A Sunday Piece

 

Greetings to all.

As we enter April I need to take a couple of minutes to talk about the state of things at Unseen Films and yours truly.

First up I need to say another HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Bully’s best buddy and Randi’s hubby John. He celebrated another year on the planet by dressing up as Ben Grim and running up and down Yancy Street rescuing cats.

As some of you know a couple weeks back my computer crashed. It has something to do with the way the computer boots up. Its being worked on, however odds are I will need to get a new one sooner than later. As of right now I am working on a loaner computer, which presents it’s own challenges.

One of the challenges has been corrected and I am back on Twitter. Its a small thing in the course of things but I found that non-fest period the ability to post reviews does keep the readership up.

Adding into all of this are issues with the day job. The short version of the story is that my office only has a tiny fraction of the people needed to do the work. We are well past the point where if one person is out it causes a problem  into there is a problem and if anyone is out we are screwed.  The tension is such that I go home at night and stare at the walls and watch TV shows I don’t have to do anything with.  Things are in motion to fix the situation but for now I, like everyone in my office ,is burnt.

Adding to the sense of being burnt is the fact that the first three months of this year have overwhelmed me movie wise. As the we begin the fourth month of the year we’ve already covered more films in 2022 than we would have had we only reported on one a day.  We are already doing a killer pace and look to be covering a record amount of films. I don’t think there is going to be an avalanche of festival coverage this month so I should be able to recover before Tribeca kicks in at the end of May and June.

Right now I am doing the best I can with what I got, but there is a chance that I will be dipping into the preprogrammed coverage of older titles for some of this month. Then again I am hoping to have some pieces from Ariela and some other members of the Unseen Family, including the recently joined Reid Ramsey (Reid’s first piece on the New Richard Linklater film Apollo 10 ½  can be found here). 

Speaking of Tribeca, as this posts Liz Whittemore and I are trying to work out  pooling our coverage for Tribeca.

I should also mention that we will be having coverage of New Directors New Films at the end of the month. I have seen several of their offerings and the festival is exactly precisely what you'd expect from the annual team up of The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.  

There will also be coverage of a few other fests including HOT DOCS, which appears to be running a massive amount of good films from other fests such as Sundance and DOC NYC.

AND I will be covering this spring's Monsterama drive in Fest at the Riverside Drive in by Pittsburgh.  Coverage will include a report on the recently moved Living Dead museum which is at the Monroeville Mall (where Dawn of the Dead was filmed)

In the you probably don't care category, I’m trying to sort out if it’s do able to do the Living Dead Weekend at the mall since it’s the first weekend of Tribeca (details here)

I'm also looking to do more coverage of classic drive in fests. If you know of any let me know (I am aware of the Mahoning Circle Drive ins.)

For the two of you wondering I did see some of the Oscars and I was less than impressed. I thought the acceptance speeches were fine but pretty much everything else was awful. (The In Memoria was WTF especially with the note to check the website for more passings).  The Will Smith /Chris Rock dust up was just a low point in a bad show that had me mumbling "oh my god" repeatedly.

Pretty much all of the awards went to winners who had the best PR. I say that despite being delighted CODA and QUEEN OF BASKETBALL won. This year the awards went to the films/performers (except for Chastain)  where the producers or the actors pushed the hardest to win (Especially Will Smith- who did what he had to get an Oscar for his worst performance-sorry, not sorry- I would have been happy with him winning for any other film except this one)

For now that's it. hopefully I can swing back to doing a regular nightcap cap piece soon, and pick up on the filmmakers lists which are growing despite my not publishing the next installment