Suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, happy endings... mainly happy endings

So here's the thing.

I found myself standing outside at 7am this morning, in the cold, wearing a heavy jacket and gloves, and listening to my iPod, waiting sixth in queue for the ticket office to open at 8am. Yay for the film festival!

This was the second year I've actually queued and waited for tickets to go on sale. And although it's really hard to get up that early (it's just unnatural to be up at 5.30 in the morning) and it means incessant yawning for the rest of the day, it's worth it to be guaranteed good seats, perfectly centred to the screen, in the nice comfortable plush seats at the Embassy or in the (only) comfortable seating section in the Paramount (Really, why don't they hurry up and install those seats in the rest of the cinema?).

Anyway, the films I will be going to see are:
- Man On Wire
- Married Life
- Rain of the Children
- In Bruges
- The Red Balloon/White Mane (just because I've never seen The Red Balloon, and it's one of these films everyone says you should see)
- Earth
- Persepolis (this is the film I was most excited to see in the festival)
- The Counterfeiters (won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film)
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (and yes, the asterisk is part of the film title - no idea why)
- Lorna's Silence
- Taxi To The Dark Side
- Be Kind Rewind
- Funny Games (this is a shot-by-shot English-language remake, by the same director, of a German-language film from 1997. I watched the original in the weekend, and have started working on a post about that film.)
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone swordfighting on the big screen!)
- Mongol (an epic about Genghis Khan. Should be great on the Embassy screen.)
- Standard Operating Procedure
- The Wave
- The Escapist
- Crazy Love
- The Savages
- The Freshman (this is the Live Cinema screening this year - a Harold Lloyd silent film with the Wellington Vector Orchestra providing live accompaniment)

I believe that, with 21 films, this is probably the most films I've ever been to in the festival. (I'm pretty sure I've never broken the 20 film mark before.) There is one day where I have four films in a row, so that will be a challenge. (There was a fifth film I was considering for that day, but I thought five in one day would just be too much, especially since that final film would be subtitled, and I would be much too tired for subtitles.)

Anyway, it's going to be exciting. 24 days to go.