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Toronto Film Fest 2008 Early Short(er) List

This year the Toronto International Film Festival has cut back on its big splashy Hollywood fare and increased the number of screens for smaller independents from 29 to 36.

This is not to say the festival will be any less red-carpet worthy.

I find an unusually good selection at this year's Midnight Madness - from the Being John Malkovich-esque JCVD wherein the muscles from Brussels plays himself, dealing with being a has-been only to turn into a post-modern action flick, to the similarly half-documentary/half-tribute Not Quite Hollywood that celebrates or marvels at some of the pulp cinema that led to Tarantino's Kill Bill and Grindhouse. Other films I chose either because they geographically interesting or because their directors have consistently delivered at Toronto and also bring something new to the table (Mike Leigh, Michael Winterbottom, Denys Arcand, Deepa Mehta, Bruce MacDonald).

Here is my long short list which I will narrow down further as actual screening times and discussion unfurls:

TIFF 2008
[Film Title - Director - Country - Series/Genre - Notes]

Eden Log - France - Sci Fi - Midnight Madness

Detroit Metal City - Toshio Lee - Japan - Midnight Madness

The Dungeon Masters - USA Comedy/Sci Fi

Food, Inc. - USA doc

Garden/Ing - Japan

Genova - Michael Winterbottom - UK

Ghost Town - Ricky Gervais new comedy

The Good, The Bad, The Weird - South Korea

Happy-Go-Lucky - Mike Leigh - UK

Heaven on Earth - Deepa Mehta - India

Horn of Plenty - Spain/Cuba

Hunger - Steve McQueen - UK

In the Shadow of The Naga - Thailand

JCVD - Mabrouk El Mechri - France - Midnight Madness (Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself)

Me and Orson Welles - Richard Linklater - UK

Not Quite Hollywood - Mark Hartley - USA/Australia - Midnight Madness

Picasso and Braque go to the movies - Arne Glimcher - USA

Plastic City - Yu Lik Wai - Brazil/China

Plus Tard tu Comprendras - Amos Gitaï - France

Pontypool - Bruce MacDonald

The Road - based on the brilliant Cormac McCarthy novel starring Charlize Theron

Rain - Maria Govan - Bahamas (coming of age)

The Real Shaolin - USA/China (sports Doc)

RocknRolla - Guy Ritchie - UK

The Sky Crawlers - Animation - Japan

Slumdog Millionaire - Danny Boyle - UK

Synecdoche, New York - Charlie Kaufman - USA

Tears for Sale - Uros Stojanovic - Serbia/Croatia

Tokyo Sonata - Kyoshi Kurosawa - Japan/The Netherlands/Hong Kong, China

Tulpan - Sergey Dvortsevoy - Germany/Switzerland/Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland

Two-Legged Horse - Samira Makhmalbaf - Iran (doc - abuse/poverty)

Yes Madam, Sir - Megan Doneman - India/Australia

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love - Chai Vasarhelyi - USA

Video games make playing God fun!

Will Wright, the genius behind the SimCity/Sims Online franchise is on year who knows what of developing Spore - a profoundly complex AI engine that looks like a cross between Playdough and Lego Mindstorm on the surface. This is not by accident - when I saw Mr Wright speak at the Bannff Media Conference several years back, he confided that one of the things that most influences his game design is Japanese zen gardens - the idea that though the landscape has been radically altered, dozens of iterations later it appears as though it had always been that way.

Spore is about building new organisms, or combinations of organisms from the uni-celled beginning to complex space colony end.

Sims is about moving virtual Barbie dolls around and seeing how they feel about each other and themselves. You can not micro-manage them, only give them subtle catalysts to work from.

But there is also another kind of playing God that doesn't have any game-designer objective behind it. That is the merge between old terra-forming software like Bryce 3D and map-making for gamers who love first-person shooters.

I am hacker when it comes to playing games - most gamers are - we like to see what we can can break about it before we commit to finishing it. Even Will Wright admitted this; the first thing kids do when they encounter a new game is figure out what the limits are - can you walk off the path, flip upside down, self-destruct, kill others, etc. This is how we learn the laws of its universe.

When I used to play Everquest - I had no interest in actually questing - I was more curious about using it as my new instant messeger. I would meet people in Qeynos and we would wander over to a willow tree I had found and chat. The game for me was to see how long I could engage total strangers in stimulating conversation, enjoying the vistas, without ever having to kill anything. Why does that almost sound creepy?

