“It’s a strong week for festivals, as while the ReelWorld Film Festival closes this Sunday with closing night gala Aloo Chaat (6:30 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre), both the Sprockets Film Festival and Toronto Jewish Film Festival open this Saturday.”

Mostly coverage of upcoming film festivals this week.

“Sometimes in life things happen and there isn’t a clear lesson to learn. Perhaps you’ll find yourself absolutely destroyed by a case of the flu for a couple of weeks and think [I should have had a flu shot] is the lesson, and then you’ll remember that you were on the other side of the country when you became sick, so the flu shot probably wouldn’t have helped. But because you’re human, and we humans like patterns, you’ll probably come up with something else—be it stress or not eating your vitamins—to blame, ‘learn from,’ and feel satisfied.”

If you can’t tell, I’ve had a horrible case of the flu for the past couple of weeks (since GDC, in fact.)

“Sounded like another week of largely unimpressive films on offer—from the ridiculous Nicolas Cage flick Knowing (called “the silliest apocalyptic pot-boiler of all time, edging out even M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening” by Eye’s Adam Nayman) through the depressingly formulaic Miss March (absurd, considering it comes from people who made their name on YouTube, of all things)—until we remembered that this week saw the release of I Love You, Man.”

I like Paul Rudd.

“We’re all sick of “torture porn” by now—and just as sick of using the phrase—so the new remake of The Last House on the Left shouldn’t even be worth mentioning as an “also playing…” in this column. Except we saw the trailer and—as much as we hate to say this—we were captivated.”

Street Horrrsing could well be my favourite album of last year.

“One of the films that Stephen McHattie is in this week is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars (well, it’s likely to) after a blanket marketing campaign and on the strength of the source material; the other one isn’t.”

You should all see Pontypool.

“In all honesty, Torontoist hasn’t had a lot of space in its brain for film this week—it’s been almost completely taken up with thoughts of Street Fighter IV, the latest (and long awaited) sequel in the premier fighting game series. With our head filled with thoughts of attempting to focus attack cancel Sakura’s super into her air juggle (don’t worry if that makes no sense) it’s entirely likely that there’s a similar group of people—lost in similar thoughts—that might accidentally wander into a movie theatre and purchase a ticket for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.”

Street Fighter IV is flawed – I mostly agree with what David Sirlin has said, and I pretty much hated SSFIITHDR – but I can’t stop playing it!

“We were recently pleased to see Not Another Teen Movie playing on a basic cable channel recently, because we rather like that film: it’s easily the best of the genre-parody genre, because it’s knowing, not just randomly gross, and TV – split up by adverts, the swears cut out – always feels like the place where it’s most fun to watch these films. You know – you’re flicking channels and you find it midway through; you don’t really need to invest in it, just enjoy the jokes when you look up from your laptop or whatever. The point we’re making? That we’re looking forward to catching Fired Up – a cheerleader comedy starring Not Another Teen Movie’s antagonist Eric Christian Olsen – when it hits basic cable.”

Other films especially well suited for the basic cable, half-of-my-attention treatment include some of the Happy Madison output and pretty much every film produced in the 80s.

In this article I talk about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

At the time, I was playing it a lot. I’ll admit that for some reason my addiction waned, and I know why – it’s because I’m a completionist. Any time I came up against a public quest (which rely on grouping with nearby players to complete) I’d want to do it (because they were normally great fun.) Of course, if there was no one about, I’d have to wait until some other players were (or else get into the un-fun situation of repeatedly failing it.)

As a result, with both of my characters – a Chosen and a Witch Hunter – I found myself at public quests absolutely no one was ever around for. So I just stopped playing. Next time I have some free time (rare as it is) I’ll go back to it, though – they’ve made a lot of changes since. Guess I’m just kind of worried about getting addicted to it again.

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“Okay, so you know by now that we often come to our conclusions on the films that we mention in this column after only watching the trailer, but I don’t think anyone is going to argue with us when we say that The International has quite easily the most boring trailer ever. There’s some kind of conspiracy involving a corrupt bank and Clive Owen and Naomi Watts have to solve it before you fall asleep!”

I moan about how bad the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween is in this article, too. It’s so bad I feel embarrassed to even be thinking about it.

This article – my first back on the job -was titled, quite simply, “Leipzig sucks”. It’s a very self indulgent article – after all, it’s almost entirely me complaining about how complicated it is to get to Leipzig, and then complaining about Leipzig (the town, which I notably call “little more than a train station between real places.”)

In fact, I don’t even mention the event until the very last paragraph, where the most interesting thing I can note is that there was an FM Towns Marty on site which was running a copy of Raiden.

There was a Vectrex too, I remember. That was quite fun too.

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