The Bloor Cinema, located in the student-bohemian neighbourhood of Accordion City known as The Annex, has been a city institution since the turn of the previous century. It started out as a vaudeville theatre, became a cinema, then an “adult film” venue, and now it’s a repertory theatre and home to second-run films, Rocky Horror nights, independent cinema, art films, foreign films, film festivals and special projects like the The Pee-Wee Herman Picture Show. I’ve had many nice dates there (contrary to legend, I do have dates that do not end in police action or crisis counselling), the most recent of which were with The Missus.

Local blog BlogTO posted an article today pointing to the documentary film titled The Bloor, which chronicles the life of this Toronto cultural landmark. It’s been posted to YouTube in two parts, which I’ve posted below. It’s good lunchtime viewing.

A mega-shark! A giant octopus! A reference to the "Thrilla in Manila"! Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson! What more could you possibly want from a movie?

(A tip of the hat to John Bristowe for pointing me to the video!)

It would probably go something like this:

Yes, you’ll need to have seen the Milton-Bradley boardgame “Guess Who?” and this scene from the Quentin Tarantino flick Pulp Fiction to be in on the joke:

In an earlier article, I wrote about the cleaned-for-TV version of Samuel Jackson’s famous in the movie Snakes on a Plane. Here’s an even better-known line – Bruce Willis’ battle cry from the Die Hard movie series – as edited for prime-time television audiences:

You have to keep in mind that there is no character or concept in the movie named “Mr. Falcon”; the words seems to have been picked randomly. He might as well have said “major factor”, “motor fixer” or even “mojito freezepop”.

(And whoever did the voice rework did a terrible Bruce Willis impression. He sounds more like a young John Travolta saying “Yippee ki yay, Mr. Kotter.”)

For reference, here’s the non-Bowdlerized version:

Inventive as the attempt to come up with a prime-time TV-friendly substitute for “motherfucker” in Die Hard 2 is, it doesn’t hit the creative new heights achieved in this clean-up of The Usual Suspects’ “lineup scene”:

I think it might’ve worked better had they simply bleeped those words out.

Once again, in the name of completeness, here’s the unedited version:

Snakes on a Plane, even when you take into account that it’s supposed to be a big dumb action movie aiming to be a cult film, wasn’t all that good. Apparently it’s been made worse through its bowdlerization for TV, where Samuel Jackson’s famous line has the profanity (and personality) drained from it:

“I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane?”

That’s painful.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil was the one documentary I really wanted to catch at last year’s Hot Docs film festival. If you watched Canada’s MuchMusic station in the 1980s and its heavy metal segment, The Pepsi Power Hour (hosted by the mullet-sporting JD Roberts, who later became CNN’s silver-haired John Roberts), you might have some dim memories of Anvil and their hits Metal on Metal and 666. It was pretty cheese-a-riffic Canadian metal; when I was a DJ at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub, I used tracks from promo CDs of Anvil’s Strength of Steel and Annihilator’s Alice in Hell to get people to leave the pub after the lights had gone on so we could mop the floor.

(Okay, I’ll admit that I sort of liked their hit Metal on Metal.)

Anvil might have remained a footnote in metal history had it not been for a teenage roadie named Sacha Gervasi, who helped lug around gear for the band in the 1980s. Gervasi would later go on to become a screenwriter for movies such as Spielberg’s The Terminal. When Gervasi heard that Anvil were doing a big tour in 2005 and had landed the headline spot at the Monsters of Transylvania Festival, he asked their frontman, “Lips” Kudlow if he could film a documentary of them. “Lips” said yes, and a real-life This is Spinal Tap “rockumentary” ensued.

Every review of Anvil! The Story of Anvil points out that a lot of the mishaps experienced by the fictitious band Spinal Tap actually happen to Anvil, a real-life band. There’s the lifelong “David St.Hubbins/Nigel Tufnel-esque” friendship between the two founders of the band. The guitar player’s fiancee can’t speak English and mismanages the band into disaster. There’s a concert scene where the camera starts with a tight shot of a crowd near the stage and then zooms out to reveals that the band is playing to an audience of 200 in an arena that holds 10,000. The band memebers make ends meet through their day jobs: telemarketing and serving school lunches. There’s even a stranger-than-fiction scene where the owner of a club in the Czech Republic tries to pay the band in goulash rather than cash.

It’s funny, yet heartbreaking at the same time, because while Spinal Tap’s over-the-top problems were make-believe, the guys in Anvil were experiencing them in real life.

Here’s the UK trailer for the movie:

It looks as though Anvil will finally get their break. The movie is getting a lot of praise, people are actually coming to see their shows, and a number of their songs will soon be available as downloads for the Rock Band videogame.

I’m definitely catching the movie once it hits the theatres here.

This article originally appeared in Global Nerdy.

Photo courtesy of Matt Gunn.

Here’s an interesting visualization of cartoonist Dan Meth’s ratings of the movies in various film trilogies. Do you agree with his assessments?

I really like the abstract works that designers like Saul Bass created in the 1960s. Here’s an example of Bass’ work – his poster for the Hitchcock movie Vertigo:

Someone who goes by the nom de plume of “Spacesick” likes ‘60s abstract graphic art as much as I do and has created I Can Read Movies, a series of covers for novelizations of popular movies done in that style. I show some of Spacesick’s creations below.

(If you’re a book publisher, you might want to drop Spacesick a line. His/her stuff is really good!)

Here’s the cover for the novelization of Caddyshack. It’s only missing one thing: the gopher!

Here’s the cover for the hypothetical book version of Sixteen Candles, one of the quintessential ‘80s teen movies:

The cover for Highlander captures the spirit of the movie while remaining refreshingly minimalist:

Here’s the Face/Off cover. Someone should let Spacesick know that “forward” is a direction and “foreword” is an introductory note in a book.

Here’s the cover to the “burning novelization” of Mean Girls:

Here’s Shaun of the Dead:

And finally, my favourite: a Japanese novelization titled Wonka-san! Just Punisher of Coddled Children:

You can see Spacesick’s other novelization covers in this entry in his/her blog as well as in this Flickr photoset.

For some reason, this photo-comic in which “Mr. Miyagi” (played by Pat Morita in the Karate Kid movies) gives mad props to Barack Obama amuses me to no end. I decided to enhance it by adding a caption to the bottom":

Found thanks to Giles Bowkett.