Hiatus

Starting today, ReelThoughts will go on a two week hiatus. This is to allow me to provide daily reports/updates from the Toronto International Film Festival. Those of you who like reading my daily output have nothing to worry about - I often write for as much as four hours a day while at the festival, so there's plenty of content to wade through. Updates will be daily from September 8 through 18. Some will go up in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some at night. It all depends on my schedule and how far ahead or behind I am. (I usually start falling behind after the first weekend.) In addition to writing about movies, I throw in a little color.

ReelThoughts will return on or around September 21. My current short list of topics includes: the new TV season, drive-ins, DVD region encoding (rant), movies giving images to music, and my Top 10 recent (1970 and later) soundtracks. Other subjects will undoubtedly tickle my imagination over the next two weeks.

Having a state-of-the-art laptop allows me to do more from the road than I was able to do as recently as three years ago. The hard drive has a copy of my entire ReelViews archive, so all I have to do is hook up to the broadband connection at the hotel and I'm off and running. Time, not technology, becomes the limitation. There are still only 24 hours in a day, and at least six have to be devoted to sleep or I will cease functioning before the festival is over. I won't be writing ReelThoughts entries for the next two weeks because there won't be time. New movie reviews will continue to appear, but those are of films I have seen (and reviewed) before leaving for Toronto. One of the reasons I never got to watch The Brothers Grimm is because my schedule was packed with September 9 & 16 releases. (Never fear, Gilliam fans: Tideland is on my Toronto schedule.)

So switch over to the daily Toronto journal starting tomorrow. It may not say "ReelThoughts," but it's pretty much the same thing.

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