Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Slacker Uprising is now available for free download or streaming. Thanks, Mike!

Well, I just bought the debut album by Friendly Fires that was released last week, but apparently I’m late to the party. Here’s a vid from 2007 for the song I’d planned to post here.

Hey, cool–my pal Todd has a design submission at Threadless, and if it gets enough votes, they’ll make it into t-shirt! Please click on the image below and gwan vote, ‘cause I wants me a Merman tee!

Read this morning that Michael Moore is going to release his next film online for free.

Slacker Uprising is a film about the pre-election U.S. campus tour that Moore did back in ‘04. His hope was to get students to register to vote in November.

I actually attended one of the more controversial stops in his tour.

My friend & coworker Karen and I took an extended lunch break from work on Oct. 20, 2004 and drove down to Orem, in Utah County, to attend his speaking engagement at Utah Valley State College. The student council had been threatened with expulsion and even violence for having used school funds to book Moore’s appearance there in that reddest of states. There were bribes offered and teeth gnashed over this. It was pretty funny (as an outsider, anyway) at the time.

There has already been one film made about this particular tour date; that film is This Divided State, made by (then-amateur) Utah filmmaker Steven Greenstreet, which I saw when the Salt Lake Film Society screened it at the Tower Theater, if I recall correctly.

But Moore has finally come out with his own version of the story and, of course, the timing is not surprising.

Go here to sign up to download the film.

(H/T to PopCandy for my first glimpse of this news.)

I was invited to take part in Peter Howell’s annual pre-TIFF “Chasing the Buzz” feature for the Star again this year, but haven’t had a chance to tell you about it around here yet ‘cause my dry-loop DSL dried up and blew away for a few days so I had no internet access. (That was fun. And by “fun” I mean “not fun”.) But the internets are back now and my breathing has returned to normal. Sad to say I will hafta re-do the computer’s bedroom, though, as my salty language over those few days stripped the paint offa the walls.

Anyhow, like last year, the instructions were to choose the 3 films that we were most keen to see at TIFF, and explain why in one measly sentence for each. Here are my choices, with a little more detailed justification of why I’d like to see them…

(And thanks to Pete for inviting me to participate in it again this year!)

Examined Life, dir. Astra Taylor - Real to Reel Programme

Frankly, it was the title that caught my attention. As it happens, the Socratic quotation being referenced in it–‘The unexamined life is not worth living’– is one that played a pivotal role in my own life. About 15 years ago, I heard someone very influential in my life use this quotation and, startled, realized that I was living an unexamined life… and so I stopped what I was doing and looked around. It was one of those proverbial life-changing experiences. So I am curious to hear the observations of philosophers living examined lives in our times.

Featured are Cornel West (pictured above), Peter Singer, Judity Butler, Avital Ronell, Michael Hardt, Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum and Slavoj Zizek, with whom Taylor made an earlier film called Zizek! (which I put at the top of my ZipList after becoming intrigued by the new one).

Pontypool, dir. Bruce McDonald - Vanguard Programme

I’d thought that Bruce McDonald had never thrown his cowboy hat into the horror genre ring before now. But he has. Just a little bit of research turned up the fact that, in high school, he shot a feature-length zombie movie called Our Glorious Dead on Super-8.

And now, in his latest film, he’s returned to the horror genre and its zombie sub-genre. The story he chose to adapt is Tony Burgess‘ Pontypool Changes Everything. Zombies in smalltown Ontario! The story puts an interesting spin on the zombie mythos… the setting is a talk radio station and the infection is spread by language. How? Beats me, but I am keen to find out!

I couldn’t find a trailer for it, but I did find this interview in which McDonald talks about the film…

Of special note is the fact that McDonald’s film was shot using the newfangled Red One camera. It is the first Canadian feature-length film shot using the Red One and it is the first Red feature to ever be screened at TIFF.

From Super-8 to Red One 4K HD–technologically, anyway, McDonald has covered a lot of ground from one zombie film to the next.

J.C.V.D., dir. Mabrouk El Mechri - Midnight Madness Programme

Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Jean-Claude Van Damme in this film that actually hews close to his real life (drug problems, money problems, child custody battles) before it veers off into fantasy. I gotta hand it to Van Damme (for whom I’d never before spared even a second thought): I think it shows a great intelligence and a delightful sense of self-directed humour for him to be willing to make a film like this.

And, from the sounds of the reviews I’ve read, I wonder if it will re-launch his career–because it sounds as though he gives a performance that no one expected of him. Least of all me.

(On that note, see also… Mickey Roarke in The Wrestler.)