Tomorrow I hit the streets of Austin, Texas for Cinema Blend’s second film festival of 2008, Austin’s annually awesome South By Southwest. In fact I’m already on the road, stopped over for the night an hour away from the capital of Texas in my sleepy, smallish hometown of Belton. We made our escape from Dallas earlier this afternoon, slipping out of town just as the year’s one and only big snow and ice storm descended on the poorly winterized metroplex. Snowflakes nipped at our heels all the way down I-35, as traffic reports spoke of slick roads and traffic jams mere miles behind us. We got out of town just in time.

Assuming Cinema Blend’s staff photographer (and Head Honcho wife) Leanne Cari and I make the rest of the way to the SXSW press office in the morning without skidding into a guardrail, the next few days on Cinema Blend will be filled with all kinds of festival goodness filed by an almost certain to be terminally exhausted me. To help you sort through the mess, in addition to showing up in our normal news feed I’ll be filing all of Cinema Blend SXSW coverage in our dedicated Film Festival channel. If you’ve got a thing for movies seen in Austin, then you might want to bookmark it right here.

On tap for my six days of festival going is a varied slate of indies and soon-to-be wide releases. The Apatow produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall will debut at SXSW, and I’m dying to see it. Harold & Kumar Go To Guantanom also gets a red carpet debut down on Congress at the Paramount, and I’ll be all over that like a stoner craving tasty little burgers. Note to self: Do not shout “Let’s burn this mutherfucker down!” in a crowded theater.

So you’ve been warned. Lock your browser in and follow along as I wander the streets of Austin bleary-eyed and almost certainly half-crazed. Will I revisit the homophobic pizzeria from last year? How long until the bats swarm out from under the bridge and feast on my entrails? Answers to those questions and more coming this week, when CB Does SXSW.