Well, look at that, 2009 is dead and gone. And to think: it feels like only yesterday that I was sitting in a theatre watching Keanu 'whoa' his way through The Day The Earth Stood Still. Man, how time flies when you are treated to one of the single funnest film years in recent history.... From being pleasantly surprised at Watchmen's non-suckage, to bearing witness to a cool-ification of the Star Trek franchise, to openly weeping not once, but TWICE as a result of some seriously good filmmaking (I'm looking at you, Up and The Cove), 2009 delivered several heaping handfuls of out and out AWESOME movie-going experiences, which is exactly why we're doing all of this in the first place. It's movies like Adventureland and Paranormal Activity and Drag Me To Hell and Funny People and Zombieland that make our insignificant little substream-ish lives worth living, simply because we love sitting in darkened theatres staring at a giant screen for hours on end so much. Without movies, we would probably shrivel up and die, but thanks to 2009, we have never felt more alive.

2009 has also been an awesome year of growth for our tiny little work-horse of a website, as we introduced a new look, social-networked our collective ass off and continued to up the ante quality-wise with our Film Lab experiments (remember Rembrandt Lighting, Boom-Holder's Waltz, our On Location series and The Anatomy of a Film Set? Good times...). We also left our darkened studio occasionally in order to to flex our film-festival muscles, covering hotDocs and TIFF's Midnight Madness. But as much fun as we had, watching movies, shooting videos and occasionally writing articles about Kung Fu, COPS and YouTube freakouts, we can only look ahead to the golden tunnel of light that is 2010, as we've still got some awesomeness to impart! So don't go anywhere, loyal substreamers! The best is yet to come!

Thanks to all for sticking with us - hopefully you've had as much fun as we have talking about movies and learning neat stuff about the making of them. We hope you enjoy yourselves this holiday season, and also hope that you take it easy in the coming weeks as you break in this brand new decade that's about to unfold. Happy new year!

 PS: Check out Mike's and Rajo's Top Ten Lists for 2009! What were they thinking??

- thesubstream.com crew (Rajo, Shawn, Don, Amanda, and Mike) 9YXB5V8MWSFZ