Sing City Chronicles

August Travesties

Just 12 songs. Sigh.

Changes - David Bowie
Doctor My Eyes - Jackson Browne
Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Poison
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Fell In Love With a Girl - White Stripes
Great Balls of Fire - Jerry Lee Lewis
Heart-Shaped Box - Nirvana
Instant Karma - John Lennon
Life During Wartime - Talking Heads
Photograph - Def Leppard
Tumbling Dice - Rolling Stones
You'll Never Find - Lou Rawls

TIFF '12 Preview: Tuesday the 11th

I'll eventually be compiling these into one big omnibus preview piece for Ain't It Cool News, but in the meantime here's the day-by-day preview of the hell that is trying to narrow a list of 101 picks into a workable, non-life-threatening 11-day schedule. Yes, I said 101 picks... this year's TIFF program is flat out ridiculous. I've never had a more laughably named 'short list'.

Thursday Sept 6th preview
Friday Sept 7th preview
Saturday Sept 8th preview
Sunday Sept 9th preview
Monday Sept 10th preview

Tuesday Sept 11th:

Here Comes the Devil is another movie about creepy Spanish kids (there are a lot of them this year) who may or may not have been touched by something evil after disappearing for a day.
From Microcosmos on up, modern camera technology has made recent bug docs true wonders to behold. More Than Honey focuses that lens on the imperiled world of the noble bee.
Inescapable casts ST:DS9 alum Alexander Siddig as a former Syrian dissident who's built a very comfortable life for himself in Canada only to have his daughter disappear in Damascus, forcing him to go back home and be a badass once again. So, basically, a Liam Neeson movie without Liam Neeson.
Many years ago I was a huge fan of Philippine films, and not just because the women in them were crazy hot and they all seemed to be ridiculous melodramas. There was an energy to their film industry that no one seemed to be matching at the time. I'm getting hints that West African films might be about to plug into that same socket... Kinshasa Kids I mentioned earlier, but Burn It Up Djassa is another one I get that vibe from. It looks like a City of God-esque brother-against-brother crime flick from Cote d'Ivoire, from a director named Lonesome Solo (!!!). Buckle up.
In addition to films about creepy Spanish kids, there's also a subset of TIFF movies this year about Japanese bathhouses. Entrant #2 after Thermae Romae is The Key of Life, about a down-on-his-luck actor who swaps identities with a hitman after the hitman slips in a public bathhouse, bumps his head and gets amnesia. So, basically, a Takeshi Kitano comedy without Takeshi Kitano.
A Werewolf Boy is a South Korean film about a poor family with a teenage daughter who take in a feral lad they find in the back yard and try to civilize him. It's described as a 'wistful fantasy'. Sure, what the hell.
Audrey Tautou graces us with her presence in Therese Desqueyroux, Claude Miller's final film and based on a novel that's sort of the French equivalent to Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Anna Karenina.
Kill List director Ben Wheatley is back with a bloody romp across the English countryside that sounds as much like Grant Morrison's Kill Your Boyfriend as it does Bonnie and Clyde in Sightseers.
Since we have a film in Mr. Pip about people who like Great Expectations, it's only fitting that we also get a reverential adaptation of Dickens' classic as well, this one from Mike Newell and starring half the people who appeared in the Harry Potter series: Ralph Fiennes, Robbie Coltrane, Helena Bonham Carter etc etc.
Passion sees Brian DePalma trying to stay relevant by getting Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace to star in a sexually charged thriller set in the advertising world. I'm sure it'll be very DePalma.
And at Midnight, Aftershock casts Eli Roth (who also co-wrote it) as an American tourist caught in the middle of a devastating Chilean earthquake that quickly rips the veneer of civilization off the survivors. The director is Nicolas Lopez, who apparently has films called Fuck My Life and Fuck My Wedding on his resume. I guess he figured calling this one Fuck My Apocalypse might not play internationally.
Also repeat screenings of Byzantium, The Iceman, Greetings From Tim Buckley, Hyde Park On Hudson, Tai Chi 0, Berberian Sound Studio, Dangerous Liaisons, No Place On Earth, The Lesser Blessed, To the Wonder and Hellbenders.

