They had me at the Scion…

1. Flogging Molly
2. Gogol Bordello
3. Great Big Sea
4. Dean Gray (Green Day mashup DJ)
5. Corb Lund
6. Captain Tractor
7. The Free Design
8. Blink-182
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Jack Johnson
11. The Flaming Lips
12. Dropkick Murphys
13. Rancid
14. Feist
15. Dungeons & Dragons podcasts

My Top Tracks (according to Last.fm):

1. Big Audio Dynamite – Rush
2. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
3. Webb Wilder & The Nashvegaans – One Taste Of The Bait
4. The Flaming Lips – Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
5. Scissor Sisters – I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’
6. Gogol Bordello – Sally
7. Trace Adkins – Honky Tonk Badonkadonk
8. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
9. Ian Tyson – This is My Sky
10. Tenacious D – The Metal
11. Dean Gray – Boulevard of Broken Songs
12. Montgomery Gentry – Gone
13. Flogging Molly – Sentimental Johnny
14. Dean Gray – Dr. Who on Holiday
15. John Michael Montgomery – Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)

Movies I saw that were released in 2008 (not necessarily the best, just some of the more memorable; in no order):

• WALL-E
• The Dark Knight
• Kung-Fu Panda
• Iron Man
• Cloverfield
• Quantum of Solace
• Mamma Mia
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Horton Hears A Who
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• The Incredible Hulk
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• The Forbidden Kingdom
• Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
• Semi-Pro
• The Ruins
• Be Kind, Rewind
• Futurama – The Beast With A Billion Backs
• Tropic Thunder

(If I tried to remember ALL the movies I watched last year, it would take me until the end of ’09!  The most watched movie of the year was a tie between WALL-E and Shoot ‘Em Up, 3 times each.)

Some of the best stuff I read in 2008:

• The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by Wil Wheaton
• World War Z, by Max Brooks
• Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis
• The Gunslinger Born (The Dark Tower Graphic Novel)
• G33k Mafia, by Rick Dakan
• Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
• Y, The Last Man, series
• Transmetropolitan, series
• The Boys, series
• Planet Hulk/World War Hulk, series
• Punisher MAX, series (Garth Ennis’ run)
• Wanted, series
• Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
• Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, core books and supplements

Teh awesomist tubes on teh internets:

• Wil Wheaton dot Net: In Exile
• The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
• Lifehacker
• xkcd
• Garfield minus Garfield
• Least I Could Do
• Questionable Content
• Penny Arcade
• Tcritic – Daily T-Shirt Blog
• io9
• Boing Boing
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Horror Movie A Day
• PostSecret

Favourite Online Video of 2008:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Favourite Video Game of 2008:

Tie: Guitar Hero III and Portal

As anyone who ever made the mistake of letting me pick the movie on a late Saturday night can attest, I have a great fondness for this particular sub-genre.  And Mr. Rudy Ray Moore’s classic film Dolemite was right up there beside Black Belt Jones as my all time favourites.

It’s always sad when a classic hard case finally proves his mortality, but if nothing else this gives me the excuse to dig up the disc and start corrupting another generation!

In closing, I have to include this quote from Rudy that I saw on Ain’t It Cool:

If I should die, have my balls soaked in alcohol, lay my dick on my chest
And tell all these good cock bitches that ole Shine has gone to rest.
Shine died and went to hell.
The devil said, “All you bitches, you better climb the wall,
Cause ole Shine done come down here to fuck us all!”

Now THAT’S an epithaph.

HOW did I not know about this???

I’m that guy.  I’m the one that you call when you’re planning a movie night and need to know what to put on to shock surprise amaze and/or delight your audience.  I’m the guy that can give you news reviews summaries and spoilers of dang-near every movie in the multiplex at any given time.  I own the region-free player, I’ve got boxes full of imports and bootlegs of movies not fit for marketing to the north american public.

I’m the movie geek.

So why didn’t anybody tell me that my own freakin city was hosting it’s film festival last week??

Or that our godless brethren from the foothills just held theirs?!

I have been walking past the host theatre EVERY DAY on my way to and from my office, and had no idea this was going on.

I missed Zach and Miri Make A Porno, but at least that one has a chance of actually making it to mainstream distribution.

I missed Let The Right One In.

I missed Midnight Meat Train (I actually wrote about wanting to see this one back in June!).

I missed Nerdcore Rising (and what I’m sure was an amazing after party!!).

