CineVegas

Starting tomorrow night, I'll be spending most of my waking moments at CineVegas, the big annual film festival here in Vegas. (Disclosure: It's owned by the same family that owns Las Vegas Weekly.) The festival gets bigger and more prominent every year, it seems, and over the weekend there were very flattering write-ups in both the New York Times and the LA Times. Since I don't get to go to big festivals like Sundance or Toronto, CineVegas is a highlight of the year for me, a chance to see some of the buzz movies from those festivals as well as discover some interesting indie films looking for distribution. As at any film festival, there's always plenty of crap, but at least it's usually ambitious crap, and every so often you find some brilliant undiscovered gem that you would never have seen otherwise. If nothing else, it's a chance to spend nine days doing nothing but seeing movies, when usually all that other pesky life stuff intrudes.

I'll probably post a wrap-up of sorts here when the festival is over, but in the meantime I'll be blogging about it, along with other LVW contributors, on the Las Vegas Weekly MySpace page. (I know, MySpace is lame, but apparently this is the best way to get people to read it.)