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| Thursday, September 30, 2010 09:44 AM |
| Philadelphia Film Festival 2010 |
 by Fëanor |
The 2010 edition of the Philadelphia Film Festival is coming up (October 14th-24th). Gird your loins!
I bought my tickets the other day, after a surprisingly painless winnowing process, and after securing poppy's generous approval for the multiple solo outings that would be necessary. Here's my schedule, if you're interested:
Saturday, October 16th
7:30 PM
Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, 2010, 103 min.
Prince Music Theater
Tuesday, October 19th
10:00 PM
True Legend
Yuen Woo Ping, 2010, 116 min.
Ritz Five A
Wednesday, October 20th
5:30 PM
Machete Maidens Unleashed
Mark Hartley, 2010, 83 min.
Ritz Five A
10:00 PM
Outrage
Takeshi Kitano, 2010, 109 min.
Prince Music Theater
Sunday, October 24th
4:55 PM
Sound of Noise
Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2010, 102 min.
Ritz Five A
Why these movies? Black Swan because of Darren Aronofsky, Outrage because of Takeshi Kitano, True Legend because it's epic kung fu, Machete Maidens Unleashed because it's a movie about movies (and movies that involve unleashed machete maidens, no less), and Sound of Noise because it sounds crazy and fascinating (a detective allergic to sound fighting sound-based criminals).
I thought I'd read somewhere that B-Side was dead, or that the Film Society had dumped the company, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that the site is running the B-Side engine again. It's great scheduling technology, and even though I'm seeing too few movies for it to be all that useful, the Schedule Genius is a really cool thing - it's basically an app you can run once you've picked all the movies you want to see, and it just figures out the best way to schedule everything. If it puts a movie in a bad time slot, you can remove it and it will just find the next best time.
Once I had everything scheduled the way I wanted, I looked for a button that would automatically dump tickets for all my screenings into a shopping cart, but unfortunately no such thing exists. They seriously need to work on that. Anything that makes it easier for me to spend money is obviously to their advantage. But the reason why such a magical button does not exist, and most likely will not exist any time soon, probably has to do with the fact that the actual ticket purchase happens through a completely different website called ETix - a site which is a complete mess. First of all, it's ugly and confusing. Secondly, each ticket has to be added to your cart separately in a multi-step, multi-click process. In order to prove that you are a Film Society member, you have to input a password every single time you select a ticket. The calendar/schedule on the ETix website is clunky, poorly designed, and completely different from the B-Side calendar on PFF's site. Also, they give you the option of adding any ticket to your cart for $0, and only tell you at the end when you try to check out that you need to add a special code if you have any $0 tickets in your cart. Admittedly, it should be obvious from the start that you're not going to be able to get all your tickets for free, but still, that is poorly designed.
Ticket-buying complaints aside, I'm excited about attending another Philadelphia Film Festival. Maybe I'll see some of you there? |
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