[Mark Rabinowitz] So the New York Film Festival announced the full lineup for their 46th annual event and yeah, there's a lot of stuff I am excited about. I won't be in Venice, so it'll be nice to see Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," the Clint Eastwood film "Changeling," Laurent Cantet's "The Class" ("Time Out" was genius) and of course one of my all time favorite films, Nagisa Oshima's 1983 masterpiece "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." Indeed, I do love this festival. The press and industry screenings have a sort of pomp and circumstance all of their own and most other fests don't do full on press conferences after the press screenings. But.....

Aside from Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir" and Alexander Olch's "The Windmill Movie," nary a doc is to be found unless you count Jia Zhangke's "24 City" ("Er shi si cheng ji"), described as "straddling the border between fiction and documentary." I haven't seen it, so I can't say where I think it ends up in its straddle but 2 (maybe 3) docs out of almost 30 films?

I know there are plenty of docs screening in Venice and Toronto and it's not like the Film Society hasn't programmed films from those two festivals before. I do understand that it's a programming committee and maybe they just didn't like Ross McElwee's "In Paraguay," Agnès Varda's "Les Plages des Agnès," Chai Vasarhelyi's "Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love" Or Paul Cronin's NY-set "A Time to Stir." Hell, maybe they all suck (doubtful) or maybe they did like them and the filmmakers didn't want to play the NYFF. Maybe.

What do you all think? Am I being too doc-centric (the name of the blog notwithstanding)? Too harsh on the selection committee?