Something you don’t see that often: A Quebec film screening at Dollar Cinema.
Sci-fi parody flick Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 (not to be confused with Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2) is playing there twice a day until Thursday. Here’s a review from when it first came out in April from The Gazette’s Brendan Kelly.
From the website for an awesome-sounding new movie:
Dear Newline Cinema,
I’m available to proofread your websites in the future.
Builders of the CHUM mega-hospital (that’s the French one) were showing off a prototype of their state-of-the-art patient rooms last week. They include the latest in accessibility and technology:
It will also feature an electronic gadget to read the bar code on a patient’s identification bracelet and automatically dispense appropriate medication.
“The bar code is to distinguish among three people (for example) all named Claude Gagnon on the same floor,” Leclerc said.
“The medicine dose will be prepared by a robot. The patient’s charts will be filed electronically in the computer.”
The electronic gadget will be connected to the hospital’s mainframe, which will be connected to the Net, but both will be protected from unwanted intrusions by Gatekeeper security software by Gregg Microsystems. So your medicine dispensing will be perfectly secure and 100% accurate, unless you’re friends with Angela Bennett.
(In case you don’t get the obscure movie reference, the previous paragraph is fiction.)
Name the metro stations featured in this short film (YouTube version, QuickTime version).
Hey, remember No Late Fees? Yeah, not so much anymore. Turns out economic reality still requires a financial incentive for a high turnover of new releases, otherwise video rental outlets would have to have huge stocks of these films and then get rid of them after a couple of weeks.
It makes sense. How many people really need to rent a movie for seven days? It’s better to pay a set price per day (or even per hour) and leave it at that.
Personally, I don’t remember the last time I rented a movie.
Jean-Michel Vanasse reports someone has actually been caught allegedly filming a movie at a Guzzo theatre, and arrested for copyright infringement.
I wonder why he wasn’t searched for the camera before entering the theatre.
I’m not a cinema buff, but since I’ve announced all the other blogs The Gazette has launched recently, I shouldn’t ignore this one.
The Festival du nouveau cinéma blog (2007) is getting contributions from Gazette researcher Liz Ferguson, film critic John Griffin, freelancer Al Kratina, columnists Brendan Kelly and Bill Brownstein, and editor Basem Boshra.
No posts yet, but the Gazoo is starting a new short-term blog about this year’s World Film Festival, with contributions from six different staffers.
A friend pointed out to me today that he was planning to pop his Fantasia cherry by going to an interesting showing this evening. One mention of the words “Total Crap” and I knew exactly what he was talking about.
For those who don’t know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there’s much better.
Now, you might think “wow, that’s a really weird hobby”, and you would be wrong. You see, there’s someone else in town who’s doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call “zapping” and showing awful clips to eager audiences.
Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn’t decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.
So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia’s DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here’s the teaser.
Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5’s Kaleidoscopic Zappin’ Party (Teaser).
Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)
Yeah, I know this is stupid PR-driven non-news advertising crap, but go Vermont! And nice video. Maybe I’ll come visit someday.
The federal government’s new law against recording video inside movie theatres has come to its inevitable conclusion: Cinema Guzzo is now searching people who enter its theatres and seizing any type of camera, whether it takes video or not.
As you might expect, some people are not happy about this.
Guzzo can’t really be blamed for this. The law makes the cinema owner just as responsible if the law is broken, so they’re just looking after their own asses. But the idea that so much is contraband — food, drink, bags, cameras — inside a room where all they’re doing is projecting an image onto a screen kind of boggles the mind. Even aircraft luggage doesn’t get this kind of treatment.
Of course, it goes without saying that, other than proving the U.S. movie industry has our government by the ballsack, this bill doesn’t do anything. Michael Geist (whose blog should be on everyone’s reading list) has a roundup of its problems (and a cool video about it too), to which I will only add this: Movies recorded in a crowded movie theatre are of such bad quality that I’m surprised anyone actually does it.
Take this badly-camcorded Family Guy / Star Wars bit. It includes a laugh track, viewer commentary, a partially obscured, darkened, oblong screen (that the camera pans away from every now and then) and a barely-discernable original audio track. Is this kind of stuff the world’s greatest threat to the movie industry?
Remember that decision by Warner Brothers to cancel advance screenings of its films this summer? Yeah, Ottawa caved. So now it’ll be illegal to record films, even if you have no intention of doing anything illegal with it.
Guilty until proven innocent, just because it’s so difficult to prove guilt.
Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won’t be able to see Harry Potter and Emma’s enhanced breasts before it’s actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won’t be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they’ll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.
I suppose I should mention that the claims — that people camcording films in Montreal’s movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies — have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn’t be able to write big feature stories about Canada’s rampant piracy problem.
In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in “trouble” because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.
The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a “diner des cons” with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.
Yesterday I stopped by the H-110 auditorium at Concordia University’s Hall Building, a room I haven’t been to in a few years, to see the local premiere of Helvetica, the movie. It’s a surprisingly fascinating and well-done documentary about one of the world’s most prolific fonts, with tons of pictures of signs and logos that use it and conversations with type designers (like Hermann Zapf of Zapf Dingbats fame and Matthew Carter, who created Verdana and my personal favourite Georgia).
The surprising thing about both the movie and its presentation was how funny it was (granted, the room was filled with geeks so it might not be so universally funny). The designers (type and otherwise) all had differing opinions on Helvetica, calling it ubiquitous, genius and boring. You couldn’t help but laugh at how absolute they were about their opinions.
To add to the fun, the screening staff had t-shirts that read “Helveticrew” and there was a small group of Arial enthusiasts in the crowd (they were playfully booed as they were announced and again as one of them won the first door prize - a Helvetica movie poster).
What got much fervent applause was the line right after the Arial introduction:
“We’ve stopped the Comic Sans people at the door.”
P.S. There really were a librarian, an archivist and a graphic designer among the people I knew at the screening. The librarian and designer are sisters, for what it’s worth.
Remember The Land Before Time? I do. It was a well-regarded 1988 animated movie about tiny dinosaurs separated from their parents. It had a happy ending (sorry if I spoiled it for you) but for a young kid watching it, there were some tense emotional moments there.
For some reason (greed), its makers decided to turn this story into an industry. They produced 11 sequels, about one every year and a half. Instead of a well-written, gritty adventure story that can be enjoyed by young and old alike, they turned it into a musical farce that a four-year-old would quickly find boring.
Their latest outing comes out on DVD this week. I just saw a commercial for it on TV. I know all movies pick and choose what critics they’ll quote, but in this case the only two quotes were from a parenting magazine. In fact, it was Parenting Magazine. This magazine. Somehow I don’t think their movie critics are as harsh as the L.A. Times or Roger Ebert.
This spring, they’re adding a Cartoon Network TV series to the empire.
God help us all.
Tonight, in order to overcome an incredible surge of boredom, I went to Dollar Cinema to catch Casino Royale with the new Bond, Daniel Craig.
As I entered I noticed the Dollar Cinema is now a $2 cinema. It’s still worth going (popcorn and soda are still $1), but on principle it seems strange. Kind of like seeing stuff at the Dollar Store that’s more than a dollar.
The movie itself was OK. Craig makes a believable (though incredibly naive) Bond. But … is there a second part to this movie or something? I feel unsatisfied. He doesn’t even get a girl at the end! (Sorry if that spoiled it for you)
Bon Cop Bad Cop won only two: best picture and best sound.
The Rocket won in 9 of 13 categories it was nominated in, including a braindead obvious best actor award.