TIFF '12 Preview: Monday the 10th

Cate Shortland, who was here a few years ago with an Aussie coming-of-age story called Somersault that showed a fair amount of promise, shoots the moon with her latest film Lore, an inverse end-of-Sound of Music about a group of children raised by SS parents trying to escape across a war-ravaged Germany in 1945.
Berberian Sound Studio sees Toby Jones as a British sound engineer used to doing nature docs hired to work on an Argento-esque '70s horror film, and slowly losing his grip on reality. So basically, DePalma's Blow Out made a demon spawn baby with In the Mouth of Madness. Sweet.
Vinterberg collaborator Tobias Lindholm makes his directorial debut with A Hijacking, about the taking of a Danish freighter by Somali pirates.
Bill Murray plays FDR in... wait, I'll let that sink in for a moment. Bill Fucking Murray plays Franklin Delano Motherfucking Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, from Notting Hill director Roger Mitchell. (Admittedly, that part's less mind-blowing.)
Casting By shines a spotlight on trailblazing casting director Marion Dougherty, whose name you've seen on more great movies than you realized.
Imagine if Haley Joel Osment's Sixth Sense character grew up and became a sad-sack high school teacher? And that the Breakfast Club ends with them all dying in a giant explosion? Then, provided you're imagining it in Spanish, you're imagining Ghost Graduation.
If you could handle that last mental exercise, try this one: imagine if Matt Murdock gave up being Daredevil, and instead tried to teach a blind Portuguese woman how to 'see' like he does. Then you'd be imagining, umm, Imagine. Yeah, OK, enough of that.
It's becoming clear that David Cronenberg will probably never make another Videodrome, or even another Rabid. Fortunately, he had children, and one of them is now picking up that fleshy, throbbing gauntlet. Son Brandon makes his debut with Antiviral, about a black market for celebrity diseases and the people who procure and inject them. Hot damn.
No Place On Earth pieces together the history of a small band of Jewish escapees who survived the Nazis by hiding in a series of underground caves for 18 months.
Fittingly, along with Lindholm's debut feature A Hijacking (listed above) we also get the latest film he co-wrote with Thomas Vinterberg, The Hunt, about a town torn apart by accusations of pedophilia which stars the always awesome Mads Mikkelsen.
Zhang Ziyi and Cecilia Cheung star as the nice one and the slutty one, respectively, in a '30s Shanghai version of Cruel Intentio... err, I mean Dangerous Liaisons.
The Iceman has Michael Shannon doing what he does best (namely, being a sick, creepy fuck- in this case mob hitman and serial killer Richard Kuklinski).
Terrence Malick enlists Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and others to help him analyze the mystery of love in To the Wonder.
In the House sees Francois Ozon in fine form, with a story about a teacher who unwittingly invites a bad seed into his home in the form of a prized pupil.
And Rob Zombie's latest for Midnight Madness, Lords of Salem, sounds like an extended Night Gallery episode, with a rock DJ in Salem accidentally awakening witchy evil by playing a cursed record. Or something.
Also repeat screenings of Midnight's Children, The Act of Killing, The Girl From the South, The Company You Keep, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, Blancanieves, Mr. Pip, The Impossible, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, Fin, Everybody Has a Plan, The Deflowering of Eva von End, London - The Modern Babylon, The Color of the Chameleon, No One Lives, Quartet, Thanks For Sharing and A Liar's Autobiography.

Oh Lord, My God, Are There No Votes For A Widow's Son?

Huh. I just found out, through Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice, that Paul Ryan is a widow's son.

Maybe picking Ryan was Romney's way sending out the Masonic distress call in code. Goddess knows he needs all the help he can get.

