My Atlantic Film Festival Picks!
/For us Haligonians (yup, that's what people from Halifax are called), it's almost time for the Atlantic Film Festival! Since we don't always get the smaller, weirder films that play in bigger cities, we all get super stoked for the AFF.
I was lucky enough to be on the programming committee again this year, so I've seen advance screenings of a few things. There's lots of amazing stuff, and I recommend clearing your schedule, and maybe quitting your job so you can see as many movies as possible. (If you're not in Halifax, check your local listings, fool!)
FILMS I'VE SEEN THAT RULED
FILMS I'M SUPER EXCITED TO SEE
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
FILM I DO WANT TO SEE BUT I'M NOT SURE IT'S WORTH THE
EMOTIONAL TRAUMA I EXPECT TO ENDURE
The Master of Weapons compounds his foolishness by choosing, when Batman and Robin show up, to attack them with a weapon meant to be used against gigantic stone walls. I don't know if the guy has been paying attention to the news or what, but I have personally seen the Batman avoid being killed by machine and regular guns, poison gas, various jungle creatures and Superman. I think that using that giant bolt as some sort of club would be a much better bet than having his two thuggish companions slew this thing sideways and fire off a wild shot. I know that Silver Age Batman villains take a lot of flak for their odd choices in weaponry but even an umbrella gun or hat-cannon doesn't take two or three minutes to reload.
See, Batman was trying to trip up the MoW by deploying some specialized language, as the only people in Gotham city who resort to slang are carnies, Gypsies, siege weapon experts and the people who have been to prison, so identifying suspicious characters by their verbal tics is actually very easy. Graham, meanwhile, in his only really clever move, pretended not to recognize what the hell Batman was talking about, thus immediately throwing the World's Greatest Detective off the scent.
Turns out that Khalis was an early adopter of religious intolerance. In fact, he was such a prodigy that he was intolerant within the bounds of a polytheistic system. Let me emphasize this a bit more: the god that he worshipped was almost certainly related to the gods that he was calling false. It's like me devoting my life to convincing my cousins that my uncle is fictional. But, you know, effort should be rewarded, so Anubis gave the guy an amulet for being such a colossal dumbtwit.. And then, when the rest of Egypt's priests joined Nabu in mummifying him alive, Anubis kindly granted him eternal life.
The culprit turns out to be one Professor Arnold Hugo, who is upset with the Cosplay Selection Committee for not choosing him, even though his ancestor was a great warrior. In an attempt to gain recognition as a scientist, Prof. Hugo subjected himself to his experimental Brain-Stimulator and grew a gigantic, science-filled noggin. At this point, Hugo's plans diverge from what mine would be in a similar situation. Rather than registering a few hundred patents and then figuring out a way to shrink his head back down to 
size, all the while not really giving a damn about whether anybody wants him to dress up and pretend to fight some dudes, Hugo decides to devote all of his energies to destroying a publicity event. Which, when you think about it, would probably generate even more publicity for the museum, ensuring that its opening would be the event of the season. To this questionable end, in addition to deploying lightning guns and jet skis, he develops a remarkable tiger-growing solution and then, after twice being foiled by Batman and Robin:
Having said that, she wrote nothing about the new Achewood collection Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar, because I was hogging that thing like nobody’s business. I have read a lot of webcomics over the years, my friends, and Achewood is just plain great, the sort of comic that you discover and read through the archives of and then get disappointed when you catch up because you can’t just keep going. Despite being volume 2, this collection starts at the very beginning of Achewood, complete with strip commentary and supplemental material. A highly interesting look at the introduction and development of characters that have been developing for seven or eight years now – a peach of a book, and it includes one of my 
Hey, neat! The series gets off to an intriguing start as the Shield goes looking for missing army guys in the ravaged country of Bialya. This is cool on a couple of levels. First off, it definitely answers my whining about the Red Circle characters not interacting with the DCU very much, as Bialya is a fictional country that has been nearly depopulated by an angry Black Adam and I would call that a pretty firm part of the universe. Secondly, there hasn’t really been too much action in this part of the fictional world since that Four Horsemen series and the exploration of the aftermath of what happened has the potential to be very compelling - Black Adam killed millions of people in a day! What the hell does that do to a country?
