Midnight Madness

Damn you, Colin Geddes. Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in.

Eight of the ten Midnight Madness titles were announced today. They all sound interesting and appealing to me. Damn it.

Midnight Madness has always been a Catch-22 for me. Do I really want to see the movie? Cause if I do, it'll be REALLY hard to get up at 8:30 am in the morning to hit the early show the next day. The movie will get out around 2 a.m. Then you have to wind down b/c you're hyped about what you saw. Volver shows at 9 a.m. Guess I'm getting four hours of sleep tonight.

And it's not just the films that Geddes programs, and he knows it. It's the crowd. The group of crazies that go to the midnight screenings are critical to the success of the films. There have been countless films that I LOVED at the Midnight Madness that I would never want to see again. But that's not to say they are all lightweight films. Ong Bak, Gozu, Ju-on, Haute Tension, Undead, Bubba Ho-Tep, SPL, Kontroll, Zebraman, The Host, Black Sheep and Severancen are all films I encouraged others to seek out. That's not even mentioning "Borat", which remains the only MM film that I couldn't get tickets to.

Usually, there's at least one film that I know I'm not interested in. Most of the time it's a documentary. I just can't get myself up for a documentary, no matter the subject, at midnight.

I can get up for blood, sex, gore, Takashi Miike, monsters, and kung fu. Which is what Colin always supplies.

So far he's eight for eight this year. There's no documentary so far for me to catch up on my sleep. That means less sleep for me during the festival. Why, Colin, why.