If history has a strange way of repeating itself, the past couple of months have been an echo chamber across the decades. Earlier this year, Warner Brothers made the decision to release the 10th Anniversary Edition DVD of David O. Russell's Three Kings, with an excellent new print of the film to be released in a few theaters. The timing couldn't have been better. The film, a subversive action comedy set during the Gulf War, is one of the best films of the 1990's and is a smart and entertaining critique of the American mission in the Middle East. The film is as resonant to American policies in the current Iraq War as it was to the original Gulf War. Currently, small movie theaters and PBS stations are full of investigations of the American identity abroad, and the decision to include a re-release of Three Kings seemed to be as smart a marketing idea as it was a savvy recognition of things coming back to where they once began.

Friday night, I took in only my second public screening of the NYFF, Todd Solondz's Palindromes. The film wasn't my favorite in the festival, but I thought it was a thought provoking and powerfully political statement by an artist that continually challenges me. That's why I was startled to read A.O. Scott's review in the NY Times this weekend. I am not usually one to read a review of a film before I write about it myself, but a friend who hadn't seen the film quoted liberally from the NY Times review in explaining why she would never want to see the movie. It sometimes shakes me up, the power of the NY Times. It is not so much that I disagree with their reviews; sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I admire the critics anyway and even when I disagree with them about a specific movie, I find much to agree with in their writings. Regardless of what is written in the NY Times, I go see the films I want to see and make up my own mind. I see criticism as a dialogue, the statement of a sensibility reacting to a work of art, against which my own opinions and sensibilities reverberate. I blog about films because I want to think about and organize my own thoughts, to add my voice to the conversation (however small that voice may be.)

Wow. I haven't written in a very long time, and it is nice to be back in the swing of things. I will admit, I have taken a couple of half-hearted stabs at blogging in the past couple of weeks-- an aborted essay about THE WORLD (loved it) which begged a second screening that my schedule couldn't facilitate, and a very short piece about the unphotographable face that I have been wearing to all of the NYFF events... Much of this goes back to the season itself. I have spent a lot of time this fall hustling and bustling around the city, seeing friends and family who have come to visit, and getting work done for my film programming gigs. But mostly, I have been walking these past couple of weeks, reconnecting with my neighborhood and taking the opportunity to clear my head. Park Slope in the autumn, you can't beat it.

At a recent press and industry screening at the New York Film Festival, I overheard another attendee talking to a friend. The two women were discussing the films they had seen so far, and neither of them had a kind word to say about any of them. Everything was either 'deeply flawed' or 'incomprehensible' or 'boring' (yes, they both used the word boring.) As I sat bolt upright in my seat, eavesdropping on my neighbors, I couldn't help but be saddened. I had watched the same films they had, and had found most of them to be exceptional. Was I missing something? At the opening night party, I polled some other festival-goers, and was shocked to hear everyone harrumphing this film or that film, focusing on this bit of unrelastic dialgoue or that plot hole. As I sipped my beer in silence, I had to ask myself if it was me or it was them. Am I missing some critical faculty that would allow my cynical side to dictate my experience at the movies, or is my love of the movies and my forgiving, excitable approach a better way to think about films? Is there power in positive thinking?