I am thrilled to bits because 1. Cute With Chris is doing another live show, 2. It’s gonna be in Tronna at the Theatre Centre, 3. It’s gonna be while I’m in Tronna in April, and 4. I snagged a ticket! Wheeeeee!
I have had a widget for Chris Leavins’ website over there —–> for a long time, but have you ever checked it out? He’s a good Canadian boy who’s living in L.A. and produces a weekly interweb show that features cute puppies and kittens. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but it’s too hard to explain. Go through the show archive to get an idea of what I’m talkin’ about. I think his show’s an absolute scream and was devastated by envy when he did a live show in L.A. a couple months ago. When he announced a few weeks ago that he was gonna do a show in Tronna, I practically lept outta my seat. The show date was announced today and the tickets went on sale and I got on the horn and stayed on the horn until I had my (virtual) ticket in hand. Then, I believe I may have squealed like a teenaged girl over an adorable kitten.
Okay, everything’s sorted out for my Hot Docs sojourn this year, so I can finally relax about that. I’ve bought the festival pass, booked the hotel and the time off work, and made a first pass through the schedule to make note of films that sound interesting. I have also bought the cutest, the lightest (so light, it practically has a negative weight!), the pinkest little (and I mean little) laptop, that I can slip into my purse and take along to use to update der blog between screenings. (I tried carrying my regular laptop with me one day during the fest last year, and it was just too damned unwieldy.)
In preparation for this trip, I had to make a series of decisions, and making decisions isn’t one of my strengths. Because I seem to have a talent for making the wrong ones. It’s just one of my many character defects special gifts.
One, I hadda decide which pass to buy. That decision was easy. I bought the same one I had last year—the Premium Pass. It cost $150 and I saw 25 films on it last year so I figure you can’t beat that deal, even with a stick.
Two, I hadda decide how many days to attend. That was not so easy. ‘Cause this year there are more factors involved… Last year, I went for the entire 11-day festival because, at that point in the year, I didn’t have any plans for other vacations (other than a desire to go to TIFF for a few days in September). This year, it’s a bit different, with an additional couple of vacations teetering on the edge of possibility. Anyhow, before I could make a decision about how many days I would attend, I hadda wait for the festival schedule to be released to see if I could trim a little at the beginning or end. The schedule was released a few days ago and I dug through it. And, so, faced with the choice between an opening night documentary about the Canadian metal band Anvil (which has a second screening later in the festival) and a penultimate night screening of Errol Morris’ new film (which has only one screening), I easily chose the latter and decided there was nothing on Friday that I couldn’t squeeze in later in the week, so promptly lopped the first two days off my planned attendance. So there’s a couple vacation days I can use elsewhere.
Three, once the dates were decided, I could book the hotel. But which one? Last year, I shuttled between two hotels and the apartment of a kind & generous friend, trying to save a little dough. The constant moving, though, was a pain in the ass, so I decided—fuckit!—I would stay in one place this time. I chose my favourite (and, naturally, more expensive) of the two hotels I stayed in last year—a boutique hotel in the Annex, where I could walk to all the screenings (except those at the Royal, down on College). The room is booked. The parking space (which, over those 8 days, works out to cost the same as another day’s stay in the hotel!) is also reserved. And, from the sounds of it, I chose wisely when I chose the hotel so centrally-located in the screening neighbourhood—seems the TTC workers may be on strike in April.
Four, I gotta go through the schedule more carefully, now. I need to prioritize my choices so that when screenings are concurrent, I have first/second/third/whatever choices delineated. With the über-portable laptop this time, I won’t hafta carry my hand-built schedule on paper. The less I hafta carry, the better. And, in between now and the festival, I’ll prolly tellya about some of the films I’d like to see–kinda like I did for TIFF and After Dark last fall.
Finally, the decision I’d hafta live with for the longest time… Black? White? Pink?
Yep. I thought girly pink would add a titch of irony to the picture, so I chose it. And now that I have it, I’m glad I made that choice. Now I just need to find some “Princess” stickers and rhinestones to bejewel this sucka up…
…as if the sweetheart pink weren’t ironic enough on its own.
If you wanna read a review and see more pix of my cute li’l Asus EEE(!), follow the jump… (more…)
It’s been years since I’ve been interested in what they’ve released, but iLike is streaming R.E.M.’s new album, Accelerate, and I’m loving what I’m hearing!
As I continue to hunt for the house of my dreams (or, at least, some approximation thereof), I look forward to the cozy, comforting feeling of being safely tucked away in my own little world.
So I prolly should’ve just kept walking when I spotted Right At Your Door on the shelf at Blockbuster. And I should’ve declined to add Ils to my ZipList. Mea culpa.
Ils (or Them) is a creepy little French/Romanian film that scared the shit outta me.
