Wait, What? The CriterionCast Is Heading To The Sundance Film Festival! [Criterion Cast News]

Well, it would appear that hard work does indeed pay off: We’re going to the Sundance Film Festival.

Yes, you read that correctly. We, a podcast dedicated to the Criterion Collection, which barely can tie it’s own shoelaces at this point, are going to be attending the Sundance Film Festival, as members of the press. Now, you might be asking yourselves, who we paid, and how much we gave them? I wouldn’t blame you, as I honestly at times question the reality of the situation myself. We applied as everyone else did, and received confirmation this past weekend that we will indeed be receiving official badges.

Having only started this podcast and blog in July, with next to no knowledge or experience of how to actually run an operation like this, we here at CriterionCast have our first real victory in the world of cinematic journalism. I would like to make it clear right away, and as often as I can, that I do not, in any way, consider what we do here, journalism.

We are fanboys. We are geeks. We love movies.

We are well aware that the world of film criticism is quickly transforming into a hive mind of synapses firing across at one another, with ever decreasing distances. People no longer need to have their film information passed down from on high by the Olympian film critics and journalists. While many bemoan the fact that one can no longer make a profitable living discussing the movie world, I look at it with an idealistic twinkle in my eye. With blogs and microblogs like Twitter and Facebook updates essentially turning anyone into a critic with a potential audience, we as an internet community have a great opportunity to revolutionize the landscape before us.

Over the past several months, we have attempted to quickly learn our way through the various rules and regulations set up by the blogging community as far as what is a good blog, what is a decent podcast. I feel like we have a long way to go in terms of quality of content, but we are having a damn fun time along the way.

This is where you come in, readers of the blog, listeners of the podcast. While we all have ideas of which angles to cover, in terms of how we can connect covering this film festival, with The Criterion Collection, we would like to hear from you. What do you want to read about? What do you want to hear us discuss once the festival is over. With this fragmented community of film journalists that will be covering the festival from all angles, we have a very specialized audience, and want to tailor our coverage to maximize our time.

Take some time and look through the Sundance Film Schedule, and either e-mail us, or post below in the comments, those films that you are most excited about.

Finally, this trip to Sundance is certainly not going to be free. While it will only be Travis and Rudie that will be covering the festival, they will be paying for their flights, along with other expenses at the festival. Obviously you don’t have any obligations to help fund our geekery, but if you have a couple dollars floating around in your paypal account, and want to buy them a cup of coffee while they’re in between screenings, or maybe help buy a beer for Jim Jarmusch, should they happen to run into him at a bar one of the nights, we would be extremely grateful for your contributions.

If you’ve made it this far into the post, I personally thank you, as this is the longest post I’ve written for the blog so far. I don’t get to write as much as I’d like to, what with all of the behind the scenes stuff I’m working on for the website, the Twitter and Facebook pages, and so on and so forth.

If you are going to be attending the festival, please get in touch with us, as we’d love to hang out in between films. While I’m at it, if you’re reading this, and have attended Sundance in the past, and are at all interested in imparting some words of wisdom to us, we would love to hop on skype and ask you about logistical things, like where to eat, and where not to eat. You know, the important stuff.

Well, I would like to close this by again, thanking every single one of our listeners, our readers, our followers, our friends and family that have supported us in this endeavor from the beginning, and all that have joined us along the way.