Staying Ahead of the Curve...For Once

Today marks the start of a very exciting couple of weeks.

I've never really been able to invest in a film festival before, due to a combination of location (never living in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles...Cannes) and lack of money (to get to those places, or to invest in Boston's one great festival, the Independent Film Festival of Boston). This year, however, I said "screw it!" and bought six tickets to six movies playing at the Portland International Film Festival.

So tonight I'm off to see The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, which has been playing at and random exhibitions seemingly nonstop for the last two years. Tomorrow, I'll be catching a documentary that premiered in Boston, but which work prevented me from attending, called For the Love of Movies. Next weekend is absolutely jam-packed, with a three-movie stint on Saturday of Waking Sleeping Beauty, Everyone Else, and the movie I'm looking forward to most of all, Alain Resnais' Wild Grass. I'll be cooling down the following day with Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'Accuse. Naturally, although these have all played at one festival or another, they've yet to see proper distribution, so it all feels very exclusive and exciting.

And SOMEHOW, I'm determined to work in The White Ribbon, The Last Station, and Shutter Island next weekend.

This all, in addition to the recent OnDemand options of Fish Tank, the Red Riding trilogy, Police, Adjective, all of which I'll finally be capitalizing on. And then on February 26th, A Town Called Panic plays at the Hollywood Theatre. And...maybe Polanski's The Ghost Writer will come out here soon? Please?

Living in Portland makes it tough a lot of the time to see the movies you want to see when you want to see them, but when they all pile up in such a satisfying manner (a month that has new films by Alain Resnais, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Michael Haneke...is it November already?), it's hard to get too down about it.

Reviews, of course, forthcoming. But for now I am downright ecstatic.