I missed [REC] (yes I know there’s a remake coming out… that doesn’t always mean it will be as good).

I missed REPO! The Genetic Opera!!!  AUGHH that one hurts the most!!!  How many sci-fi-horror-opera-musicals starring Giles from Buffy do you get to see?

And I’m sure I missed a whole bunch of other really cool stuff that I will probably never have another chance of seeing and some of it I might have really really really liked!!

I shall either be banned from seeing or forced to see one random movie from The Lobby (kick-ass underground (literally) movie shop on Whyte Ave here in Edmonton) for every festival day I missed.

No movies with subtitles for a month?

Nothing but movies with subtitles for a month?

Forced to read all the talkbacks on AintItCool… [shudder] no, no, some things are TOO cruel.

Have you heard of Outlander?  Do you like the sound of a “Sci-Fi Viking Epic”?  Do you like aliens and dragons and spaceships and barbarian warriors and massive battles and Jim Cavieziel and John Hurt and Ron Perlman and Lord of the Rings meets Predator meets Beowulf??  Do you want to see a movie like that?

Good luck.

Once again, a movie that looks amazing, is getting great advance press, but doesn’t fit neatly into the “second-class sequels, unwanted remakes, or blatant Oscar-baits” corporate strategy is getting dumped unceremoniously and with as little marketing as possible onto a handful of screens then relegated to the bottom row of a Blockbuster wall, to be passed over by people who probably would have loved it on the big screen but “never even heard of it, so it must suck”.

Moriarty, from movie geek uber-site Ain’t It Cool News, posted an open letter to Harvey Weinstein, of The Weinstein Company (who owns the rights to this film) begging him to reconsider and give this movie the attention he believes it deserves.  The Weinsteins have brought some amazing and risky genre movies to us in the past (Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Sin City, The Mist); unfortunately they also have a habit of buying up the rights to some really cool foreign/independent productions and then sitting on them until everybody forgets about it (Shaolin Soccer) or chucking them out to guaranteed obscurity with limited screens or direct to DVD and no marketing (Equilibrium, Feast).  Sadly, it looks like the latter choice is the way they’re going for Outlander.

Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about… maybe Outlander sucks horribly and they’re just trying to minimize their losses.  Unless I’m one of the lucky 50 or so cities that get to see Outlander in theaters I guess I’ll have to try and track it down on DVD to figure it out.  Somehow though, I get a feeling from the trailer below that this is my kind of flick.

Apparently there’s some political dick wagging happening over at Lionsgate that might scuttle the flick.  My good friend Brian over at Horror-Movie-A-Day is trying to organize a campaign to save Midnight Meat Train:

A very reliable SOURCE from Lionsgate has told me that the Lionsgate decision to “dump” Midnight Meat Train in as few screens as they are contractually required and then rush the film to DVD is based purely on INTERNAL POLITICS.

The new head honcho doesn’t like the old head honcho and is deliberately “dumping” all of his films out of spite and malice.

But there is HOPE! The only thing that overrides backstabbing politics in Hollywood is PURE GREED. It is clearly not healthy for investor relations to “dump” a movie that has a vocal and dedicated audience. Midnight Meat Train represents the kind of horror film that audiences have been dying for!!!

There is growing internal pressure within the company for a wider release of this film and PUBLIC FAN PRESSURE may help to push this decision over the edge.

Read the rest here, and get on board!

Courtesy of Topless Robot’s The Best 11 Songs From Geek-Movie Sountracks

Batman, meet Prince’s dirty mind. Prince’s dirty mind, meet Batman. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about! Man, try to imagine modern-day Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan turning over the soundtrack for their ponderous Batman Begins to, I dunno, OutKast and you’ll have some idea of how freaking crazy it is that this song and video ever even happened. Torn between his brother-in-mononymhood Batman and his fellow purple enthusiast the Joker, Prince created a hybrid character called Gemini, who presides over a berserk interpretive dance involving women in batsuits, a parade of Vicki Vales led by a woman in a shirt reading “ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO ” (an homage to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns!), cheeky references to the ’60s TV-show theme that still have over-serious Bat-fans sputtering with fury, collage-style lyrics culled from all of Prince’s other Batman soundtrack songs, and a fucking vicious guitar solo. The end result is a ballsy slab of industrial-dance-funk-rock-madness that proves superhero soundtrack music doesn’t have to be kid-tested and mother-approved.