I had just dropped off to sleep after a very long and physically exhausting day. Really looking forward to a peaceful sleep in Sunday morning. Now my adrenaline is pumping and every home invasion horror and vigilante beatdown movie scene is running through my head.

In the light of day this is nothing more than an innocent and silly prank by some kids goofing around on a Saturday night. Laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, at one in the morning… this is justification for great and terrible vengeance. Since my brain gets locked in a feedback loop on whatever it’s last focus was on, I laid there for two hours going through increasingly violent and outlandish scenarios in my mind as I tried desperately to regain my lost slumber.

I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and scare him good.

I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and catch him, smack him around.

I hear them approach the door, I run down the stairs, throw open the door, catch him and beat the crap out of him.

… and his friends.

The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I surprise them, beat the crap out of them and throw them out.

The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I catch them, beat the crap out of them, take their wallets, tell them I can call their parents or the cops, which one do they want.

They kick in the door, I jump down the stairs onto the first one. I turn and tackle the second, knocking him out and tying them both up for the police.

They kick in the door. I jump over the half-wall between the second landing and the front door. I land behind the first invader, dropping my elbow on his clavicle, breaking my fall and his collarbone. Crouching to absorb the impact of the landing, I turn and leap with full force driving the heel of my palm into the nose of the second invader, then my knee into his solar plexus. I grab the bat out of his hand, twisting his wrist back hard enough to hear tendons snap as I swing it backwards through the jaw of the first thug. A second time I spin back around, following the swing through as I bring the bat down on the top of it’s previous owner’s head. I thrust the bat like a spear to the chest of the third attacker, still in the door frame. He stumbles backwards off the steps, I am following through the air, bat raised in both hands above my head like a woodsman’s axe. Bat meets forehead at the same time as skull meets concrete. Bursts like a rotten jack-o-lantern.

These little fantasy scenes don’t bring me rest; instead each one gives my brain a little micro-burst of adrenaline that keeps me awake and angry. This is exactly why I need to read a good and engrossing book before sleeping. I need to take my mind off of whatever I was thinking about before coming to bed, or I will lay there, unable to sleep, going over and over every detail of the game I was playing, show I was watching, work I was doing, or whatever else was going on. This is also why I am and always have been a very poor choice of person to bother late at night for anything less than a dire emergency.

(As an annoying side note, there is a pack of asshole teenagers that hang out in our neighbourhood. All summer they spend their nights getting drunk in the playground park across the street from our house, where we get to enjoy listening to their mindless blather and stoned howling. And, should they feel particularly energetic, we get to wake up to a street littered with broken planters, scratched and dented cars, trashed gardens, and other evidence of their adventures. Of course, a couple of them have their little souped-up Civics that they love to race up and down our residential streets. Basically, a bunch of ignorant bullshit that I really would love to enact violence upon. And before anyone gives me the “they’re just kids being kids” crap: stupid is stupid, you don’t need to be any age to know that. Even as a teenager, I hated pricks that acted like this.)

<H1N1>me</H1N1>

Got knocked on my arse the very day they released the shots. And yes, I would have got mine. If you don’t get yours, you’re an ignorant selfish asshole. I’ll go off on that rant another day.

The worst part of it is I’m still too sick to do anything for Halloween, my favourite holiday of the year. I’ve got no costume, no parties to go to, I can’t even hand out candy to the kids. Just sitting in the basement watching horror movies (ok, that part’s not so bad).

A toast to the demons: May your jack-o-lanterns burn bright, may your trick-or-treat’s ring loud through the night, may your candy arm stay strong, and may you have glorious nightmares ALL WINTER LONG!!

This H1N1 is worse than I thought

Now if you’ll excuse me, Rocky Horror Picture Show is starting, and I need to make some toast.

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!