The festival gets rolling in a big way on Saturday, October 27, with Silver Linings Playbook at Trustees Theater at 7:30 p.m., and then a slew of films on Sunday at both Trustees and the Lucas. Highlights include Hairspray at 2:30, Flight with Denzel Washington at 7, and Violet & Daisy at 9:30, followed by a Q&A with director Geoffrey Fletcher and actor James Gandolfini. (The film clocks in at just over two hours, so that’s going to be a pretty late night.)

And it’s Halloween weekend.

The 31st isn’t until Wednesday of next week, but parties abound — Halloween is a big deal in Savannah.

There will be plenty of costumed folks wandering downtown, especially on Congress Street near where The Jinx hosts the reappearance of psychedelic rockers GAM and the annual blood wrestling. It’s always a decadent time. Click here for more.

And there’s plenty more music on Saturday with Savannah’s first Graveface Fest, featuring Black Moth Super Rainbow, CUSSES, and a slew of other acts.

Click here for my post with clips of all the Graveface Fest performers. Savannah Morning News has coverage here and Connect Savannah here.

I honestly don’t know which acts I’ll end up catching on Saturday night, but I’m planning to start my music weekend on Thursday evening with in-store acoustic sets by up-and-coming Savannah bands Triathalon and The Casket Girls at Marc Jacobs on Broughton Street during the book signing for illustrator and album artist William Schaff‘s new book From Black Sheep Boys to Bill Collectors. That 5-7 p.m. event has been organized by Graveface Fest and will be the last chance to buy discounted tickets for Saturday.

There’s also tons of good music around town on Friday, but I’ll likely end up at Les Racquet at Live Wire Music Hall. Click here for pics and clips.

Sunday also features not one but two food festivals. I will definitely have lunch at the 24th annual Shalom Y’all Jewish Food Festival, so I’m not sure if I’ll make it to Daffin Park for the Savannah Food Day Festival. (Temple Mickve Israel has had the Jewish food fest on that Sunday for many years, so I hope that next year the organizers of the newer Food Day will find an alternate weekend — or at least an alternate day.)

I could go on and on about all the other events lined up for the weekend.

Just a note to those hoping to launch new ventures on the weekend closest to Halloween and to those hoping to get exhaustive press coverage even though they’re up against a huge array of other offerings: there are 51 other weekends during the year that you might want to consider.

Actors Matt Dillon, Diane Lane and Michelle Monaghan and writer/director Geoffrey Fletcher will receive awards at the 15th annual Savannah Film Festival, organizers announced today.

Actor James Gandolfini of “The Sopranos” fame and Christy Turlington Burns, a film director and former supermodel best known for representing Calvin Klein from 1987 to 2007, also will attend.

Gandolfini will be in Savannah to support his film “Violet & Daisy,” which was written by Fletcher.

There’s much more in the article, but I couldn’t get past Dillon and Lane. Rumble Fish!! The Outsiders!!

Lane and Dillon were both under 20 when those youth-charged adaptations of S.E. Hinton novels were released. I sure hope that the SCAD-sponsored festival will feature special screenings of one or both of those teen classics. (If “classic” is the right word.)

I’ll admit that I didn’t like Crash much — the film Dillon received an Academy Award nomination for — but I thought he was great in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy.

Anyway, there’s much more in Linda Sickler’s SMN article.

And for the heck of it, the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, in which you can also see Savannah native Diana Scarwid: