Dreamwidth FAIL. add_me has been deleted, as well as ladylivin, who created the community and subscribed to my journal. (ETA: She deleted it, not DW.) Dreamwidth is painfully slow already. How can a website actually take off if active communities are being deleted out of the blue? You can't delete a community with over 150 members without either notifying its users first or handing power to someone else. How frustrating. I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK TO LIVEJOURNAL.

I got a Twitter account: troopingcrows! I'm going to add you guys who replied to my previous post. Let me know if you have one! :)

I want to apologize for my slow going at getting this journal fully running. I don't even have a profile yet, and I've been here for two weeks. Admittedly, I seriously considered going back to LiveJournal (already), but I refuse. I can't. I've been there for five years! I don't want to be there anymore! I'm going to stay here on Dreamwidth. My LJ has turned into so much nonsense; it's almost irreparable. I want to build this journal from the ground up, as I already have started, and make it my new home. I'm staying, I promise.

You can read my introductory post here (Part II coming soon), and if you haven't yet, please fill out my Get To Know You survey!

In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that I'll be importing most of the entries from my LJ film blog (miscfilm). I started it last month, and I love what I've posted there thus far. I don't want to give it up, so I'm going to write my updates in this journal. So when you see ten or so posts in a row, they're imports from another journal. Done! Entries are labeled with the tag "internet: miscfilm." I again apologize if you don't like film very much, but more updates that you're able to skim/skip is better than fewer updates! I hope that's OK. :)

• Jess

P.S. Does anyone have a Twitter? I'm seriously considering starting an account (Misha Collins is a huge selling point; he's so funny!), and I want to make sure I'll have friends to follow.

P.P.S. I changed the time stamp on this entry, so it's newer than the billion entries I imported in a row.

I attended opening weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival! It's the second film festival I've ever been (second after the Cleveland Int'l Film Festival). I wouldn't mind going to TFF again in the future, and I will consider overlapping any future visits to New York City with the festival, but I'd like to attend more festivals before returning to Tribeca (the Toronto Int'l Film Festival being at the top of my list, along with Sundance and SXSW). My sister and I saw three films: Tell-Tale, The House of the Devil, and Serious Moonlight, two of which are detailed here. The third film:

The House of the Devil, Saturday, April 24, 9:45 p.m. All the more shocking for being "based on true unexplained events," this suspenseful horror flick eschews the cheap scares of today's dime-a-dozen gorefests for the retro school of slow-burn terror. Set in the 1980's, The House of the Devil centers on cute college girl Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), who responds to an ad for a babysitter to land some quick cash for a new apartment. Her skeptical friend Megan (the charming Greta Gerwig) drives Samantha to a big, creaky Victorian house lorded over by a creepy elderly couple with mysterious plans to celebrate the night's rare lunar eclipse. Desperate for the money, Samantha agrees to stay even after she finds out there's no baby. Directed by Ti West.

Unsurprisingly, one of my big draws to Tribeca was its claim of star-studdedness. This was not true, at least not in my case. I saw two legitimate celebrities—both at the premiere of Tell-Tale on Friday evening. Tribeca is so spread out across Manhattan; there's no central location to the festival. (If there is, will you let me know where? I saw nor heard anything about it.) Tell-Tale played at the BMCC Tribeca PAC theater in Tribeca; The House of the Devil at an AMC theater somewhere in the East Village; and Serious Moonlight was in Chelsea! Each theater had a red carpet, but there wasn't really a place to hang out and be, like, "Oh, hey, there's Robert De Niro." Media photographers had full access to the red carpet, but the audience's only hope was the Q&A. I feel lame for celebrity-spotting, but I saw a buttload of stars when I camped for Saturday Night Live, most of them being TV personalities. I wanted movie stars! That being said, the CIFF got it right: It screens MORE films than Tribeca (almost 100 more), yet CIFF is held at one location (Tower City Cinemas in downtown Cleveland). I get that NYC is crowded and stuff, but why is it so damn spread out? Can it not be organized better?

They make it nearly impossible to see film after film after film in a row. You can't, unless you rent a taxi for the day. For example, both Tell-Tale and Serious Moonlight played in buildings that were one screen only. It would be fine for NYC residents because living in the city, one could attend a film a day without a problem. For a visitor like myself, it's much more difficult with limited time. TFF was envisioned to bring tourism and industry back to Tribeca. It took only eight years to extend way beyond that.

I had purchased tickets to Tell-Tale and Serious Moonlight, but we waited for rush tickets to The House of the Devil. The AMC theater and its staff were grossly unorganized, and I heard a volunteer at one point tell a moviegoer that "the chances of [him] getting in were very slim, so [he] should go to a club, get a drink, and kick back and relax instead." ARE YOU SERIOUS? (1) His chances were NOT slim. Every single person in the rush lines got into his/her respective film. What bullshit! (2) Does she really not understand the psyche of a moviegoer? If a person is standing in that line, they're staying in that motherfucking line until the film starts. Moviegoers don't give up and "go get a drink" instead. I'm willing to chalk it up to the heat, which was well over 80°F, but much of the staff I encountered was snippy. I promise to stop mentioning CIFF, but it has a much more welcoming, calm, and personal atmosphere. I truly felt apart of a moviegoer community when I stood in line, sat in the theater for The Brothers Bloom. TFF was more exciting by reputation (star-power, record-breaking rise in popularity), but I felt no connection with the people, my fellow film lovers.

Prior to my trip, I skimmed Chris Gore's The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide in which he wrote that the Tribeca Film Festival has yet to find an identity. This ties into what I wrote above: little organization, lack of an identity, popularity without personality. True, true, true! Not so ironically, I googled it, and Lou Lumenick of the New York Post discusses the exact same problems I have with TFF (and I'm a first-timer!): Should Tribeca Be Renamed the American Express Film Festival? I responded with a comment over there, basically a summarized version of what I wrote here.

• Jess

Thus far, I'm 3/4 for the summer blockbuster season:

• State of Play, April 17
• The Soloist, April 24
• Star Trek, May 8
• Angels & Demons, May 15

I didn't see The Soloist, but I might decide to go when it comes to the $2 theater near me. I absolutely loved both State of Play and Star Trek (receiving three-and-a-half and four stars from me, respectively). The latter is an excellent specimen of what every blockbuster should be: clever, hilarious, well-cast, and a little extraordinary. State of Play was damn great, period. Russell Crowe delivers yet another stellar performance. I didn't see the original British mini-series, but I love the American cast too much, anyway (Crowe, Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, Helen Mirren, and Ben Affleck). Crowe raises his character from Just Another Stereotype to The Cal McAffrey. It's what The International (Clive Owen, Naomi Watts) could have been. Lastly, regarding Angels & Demons, the film is a watchable two hours and twenty minutes, but it's not good. Dan Brown's novels are inherently bad films because the exposition just isn't there. What works in writing does not translate to the screen. Both The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons are smart books; tangents and superfluous information are needed to complete the narrative. When you try to translate that to film, critical points are scrambled, and the suspense feels forced. Since the mythos is so complex, you know the mystery will be served to you on a silver platter at the end (as opposed to as you go along while reading). I hope I explained that properly. Tom Hanks remains poorly miscast, but Ewan McGregor was the real travesty. What happened to his acting ability?

• Jess