WARNING: If you are not an obsessive film geek yourself, the following post may frighten and horrify you, and/or cause you to snort derisive laughter in my direction. That is all.

In past years, film geeks like myself were forced to schedule their Philadelphia film festival outings by laboriously copying data on film titles, locations, dates, and times into a spreadsheet application or some other such piece of software, and then arranging and rearranging, painfully stripping away those films we just couldn't make it to, either due to scheduling conflicts or time constraints, until we had a list of the movies that looked interesting and that were (at least on paper) physically possible for us to see. Now this process has been updated and made slightly less painful thanks to the festival website's online calendar feature. You can see my schedule, created using this new feature, collected in these four images (so you can follow along at home if you want to).

I found the calendar pretty useful. Create a free login on the site and you can start adding films to your schedule right away, just by clicking a small icon on the page for that film. The site stores all the films you've added on a special schedule page just for you, with all the times and locations listed. It even lets you know how many other people have added those films to their calendars. It's not possible to get a quick look at your schedule as a whole, however, and this fact would have led to me seeing This Film Is Not Yet Rated twice if it weren't for the sharp eyes of a friend who was looking over my schedule.

Also, I would have liked it if the calendar had some kind of color-coding formatting (like a nice bright red background, perhaps) to let me know which screenings were overlapping each other, or were scheduled so close together that it was physically impossible for me to make it from one to the other in time. And I think it would be handy to have a printer-friendly version of the calendar available so I could easily get a hardcopy of my schedule that I could carry with me in my pocket. As it is, I may have to seriously shrink and mangle the images I linked to above to get them into some kind of easily-printable format.

However, all-in-all it was a much easier process than it has been in years past. If you plan on seeing more than a few movies, it's definitely worth it to log on and try it out.

BTW, I don't promise to go to ALL the films on my schedule, or to write about all of them for Phillyist, but I do promise to try, very hard. Regardless, see you at the movies!

Image Credit: Wikipedia