Off to the Races

"My bags are packed, I'm ready to go." Whoa – wrong song. That's not me. No matter how much I hum the tune, it does no good. I'm running around like an ADD nutjob trying to get everything done in order to head out of town to the Toronto International Film Festival.

There are so many films opening here in Austin on a weekly basis that it's getting increasingly hard to see the forest through the trees anymore. It's not my imagination; the number of films released every year has been increasing of late – while the number of eyeballs in my head has remained the same and my supply of brain cells is ever-diminishing. And now it's off to the races to see how many of the 349 films from 55 countries playing in Toronto over the next 10 days (Sept. 6-15) I can catch. (Even if a body diligently attends five screenings a day, at most only a seventh of the offerings will have been sampled.) Yet it's a busman's holiday that I've come to love (I think I've been attending for the last 12 years). New for me this year, however, is that I've decided to join the 21st century, bite the technology bullet, and blog.

So stay tuned, and I'll write more about the individual films, what I'm excited about seeing, what disappoints, and the heart-breaking choices that must be made on a daily basis (if I go see this, it means that I can't go see that). But first I've got to get my weary butt on that plane out of Austin.