TIFF '12 Preview: Sunday the 9th

Ken Burns returns to Toronto with a doc about a more contemporary subject, The Central Park Five, about the Central Park Jogger case in New York.
Pixar takes their first crack at a 3D film with the Finding Nemo re-release.
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners examines the life and work of scholar, activist, firebrand and (depending on who you talk to) terrorist and traitor Angela Davis.
Hugh Laurie stars as a schoolteacher with a love for Dickens' Great Expectations caught on the fringes of a civil war in Mr. Pip.
Documentary maestro Alex Gibney is back with Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, a scathing look at the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church.
One of my hunch picks, The Lesser Blessed is a First Nations coming-of-age story set in the Northwest Territories.
Greetings From Tim Buckley recounts the period in Jeff Buckley's life just before he became, well, Jeff Buckley, leading up to a tribute concert for his father.
One of the biggest movers and shakers behind modern pop culture gets the biodoc treatment in American Masters: Inventing David Geffen.
Deepa Mehta adapts Salman Rushdie's acclaimed Midnight's Children, which I'm sure will be all lush and magic realist and whatnot.
Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona tackles The Impossible, a ground-level drama about a family caught in the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
The Deflowering of Eva van End looks kind of like a Dutch Welcome To the Dollhouse, which would be just fine with me.
Neil Jordan gets back to doing weird, Neil Jordan-y stuff with Byzantium, a sexy vampire romp starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan.
Robert Redford gets back to doing righteous, political, Robert Redford-y stuff with The Company You Keep, about a fugitive former Weather Underground member gone straight who has to go on the run when Shia LeBeouf threatens to expose him. Stupid Shia.
Quartet sees Dustin Hoffman stepping behind a camera for the first time, directing a story of four opera singers reuniting in a retirement home for musicians.
And JT Petty returns to Midnight for the third time with Hellbenders, about a group of badass rogue exorcists led by Clancy Brown.
Also repeat screenings of How To Make Money Selling Drugs, Something In the Air, Silver Livings Playbook, Cloud Atlas, Pusher, Ginger and Rosa, In the Name of Love, Thermae Romae, Much Ado About Nothing, Call Girl, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Janeane From Des Moines, The Brass Teapot, Painless, and Yellow.

TIFF '12 Preview: Saturday the 8th

Japanese box office champ Thermae Romae is about a Roman architect who becomes a hit after accidentally time-slipping back and forth to modern Japan and adopting elements of their public bathhouse culture for his own time period.
Genndy Tartakovsky, the animation genius behind the Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, the Clone Wars and Dexter's Laboratory finally directs a feature, the 3D CGI romp Hotel Transylvania.
Much Ado About Nothing... sigh. Leave it to Joss Whedon to crank out a Shakespeare adaption with all his friends in 12 days while in the middle of shooting a massive Hollywood blockbuster.
The long, sad story of the West Memphis Three gets one more chapter, although not from Berlinger and Sinofsky, with West of Memphis.
There's a very The Man Who Was Thursday vibe about spy thriller The Color of the Chameleon, from first-time Bulgarian director Emil Christov, that has me intrigued.
The Year of Big Screen Snow White Adaptations (which I'm sure is how 2012 will be immortalized by historians) wouldn't be complete without a silent art-house riff, Blancanieves, in which Snow becomes a bullfighter. Because why the hell not.
Video director Ramaa Mosley debuts with the Twilight Zone-ish The Brass Teapot starring Juno Temple.
Viggo Mortensen plays twins with a dark past in the Argentinian thriller Everybody Has a Plan.
The Wachowskis team with Tom Tykwer to film the unfilmable, Fountain-esque Cloud Atlas (Tykwer didn't do too badly with the almost-as-unfilmable Perfume, so I have hope this'll be more than just a spectacle).
[REC] writer Luiso Berdejo co-writes Painless, about a surgeon with a mysterious past and an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War where bizarre experiments were conducted on bizarre children.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is Emma Watson's first big post-Potter chance to show she's worth paying attention to. Oh, and it's also an adaption of a beloved teen novel blah blah blah. We all know why you're really seeing it. You're fooling no one.
David O. Russell, who has yet to make a bad film in his career, returns to more idiosyncratic, Flirting With Disaster/I Heart Huckabees-ish territory with Silver Livings Playbook.
Argentinian doc filmmaker Jose Luis Garcia tries to finish a film he started over twenty years ago, tracking down a North Korean activist who miraculously walked through the DMZ to South Korea in The Girl From the South.
Fin looks like a post-apocalyptic thriller crossed with the Big Chill, from a first-time Spanish director. That's fest-speak for "total wild card that could be anything from great to awful".
Olivier Assayas does a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film set in the wake of the May 1968 Paris protests, Something In the Air.
Julien Temple parades you through his version of the last 100 years of history along the banks of the Thames in London - The Modern Babylon.
The Act of Killing literally made me sit up and shout "Holy shit!" to an empty room when I read the synopsis. Former members of Indonesian death squads (people who have never been brought to justice and see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, since after all their side won) re-enact their crimes as though they were movie scenes, complete with special effects, sets, costumes and extras to gun down. Errol Morris and Werner Herzog apparently had the same reaction I did, since they signed on as executive producers after seeing early footage.
Yellow sees Nick Cassavettes possibly remembering who his father was and ditching his relentlessly middle-brow CV to do a pic about a woman who hallucinates her way through life.
Leave it to Graham Chapman, Monty Python's most subversive member, to narrate his own animated pseudo-biodoc, A Liar's Autobiography, decades after his death.
The Secret Disco Revolution continues a long, proud Canadian mock docs that began with the criminally-underseen The Canadian Conspiracy.
Tai Chi 0 is a cheeky, steampunk-and-anime-infused historical martial arts flick with fight choreography from Sammo Hung. That, folks, is what you call "must fucking see".
Palme d'Or winner Amour sees Michael Haneke trying to make something that isn't agonizingly misanthropic for once, as it portrays an old man watching his wife slowly fade away after suffering a stroke. On second thought, that could easily end up being just as misanthropic as the rest of his filmography...
Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow (Gwynnie-cakes to no one but me) headline Thanks For Sharing, a comedy about sex addiction from Kids Are Alright director Stuart Blemberg
And finally, No One Lives sees Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura pitting kidnappers against backwoods clans against who knows what else at Midnight, with an appropriately high body count.
Also, repeat screenings of Reincarnated, Far Out Isn't Far Enough, Argo, The Place Beyond the Pines, The We and the I, Dredd 3D, Three Kids, What Maisie Knew, Imogene, The Master, Seven Psychopaths, Me and You, Anna Karenina, Frances Ha and Wasteland.