So you can imagine my interest when I see a map-maker become available in a first-person shooter like Ubisoft's Far Cry 2. Check out this vid:



I have little to no interest in shooting anyone. But I have a lot of interest in creating landscapes that I can walk through - not as some omniscient invisible Arrow Key Monster checking out my Thomas Kincaid wannabe digi-art (a la Bryce) but rather as a developed avatar with rich 3D, ray-tracing and texture on a next-gen console.

Halo 3 also worked towards this with its Forge software. And Bethesda's Obilvion on a PC is simply a dream for world-building - there are currently over 4500 modifications online created by user that you can implement into the world and see how it unfolds. Not all the mods work together, and many are redundant in ways that prove disastrous to running the game without a crash - but when you get the combination just right, you can get a near-cinematic experience with endless variation that has no time limit and no rules. My girlfriend and I use to play with a hyper modded Oblivion and then go out to a garden and comment on how much nature looked like the game.

And if you were to believe Plato. or the Baghavad Gita's discussions of maya - then you would recognize this is hardly a new idea.

Xbox and Netflix Team Up - Still Waving that Blu-Ray Banner SONY?

From xbox.com:

"At E3, Microsoft and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to your television via Xbox 360®."

Netflix recently introduced its Watch Instantly program that allows subscribers to view selected (that is, the titles already converted) titles instantly on their PC. A plan costing as little as $8.99/month allows unlimited viewing during that month.

Well here is the trump card Microsoft was holding as it took egg in the face over the loss of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war. This is not another Xbox vs. Playstation post nor is it an HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray treatise - it is a celebration of the fact that at long last a massive high-definition video-on-demand solution exists backed by two of the respectively largest players in the world.

Yeah it's too bad it's an exclusive grab for Microsoft because it means not everyone will be happy; investors in Playstation will punch all sorts of holes in it, and lots of finger pointing will happen. But every time I go to NAB show and see the big TV players scrambling for what is going to happen next and we all wonder when Broadband random-access, full resolution, full-length programming video will be available (yes Vimeo.com is cool and looks nice but really, do you want to watch 3 minute programs for the rest of your life?) well its now. Actually, it is technically this holiday season (2008).

I was already radically changing my movie-viewing habits by staying home to purchase whatever might already be up on the respectively meager offerings from XBOX LIVE Marketplace - it was worth it for instant on-demand on my 46" HDTV. But with the introduction of Netflix and an $8.99 a month subscription to Netflix (with a $7.99 monthly Xbox Live Gold membership) - thus a total of under US$20 - I have access to tens of thousands of titles for unlimited use directly through my Xbox 360 with HDMI out to my HDTV.

But hundreds of questions arise as we contemplate the implications of this announcement. With Sony launching its video-on-demand (VOD) service on the Playstation 3, with portability to the PSP, are we caught once again in a format war - this time between Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft's XBox 360?

What will the new console-based VOD universe mean for distributors?

How will actors, producers, film composers/musicians and the rest collect royalties?

What will differentiate legitimate films from indie YouTUbe fare? Surely studio releases will qualify as "legitimate" films and television, but what differentiates them? As a film studio, Sony and all of its subsidiaries has a direct interest in the films in makes available, whereas Microsoft simply wants to push as much traffic through so that it can participate in the home entertainment lexicon.

One may argue that the audience that doesn;t yet own an Xbox, may not be so excited about having to commit to the platform just to take advantage of the exclusive Netflix opportunity. But look at the inverse - with the Xboxers super happy with this seemingly limitless and convenient option, the advertisers and studios should be asking - how will they get the Xbox/Netflix viewers if they aren't in that catalog?
Bravo.

Save up for those Gucci 3D glasses

Hollywood has started to align itself behind the idea that the movie industry, despite a healthy summer take 26% over this time last year, is still seeing 5% decline in people's butts in movie theater seats.

They are meeting this challenge in a variety of ways, principally among them the idea that 3D is a movie viewing experience that can uniquely be appreciated in the IMAX 3D screening theater. The Hannah Montana movie of 2007 made almost 3 times as much on its 3D screenings as it did in conventional 2D theaters - earning almost 60 million in 3D showings off its meager 15 million dollar production budget.

The studios have taken notice, and there are no less than 25 3D movies in the production pipeline including comers from Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, Universal and even some independents.

Interestingly enough the companies that manufacture the 3D production equipment were caught off-guard by this sudden backing from Tinseltown. Caught with their pants down, they are now scrambling to get everything from cameras, lighting systems and stereoscopic editing solutions to market. And they are meeting the challenge - companies like Iconix, makers of the world's smallest HD camera showed a high-def stereoscopic camera system at this year's NAB show that can be had for somewhere in the ballpark of US$250K. Sounds like a lot, but that is just the first wave. Digital Ordnance showed a High-Def stereoscopic video playback system for newar realtime playback of your 3D content on set so you know you are getting things right. This is quite something considering the massive amount of bandwidth required to spit out synched, near parallel streams of full 2k HD of an array of hard drives.

