Well, it didn’t take long for me to break my promise of daily festival reports. In the unlikely event that you were eagerly awaiting for my first Berlinale dispatch yesterday, I can only apologize: it’s hard to review films you haven’t seen.
A domino-like series of misfortunes conspired to make my first day of planned festival action entirely: a last-minute train cancellation from London caused me to miss my flight, while the rescheduled flight landed me in Berlin too late to register with the press office. Add the fact that I’m still limping round the city on a single crutch, and I am the poster boy for the Twitter hashtag titled #festivalfail.
On the plus side, I can inform you that the Competition title I missed yesterday — corporate thriller “Margin Call,” whose starry cast includes Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore — was at least one that has been roundly dismissed. Meanwhile, while I gained no film-related knowledge yesterday, I can at least share a culinary tip: the best burger you’ve ever eaten in your life is to be found at a pleasingly rowdy American bar called The Bird in Prenzlauerberg. Book a flight, and thank me later. (I understand there’s a second branch opening in Wyoming soon. I swear I’m not making this up.)
In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale.
Of all the festivals I attended this year, Berlin was perhaps the one with the most covert significance. At the time, it seemed critics were foraging for scraps amid a dismal competition lineup and a confusingly scattered selection of sidebars — and yet so many of the films I caught there (and some that I didn’t) are still with me at the year’s end.