TIFF '12 Preview: Friday the 7th

Another classic restoration sees the light of day, this time of Rossellini's little-seen Stromboli (the film on which he and Ingrid Bergman fell in love). It's paired with a doc on the shoot itself, War of the Volcanoes.
Imogene stars Kristin Wiig in what seems like a fairly by-the-numbers American indie wacky family comedy but hey, it's Kristin Wiig.
Three Kids looks like a vaguely George Washington-esque film about some young 'uns trying to survive in Port-au-Prince in the wake of the Haitian earthquake.
Zizek returns for another round of analyzing film clips while making your head simultaneously spin and hurt with The Pervert's Guide To Ideology.
Ryan Gosling re-unites with Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, hooks up with Eva Mendes (in real life, I mean. I have no idea what their characters get up to in the film) and goes mano a mano with Bradley Cooper in moody crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines.
Call Girl is a '70s Swedish period piece and stripped-down procedural recounting the tale of a prostitution scandal that derailed the government.
Janeane From Des Moines is another semi-doc, this one about a Republican Iowa housewife who experiences a crises of political faith during the 2012 GOP caucuses.
Ben Affleck returns as director (yay!), but also as leading man (uh oh...), in Argo, a thriller about the Iranian hostage crisis and the too-crazy-not-to-be-true, Wag the Dog-ish rescue effort.
The We and the I sees Michel Gondry (who I've decided to forgive for the Green Hornet) riding shotgun with a pack of Bronx schoolkids on a bus on the last day of school.
Hip hop godfather Snoop Dogg becomes reggae neophyte Snoop Lion in the doc Reincarnated.
Paul Thomas Anderson. The Master. 70 fucking mm. Holy fuck. Did I mention there's a non-zero chance of a Scientology protest or something given their large, decrepit church/chapter house/gormless office building on Yonge Street in Toronto?
I'm actually not terribly looking forward to this one, but the English remake of Nic Refn's Pusher sees the light of day. At least Zlatko Buric returns as Milo.
Sally Potter is back with a Cold War coming-of-age flick starring Elle Fanning, Ginger and Rose.
Wasteland looks like a Ken Loach film made a baby with The Usual Suspects, which is too ridiculous a mishmash not to check out.
Julianne Moore struts around in leopard print and spars with Steve Coogan in What Maisie Knew, a 21st-century Kramer vs Kramer based on a Henry James book.
How To Make Money Selling Drugs is a doc exploring the US drug trade from the inside out, apparently structured like a video game that sees you rise from selling crack on the street corner to lording over a cartel and featuring interviews with everyone from David Simon to "Freeway" Ricky Ross (not the MC, the guy who says he invented crack).
A childless Vietnamese couple gets torn apart when the wife decides to let her husband's ex-best friend impregnate her in In the Name of Love.
Bernardo Bertolucci is back behind the camera with Me and You, about a couple of troubled young half-siblings who have different ways of hiding, and different reasons for doing it.
Joe Wright teams back up with Keira Knightley, again, for an adaptation of Anna Karenina.
Indie darling Noah Baumbach teams up with indie darling Greta Gerwig for a film about a rootless Brooklynite that's sure to be an indie darling, Frances Ha
And at Midnight Colin Farrell re-teams with In Bruges writer/director Martin McDonagh and drags Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Tom Waits and Goddess known who else along with him for Seven Psychopaths, which looks like nothing less than a rebirth of that crazy '90s sub-genre of crime film that featured insanely deep, talented casts and made no sense at all (you know the ones I mean... Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, 8 Heads In a Duffel Bag, Two Days in the Valley etc etc). Of course Seven Psychopaths looks like it might actually be good, but I'll settle for random, entertaining bosh.
Also, repeat screening of Kinshasa Kids and On the Road.