But enough geek talk.

Another very interesting event that took place at this year's NAB show was the live satellite 3D television broadcast from Howie Mandell in Los Angeles. The company behind the demonstration, 3ality, has managed to acheive this using a simple single stream no different than 2-D television.

Yes, you heard me right. Live. 3D. Single-stream. Broadcast.

Samsung and Mitsubishi are already selling 3-D ready digital televisions, and recently WIRED magazine featured an exclusive stream of Bjork's new 3D video. They pointed out that the stream HAD to be viewed from their site because of a special encoder that permited it to work. see the trick here? it requires a proprietary encoder for playback - that means, until some hacker/coder develops a freeware/open source version of a hi bandwidth 3D streaming encoder, people can control where viewers access content. Advertisers LOVE this. And so do the content creators because they get financed by the advertisers. So 3D is big business and mark my words, before you can say "What is Blu-Ray?" you will be getting a catalog from Fred Segal's with a price list for the latest Gucci Polarized 3D glasses - you know the tortoise shell ones with the miniature diamonds in the arms.

Because in a year's time, you won't leave home without them.




ps. the above Gucci is FAKE and they had nothing to do with this article which is entirely speculative.

The Golden Age of Steampunk is Upon Us

Why do I feel like I have already posted this entry? Perhaps it is because I have been announcing the sentiment in the tagline for the past decade.

The etymology of "steampunk":

I first heard the word steampunk when my friend Matt Johnson, after editing my book True and Selfish Prophets commented how much he enjoyed the steampunk imagery. Though I had never heard the term, I immediately knew what he meant; my book is filled with "Gnostic technology", "dream gadgetry", "systems of gears and crankshafts", antikythera mechanisms, and a wraith-like blue-skinned creature named Archkali who skitters along the ceiling of the protagonist's dreamworld hovel on a system of wires and pulleys.

My interest in these things stemmed from my lifelong study of Alchemy, the Templars, secret societies, Darwin, the Kabballah, The Dark Crystal and Time Bandits, technology and my strangely inherent Luddite tendencies.

I began researching this astute term for my suddenly obvious obsession and was inevitably directed to Steve Jackson and his GURPS role playing system. "Steve Jackson came to it happenstance by drawing on his prolific genre bending to corroborate the pieces into what he coined “steampunk” but probably was an evolution from Cyberpunk. Indeed, the two share similar anti-social traits and usually embody those who are on the bleeding edge but living in the margins."

It is a logical progression. As Steve Jackson games are necessarily creating rich environments for their subscribers to play around in, as Cyberpunk was a rich palette in the early 90's to draw from, the seemingly natural migration of its system to other time periods like a hundred years prior to turn-of the century Mary Shelley/Emily Bronte/Conan Doyle/Jules Verne with all of its explosion of new tech is practically guaranteed.

I was amazed that there was never a dedicated section to the Steampunk genre in any video or bookstore and so I explored creating a tome that discussed its origins, significance, meaning and impact on our culture. I logged extensive notes on the topic and promised myself I would release at the very least a handsome coffee table book (because it is so deliciously visual) but feared that somewhere there was already someone beating me to the punch.

When I created my musician profile at garageband.com almost five years ago, I bypassed their stock music genres from the drop down list, selected other and input "Steampunk" as that which best described my music.

When I submitted my 40 page grant proposal to FACTOR in Canada last year, the section designated for marketing and style was replete with images of airships, copper gadgetry and citizens dressed in handsome teched-out Victorian attire. Despite the excellent proposal, I was denied funding - the evaluation gave me excellent marks in all categories but flunked me on this area.

Steampunk as a musical genre (what it might be):

What does Steampunk as a music genre sound like? Well I have seen the emergence of bands that claim they are steampunk because they Cosplay the genre while playing whatever kind of music they might, but rather than shoot them down for it, I would venture to be even more inclusive – for me Steampunk as a musical genre embodies that which merges an organic sincerity with an admission of a deliberate influence or interference of technology. By this definition, My Bloody Valentine (lumped under the Wombadelia umbrella in the Gen-X 90’s) is Steampunk for its organic somnolent breathy vocals and miasmic textures, while deliberately forcing the listener to be self-conscious of the very medium to which is was recorded by wobbling the whole 2 inch tape itself while playing back – breaking down the fourth wall. I submit that Steampunk may also be the more classic camera obscura organ-driven musical accompaniment to a Lumiere brothers screening, or perhaps Tom Waits’ Bone Machine, made of blown dynamic mics recording giant tin artifices clanged and beaten with sticks in a backyard shed. I hope that the genre does not ferment and harden into some self-parodizing gimmick that can be quickly discarded when the fad goes passé.

