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.