Sunday, November 11, 2012

Sunday Nightcap 11/11/12

As DOC NYC, the NYC Horror Film Festival and BAM Puppet in film series all wind down I’m hoping that much of the craziness here at Unseen will wind down as well. As you’ve no doubt seen we’ve been providing you with a steady diet of the films that have been on the New York Festival circuit. It’s been a killer proposition since there are too many films and too few of us (indeed my efforts to enlist correspondents outside of those in the sidebar have result in non-reports on the Gold Coast Film Festival they saw films, liked them, but have been unable to write anything on them)

As the festival season and the year begin to come to a close I’m going to make a couple of quick announcements.

First despite my best efforts to try and have timely coverage of films currently in theaters, I’m going to not be as active in my pursuit of stuff. Yes I’ll report on anything I see that I think you should know about and I’ll still be reporting on stuff where press screenings match my schedule but I can’t be as actively pursuing stuff as I have in the last few months. The problem is I work a day job and I can’t be running into Manhattan to see much of the stuff being tossed my way, my schedule won’t allow it.

Instead I’m going to try and concentrate Unseen’s efforts on the film festivals that play in and around New York. I think this is our strength since with few exceptions there aren’t as many outlets who wade into a festival and really look at the films that are playing. If you look at festivals such as Tribeca, The New York Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York International Children’s Film Festival, Japan Cuts and Korean American Film Festival New York you’ll see that we reported on well over three quarters of the films screened. With other festivals, like DOC NYC or Rendezvous with French Cinema or some of the others you’ll see we made a good dent in the number of titles. When we can concentrate our efforts into a short period of time we do best. I also think it works more toward keeping with our mandate of highlighting films people are not aware of.

Do look for coverage of Lincoln Center’s Romanian film series as well as their Spanish film series as well as several other series that will be appearing over the next few weeks.

Next I wanted to say is that once the New Year comes look for the semi-carefully planned weeks and weekends to become less and less frequent. Yes I’m preparing reviews for your entertainment, but I’m finding it harder and harder to group things together. I had tentative plans into February but other than the odd week here and there I was finding I was stuck with parts of weeks and not complete ones. Find I’m constantly moving things around to cover holes. I have solid plans into the first week of January and I have Chinese New Year penciled in but other than that I have reviews but no groupings.

I've also noticed that I've reviewed a good number films as capsule reviews but no one really has paid them any mind, so starting in January I'm going to start breaking the collected posts apart and reposting them as bonus reviews. I'm doing this because there are some really good films locked in those posts and no one is noticing them.

So much for the state of things onward and upward...

I know that Chocko wrote up Shepard and Dark on Tuesday but I just wanted to slip in couple of quick words on the film of my own (which is all I can put together concerning the great film)

In the two plus weeks since I saw the film it, like the Tomi Ungerer film, has not left me. The film and it’s portrait of a long standing friendship has haunted me. Never have I seen a film show so clearly the ebb and flow of a relationship. It’s one of the best films on friendship I’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the most important ones as well.

The film is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of looking back too long and too hard. Its clear from how events play out that some people should not look back at the way things were via say letters but instead live in the present with misremembered memories.

I don’t know what the status of the film is past the DOC NYC festival, I seem to recall hearing that the film may still not have a distributor, so it’s vital that you get to the IFC Center tomorrow and see the film when it plays in the afternoon.

See the film.


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From  ESPN's E:60 The story of a little boy with progeria who just wants to play baseball

The trailer for Wong Kar Wai's Grandmasters

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