Wow, how a week as jusdt flown by. Now I’m way behind again with posts backing up just waiting to be written. But I have a relatively decent excuse. If you’ve happened to swing by here and paid any attention to my Twitterisms in the column to the left, you would have noticed a few mentions of a certain apartment that I was hoping to get. I hate apartment hunting (as I’ve mentioned here before), and as usual, this one was causing me my fair share of agita. Thankfully, the search is over: I saw a nice one bedroom in a part of Prospect Heights (for you non-New Yorkers, that’s still in Brooklyn) which I categorize as “Aaron’s preferred neighborhood”-adjacent. I can’t afford to live exactly where I want to live, but I got damn close this time, and in a surprisingly nice and relatively good-size apartment all for a relatively inexpensive (thanks rent stabilization) price.
Anyway, that’s why I’ve falled behind, so now I need to get back on the ball. And since today is Thursday, that also means the Tribeca email newsletter was released, this week making one very important announcement: The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival will be held April 23 through May 4, and we start accepting submissions on Sept. 10. That means, I start watching submissions not long after, I’m sure. The various deadlines start in November, and last year, November was when I started viewing. If you’re prepping a film you’d like to submit to the festival, while it doesn’t hurt you by any means to get it in right at the deadline, there is something to be said for the early bird. Although, with that said, if you’re submitting a film to the festival, make it the best you can and use the time you have to do it.
One of the very first films I received and watched last year was The King of Kong. I fell in love with it instantly, going in to the office after the weekend saying that we had to show it and how it would be perfect as part of the Tribeca/ESPN program we were developing. Not so long after, it was announced that the film would make its world premiere at Slamdance. Then it was also accepted at SXSW. But I was very happy when we were able to offer it a slot too.
I’m going to write a separate post about the movie itself: Picturehoues bought the rights to it out of Slamdance, and it opens tomorrow in New York and LA. The Picturehouse distribution deal was part of a larger deal so that New Line and HBO Films could make a dramatized version of thie documentary. The director Seth Gordon (who talks to Elvis Mitchell in a pretty interesting episode of “The Treatment”) will also be making the new narrative version. It should be a challenge because had this film not been a documentary, it would have seemed impossible to believe. But instead, The King of Kong is one of the most fun, fascinating and entertaining films you’ll see this year, and it’s much more than simply two guys playing arcade games. (It’s also much better than the Sundance entry Chasing Ghosts which, personally, I found fairly dull.) We have our own video interview with Seth on the Tribeca website.
And by the way, if a feature or short for the festival seems like too much work, and if even putting a seven-minute film for Tropfest@Tribeca seemed like too much work so you missed last week’s deadline, we have another contest that just opened, and there’s a good chance you already own all the equipment you already need. Nokia is sponsoring a “Slice of Life” competition in which people can shoot 30-second clips of virtually anything as long as they use their mobile phones. Click here for more info, details, rules, and all that other specific and important stuff.
Out of Focus 