TIFF, eh?

If you plan on being in the Toronto, Canada area early next month, you might want to pop round to the 33rd annual Toronto International Film Festival which runs September 4-13. This year 312 movies will be featured and over 500 celebrities are expected to show up on various red carpets. While 64 different countries will be represented at this year's festival, the opening film honor goes to Canadian Paul Gross' World War I drama, Passchendaele. "The film tells the story of the Third Battle of Ypres, a battleground in Belgium that became one of the key conflicts for Canadian soldiers during the Great War."(Peter Howell, The Toronto Star, June 18, 2008.) One particularly anticipated film from the US seems to be the Coen Brothers' dark comedy (do they make any other kind?) Burn After Reading. After quickly scanning the list of festival films, the tickets I'd most want to snag would be for The Brothers Bloom, a con men adventure with Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo and The Stone of Destiny, the closing night selection, about a group of Scottish students who try to steal back the famous relic of their heritage from the English. (Didn't Hamish MacBeth already cover this?)

Anyhow if you are lucky enough to attend the festival festivies, let us know how it was. At least I could live vicariously through you.

Entertainment Bargain

I constantly urge people to use the library as a source for movies. The library I work for has a wonderful mix of blockbusters, classics and lesser-known films. And if we don't have what you're looking for, we belong to a consortium of libraries, one of which will probably own that elusive title. Some don't like to delay gratification and sit on a waiting list for the more popular new releases. However, the price of admission for movies approaches $10 and the cost of online rentals, while more reasonable, is still a disposible income expense. With the tight budgets so many of us are coping with today, the fact that borrowing movies at the library is free might make it worth the wait.

I also have been able delve into the depths of library collections to find some of the more obscure work of now-famous performers just getting their starts. While the films or television series are sometimes less than stellar, it is fun to see actors early in their careers, paying their dues and sometimes shining amongst a otherwise mediocre cast. I wouldn't want to spend money renting some of those DVDs, but for free it's amusing to study an actor or director's career or a particular time period or genre in film.

I really feel films can be a wonderful source of education, enlightment and entertainment and, oddly enough, I believe libraries are too.

Experience UnSpun

After watching 27 Dresses last night (which I enjoyed by the way), I got to thinking about those movies we love, but might be embarrassed to admit that we watch. I starting Googling "guilty pleasure movies" and discovered the Amazon-sponsored UnSpun community. This is basically a place to list your opinions on topics from Best Food at the Beach to Worst Cell Phone Carriers. Create a new list, vote on existing ones or just marvel at the variety of things people spend their time catorgorizing.

UnSpun Guilty Pleasure Movie List
1. Titanic
2. American Pie
3. Dirty Dancing
4. Mean Girls
5. Showgirls
6. Bring It On
7. The Notebook
8. Clueless
9. 10 Things I Hate About You
10. Police Academy

By the way, my favorite guilty pleasure film is 13 Going on 30.

Image Generators, Rollyo and Pandora - Oh My!

So much to explore, so little off-desk time. As you can see, I found an image generator to match my blog theme. Unfortunately there wasn't room on the marquee for that other library classic, Indiana Jones and the Last Card Catalog.

A few of my other web adventures included creating my own Rollyo search engine - Stories in Motion. I included websites and databases such as IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango, BAFTA, and The Sundance Channel to meet my film surfing needs.

Pandora was fun, but a little frustrating. Apparently the only artist out there that musically resembles the talented John Mayer is Jack Johnson. (Not quite the same league in my opinion, but, oh well.) And what may you ask is the movie connection for either of these artists? Among other ventures, John Mayer wrote and performed "Say" from the The Bucket List and Jack Johnson contributed a large chunk to the Curious George soundtrack.

Tag, you're it, Lars!

Originally uploaded by TiVo_epaper

I did my tagging on Amazon. One of the items I chose to practice on was the movie, Lars and the Real Girl. As other users' tags indicated, it was a quirky, poignant, original film about a delusional young man and the community that supports him through a very unique healing process (that's my tag). Not everyone agreed with my assessment of this film; some called it overrated, dull and shmatzy (?) To each his own of course, but it was interesting to find tagging being used as a very short-hand form of film critique. Watch out Ebert and Roeper.

Movie Mashups Central - You Tube

While experimenting with movie mashups I found you will mostly likely be led to the land of You Tube videos. Trailer-esque music montages and creative combinations of two or more films abound when you mash up your favorite movie titles. The most clever offering I found was when I did a mashup with the Oscar-winning film title, The Last King of Scotland and was treated to the even more classic animated feature, The Last Lion King of Scotland. The evil Scar is voiced by the evil Idi Amin while our reluctant hero Simba is voiced by the charming young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan.

Check it out for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfdSDedM2Ks or just type The Last Lion King of Scotland in the search box on You Tube.

Hidden Treasures- SNOW CAKE

snowcake_poster1
Originally uploaded by kak_sulayha

This is my Flickr experiment, a Snow Cake movie poster originally uploaded by kak_sulayha.

I watched Snow Cake on DVD a few weeks back and wanted to get the word out about this lovely film. It stars Sigourney Weaver as Linda, a high functioning autistic woman who lives, figuratively anyway, in a well-ordered, sparkly snowglobe. Alan Rickman is Alex, a mysterious and lonely stranger who tragically appears in Linda's life and does his best to make things right. This film charmed me with its quirky humor and inspired me with the dignity of its damaged characters who reach out, connect and get on with life despite its very unpredictable nature.

Snow Cake was delicious and low-cal, too!