So last fall when my mother sold my childhood home, I came across like 100 old homevideos.. One of my projects this past year was converting them all to DVD at my university's dubbing center, and recently I finally finished them all.

I downloaded the program Handbrake to try and convert some to AVI or MP4 so I could play with some clips just for fun. But for some reason, Handbrake will only encode random portions of the DVDs, which results in 2 or 3 hours of footage being turned into a 2 minute "preview." Does anyone out there know what I'm doing wrong or if there is a better program for this kind of encoding? Either way, though, I spent an entire day playing around with the disfunctional encoding, as each time it produced a different result. As annoying as it was to not get the full clips, I ended up having a lot of fun.

And I'm posting two of my favourites, mostly for the pleasure of the people in them. The first is a night in 1987 with my parents, my grandmother and my all of my mother's siblings which I had no part of but am fascinated by (theres 4 hours of rather high-quality footage all together, involving everything from political conversations to charades, here edited randomly down to about 2 minutes). The most annoying part is that it squeaks in between the cuts, and is likely not entertaining to anyone who doesn't know these people.

The second is a ton of really embarrassing "short videos" I made from 1998-2001 or so, with my parents' super-crappy camcorder. Some of them are improv comedy-style, some are assignments for school (hand in a video, you get an "A", even if you made it 30 minutes.. for a book report on the book "1984" 6 of us just made a 20 minute clip about what "the real 1984 was like" and my teacher ate it up despite it having no relevance to class material), and some are just a bunch of us sitting around stoned. As a whole, I would never post them due to the extreme cringeworthyness of my "performances" (characters I played included a misogynist small-town thug; a virgin who hires 3 prostitutes to take his virginity; and a not-so-butch lesbian with enormous breasts and a killer wig), but condensed into a minute or two, its not so bad.

Not really. But this apparently official video for "Discipline," Nine Inch Nails' single off freebie The Slip is pretty super gay. I advocated for years that the lyrics of "Pretty Hate Machine" were proof of Reznor's gayness, but he's never publicly admitted this (unless the undeniably explicit lyrics of "Starfuckers, Inc," which speaks to his sexual relationship with Marilyn Manson, counts).

This video might be as close as I get to it. Its also nice to see Trent has such a sense of humour. And hes not afraid to show some shoulder hair.

Today's date seemed like an excuse to post this clip from Werner Herzog's 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small, which taken out of context (or even in it), is extremely creepy.

From last night's The Colbert Report:

Canadians sure know how to create controversy.

Every decade and a half or so, pop radio embraces a song about girls toying with the other side, and apparently, they like their titles simple, to the point, and exactly the same. Look below at the video's for Jill Sobule's "I Kissed Girl" from 1995 and Katy Perry's just released video of the same name.

1995:

2008:

So how has bicuriousity in pop culture evolved based perhaps too simply on two pieces of evidence? Well, its catchier, more naked but somehow less explicit. But other than that, lyric-wise and even image-wise (despite Fabio's cameo), Sobule's take is considerably more appealing. Mind you, it was a surprise hit, with folk-influence that probably wasn't intended to hit the mainstream. Perry's song, however, seems manufactured for it. But basically, it all comes down to this: Sobule's song speaks to genuine bicuriousity, or perhaps even bisexuality or lesbianism, in a sweet little way. Perry's song speaks to sluts who get so drunk they make out with a girl because thats the way their attention seeking ways go. Am I wrong? Take a brief comparison of the lyrics:

Sobule:

And I opened up and I told her 'bout Larry
And yesterday how he asked me to marry
And I'm not giving him an answer yet...
I think I can do better!

I kissed a girl
Her lips were sweet.
She was just like kissing me
Kissed a girl won't change the world
But I'm so glad,
I kissed a girl!

Perry:

No, I don't even know your name
It doesn't matter
Your my experimental game
Just human nature
It's not what, good girls do
Not how they should behave
My head gets so confused
Hard to obey

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don't mean I'm in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it

Sunday afternoon hijinks in Montreal's wee Chinatown.

Click here for some joy from someone with a lot of time to spare.

Looks very promising. Brad Pitt's 2 for 2 in trailers released this week.

