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Let's talk about me for a while, shall we?

Last December I began going to Philadelphia for press screenings - seeing, among others, Brokeback Mountain, The New World and King Kong - but ya know what...Philadelphia is a dead city. So my next logical step - especially considering my desire to pack up the wife and three cats and head up there - was to go to New York. Home of the Yankees (currently sitting atop the AL East by a half a game by the way) and pretty much anything else you could ever want.

Well now it is my new stomping ground for press screenings. My first such screening was Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times (his best film since Flowers of Shanghai) at the IFC Center. This past Thursday I discovered the Magno Review house (just off of Times Square). It is a wonderful place. All the critics hang out there. There are two theatres and a lounge overlooking 50th street. It has the potential of being my very own Algonquin Round Table, but I suppose I am romanticizing the whole thing a bit too much.

My main point is, that I am being added to all the invite lists for NYC screenings - thanks to some online diligence and the help of people such as Brad Balfour, the editor of timessquare.com, where I might have some of my reviews published in the near future - albeit in a somewhat dumbed-down version - I do tend to get rather obscurantist (that was how I was described recently). So let the fun begin. Next Thursday I'll be seeing Les Temps qui changent (Changing Times), the first film in over twenty-five years to pair Deneuve and Depardieu, and Vers le sud (Heading South), the new film by Laurent Cantet.

Meanwhile, my reviews are now coming at an alarming rapidity and I am at work on several essays (for hopeful publication in Film Comment, Film Quarterly and some other outlets) and also at work on my first book (about Béla Tarr). It looks as if my life as a critique/essayist is swimming along rather smoothly.

My goal? I want to be living in New York (with my lovely Poetess wife and three cute-as-kittens cats) and working as a film critic, Essayist + Historian full time (without having to have a "day job" like now) by my fortieth birthday. My fortieth birthday? July 2, 2007.

Well, enough about me. Go out there and rent a movie. My suggestion: Andrei Rublev.