Man my festival experience is not shaping up well so far. The weeks preceding it are full of articles with words like “buzz,” “star” and “carpet” which make me rage-tingle a little. My first film – my fault for choosing it, I’m sure – is a 900-hour-long art travesty that features 5-minute takes of people sleeping. The film this morning is Rwanda: The Day God Walked Away which is actually fairly decent, but still smacks of art-colonialism as the funding and writer-director are French. I skip Jennifer’s Body because a sandwich now sounds like a more exciting proposition, and then at the AMC for All Fall Down, which hardly sounds like a line-up attractor, I’m forced into Satan’s Own Line which contains people who are lining up for two other, surely more “buzz-worthy” films, and we are all screamed at by ferocious, sex-starved volunteers to pack closer together, then told my film will in fact leave the line, then when I do I’m told I should get back in the line – to the back of the line I just left. What the fuck? I impulsively walk out, whether because of personal sense of outrage, my introvert’s severe dislike of lines, or a purely rational calculation that I would rather pay the $10 value of the ticket than remain in that art scum fattening pen.

It’s too bad, I would have liked to have seen that film.

The whole festival so far has a villainous feel to it, Mos Eisley for corporate sponsors, Indiewood marketers and the aspirational middle class, where people line up to exchange cash for artistic cachet. Because of the money I paid, I can now have a delightfully scathing opinion of Face, or a somber, scolding recommendation for the genocide flick, or crow that I’ve seen the shitty Diablo Cody film two weeks before it sits empty in regular schmuck theatres.

Maybe I should stick to my fucking downloads.

Nah, I’m sure this will get better, it’s the weekend and the daytime screenings will thin out during the week, and I think my picks will be more agreeable even as of tomorrow. But I’m starting to think Jesus invented Blu-Ray so I could avoid bullshit like this.