With Cannes over, I am into the final countdown of many a thing: finishing my thesis and, thus, not being in school for the first time since 1988; the end of my tenth (and favourite) apartment in six year;s and most sadly, the end of my time in Montreal, a city in which I have fallen in love with ten times anything I ever felt toward its predecessor, Toronto, which I spent twice the time in.

Anyway, to coincide with the 66 days I have left before my yearly August 1st put-my-shit-in-a-truck day, I've decided to try and visit, or re-visit, all of Montreal's highlights, and, of course, put them up here for essentially my own amusement and archival use.

First on the tour was the Lachine Rapids, which I'd never been to, mostly due to its non-pedestrian friendly location on the south end of the city's shipping yards. I'm partially paraphrasing Wikipedia here, but to quickly educate: they are a series of rapids on the Saint Lawrence River, between the Island of Montreal and the south shore. As for the impressive part. They contain the largest standing waves in the world. This is because the water volume and current do not change with respect to the permanent features in the riverbed, namely its shelf-like drops. Seasonal variation in the water flow does not change the situation of the waves.

Yesterday, with a car thankfully, I found the rather hidden rapids (behind a "highlight" in its own right, the wild Habitat 67, which I'll post later on), as well as a bunch of hunky Quebecois surfers who were riding the world's largest standing waves. Thats pretty much the whole story, but I'll share some video and photo of them:

I thought she was in MENSA?

I'm back in Montreal, lying near comatose on my couch trying to not fall sleep to avoid letting this jetlag get out of hand. My plan to not sleep last night so I would on the plane backfired. My seat was on the aisle in a 3 seat row. The people next to me were an elderly Quebecois couple, the husband of which was obviously suffering from a severely dehabilitating condition. It resulted in being woken up about 10 times so that his wife could help him out of his chair and to the bathroom, and many other times by noises he made that seemed to suggest some sort of physical pain. I asked if I could take the window to avoid disturbing their need to get up, and she told me that he likes the window, which is fair enough, but also put me in that horrible state of no sleep in 20 hours + 2 advil PMs and no possibility of sleeping.

Its obviously not their fault, and I certainly was not annoyed at them specifically, if anything was deeply empathetic. But I was feeling annoyed in general, and was specifically annoyed at the airline for continuing to shit all over their movie selection. They one upped their showing of P.S. I Love You on the way down with The Bucket List, which was the last thing I wanted to see. It probably seemed even worse considering I was sitting next to someone that was actually facing death, and I kept thinking about intense it must be for his wife, and himself, to deal with that. And then I watch Rob Reiner's horribly misrepresentative schmaltzfest that disrespects those actually going through cancer or any other life threatening disease. And thats only from the half hour I watched before deciding that sitting in silence was more entertaining.

Anyway.. unrelated (although it does technically relate to both Montreal - it was shot here last summer, and death - its about a man aging backwards), I found the Spanish trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in an aimless three hour youtube fest to try and keep me awake. It looks like it has some serious potential. Though the trailer is pretty much dialogue-less, its visually stunning and Brad Pitt looks like he went through the quite the transformation.

This might also be my only entry for a few days while I try to readjust to Eastern Standard Time and a life in which the Mediterranean Sea isn't a 5 minute walk away.

I'm about 4 hours from leaving for the airport (Its 2am and Im staying up until my 6am car arrives to try and put myself on Montreal time before I get there, which may or may not prove disastrous). I was also not really festival savvy today.. me and the rest of the indieWIRErers made a day trip to Antibes. So I'm instead posting this very clever video posted on Mike Jones' Variety blog, interviewing people around the festival about the difficulties saying the name of the film I'd really wish I'd been able to see (It plays Friday night, when I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic drugged up and passed out), Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (I'd been calling it Sin-Eck-Douche all week, which is very wrong). Enjoy:

Last night, the Germans went all out with their national party at Cannes. A 20 minute (coach) bus ride from Cannes took you to their extravagant villa, complete with a buffet a good 100 feet long, a dozen bars, a pool, and about a thousand Germans. Elaborate lights gave it a really interesting aesthetic, though the odd way that the carpet's colour on the stairs merged with the raising floor around it left at least 3 (I saw 3) people collapse face first on the ground due to the optical illusion. Either way, some pics:

Unfortunately, around midnight the largely outdoor space fell victim to Cannes 08 weather. But instead of crowding into tents, most of the attendees danced in the rain, and in some cases, danced quite aggressively in the rain: