Behold. It blows my mind that Van Vandaelle had no clue what this was until today. Madness.

I hate Nicholas Cage.

Ahem. Now that’s out of the way, an explanation; I think he’s droll, dull, and sarcastic for all the wrong reasons. The man doesn’t just play the same role twice, but five, six, maybe eleven more. And as it turns out, he’s going to be here for TIFF, too.

Cage stars in the upcoming film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. When I first caught wind of this movie a few months ago, I thought it was a joke. An LA Times blurb does a nice job explaining the film’s synopsis…

A New Orleans lieutenant must find those responsible for a recent massacre while juggling his prostitute girlfriend, his drug addictions and his sanity.

There’s just so much wrong here. It’s a Nicholas Cage movie in which Cage gets to beat people up, hobble around under the influence of drugs, and act both bemused and confused. It’s as if I’ve seen this movie a few times before or something.

That being said, I will see this movie. And laugh, not with it, but at it. November 20th can’t come soon enough. Watch the trailer here.

If you don’t already know of Archive.org, I’d suggest you get yourself acquainted. The site essentially serves as the internet’s equivelant of archivial storage, with a goal to catalog most, if not all of the Internet’s vast amounts of information. An impossible goal? Definitely. But it’s still a valiant one nonetheless, and the amount of information the site has gathered over the years is staggering.

Chances are, you’ve already use the Wayback machine in some way or another. As you can imagine, constantly trawling the internet for data reveals a great number of revisions for certain articles, sites or portals. The Wayback machine takes all of these revisions and organizes them neatly, by date, into a virtual timeline allowing users to see exactly how a site may have looked at any given date. In case you’re too young to remember – or in some cases, would rather forget – the Archive has some pretty interesting artifacts from the nineties, and oftentimes with looks we wouldn’t necessarily expect.

But while gathering textual information is all fine and good, what really struck me was the size of their video archive. What many people don’t realise is that, for many older films, and even certain recent releases, the copyright info on particular pieces of media has expired. Without any active copyright license, the film becomes free to share, distribute and watch, without fear of such lovely organizations as the MPAA. A few of the sections more notable selections…

• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms - A masterpiece of Japanese cinema
• The Last Man on Earth – The *original* I am Legend
• Being a Teen in the 1950’s - Awesome and inadvertently funny videos on being a teen in an era past
• Charlie Chaplin – Lots of Charlie. This one in particular is his 23rd film.

And that’s just a small selection of what the site has to offer. Check it out, and tell me if you find anything interesting!

It wasn’t long after I opened my original Xbox that I had it softmodded, bent to my every whim. Things like EvolutionX and UnleashX, replacement dashboards for Microsoft’s own implementation, made the world of homebrew gaming and software incredibly easy, and yet was still powerful enough to satisfy users like myself. It was only a matter of time until XBMC was released.

Xbox Media Center, or XBMC for short, was the swiss army knife for media on the Xbox. It grew from a jack of all trades player, to a fully fledged dashboard, capable of launching apps, games, FTP capabilites, and streaming. It was a completely robust solution, and is of the best TV-capable media centers out there to this day.

Of course, it’s no wonder that people would want to replicate the software’s success on home PCs. XBMC was actually ported to both OS X and Windows a few years ago. Yet, it lacked many of the features and stabilty that made the Xbox version so succesful. But now, there’s Boxee.

While I just started playing with it last week, Boxee essentially takes the PC port of XBMC, and turns it into what they claim is the first “social network” capable media player. Think a media center with the (arguably) best parts of social network platforms like Facebook. It’s a system where, as you and your friends build a catalog of music, movies and TV, Boxee will make reccomendations to you, based on what your friends may be watching or listening. It’s a slick system, and one that has the potential to turn the personal enjoyment of media into a much more social experience.

Expect a nice big review near week’s end, one I have a chance to hook it up to my HDTV, in all Boxee’s 1080p glory!

I must admit, I’m a bit of a slave to Eric Idle and the Monty Python troupe. There’s something strangely appealing about trouts and dead parrots that I really can’t resist. But now for something completely different…

Spamalot’s been in Toronto for a couple weeks now, its second run in the city after going back to Broadway for another successful outing. Due to a bit of Ticketmaster magic on my Dad’s part back in April, myself and the parents had three tickets for Sunday’s performance, the last week for the show here in Toronto.

I must admit, it was my first true theatre show, high-school outings nonwithstanding. Yet, I felt strangely at home with the whole affair, which made the whole experience a whole lot more enjoyable. Of course, that wont stop some people, like the man beside me who felt it necessary to talk incessantly throughout most of the show, much to my dismay.

Spamalot, for the most part, loosely follows the misadventures of King Arthur found in the Python’s Holy Grail. You get everything you’d expect from a Python film of this magnitude, from the Knights of Ni to the Holy Handgrenade. Yet, there were a couple surprises which made for interesting diversions from traditional Python lore. Gone were the castle virgins, only to be replaced by an amusing, pride-themed Lancelot coming-out party. Additionally, it was to the delight of the audience that Idle was able to work in Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, a Python staple.

Yet, while much of Python’s humour still shines through, you can’t help but feel it would be so much more effective with the cast fans have come to know and love. Staples of Grail, like the farting Frenchmen and shrubbery-crazed Knights of Ni, simply don’t seem to have the same punch in their delivery as they should.

For the most part, though, Holy Grail translated surprisingly well into a theatre-bound production. The humour appeared as fresh as it was some thirty-odd years ago, and part of the fun was simply seeing how some of the sketches could be pulled off in a convincing manner. Scenes, like those with God and the killer rabbit, came at the behest of a particularly ingenious set, which succeeded in appearing as whimsical and engaging as the material which inspired it.

All in all, breaking the fourth wall has never been this fun.