mongol

Chris Knight's avatar

Last December at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9, the annual film festival in Austin, Texas, the big breakout hit of the entire show was easily Mongol. Sergei Bodrov directed, co-wrote and co-produced, and collaborated with a crew from over forty countries to produce this vast epic about the early life of Temujin… who history would remember as Genghis Khan.

Even before I had left Texas, my good friend Phillip Arthur had expressed some envy that I got to see Mongol waaaaay before its wide release. Well, ever since then I’ve been keeping an eye out for that, ‘cuz I vowed that I’d see Mongol again and that next time it would be with Phillip. Last week it finally came out in Greensboro (at the Grande at Friendly Center). I shot Phillip an e-mail about it and we quickly made plans to see it the next evening. That’s what we did on ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Go to Best Buy or FYE or wherever, and get the DVD box set of HBO’s recent John Adams miniseries (came out last month, we got ours a couple of weeks ago). And watch the whole thing while waiting to go out and eat hot dogs and see fireworks this evening.

If you read this blog during the time HBO was running it, you know fully well that I thought this was one of the most masterful and poignant miniseries to have graced the medium in a very long time.

Watch John Adams, and then think about the America that Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and all those other guys worked and fought to give us… compared to the America that we have today.

“Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will

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Chris Knight's avatar

Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News and me on the night before Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9

So here it is: my review of Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9, the annual 24-hour long film festival hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, which was held at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz in Austin, Texas this past weekend on December 8th through 9th. It might be worth noting that according to the yearbook that we all received, I was the attendee who was from the most obscure town anywhere: a miniscule spot-on-the-mind somewhere in North Carolina, as opposed to being from Austin or Los Angeles or Atlanta.

This was also my first Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

First film festival ever for that matter.

Heck, this was my first time in Texas, period.

I left my friend Deborah’s house around 10 a.m. and was in Austin about 30 minutes later. I parked at the Hilton ...

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