Griff's Village

Orson Welles' 1941 classic, Citizen Kane , is often cited as the greatest movie of all time. How many people would actually list it as their favourite, however? Everyone says that it was unlike any movie before and influenced every movie since, and now many see Citizen Kane as homework for film students. They think that  Citizen Kane is what people who love Star Wars watch so they can make The Avengers . So, does the greatest film of all time have any value outside a classroom? I've seen Citizen Kane a handful of times--most recently, on the big screen at the ByTowne Cinema. It's not my personal favourite movie (that would probably be Who Framed Roger Rabbit ) or even my favourite Welles movie (I prefer Chimes at Midnight ). But I do like Citizen Kane --not because I was told to or because I am trying to impress people, but because, aside from being a great film, it is also a good movie. (A warning: I will be spoiling some of  Citizen Kane's story in this post, and...

Hundreds of Beavers, directed by Mike Cheslik, is one of the most memorable movies I've seen in a long time. It owes a lot to the slapstick of the past, but still feels modern. Set in the 1800s, it tells the story of Jean Kayak (played by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who co-wrote the film with Cheslik), a man who must learn to survive and thrive in the woods during a cold, harsh winter. Much of the film focuses on his career as a fur trapper, trying (with increasing levels of success) to kill wolves, beavers, and other animals--all of which are portrayed by humans in mascot costumes. The film, although live-action, has the energy of an animated  short, and the (relative) lack of dialogue recalls the works of the silent screen comedians. Nevertheless, it's very much its own thing with its own style. And it's the funniest comedy film I've seen in ages. A lot of pastiches try to copy the classics without doing anything of their own. You can't accuse Hundreds of Beavers ...

Ernest Cline's novel  Ready Player One is a love-letter to nostalgia. As the name implies, it focuses on gaming, but all types of popular culture--from movies to music--are lovingly referenced. I didn't read it when it came out in 2011, nor have I seen Spielberg's 2018 adaptation, but I've always been aware of the story. I've recently decided to borrow a copy of the audiobook (narrated by Wil Wheaton) from my local library. I was sceptical; having heard so much about the nostalgia, and so little about the characters, story, and prose, I began to suspect that the nostalgia was all the book had to offer. Still, this book did resonate with a lot of people, so there must be something worthwhile about it. Even if it might not be the sort of book I'd love, it might at least be the sort I'd like--something with a few fun scenes that'll help pass the time. And that's exactly what it was. Cline's novel takes place in 2045, in a society that revolves aroun...

When I first started this blog, my intention was to write about other people's creations--the books and movies and video games that I have read or watched or played, and that I felt compelled to discuss. This post is going to be different, and it's going to be more stressful, because it's about something that I created myself. For the past several years, I've been spending a portion of my spare time in RPG Maker creating a game. That had always been a dream of mine, and I knew that I wasn't going to be satisfied until I made it happen. And now I have. Song of the Enchantress has finally been completed and released. You can download it for free here . I am very aware that this is an amateur effort, but it is one that I worked hard on, and I think that I achieved what I set out to do. I wanted to design a Dragon Quest -style game that is full of secrets. Every medium has its own strengths and own quirks, and the advantage of video games is that they allow you to exp...

I've loved animation for as long as I remember, and the cast of Looney Tunes have always been my favourite animated characters. Heck, they've always been some of my favourite fictional characters, period. As much as I love Disney and Ghibli, there's no seven-minute stretch of time in all of animation history that means as much to me as  The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Rabbit Fire . However, as much as I love the Looney Tunes' short films, their theatrical  features 1  are a mixed bag. Both Space Jam movies have their moments, but neither are very good overall. Back in Action is the best dedicated Looney Tunes theatrical feature I've seen yet, but it's still not as good as the original shorts. I grew up in an era when these cartoons were easily available and the characters were on every piece of merchandise imaginable, from video games to T-shirts. Looney Tunes wasn't just a series of short films or a TV series: it was a property. These were beloved...

The Life of Pi originated in 2001 as a novel by Yann Martel. In 2012, the story returned, this time as a movie. I read the book about twenty years ago and saw the movie about ten, so I went into Lolita Chakrabarti's stage adaptation (performed at Toronto's Mirvish Theatre, and directed by Max Webster) knowing what to expect. My only question was how well this story would work on the stage. I had high expectations going in, and I'm happy to say the show met them. Life of Pi is about Pi, a young Indian kid (originally a boy, though Pi was played by Riya Rajeev and rewritten as a girl for the performance I saw) who is stranded on a boat with various dangerous animals--most notably, Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger. The original book is very philosophical, dealing with issues relating to religion, truth, and storytelling. Yet, like Moby Dick , it also functions as an adventure story. The movie turned Life of Pi into a visual spectacle, and the stage version follows suit by u...