TIFF '12 Preview: Thursday the 6th

Things kick off with a bang as the opening night Gala is Rian Johnson's existential dilemma of a time travel thriller, Looper.
Kinshasa Kids is a semi-doc about Congolese children thrown out onto the streets because of suspected witchcraft, only some of them form a band instead of moping (there's a lot of this in the program this year, by the way, where the lines between fiction and documentary are deliberately blurred.)
The 3D restoration of Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder gets a test drive.
Rust and Bone stars Marion Cotillard and Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts as broken, damaged people trying to rebuild their lives. I can't think of two actors I'd rather see tackle that kind of material.
A doc on counter-culture illustrator Tomi Ungerer tells us that Far Out Isn't Far Enough.
Motorcycle Diaries' Walter Salles brings us his long-awaited adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, with Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund and Viggo Mortensen along for the ride.
And Midnight Madness hits the ground running with Dredd 3D, the plot of which sounds suspiciously like a riff on The Raid. Frankly, if it's as hard core as a Judge Dredd movie should be (and which all the early reports say it is), I'm OK with that.

TIFF 2012: ...and the rest

With the last of the program announcements rolling out from TIFF, here are the final handful of films that seem like they might be worth my time in September:

- PTA's The Master. Mentally, I'm already in line

- Claude Miller's final film, Therese Desqueyroux, stars Audrey Tautou, which means there are two good reasons to check it out

- Nick Cassavettes' Yellow should prove once and for all whether he inherited any of his father's talent. I mean, would you trust the director of The Notebook with what sounds like a doggedly middle-brow Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

- Key of Life is a Japanese film about an unemployed actor who switches lives with a hit man after the hit man slips in the bath house, hits his head and develops amnesia. This is now the second movie announced for this year's fest about weird things happening in a Japanese bath house.

- Kinshasa Kids sounds like its right in my wheelhouse: Congolese children get kicked out of their homes due to charges of witchcraft, and decide to form a band.

- Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with what at blush looks like a non-genre effort called Penance, about four women burdened by guilt years after their childhood friend was murdered and they weren't able to help bring the killer to justice.

- despite the Thing remake I still adore Mary Winstead, so seeing her get a chance to actually act will be interesting. James Ponsoldt's Smashed has her as a school teacher trying to figure out which parts of her life are worth salvaging after she checks herself into AA.

- Jeon Woo Chi director Choi Dong-hoon returns to his caper flick roots with The Thieves, about a jewel heist in Macao.

TIFF 2012: Midnight Madness and Other Goodies

I've fallen behind in skimming through the TIFF program announcements to see what looks good. Let's rectify that:

Midnight Madness

No Man With the Iron Fists, sadly, but the program still looks pretty crazy even without it.

