After a few days of being sick and then a few more days studying for and taking the Illinois drivers test and/or supporting a spouse doing the same, I managed to catch a handful of films at the Chicago International Film Festival, mostly movies that I'd missed at previous festivals. I'm sure I'll have more to say at some point about those films, but in the meantime you can monitor our quick reactions to recent screenings on our sidebar, Twitter, and -- for reactions to new films in theaters -- the grid.
Plus, we have a drift of interviews coming up here and on the podcast, with the likes of Claire Denis, Darren Aronofsky, Rian Johnson, Danny Boyle, and Arnaud Desplechin, each of them offering do-it-yourself instructions for performing some type of automotive repair, just in time for winter. Be there or be stranded. On yet another future episode, J. Robert Parks will go out of his way to try to convince me to watch a few classics that I've never seen, and vice-versa.
It's a pretty exciting queue of items, and I'm just glad we decided to call our site Occasional Plastic instead of one of the other, more demanding names we'd considered, which might have required us to type more consistently, read less exhaustively, and chew less safely. whew