I'm a huge fan of old black-and-white silent comedies. In that world, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd cast such a large shadow that it can be almost impossible to notice anyone else. Nonetheless, I'm always open to discovering new gems, so I recently purchased and watched Flicker Alley's 2019 release, The Extraordinary World of Charley Bowers . These movies--a collection of short films, both animated and live-action and predominantly comedic--are a delight, and it's a shame that their star isn't more well-known. Bowers--or Bricolo, as he is known in France and in the French-language intertitles included in this collection--had worked as an animator before becoming a screen comedian, and he continued to use his skills during his live-action career. He loved stop-motion the way Keaton loved stunts, and used it to create effects that hold up surprisingly well almost a hundred years later. Some of his earlier live-action shorts only make use of stop-mot...

I've always been interested in folklore. I remember falling in love with Greek mythology while watching  Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess  as a kid, and this passion steadily grew throughout my teens. I'm especially fond of mythical creatures, and have been for as long as I can remember.  Many of my favourite mythical creatures are yōkai. If you're into Japanese entertainment, then you've almost certainly seen at least some. You probably know what a kappa is, or you've heard the term "oni" before, or you know that racoons (or "tanuki") keep shape-shifting in video games and anime. Those are all yōkai, and there are many more that the average westerner has never heard of. This passion brought me to the works of Toriyama Sekien, an 18th-century Japanese artist and writer who is best known today for his illustrations of yōkai. Many of the creatures he drew were taken from Japanese folklore, but he'd also made up his ow...

I love food, unfortunately. I'll look at a restaurant menu days before I eat out, then spend those days fantasizing about how the food will taste. I like chocolate, I like cheese, I like sandwiches and chips and fries and burgers and pizza and all the stuff that's worst for my body. I don't much care for exercise, either. I am getting better at portion control, though. I used to get an appetizer and dessert whenever I ate out. I almost never get an appetizer now, and I only sometimes get dessert. I haven't given up soda, but I almost exclusively drink diet. (I know this still isn't good for me, but at least it's bad in a less fattening way.) I haven't given up any of my favourite foods, but I am more restrained in terms of how much or how often I eat them. And I'm getting better at physical activity. I walk all the time, and I have a miniature pedal bike under my desk so that I can pseudo-walk while I'm working. (I'm doing it right now, while ed...

A local community theatre will be putting on a production of Ken Ludwig's BASKERVILLE: A SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY in about a week. I am not going to write about Sherlock Holmes, though. At least not today. When I was a student, I never took part in extracurricular activities. I was never into sports, I preferred being on my own, and I wasn't interested in spending my downtime at school. It wasn't until I got older that I started to think about the experiences I had missed out on. In late 2023, my therapist advised me to get out of my comfort zone. Orders are orders, so I thought back to my days as a student, asking myself what I should have done differently. I don't like sport any more now that I did then, but I've grown to love the art of storytelling even more. If I could go back to high school, I'd have joined the theatre club. Not as an actor, but in a behind-the-scenes capacity. I already have a diploma, so going back to high school isn't really an optio...

I recently read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories , a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translated by Jay Rubin. Akutagawa is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, but, for most of us in the west, he's most notable for "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which provided the plot and name, respectively, for one of Akira Kurosawa's best-known movies. I'd be lying if I said that his connection to Kurosawa had nothing to do with my decision to check this book out, but I don't want to imply that Akutagawa is little more than a cinematic footnote: his short stories are some of the best I have ever read. While enjoying this book, I often thought about the language barrier. When you're watching a foreign movie, the picture is, for the most part, unaltered, so much of the artistry (the lighting, set design, costumes, and cinematography, for example) is preserved. Words are different; you can't really see a writer's words through...

I've been interested in the public domain for a long time. When I was an unemployed, carless twenty-something, I liked knowing which works of classic Literature I could find for free online. To this day, there's something very satisfying about downloading P.G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes from Standard Ebooks and loading them onto my eReader. Some people always get excited about Public Domain Day, but this year's has been one of the biggest because of soon-to-be horror icon Mickey Mouse's new legal status. It's funny to think that Disney, a company who embodies art and commerce in almost equal measure, has lost even a little bit of control over one of the world's most recognizable characters. The same thing happened when Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain a few years back.  It was Walt Disney, and not A.A. Milne, that made the idea of Pooh as a slasher villain so appealing. A lot of ch...

I've always been a fan of the Mario games. When I was a kid,  Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars,  released in 1996, was probably my favourite. For the first time, gamers got to play a story-focused Mario adventure. And what an adventure! The thought of an enemy so dangerous that Mario and Bowser had to team up left a big impact on my ten-year-old self. Now it's 2023. The remake, still called Super Mario RPG , but with the Legend of the Seven Stars subtitle dropped, has been available for a few weeks. But how does it hold up? Should you play Super Mario RPG ? Should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch? And should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch if you already own the original? It's fashionable for gamers and gaming critics to say that a remake renders the original obsolete. Super Mario RPG on the Switch complements the original Super Nintendo version, but I don't think it's a good replacement. Yes, this new release adds severa...

I recently attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  It got me thinking about the age-old debate over plays, and whether they are to be read or watched. It's a discussion that seems to follow the Bard of Avon more than any other writer. My first direct exposure to Shakespeare's literature was in a high school English class, when I read  Romeo and Juliet . I already knew who Shakespeare was, of course, but this was the first time I experienced one of his masterpieces first-hand. At fourteen, I still struggled with understanding the play, but I enjoyed it, found the footnotes fascinating, and looked forward to studying Shakespeare's other works in future English classes. In the summer I turned 17, I bought a collection of Shakespeare's plays, and read both Much Ado About Nothing and  Hamlet on my own ;  the latter would soon show up on the syllabus in my last year of high school. I would soon after become an English major at Carleton University,...

