
by Jamie Uhler
With each passing year of the Allan Fish Online Film Festival I feel different points of interest in thought that nevertheless strengthen the memories I had in friendship with him and others in the Wonders in the Dark community. Usually for this festival I make selections to highlight these very beliefs, and this year was no different. As movie-going as ever increasingly moved towards streaming, or, in other word ‘online’, half of the point of this very festival is made more abundantly clear. Not only did I experience a friendship with Allan (and others) online, but how I interacted about movies with Allan was a near-wholly web-based experience. So, I spend a bit of toil thinking about how much he and I interacted via email scouring torrents, me finding seeds to files that he wasn’t willing to download, a process he deemed ‘beyond his computer prowess’, but that I nonetheless procured and sent over an ocean to him on flash drive. But now, in just a few short years, how much of that has been mitigated because our lives have continually moved towards nothing but online viewing, his pieces that opening with movies being either ‘on’ or ‘not on’ DVD becoming a wholly moot point to whether or not they can or cannot be streamed. It left me thinking of several films I watched recently, one, a previously presented piece on Wonders, for the great ‘Fish Obscuro’ series, a series so regularly held to Asian films he prized, a capsule published in September 2010.
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