- The ABCs of Death is a 26-chapter horror anthology by, well, everybody. I'm sure the quality will be uneven (anthologies always are) but my big worry with this one is that, unless it's a six hour epic, each film is going to be no more than about four-five minutes long (even if they average five minutes, with no framing device, that'd still be an over two hour movie). That's a lot of shorts to digest in one sitting.

- Aftershock: a US/Chilean co-production starring Eli Roth and Selena Gomez, which appears to be a post-earthquake survival thriller or something. No, seriously, Eli Roth and Selena Gom... shit, what if Biebs shows up at the screening? OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

- The Bay is "a brutal and harrowing film about a deadly parasite" infecting a Maryland town, which is fine except that it's directed by Barry Levinson. Yes, Diner/Homicide/Wag the Dog Barry Levinson. Or, if you're a pessimist, Sphere/Envy/Man of the Year Barry Levinson.

- a Mexican creepy kids (as in, the kids are creepy, not that it's a kids movie that is creepy) flick called Come Out and Play

- Dredd. Fantastic.

- JT Petty's exorcism spoof Hellbenders, which should make a fine double bill with...

- John Dies In the End. Most excellent.

- Rob Zombie's latest, Lords of Salem. Unless the buzz is off the charts, or Rob agrees to come out to karaoke with me, I imagine I'll be skipping this one.

- Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura's latest, No One Lives. Ain't skipping this one, especially with that title.

- In Bruges writer/director Martin McDonagh re-teams with Colin Farrell for another crime comedy-thriller, called Seven Psychopaths. It also stars Chris Walken and Sam Rockwell. Yes please!

Other Crazy Stuff

- when they say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, this is what they're talking about: Cronenberg's son Brandon directs a film called Antiviral, in which a guy who works at a clinic that specializes in celebrity diseases (not to treat them, but to inject them into obsessed fans) gets accidentally infected himself and has to track down the mysterious star whose pathogen he now shares. I mean, of course he's Cronenberg's son. Who else would be making a movie like that?

- apparently learning nothing from I'm Still Here, 30 Seconds To Mars singer and Brad Pitt punching bag Jared Leto directs a doc called Artifact about his fight with EMI over some bullshit or other. I'm sure it won't be hopelessly myopic and self-indulgent in the least. Nope. The fact that he directed it under a Dr. Seuss-inspired, multiple hat-themed pseudonym isn't a tell-tale sign of wankery at all. I strongly suspect this will be epically bad.

- Berberian Sound Studio is about a composer who loses his mooring to reality while working on the score for a '70s Italian horror flick. Sure, what the heck.

- another Mexican creepy kid flick called Here Comes the Devil, although this one seems more of the psychological thriller "maybe the parents are just nuts" variety. Still, if I'm seeing one I better see them both.

- Johnnie To produces a Hong Kong car chase movie called Motorway.

- [REC] writer Juan Carlos Medina directs a "creepy kids grow up and one of them starts digging into the past" thriller. Seriously, what is it with Hispanic filmmakers and creepy kids this year?

- Peaches directs and stars in a semi-sorta-authobiographical rock musical called, naturally, Peaches Does Herself.

- Luis Prieto's English remake of Pusher gets a showing. I guess I'm obligated to see it, aren't it?

- I'll finally get to see Room 237, the doc about crazy Shining fans and their crazy theories

- Down Terrace/Kill List director Ben Wheatley returns with Sightseers, which sounds like the love child of Natural Born Killers and Grant Morrison's Kill Your Boyfriend. Very nice.

Other Non-Crazy Stuff

- one of my early hunch picks, The Lesser Blessed is a Native Canadian coming-of-age story.

- Ken Burns and crew bring a doc about the Central Park Five

- more docs: ones on Tomi Ungerer (Far Out Isn't Far Enough) and Iceberg Slim (Portrait of a Pimp), a Julien Temple doc on his London (London - The Modern Babylon), an Alex Gibney film on the Catholic Church's cover-up of widespread abuse (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God), and a doc/spoof on disco called The Secret Disco Revolution

- Michel Gondry's The We and the I is about kids on a school bus. That's all, just kids on a school bus. Good enough for me.

- Hotel Transylvania is... hang on a minute, before you slag me for wanting to see it, keep in mind it's the feature debut of Genndy Tartakovsky. Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, Clone Wars Genndy Tartakovsky. Fuck you, it'll be awesome.