“This week I got a chance to sit down with S&Man director JT Petty and chat with him for a while about his new documentary S&Man, shortly before his film made its Canadian premiere as part of the Midnight Madness programme.

S&Man is a highly controversial film, so controversial that it seems to have caused even an indirect argument between myself and the Gomorrahizer right here on the pages of Twitch. I’ve given it a glowing review, and I maintain that an important part of the film as a discussion of the cinematic form is what you don’t know about it. JT, in this very interview, says, ‘I don’t really want to reveal too much, because it somewhat ruins the puzzle box of the movie.’ He also offers many insights throughout, and you’ll be pleased to see I’ve actually transcribed it rather than just chuck up the raw audio.”

S&Man might be one of my favourite films of the festival, but it’s also the one I had to spend the longest time discussing (and, occasionally, defending) so by the end of the festival I was practically sick of thinking about it. It’s controversial, basically, but I think that JT Petty does quite a lot of good work in this interview to explain his take on the film.

“Yeesh; another week, another pile of movies which were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Considering there are, oh, 32,064 or so films at each TIFF we should probably get over this as soon as possible, otherwise every week our column is going to sound the same.”

In this column, I urge the murder of Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher. To be honest, though, death is probably too good for them.

Other posts this week:

Toronto After Dark Film Festival Launches with a Fork in the Nose

Norman McLaren at NFB Mediatheque

“S&Man is a film that has already made headlines here at Twitch, and it saddens me to say that it’s for all the wrong reasons. S&Man, contrary to assumptions which are easy to make, is not a film that should be “exposed”, and which, I lament, should never have been sold on the promise of its secrets in the first place. S&Man is a post-modern masterpiece; a documentary film in which one of the subjects is you, the viewer.”

Yes! It’s true! I’ve finally reached my Toronto International Film Festival 2006 coverage for Twitch. This really is turning into a bit of a film blog, eh? I promise I’ll go back to video games in time for the Christmas rush. You’ll be sick of them by January!

Anyway, S&Man was one of my favourite films of the festival; as I said above, a post-modern masterpiece. I urge you to check it out when it is released, in whatever form that may be.

Cinematheque Ontario is the Toronto International Film Festival’s seasonal programming; often they’re showing arty films or well known films from the “masters” (Antonioni, etc.) but sometimes they show some really really ace stuff. Their recent programmes of kung-fu and samurai flicks were completely ace, and this season they have a Gilliam season, including the Director’s Cut of Brazil presented by the man himself. Awesome! I reviewed a couple of the classic Shaw Brothers flicks they put on last season for Twitch:

Cinematheque Ontario Report: King Boxer Review

Cinematheque Ontario Report: The Five Venoms Review

Hot Docs is the largest documentary film festival in North America and it’s right here in Toronto, which must be the city with the most film festivals, seriously (but I haven’t counted.) I covered Hot Docs for Torontoist too.

Hot Docs Report: Darkon Review – An interesting film about LARPers that I haven’t heard of since. Actually, that’s a lie; I did see one of the subjects in, I think, the “games issue” of Wired.

Hot Docs Report: Dear Pyongyang Review – I always try and check out films about North Korea since the A State of Mind review; this film is so, so boring, though.

Hot Docs Report: Black Gold Review – I just brewed up some fresh Tim Hortons coffee; Tim Hortons doesn’t sell Fair Trade coffee and now I feel rather bad about it. My excuse honestly is that my recent visitors finished all of my Cafédirect 5065 instant, though. Which you can’t get here in Toronto. Sob.

Hot Docs Report: 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep Review – “37 uses for a dead sheep, you say? I can only think of one, and once I’ve done that I’ll be pretty sleepy, so I wouldn’t be any good for the other 36 anyway.”. Winner of the Best International Feature award at the festival.

Hot Docs Report: An Unreasonable Man Review – I love Ralph Nader and (most of) the things he stands for. I don’t care who knows it! Probably my favourite film of the festival, but I’m possibly biased.

“It’s really only fitting that one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long while would come to me in the strangest of circumstances.

One day I happened to find myself in the kitchen of the Director’s Guild of Canada. (It’s a story too boring to be worth recounting). Lying on the counter of the over-designed kitchen, buried underneath a fully signed copy of the 2006 Toronto Fire Fighter’s calendar, I found a copy of Otto Buj’s The Eternal Present.”

This is, much like my review of Workingman’s Death, a review that seems to have been written too harshly for what I was trying to say, because I remember I rather liked it, even though I wouldn’t say I now disagree with anything I wrote in the review.

“How much do you know about modern North Korea? I’m guessing that, unless you’ve just escaped from North Korea (and been pretty quick at learning to read English competently / use the internet / gain a love of obscure cinema to bring you to you to Twitch in the first place) very, very little.”

A glowing review of a film about North Korea’s “Mass Games” which created some controversy in the comments thread as certainly at least one reader seemed to think my appreciation of the Mass Games meant I had been sucked in by propaganda. I really don’t consider A State of Mind to be itself a propaganda piece; it seems at least as “fair and balanced” as Seoul Train, which I have now seen, but have not yet got around to reviewing. I will soon, though.

“The opening scenes of The Chronicles of Narnia deal with the realities of the world that the child protagonists, Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy, live in. Bombs fall from the sky during a blitz on London in World War II, and with the immediate and terrifying results of a war apparent all around them, their mother sends them off to the countryside as part of the evacuation programme for school aged children.

It’s around about this point I began a rumination.”

A strange sort of review; a defense of The Chronicles of Narnia as an adaptation, really. I thought it was very good; managing to capture the unique Britishness of C.S. Lewis’ work. Not everyone agrees. I think it’s a good kids film, really!

“The opening night gala film for the Reel Asian International Film Festival, Michael Kang’s debut, Motel, is an interesting choice. Separate from the festival’s national spotlight, Malaysia, by virtue of being an American production (the script workshopped at a Sundance filmmakers lab), but it fits the festival very well, with pan-Asian appeal, featuring both Korean and Chinese Americans, and exploring the themes the expected audience of the festival are undoubtedly familiar with – the struggles of growing up Asian in North America.”

There is no (obvious) way to list reviews by author on Twitch, which means this cataloguing of my work there is long overdue. And that it’s been very hard to remember what I’ve written. I nearly missed this; a review of little indie film I liked very much, despite the fact it was a “coming of age” flick (the only indie films that there are, it seems like sometimes.) It doesn’t really subvert the genre or anything but it does twist it slightly, at least.

“I can’t really work out why I was so excited to see this. I could put it down to the fact that, yes, I’m a gamer, I played the original game in ’93 and it scared the 12 year old pants off of me (I was 12, not the pants) so much that I could barely play it. But, to be honest, I think it’s probably because I saw the trailer and it made it clear they they’d put some kind of ludicrous ‘first-person’ segment into the film to make it seem like the game (which is played entirely in first person). Therefore promised the spectacle of a director trying to directly translate game techniques into his cinematography (rather than just lazily stealing them), and the prospect of the Rock doing that thing that he does with his eyebrow several times during the film, I was sold.”

A very punchy, fun and jokey review of a frankly terrible film that I found myself liking anyway. This kind of joyful writing that just trips off the fingers onto the page with nary an edit is probably the best kind; this review is the one that gave me the impetus to pitch to Eurogamer, as Gillen said he liked it.