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Mimoco, a company that designs “designer USB flash drives”, is releasing a limited edition Darth Vadar USB flash drive. How cool is that? You can pre-order it now before its release in January, 2007. Every couple of weeks they will unveil one of the next three characters to be USB’d. Awesome.

Thanks to Josh Spear for the link.

I spent a lot of time this past long weekend, relaxing in front of my TV and watching a bunch of this season’s new television shows that I’ve been dowloading.

First off was the set of ten mini “Webisodes” and then the Season 3 premiere double-episode of Battlestar Galactica. The webisodes were cool and low budget and a nice contrast from the slickly produced regular episodes. I was pretty happy with these two episodes, even though not that much happened. I was sure that the Galactica would FTL their asses back to New Caprica sooner than four months. And Lee got really fat. Anyway, I guess they are setting things up for what is sure to be an exciting season!

Next was the second episode of the new show Heroes. I was all over this show from the first episode and the second was great. I’ll be watching episode three tomorrow night or something – I can’t wait. It’s pretty exciting and interesting to see these characters discover their “powers”, and the end of episode 2 definitely convinced me to keep watching.

Probably the most interesting and darkly entertaining of the shows I checked out this weekend was Showtime’s Dexter (sorry, no official site link – Showtime won’t let us Canadians look at them). Dexter is played by Michael C. Hall, and is a role that is sometimes oddly similar to but also contrasts his character on the excellent Six Feet Under. Dexter is a blood splatter forensic whose is also self-employed as a serial killer, but he only hunts down and kills those who “deserve” it.

Jericho came next. The pilot was pretty intense and I was intruiged almost right away by the lead character, Jake (played by Skeet Ulrich – should I know who this guy is?). Mushroom clouds appear from Denver, the closest large city to Jericho, and nobody is certain if other cities have been hit and if this is the work of terrorists. Jake is somehow the master of all trades which makes you, along with the members of his family and small hometown, wonder where he has been for the past few years.

So, that was my weekend of TV. Aside from these shows, I’m also following Lost, The Amazing Race, Prison Break, Supernatural… watching TV could be a full-time job, I’m telling you – and I don’t even have cable.

I’m pretty excited to meet my friends Ryan and Jay this evening to check out A Tribute to François Truffaut at the National Film Board Mediatheque, which is right around the corner from where I work. For only $6 there is a screening of Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), a Q&A with a Truffaut expert and then a 78 minute documentary! I’m very excited as this is one my favourite films.

What’s weird is that Ryan and I have been meaning to watch the entire series, of which I have only seen the first two installments and he hasn’t seen any of yet. We had made plans to watch The 400 Blows tonight, and then I got an email announcement from NFB that this event was happening: the same movie on the same night!

I actually succeeded in transfering my Wordpress data from jasonchu.com to my new domain, trendaway.com. I can’t believe it myself and if I were to try it again, I’m sure it wouldn’t happen. I used a bunch of online guides (like this one) that made me feel like I was reading instructions in another language. But I finally got it, and I’m very grateful to the people who actually sit down and make these guides – Thanks!

Bear with me for a while – some things got a bit messed up in the transfer (most noticably the words with accents in them) so I’ll need to go through and fix them when I have time. I also haven’t decided if I’m going to move around all of the image files, to clean up my root directory a bit.

I had been looking forward to Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb) for a long time, having read the buzz about it after its success at Cannes (the Best Actor award was given to the male ensemble). I am a big fan of films that deal with both the humanity and action of war. This film promised to be different than other WWII films as it focuses on North Africans from French territories who are fighting for France, a country that none of them had ever set foot on.

The film follows four soldiers, each with their own reasons for joining the war. Be it security, money, adventure or a sense of patriotism, these men fought against the same enemy. One of these enemies, however, was not Nazi Germany, rather racial discrimination from French soldiers and leaders. They did not receive the same benefits as the native French soldiers, including types of food, time off and, after the war was over, pension. Soldiers from former French colonies have, for over forty years, been paid ten to twenty times less than French countertparts. Very recently, and in large part thanks to this film, this has changed.

This was an excellent film. It looked great and the acting was supurb. Photography was cool – there were some really neat transitional aerial shots in black and white looking like a photo from the period, which would then sweep slowly from left to right and turn into colour. This film also had some of the best combat scenes that I’ve seen: very intense and perfect for plainly demonstrating one of the many reasons why France’s mistreatment of its troops is so terrible.

***
Indigènes (2006) * Director: Rachid Bouchareb * Writers: Rachid Bouchareb, Olivier Lorelle

Sleeping Dogs Lie (Bob Goldthwait) wasn’t really the type of film that I wanted to see at TIFF. It is a romantic comedy trying to be different by springboarding the story off of a sick prank, but instead of following through with a smart story and interesting dialogue, it progressively got worse and worse, complete with predictable plot elements and redundant voiceovers.

The event that this story centres around is not enough to make this run-of-the-mill RomCom successful. It does indeed involve a sexual encounter with a dog, which is kind of gross, but that isn’t what I didn’t like about the film. I really don’t have much to say about it, except that I felt like I had wasted one of my TIFF choices.

***
Stay (new title: Sleeping Dogs Lie) (2006) * Director/Writer: Bob Goldthwait