“Without a doubt, this week we’d be letting cheapskate cinephiles down by failing to mention the CNISSU’s Free Friday Film of the week, which isn’t just one but three, starting at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) with the remarkably hard-to-see The Monster Squad, followed by Toronto classic The Brood, and finished off with the excellent blaxploitation nonsense The Human Tornado, starring, of course, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore). Check out the trailer, which is pretty much NSFW – he uses an earthquake to make his milkshake!”

You really should check out the trailer. It’s amazing.

“There’s this brilliant thing that ‘the kids’ are doing these days called ‘ghost riding the whip’ where you set your car into neutral, get out and dance beside it while it rolls along with no one at the wheel. It’s a pretty fair metaphor for Ghost Rider: it wobbles along so slowly and unsteadily that you’d think no one was in control of it.”

“Ghost riding the whip” of course the inspiration of the title of yesterday’s Film Friday. I’m rather pleased I managed to shoehorn a reference to it into this review; proving just how “down with the kids” I am (I doubt Roger Ebert regularly references hyphy culture, or anything.)

“Ghost Rider’s head is a flaming skull. Can’t get much cooler than that, eh? And yet, from trailers you’d barely know that Ghost Rider is a cinematic version of a Marvel comic book (with, as per usual, a ridiculously complex history) that stars a biker whose head is flaming skull.”

I say ‘flaming skull’ in this article twice more!

“A film almost certainly made without any references is Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick, who was briefly connected to that Andy Warhol feller. Lou Reed called it ‘one of the most disgusting, foul things I’ve seen by any illiterate retard in a long time.’ Which, while not very PC, certainly means he hasn’t seen Because I Said So.”

Lou Reed is excellent.

“One of the worst things a film critic can do to a movie is to walk out in the middle of it; it’s a condemnation of a work that they consider so awful that it’s not worth staying until the end to see, at least, if it gets any better.

It’s therefore an unfortunate probability that I’m going to have to ‘walk out’ on the game after a number of hours, without having seen it to the end. The question is, of course, is if I want to run back to it the minute the review is finished.”

The conundrum of how long you have to spend with a game before you can consider yourself to have seen enough of it to review it is one that I imagine most game reviewers struggle with. Are you only fit to review a game if you’ve seen every part of it, or can you stop early if it’s terrible or broken? What if you like it, but you’re play it so much in such a small amount of time you get bored of it?

Who knows? All I know is that it just seems to be a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of situation; few reviewers reveal how long they spent with a game, and to play a hundred hour game to completion for one review would be slave labour, even if you’re having fun, unless you’re paid ridiculous wages (unlikely.)

I decided, after a number of hours (in double digits) with Rogue Galaxy that I liked it quite a bit, because by then I’d learned that the story was terrible, the world was cheerful but cliché, battles were clumsy fun, and I wanted to continue playing it. Seemed fair enough to me!

In other news: Radiohead’s Jonny thinks Dokutusu Monogatari is “a work of art.”

“Still, no matter how bad it is it can’t be as bad as Because I Said So, which has universally been ripped apart by the critics. As usually we haven’t seen much more than the trailers, but when even the film reviewer for 680 News (We apologize to him, we’ve forgotten his name) is kicking the film to bits you know it’s not a classic. Eye’s Adam Nayman calls it “A women’s film that actively hates women”; the Sun’s Liz Braun commits suicide over it (“We discovered the movie was actually co-written by two women, so … we just put our head in the microwave.”) And everyone, all round, laments what has happened to Diane Keaton.”

I should really give thanks to Jim Rossignol for revealing the remarkable insanity of Alejandro Jodorowsky (referred to in this Film Friday) to me in his blog post “Space Messiah, Rabbit Killer.” Or perhaps I should retain my thanks until after I’ve seen The Holy Mountain this weekend?

“Held in mid-December at Montreal’s chic Sofitel Hotel, located at the foot of Montreal’s most famous landmark, Parc Mont Royal, Autodesk’s Backstage Pass event promised a behind the scenes look at Autodesk’s media and entertainment business and the future developments of their product line, which includes 3D animation tools used across the games industry such as 3ds Max, Maya and Motionbuilder, as well as editing and effects tools such as Toxik and Lustre, used in the film industry.”

Much like my previous interview with Autodesk’s Michel Kripalani, this is a rather hard article to say something about, as it’s very specific to one company, and a company that works in the “back-end” of game development making tools.

Well, I can say this, actually. One of the demonstrations I saw was of a colourist working with Autodesk’s new, um, system for working with the colour levels in movies, etc. My mind was blown by his ability, in real time, to change a bright summery street scene in Washington into a dull autumn street scene… On the Moon. And that wasn’t just a still! He was actually working with the scene while it played. So, yeah. Autodesk’s tech is amazing (even though I was lying about the Moon.)