A few weeks ago I even promised my friend that within not five years but one year, kids on the street would be sporting monocles as the latest fashion trend. He looked at me as though I was crazy, but alas, even in this projection I was overly conservative. Just type Steampunk into the searchline at ebay and you will see how true this is.

I did the same with robots in the early 90's when I created the ironic annual holiday Robot Pride Day. Then pirates (when we formed the league of Sky Pirates in 1994). Now, in retrospect anyone even remotely jacked into the system would retort "big deal, that's obvious." It wasn't before Bruckheimer and Netscape and Pixar and licensing PKD happened.

But really I am not here to trumpet my prescience, but instead to contribute my two cents before this all blows up in the mainstream and saturation steamrolls the finer points into mass-marketed pulp. Because Steampunk is indeed now locked on with its Tipping Point.

So here are some lists and excerpts from my notes with some additional commentary. The lists are hardly exhaustive, they are just here to substantiate the prevalence of Steampunk in our culture:

Films:

Amelie
Brotherhood of the Wolf
The Brothers Quay films
City of Lost Children
Dark City
Delicatessen
Jan Svankmeier films

All Hayao Miyazaki films:
Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle In the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso

Metropolis
Stardust
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Steamboy
Time Bandits
Treasure Planet
The Great Mouse Detective
The Dark Crystal
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The Golden Compass
Van Helsing
Wild Wild West
Westworld
A Very Long Engagement

Tin Man (television)

Steampunk Subgenres:

Victorian
Gothic
Western
Post Apocalyptic
Fantasy
Dickensian
Post Renaissance

Steampunk Videogames:

American McGee's Alice
Myst, Riven
Arcanum
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
Oddworld
Final Fantasy series
World of Warcraft
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Gunvalkyrie
Thief

There are too many books to even open the category. Just visit Amazon and you will get more than you could ever want. But beyond the obvious Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, and Jules Vernes, I do want to give special mention to the perhaps less obvious Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, Erik Davis, Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake and Piers Anthony as participants in the genre.

I kindly request that those of you who are geeking hard on this genre do not flame me for including or omitting items, as I am posting my own research pro bono here - forfeiting the opportunity to participate in the coming landslide of money to be made from exposing this movement. I do invite your constructive comments, however.

A steampunk infomercial for WETA workshops custom Steampunk pistols:

Why is Steampunk relevant?

I had a band in the late 1990's called Ribcage. The band's motto was "air for flight, blood for rage." The name stemmed from my epiphany that the ribcage protects our breathing mechanism, our inspiration, our soul, and it houses our heart, our passion, our blood pump. It is the technology that serves as a vanguard to all that embodies our most sacred and important inner machine.

When I attended the Toronto film festival in, I think it was 2002 or 3, I had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam do a very exclusive master talk for select members of the media. It was centered around the new film he was working on "Tideland." I had prior knowledge of this project because I was sent the script and asked to audition several months prior. I realized something as I approached the material about Gilliam and his subject matter, and the way he did things, and I wanted to ask him directly if I was near the mark. Here are my notes, in their original form from that evening:

Terry Gilliam says it’s mostly a budget thing, but even so with all the glories of CG he feels ultimately cheated; despite the visuals being there, there is a lack of credible tangibility…he likes the idea of found objects that you can touch and tinker with. And that’s really what this is all about isn’t it. Keeping the magic in our own hands in a way that we can grasp. As though we are the frustrated inhabitants of Flatland, we need the techgnosis to exist in a dimension beneath ours so that we can still feel as though it is under our control.

Gilliam says that the ubiquitous pipes coming out of everything for him represent a form of opulence as he grew up on a farm with an outhouse and the radio was a medium that forced the listener to use their minds eye to create the imagery. In London the pipes were due to retrofitted bathrooms growing up and around antique elaborations of architecture and so it also represented a form of urban sprawl slowly choking the landscape of tradition.

I asked Gilliam what the term Steampunk meant to him. He looked at me the same way I must have looked at Matt Johnson that day I heard the term for the first time, and yet knew exactly what it meant. Having earned his attention, I hypothesized that considering his obvious reticence about the positive influence of technology and bureaucracy (Time Bandits is about greed and power that comes from controlling technology, Brazil is about the terrors of bureaucracy and overindulgence in technological systems) that perhaps the lean towards the last industrial revolution - that which was powered by steam and coal - permitted an exploration of our irrevocable cyborgian reliance upon the machine, but sustained in a world of things and organica; that at the very least the age of steam resembled our human makeup in some way - where coal and fire is our heart and the steam is the air exhausting from our lungs. He considered it, visibly filing it away in some mental lower drawer, and then responded he didn't disagree.

