80/20 Rule

One of the recommendations from the festival folks is to get in the habit of watching four to five films per day. Kind of like spring training, I guess, to get in shape for the upcoming festival. I’ll be sitting in various dark rooms in different screening venues for ten to twelve hours a day -- day in, day out -- for ten straight days.

Sounds like work to me.

I was also warned to drink plenty of water, but not too much. Too much and I’ll have to leave my seat often. Drink just enough to stave off any drowsiness. I guess there’s an art to this.

I’ve done this before -- kind of. I lived in London some time ago and most Sundays I’d find myself in Hammersmith catching three or four films for the price of one. There was an art house cinema that would put on a thematic slate of films, back-to-back, say from Antonioni, or Mikhalkov, or Hitchcock, and in many ways it was my film school. I learned to take notes and pen thoughts as the films would tend to blend together if I relied too much on memory.

I’ll be doing much of the same in Berlin. I’m sure the 80/20 rule will prevail whereby eighty percent of the films won’t be as memorable as the top tier and I’ll probably have much more to share with everyone on those films in the top twenty percent...