I really hate to compare it to The Blair Witch Project — given that film’s many detractors — but Ils has much in common with the pseudo-documentary’s ability to spook you without relying too much on horrific visuals. I’m a firm believer that what you don’t see is often more terrifying than anything on-screen, and Ils is a perfect example of such classic filmmaking techniques. Remember the spine-tingling knock-knock-knocking in the Robert Wise classic The Haunting? How about the bouncing ball in Peter Medak’s The Changeling? It’s that kind of horror. Subtle yet effective.
- T. Rigney, Blogcritics
It’s a very low budget but nicely put-together little piece that may make you think twice about getting that nice weekend place out in the countryside…
It is allegedly based on a true story, but that is most likely a bogus claim. I suspect this is just an example of viral marketing. Anyhow, that doesn’t matter.
Ils is about a young French couple, Clementine and Lucas Saveur, who have just moved into a large but crumbly country estate in the Romanian woods. After a prologue which succeeded in making me scrunch down into the corner of the couch, wide-eyed and with my blankie tucked up just under my nose, when Clementine is subsequently awakened by a sound outside the house in the middle of the night it became clear to me that I was prolly not going to sleep well, myself, that night. And I didn’t.
With no fanfare, no special fx, no CGI–in fact, relying only on extremely effective editing and sound design, the kind of tense composition within the frame that makes you strain to see around the “corner” of it, as well as tightly-tuned performances by both leads–Ils is an unsettling little movie to watch. I don’t want to tell you much about the plot because too much plot knowledge can ruin a thing like this. Suffice to say that I was (very pleasantly) surprised by how this story turned out. Take your cue from the review I quoted above: if you like your “monsters” front-and-centre, fuggeddabuddit. This movie ain’t for youse. If you like the kind of creeping dread in those other movies he mentions, then I think you’ll like this one.
My only complaint is that the DVD is dubbed from French to English and I prefer subtitles. Small complaint, really.
Right At Your Door played at Sundance ‘06–the year I volunteered at the festival–but I didn’t see it until a few days ago.
Writer/director Chris Gorak’s film looks at what happens when multiple dirty bombs explode in Los Angeles, but rather than look at the big picture–as y’r big budget H’wood movie would–this story tightens its focus on one couple and what happens to them when the wife, Lexi, is caught downtown (one of the targets of the bombs) while the husband, Brad, is at home in the hills. The director says that he wants to show the kinds of psychological limitations that are around us in this post-9/11 world.
I think this film might provoke some potentially uncomfortable conversations between couples, so you might not wanna watch it with y’r sweetie… See, the bombs contaminate those people who are exposed to them (Lexi) and those who haven’t been exposed (Brad) are instructed to seal up their homes to prevent the contaminated air from seeping in. The (miraculous) thing is, Lexi manages to survive the initial blasts and get outta downtown and back home–only to find Brad on the other side of the front door, inside his scotchtape-and-saranwrap barricade. So you have Brad on the inside, in the uncontaminated air, and Lexi on the outside, in the contaminated air. If you were Brad, what would you do? I certainly know what I’d do.
As with Ils, you may be surprised by how Right At Your Door ends. Whether it comes as a pleasant or unpleasant surprise depends on what you think of Brad’s decision.
Again, the style of the film suits its subject. It’s told in close-ups, which only serve to emphasize the claustrophia of being in the sealed house. We see a few extreme long shots of downtown L.A., with clouds of smoke and dust and debris rising towards the hills, but the film’s focus is intimate. Gorak uses the constantly playing radio to tell the larger story and I suppose this has as much to do with the limited budget as it has to do with the media saturation in our lives. I think the idea of the film a little better than the execution–the script is a little weak and meandering at times–but I do certainly like the conflict at the centre of it. Even though I think Brad is a numbnuts.
When I first clapped eyes on this thing, my hair stood on end. It may walk like a dog but I hafta say the first thing that went through my mind when I saw it was it was the world’s most ginormous fly. The only way this thing could be creepier would be if that Argentinian gnome was riding it!
Amazing. But also unnerving. Especially outside, where they use the hydraulic pump—which sounds just like… a ginormous fly!!
Y’always hear about pranksters “liberating” ceramic gnomes from neighbours’ gardens, but what if one of ‘em just got up and walked off on its own steam?
In the little Argentinian town of General Guemes, locals allegedly have had a number of sightings of what appears to be Snow White’s little-known and rarely-discussed and totally-overlooked-by-Disney 8th Dwarf, Scary. Apparently, these kids were just hanging out after midnight when this li’l dude in the pointy hat came lurching down the road. That sideways gait of his is seriously creepy. But that girlish shriek right before the footage runs out makes me laugh every time I watch it.
And mebbe it’s just the time of year (well, that and what one bystander suggests: a crackheeaad)… It’s leprechauns they’re spotting in Alabama…
