“‘Tis Thanksgiving weekend, which, to be honest, we plan on using to get through all of the video games, films, and books that we’ve had piling up waiting to be played/watched/read (if content is king, then we are absolutely its slave.)”

Not an exciting week for films, no.

“There are a lot of films out this week, and a lot of them played at TIFF. In fact, we caught a few of them at TIFF after their public screenings, so let’s take a break from our usual format and give them proper capsule reviews!”

Capsule reviews of Blindness and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist; neither of which I liked.

Also – I’m on twitter, now. I’ll be linking any interesting work related things there that I don’t think warrant a full post here – as well as other nonsense.

“Well, we’re suffering from our “festival cold” two weeks after the festival ended, which is kind of odd. It probably isn’t even a festival cold at all, just a lame cold we didn’t catch from a visiting celebrity or hot-shot Hollywood producer. Actually, wait, god knows what you could catch from those people, so forget our complaint.”

I think it was developing a MySpace that made me ill, honestly.

“Urgh, with only a week since TIFF ended, who wants to talk about film again now? Paradoxically, we wanted to talk about TIFF again yesterday, but we’re fickle like that – perhaps now it’s just the realisation that most of our Film Fridays are only going to talk about films that played at this year’s TIFF. Instead we’ll lead with something from last year’s TIFF and probably one of the most welcome releases we can think of in recent memory – Sukiyaki Western Django.”

My return to Film Friday after a short sabbatical! The title is a obscure reference; Kyu Sakamoto’s early 60s hit “Ue o muite aruko” (“[I] shall walk looking up”) which was retitled Sukiyaki for overseas markets.

My third festival has passed without major incident; this year I didn’t even catch a cold (touch wood) so things went pretty well, by all accounts! If there were any disappointments, it was that due to scheduling conflicts I managed to miss a lot of my most hotly anticipated films, such as Pontypool, Hunger and The Wrestler. But I’ll be able to see them all sooner rather than later, I’m sure.

TIFF 2008: Preview – A review of the Coens’ lamentable Burn After Reading, and a general preview of the rest of the fest.

TIFF 2008: A Film With Jean-Claude Van Damme In It – Reviews of JCVD and Treeless Mountain.

TIFF 2008: Horizontal Cuts – Reviews of Vinyan, Wavelengths: Horizontal Boundaries and Short Cuts Canada Programme 1.

TIFF 2008: Trips with Bashir – Reviews of All Around Us, Waltz with Bashir, Wavelengths: Trips, and Short Cuts Canada Programme 2.

TIFF 2008: Plastic Girl – Reviews of Deadgirl and Plastic City.

TIFF 2008: The Burrowers Bloom – Reviews of A Film with Me in It, Short Cuts Canada Programme 3, The Brothers Bloom, and The Burrowers.

TIFF 2008: Tears for Liverpool – Reviews of Short Cuts Canada Programme 4, Liverpool, and Tears for Sale.

TIFF 2008: The City Masters – Reviews of The Dungeon Masters and 24 City.

TIFF 2008: Good – A review of Good.

TIFF 2008: Tony Log – A review of of Tony Manero and Eden Log.

Talking TIFF With Cameron Bailey – This year I decided to end my coverage with a sort of “post-mortem” with festival co-director Cameron Bailey – his answers are smooth indeed! Some of the best commentary is in the (ahem) comments though, where people are discussing their own experience of the festival at length.

“It’s the fourth of July weekend, and as a result Canada joins its southern neighbours in having very little new of note in cinemas—it’s probably why Hancock, for example, started screening early.”

Nothing came out this week, so this is a very boring Film Friday. Please ignore it!

“Since an enlarged heart is such a dangerous medical condition, how on earth do Pixar get away with causing people’s hearts to swell so much with each of their new releases? With Wall*E, the tale of a lonely little robot that falls in love, we’re worried our chests will burst right there in the cinema! It just sounds too adorable.”

I have now seen Wall*E, and lo, my heart did swell till it was almost painful.

I am also pleased with that title; has anyone else referenced a Spectrum game when talking about the latest Pixar film? Probably, yes. But give me my moment in the sun.

Oh, and can’t forget to mention my post on the Toronto Independent Game Development Jam: TOJam and Cheese. Good games by Shawn McGrath, Jon Mak and Benjamin Rivers are available to download!

“…This conclusion is unusual, because it takes only a very short amount of research to find that two of the tracks from Crystal Castles listed above—”Mother Knows Best” and “Loving and Caring”—feature unapproved samples and are commercially available.”

I’m posting about this article before my Film Friday because, well, it’s important enough to stand up on its own. As this is my own blog I can state that on one level, this article is as much about my personal feeling that if you’re going to write “journalism on the internet” you should hold yourself to as high a standard as possible, as it is about how Crystal Castles should really admit and apologise for all that they’ve been up to in public rather than just put out more misinformation.

The basic fact is the Pitchfork article that this article is a response to is gob-smackingly bad. It takes maybe ten seconds of research to learn that the conclusion they draw is completely incorrect, and in fact, they’re actually proven wrong by at least one of the articles that they link to!

Some folks I have talked to put this down to an undercurrent of “well these chiptunes artists don’t really matter and Crystal Castles says everything is peachy so let’s just believe them!” Which is pretty likely, I guess. And makes it even worse.

Sigh.

(Oh, and special thanks to David Topping for working with me at length on this article, polishing it up into the tip-top hard journalism it is now.)

“For some reason, this year we’re already tired of the summer blockbuster schedule. It’s only mid-June and we’ve already had multiple superhero movies, CGI films, and big-budget comedies. Maybe it’s that desperate urge to not get killed by poor word-of-mouth that leads to another “must see!” movie every week until you can’t remember the last film you were told was “must see!”, but we’re exhausted.”

Includes a review of Peter Lynch’s legendary documentary Project Grizzly. As I say in the article, you must read Troy Hurtubise’s Wikipedia page. I’ve seen a clip of him testing his fire paste, and considering that appears to work, I absolutely want to believe the Angel Light does too…

“This week’s big summer blockbusters are The Incredible Hulk and The Happening. We have a lot of interest in The Incredible Hulk, simply because it was impossible to traverse downtown last year and not walk into at least one area that “looked like New York” (how to make Toronto look like NY, Hulk style: stick American flags everywhere) and even from the trailer, its “Torontoeyness” is very obvious.”

I wait for the Scott Pilgrim movie with bated breath, as I really want to see Toronto as I know it put on the big screen – not just as a stand in for New York. Edgar Wright is in charge, so I’m sure it will (because we’ll kill him it it doesn’t.)