And this, I think is the essence of Steampunk's true allure for us today; we are surrounded and often outpaced by the technology to which we are unsustainably married, and yet the interface is virtual and alien - not tactile and visceral, but representative. We call ourselves meat suits and wetware, but we are profoundly ensconced in the circumstances that arise from our interactions therein.

In his seminal book "Finite and Infinite Games" James P. Carse writes "in order to operate a machine, one must operate like a machine." We must change our very nature in order to commune with the object that empowers us. It renders us differently than we are and enslaves us to it. But steampunk attempts to reclaim some of that control - its origins are in a time of imagination, wonder and discovery as we plug things into wrong sockets to see what lights up, we tinker, modify, experiment, bend the laws of nature and influence the elements to serve our fantasy. It is self-empowering rather than overwhelming. It is a tweaker/hacker's heaven. It is populated by modders, do-it-yourselfers, independent researchers, alchemists, mad scientists and independents. Of course its time has come - nothing could better reflect the double-aught zeitgeist. It is the story of us fighting for our lives.

In his book Carse also writes that a machine operates from an energy that is introduced from outside of it, a garden thrives from energy that comes from within, from its own chaotic and variable nature. This inspired the name of my mid 1990's ambient music project "Automated Gardens" whose motto was "There will never be a future" - meaning, there is only a now. Our imagination is the seed of our tomorrow (I am now paraphrasing Kahlil Gibran).

Steampunk is the externalized manifestation of this inner urge to remain a part of the magnificent and mysterious world of which we are still a part.

This article is ongoing, and may be updated without notice. Your comments and contributions are invited.

the britney block and the erosion of n american media

It is a form of insanity, what the Buddha would call hardcore addiction were he to use the vernacular. We are in a riptide of obsessive compulsive behavior that has left mainstream media culturally bankrupt; everything is post-source to a degree that we are mashing up a mashup culture. Every news source now has a dedicated Britney block that is set to follow Britney, and any incoming reports on the subject trump all others. One tabloid promotes its cautionary tale examining what it is to live with mental illness with Britney Spears as its focus. beside it, another tabloid gleams about how you can learn how Britney lost 15 lbs in a month. Hrm. Mental instability / weight loss. I wonder if there is a co-relation in this case? Could it be the girl wouldn't be half crazy if she wasn't being followed around by a bunch of lecherous spectacle vultures all day?

As South Park eloquently illustrated, she is this year's sacrificial lamb, whom they wait to execute in the town square so they can move onto their next virgin. Hannah Montana anyone? The druids did it because they wanted to please the gods, but what do we gain from this mania other than to stuff the holes in our psyches, those perturbed emotions and over-stimulated nervous systems, than junkie-level distraction?

But I turn this lens around on you now: how ya feelin? Little kooky?

If you want to know how to scratch that itch, check out nature. Try silence. Take a vow of silence for a week - don't comment, don't talk, don't attempt to mitigate. Just focus on impartial awareness. If you embark upon this, I further recommend at least temporarily discontinuing exposure to the noise - of the radio, the internet, the television, the game console. Check in with your self and register What's Up. This will be hard. It will feel like you are going crazy for a day or two or three as your mind grasps for something to satisfy its insatiable hunger for information. And then something will shift. You will begin to detox your nervous system and perhaps even, in recognizing your aversion to the mental clutter, begin to abhor it the way an ex-smoker abhors cigarette smoke.

I am not presenting anything here that you do not already know. I am simply substantiating that it is going on. Here. Now. Here. Again. Now. Like knitting. Loop in. Now here. Loop in. When you have reconnected to the immense richness of all the things around you in the present, your junkie-mode for all the attention grabbing drivel of the mainstream media will begin to appear as it really is - a desperate and petulant child crying out for your attention. You can either feed it, or let it exhaust itself and restore some equilibrium and have a good life.

And from that place, you will create. You will become a source. And then, I will blog about you.


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I am attending the National Association of Broadcasters convention this week. This year's conference has a heavy focus on content creators. I am interested in hearing with what they want to populate the multiplicity of broadcast "solutions." I do not have any disdain for the content creators; they have stories to tell and they need your attention to get the funding to tell them. some will bail out and fall prey to sensationalism. some will figure out a way to transcend that and win you over by virtue of a virally active word of mouth based on merit and innovation/genius. I look forward to reporting back to you.