Home Film Festivals

A few years ago my dot com died, along with many others, and I found myself with a confluence of events that led to something of an ongoing home film festival in my living room.

First, I had some cash, second, I had a new, large screen TV that quite literally, while only modest by current standards, nonetheless rivals a theater experience. Third, I lived right around the block from the Carolina Theatre's unusual video store, stocked with 4,000 foreign, classic, indie, and cult movies.

Not to mention access to all that gooey, funky, weird stuff I also love.

Although I've written film criticism and features for as long as I've been a journalist (there were dinosaurs in the backyard when I started), I've always done other things as a primary job. Writing about technology for OMNI (and currently at Local Tech Wire , writing about food, politics, music, business and all the assorted other topics a working journalist often has to cover, especially one with a penchant for starting new publications. Anyway, I felt the need to fill in the gaps in my film education.

That confluence of events made it possible for me to do that at a clip of three movies a day for months, then at a somewhat slower pace over the next two years (from 2001 until the present). The collection, which included most of the French and Italian major film makers, a good selection of Japanese, Russian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hong Kong, Chinese, and others foreign films, cult fare and indies (all of Abel Ferrara, for instance) was constantly on special (like five for the price of two and you could keep them a while). Then, even better, the local library bought the entire collection, which I've continued to watch (and rewatch) for years now.

I supplemented viewing all of Fellini, Kurosawa, Truffaut, the first ten Godards, Pasolini, Tartovski, Renais, Almodovar, Bunuel (what a treasure trove), by renting dvds, taping wonderful digital prints off of TCM (Metropolis, M, Scorcesse's My Voyage to Italy, and much, much more) and going to film festivals.

At the same time, I read director biographies and autobios, critics from Bazin to bizarre Internet fanatics, including huge chunks of what Ebert (there's a reason that man won the Pulizer for film criticism), Agee, Kauffman, Kael, Sarris, Godard, Truffaut. I read books mulitple books on the major directors, foreign and American.

And I'm still at it. In fact, I'll be doing a Home Film Fests column on my new bestfilmfests Web site eventually and may syndicate it elsewhere or do pieces of it as separate articles.

Local Tech Wire


Now I'm starting a new Web site, Best Filmfests.com, , to more fully endulge my passion for watching -- and writing about -- films.

C'mon over and join us.

Allan