I'm scared of ghosts. That's not to say that I necessarily believe in ghosts, but they scare me just the same. The thought of something that's real, but not QUITE that real, is frightening. A lot of my favourite works of horror fiction--that is to say, the ones that stick with me--either involve ghosts ( Poltergeist)  or ghost-like entities (Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Green Tea"). I think it's the psychological element--a creature that you can see but other's can't, or that manifests itself in ways that shouldn't be possible--isn't just an attack on the body, but on the mind. Probably the movie that scared me the most was the 2015 documentary  The Nightmare, which is about sleep paralysis and the visions that may accompany it. I know what sleep paralysis is, and I know that the images that accompany it are just that--images. The shadowmen are not real and cannot hurt me--and yet I bought and started wearing a sleep mask right after watching it...

I was a huge fan of  The Simpsons  growing up. Then, shortly before I began high school, Matt Groening created a new show:  Futurama . I fell in love with it from the first episode, and eagerly watched it throughout its twenty-some years of irregular existence. I stopped watching  The Simpsons  over a decade ago, but  Futurama  has a special place in my heart. Still, I was cautiously optimistic when I heard it was being brought back again. I think that Futurama has been top-notch until now, but every show will eventually dip in quality if it goes on long enough. Would season 8 be the year that does Futurama in? The first episode of the newest revival, "The Impossible Stream," involves Phillip J. Fry's decision to set a life's goal for himself: to watch every TV show ever made.  Despite the daunting set-up, much of this episode focuses specifically on the FINAL show that Fry has to binge: the in-universe soap opera,  All My Circuits, which ...

Do you finish what you start? Do you read to the last word of every book, or sit through the credits of every movie? If you start a video game, do you finish it? I used to. I'm more flexible now, though; the older you get, the more you worry about time.  I still finish every novel I being, and I still don't like to walk out on movies--seeing these through to the end gives me a sense of closure. But I can read a book in a few weeks, and watch a movie in a matter of hours.  TV shows and video games are a much longer commitment, so my newfound flexibility is mostly to accomodate them. If I start to watch an episode of a TV show, then I finish that episode. I may or may not move onto the next. If I do, then how I proceed depends on what kind of show I'm watching. If it's something with a strong emphasis on continuity, like Arrested Development  or Breaking Bad , then I try to watch the show at least once a week, if not more, to make sure I don't forget where I am in th...

Looking over some of my previous blog entries, I noticed that previous topics have included: the Roald Dahl, Pokémon , Looney Tunes , and the Walt Disney Company. Rejected blog topics have included the Sailor Moon manga and the Super Mario RPG remake. It wasn't my intention make make a blog that leans so heavily into children's entertainment, but then I guess that I'm just a big kid at heart. I've been a life-long fan of animation, I'm a retro-gamer, and I have a soft spot for fairy tales. There's a stereotype that people in their thirties are too fixated on books and movies for younger people. The  implication  is that our generation cannot handle more mature works of art. I used to feel insecure about some of my tastes, but reading C.S. Lewis' "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" has cured me of that. Now, I believe that art made for children's can have just as much merit as that for adults. Paddington is a great movie. The Wind in the W...

My dirty little secret is that I've always loved crossovers.  Who Framed Roger Rabbit  was one of my favourite movies as a kid.  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein  is one of my favourite movies as an adult. I've been thinking more about crossovers lately because of the Walt Disney Company's upcoming short film,  Once Upon a Studio , which is said to include characters from every one of the company's animated features. The idea has potential. We've already heard that Olaf will interact with the Genie. What else? Will Hercules meet Maui? Winnie the Pooh meet Kenai and Koda? Peter Pan meet John Silver? Obviously, this isn't the first time Disney characters have crossed over with each other-- House of Mouse  and  Kingdom Hearts  both come to mind. It's not even the first time that the portion of the Walt Disney Company responsible for theatrical animation, Walt Disney Animation Studios, have created their own crossover-- Ralph Breaks the Inter...

I recently saw a production of the world's longest-running play: Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap . Its twist ending (which I shall not spoil here) is a closely-guarded secret, to the point that Wikipedia has drawn criticism for spoiling it, and TV Tropes refuses to give it away at all. Though I am merely a casual theatre lover and a neophyte Christie reader, seeing  The Mousetrap  has been on my bucket list for years, so when I learned that Phoenix Players were staging a production at The Gladstone, I bought a ticket. The play is set at a newly-opened hotel called Monkswell Manor. The owners, Mollie and Giles Ralston (played here by Monica Maika and Austin Beaty) haven't had time to hire any employees, and are clearly still figuring out the hotel business. Nonetheless, the rooms quickly fill with guests--the most cantankerous being Mrs Boyle (played by Lorraine Hopkins, who really sells how miserable her character is). Other guests include the eccentric Christopher W...