Features
The year of 2004 brought us many things cinematically. We were treated to two films (The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11) that brought enormous controversy with them for different reasons, yet both ended up making huge money at the box office. Documentaries took an even bigger jump towards becoming accepted by the mainstream media.
By the 6 day marker of the film festival last year, things were getting way too crazy for me to handle. I wasn't sleeping at all, I was stressed out beyond belief, and I had gotten sick and felt as though the end was near.
Short films are different than feature length movies in many ways. Throughout the year, the only real venue to see them is at various film festivals throughout the world or on specialty cable channels like Bravo or Showcase, who devote air time in between feature films and other television series to their airing.
Traditionally, the new television season comes the Monday after the Emmy telecast. But in recent years, networks have begun rolling their new seasons out before the Emmys have even aired. Now this season, it seems that networks have no idea when to debut new shows.
As the film festival entered its second week and I entered about day five or six of minimal sleeping, I'd seen far too many movies, and the location at which I live began to seem a distant memory, I took a step back.
Okay, if you were to ask me last week how many movies I planned to see at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, lovingly referred to as VIFF by film geeks young and old, then I would have told you I had a tentative schedule of nearly 50 ready and lined up.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas! All right, I know what you're thinking. Have the movie studios finally lost it entirely and released Holiday movies in September? After all, it's only a matter of time before the holiday season extends back into the back-to-school shopping season.
It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since I wrote my introduction to last year's Vancouver International Film Festival. In fact, this year's festival -- which runs September 23rd through October 8th at the same four venues -- opens just two days shy of a complete calender year.
Those of you who regularly read my coverage on film will know that first and foremost I think of myself as a film critic and secondly as a film journalist. Although I've been approached to do various interviews and have had the opportunity to sit down and talk with a number of actors, actresses, writers, and directors, it's not often that I feel inspired enough to do just that.
Director Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a look back at how people of the 1940s and 1950s saw the future through comic books, pulp novels, and serials of the era.
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