Wanna hear a funny story? One involving a broken cell phone, a missed flight, a flat tire, my general inability to wake up before dawn, the horror that is ATA Airlines, and what was, overall, the most comically disasterous day of my life?

Well, because this is Cinematical, and not Karina Longworth's Diary of Sad Days, I won't go delve much deeper into it than to say that my plan was to arrive in Chicago yesterday around 9 AM, check into my WiFi-equipped hotel, and immediately head down to the Loop to pick up my press pass and start designing my coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. None of that happened except for the picking-up-the-press pass part, and that didn't happen until around 5pm. Click after the jump for a dramatic illustration of my frustration, and more details on the few festival-related things I did manage to get to before I crashed for the night.
That's me at left, taking out my frustrations on my poor Easy Share camera.

When I finally got here, the sky was gorgeously gray-violet from a mixture of sunset and impending rain. I hopped in a cab and asked the driver to take me to 30 East Adams, to the film festival press office. I had just thirty minutes to get there before they closed, so of course as soon as I got in the cab we drove straight a torrential downpour hit downtown Chicago. Miracle of miracles, I made it, picked up my press packet just before the office closed and immediately started making my way through the schedule. CIFF isn't doing formal press screenings this year, which is only a pain because their festival is so well curated that it might be hard to see everything that interests me in just four days. Fortunately, the press office has put together a viewing library containing nearly every film on the schedule. I plan to lock myself in there on Monday and chain-screen Bee Season, Shopgirl, this Argentinian film everyone's talking about called It's Not You, It's Me, and a few others.

I had a couple of hours to kill after the press office closed, so I wandered around the city a bit. As I've said before, I moved to Chicago the summer I turned 18 to go to film school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; I left 2.5 years later and haven't been back since. But it was here that I saw all the great films – the Citizen Kanes, the Vertigos, the Alphavilles – for the first time. I had always liked movies; in Chicago, cheesy as it sounds, I learned how to love them. Some of that came from my very expensive degree studies, but most of it came from Chicago itself – the resources, the people, and the fact that its simply so bloody cold here that spending the entire weekend bundled up inside a movie theater seems like a really good idea. From Facets to CinemaChicago to the still-surviving rep houses and independent theaters, Chicago is a great place to see, make, learn about and learn how to love films. Yesterday, just walking by the SAIC building where I first saw Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, I had trouble holding back tears. When I later passed by the first apartment I lived in here, a campus-owned building on State Street where I quickly fell for a boy who owned Pierrot le Fou on VHS ... well, let's just say I had to duck inside Osco for some Kleenex.

Bittersweet tears of longing quickly dealt with, it was time to head over to the AMC River East, for the 8:45 screening of Joe Swanberg's Kissing on the Mouth. I don't want to say too much because Joe is actually keeping a fest diary of his own for us, but I'm so glad I went last night. I've been a fan of the film since SXSW, but last night's screening was amazing: the multiplex screening room was nearly packed, and the audience seemed incredibly supportive. The film, shot on prosumer DV, also looked great on the big screen. On second viewing, Kissing comes across as an extraordinarily well-edited film; Swanberg's really got away of using cutaways to insert purely visual jokes. It's also a funnier film than I had remembered, but I think a lot of that has to do with the audience – unlike when I saw the film in Austin, no one in attendence last night seemed incapable of looking beyond the political content of such a proudly, explicitly sexual peice of work.

I must run off to screenings now; I think tonight I'm seeing Amos Gitai's Free Zone, and a Chinese film called Everlasting Regret. Described in my press kit as "Sex in the City meets Shaghai", it sounds like a tricky proposition – my favorite kind.