Griff's Village

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...

Like a lot of people born in the 80s and earlier, I grew up watching LOONEY TUNES. THE BUGS BUNNY AND TWEETY SHOW, and similar compilation programs, aired regularly on TV, and decades-old cartoons were readily available on VHS tapes. Of course, as any animation affictionado knows, most of these cartoons weren't created for televsion: they were created for movie theatres. Animated shorts before features is a treat rather than an expectation these days, but if you want to see a classic cartoon in a cinema, you can still sometimes find them at festivals or revival houses. I recently attending a screening of various LOONEY TUNES shorts at the Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa. The lineup opened with Chuck Jones' RABBIT SEASONING, closed with Friz Freleng's BIRDS ANONYMOUS, and included a great variety of cartoons in the middle. The biggest surprise for me was the inclusion of a few computer-animated cartoons from the 2010s: the musical short I TAWT I TAW A PUDDY TAT (which is essentiall...

I hate taking my blood pressure. I'm fine with dentists. I'm fine with needles. I'm not fine with blood pressure monitors. Haven't been since I tried to donate blood in 2013, and wound up in the hospital for stage 3 hypertension. Now it's ten years later, and there doesn't seem to be much left for me to complain about, blood-wise. I've lost about 100 pounds since then, and I'm able to keep my blood pressure under control with only a little medication. I've been checking my blood pressure every two-to-four weeks since then. I have a decade of experience taking my blood pressure, and my doctor is generally happy with my readings. I still get anxious every time I have to take it. My heart rate jumps up, sometimes as high as 140 BPM or more. I have spoken to my doctor about this. He's told me that there's nothing to worry about, that he doesn't think that my blood pressure will increase again without a change in my lifestyle, and that, even i...

These days, there's a lot of debate on the merits of streaming a movie versus buying a DVD. It's the age-old conflict of the convenient against the familiar, and one that will always find new battlegrounds as technology marches on, yesterday's new ages into tomorrow's old, and unforeseen inconveniences sneak in with modern comforts. It's not a debate that I concern myself with too much. I have a pretty large collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, but I don't see any reason to shun digital. My favourite streaming service is The Criterion Channel. I recently used it to watch Robert Altman's 3 Women (staring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, & Janice Rule), a movie I had always meant to watch, and which will be leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of this month. The Criterion Channel reminds me of watching movies on traditional television in that respect. When I was a kid, if you didn't have a spare VHS tape to record a movie or TV show, you watched it when i...

Like a lot of people my age, I'm a fan of retro gaming. When you grew up on something, it just hits you in a way that news things--however well-made--can't.  So I was happy to learn that Nintendo has started rereleasing some of their Game Boy and Game Boy Advance titles through Nintendo Switch Online. Once I finished replaying Link's Awakening , I began to wonder what else might be on the horizon. Titles like Super Mario Land  or Metroid: Zero Mission --although not officially announced yet--seem like no-brainers. And yet there is one beloved, influential game (or two, it's hard to say) that I have been wondering about more than any other. I was already in my early teens when the original  Pokémon Red and Blue  hit North America, so I was a bit older than the target demographic at the time, but I still loved them. I always liked monsters--especially cartoonish, goofy monsters--and had long wanted a game where you play as the monsters instead of against them.  Po...

Once a year--excluding a few COVID years--Ottawa hosts a music festival knowns as Ottawa Bluesfest. Despite the name, all genres of popular music are represented: rock, pop, rap, country, and, yes, sometimes even blues. This is always exciting because Ottawa is not a musical city. Most big musicians only visit here every couple of tours, if they ever do. That's one thing that I've always envied about Toronto, who seem to get all the best concerts. But there's always something for me to look forward to at Bluesfest. Foo Fighters put on a legendary show  a few years back, and they're making their return this summer. Aside from seeing Foo Fighters again, I'm looking forward to Weezer (who I have never seen live before) and Tegan and Sara (who I have seen live several times). Granted, a Bluesfest show does have its drawbacks. I'm at the age where my back protests if I stand for too long--and since Bluesfest is an outdoor concert, standing is the norm. Bands also usu...