters who could be Thompson and Adres a few years down the road. In my review of another SXSW movie the other day, I made a disparaging comment about a character reciting the Taxi Driver "You talkin' to me?" bit for the bazillionth time, but lo and behold, Ott manages to do something fresh with it here, as a community college student uses Travis Bickle's mirror rant as a monologue in his acting class. It doesn't go well, as his classmates are only too happy to inform him, but it's a masterpiece compared to his buddy's attempt to meld Jerry Maguire and Meat Loaf into his own monologue mash-up. Both guys are trying to impress the same girl with their valiant efforts at saying something intelligible about Scorsese or Brecht, and the result is a very funny spin on the artist's eternal struggle for acceptance.

(Both shorts screen tonight as part of the Reel Shorts 3 program at 7:30 pm, Alamo South)