Today, the 31st Montreal World Film Festival announced its programmation. The Festival, which will be held from August 23 to September 3, 2007, will offer 230 movie features and 215 shorts from 70 countries (including 53 world premieres (PM), 56 international premieres (PI), 59 North American premieres (PNA), and 42 Canadian premieres (PC))!
Unfortunately, there is very little Japanese movies at the festival this year: two in competition (COMP), one out of competition (HC), four in the “Focus On World Cinema” segment (REG) and one short:
KURO-OBI (
Black Belt) (COMP) (PM) Japan / 2006 / 95 min / Dir.: Shunichi Nagasaki; Cast : Akihito Yagi, Tatsuya Naka, Yuji Suzuki, Takayasu Komiya, Yasuto Kosuda, Kenji Anan, Masahiro Sudo, Taro Suwa, Arashi Fukasawa, Narumi Konno. Set in the 1930s in Japan, three martial arts practitioners who are competing to inherit the mantle of their late master, are ordered to enlist in the military. Having no choice, the trio leave their dojo for an encounter with fate.
Review.
OH-OKU (
Oh-Oku, The Women Of The Inner Palace) (COMP) (PI) Japan / 2007 / 128 min / Dir.: Toru Hayashi; Cast : Yukie Nakama, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Haruka Igawa, Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Kaoru Sugita, Machiko Washio, Kaori Yamaguchi, Maki Kubota, Yuki Matsushita, Reiko Takashima. Set during the short reign of child Shogun Ietsugu Tokugawa, OH-OKU recounts the legendary power struggle between the young shogun's natural mother and his official wife, who must watch her stake in the bloodline.
Review.
BIZAN (HC) (PNA) Japan / 2007 / 120 min / Dir.: Isshin Inudo; Cast : Nanako Matsushima, Takao Osawa, Nobuko Miyamata, Aya Enjoji, Tatsuo Yamada, Manami Kurose, Toshiyuki Nagashima, Takeo Nakahara, Ken Kaneko. A Tokyo travel agent who returns to her hometown when her mother is hospitalized for cancer discovers that the father she never met is not dead as her mother always claimed. She sets out to find him and perhaps re-unite the family before it is too late.
Review.
DEAR FRIENDS (REG) (PI) Japan / 2007 / 115 min / Dir.: Kasuyuki Morosawa; Cast : Keiko Kitagawa,Yuika Motokariya, Masaya Kikawada, Airi Toriyama, Mao Sasaki, Hatsune Matsushima, Mantaro Koichi, Naoko Otani, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Ren Osugi; Prod. & Sales: Toei Company Ltd.
MAMIYA KYOUDAI (
The Mamiya Brothers) (REG) (PNA) Japan / 2006 / 119 min / Dir.: Yoshimitsu Morita; Cast : Kuranosuke Sasaki, Muga Tsukaji, Miyuki Nakajima, Takako Tokiwa, Erika Sawajiri, Keiko Kitagawa, Hiromi Iwasaki, Ryuta Sato, Teppei Yokota, Koji Sato, Kenichi Katsura; Prod. & Sales: Yasushi Tsuge, Kazuko Misawa, Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc.. The nerdy Mamiya brothers live in a comfortable Tokyo apartment, work 9-to-5 jobs and have done everything together for over thirty years. Everything but date girls. Which they've never done at all. They decide a curry-and-Monopoly party might kick-start their love lives...
Review.
SAKURAN (REG) (PC) Japan / 2007 / 111 min / Dir.: Mika Ninagawa; Cast : Anna Tsuchiya, Kippei Narimiya, Yoshino Kimura, Miho Kanno, Masatoshi Nagase, Minami, Hiroshi Yamamoto; Prod.: Mitsuru Uda, Yoshinori Fujita, Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc. An elegant red light district flourished in In 17th century Edo, as Tokyo was then known. SAKURAN tells the story of one woman living in the lustrous world who was determined to stand on her own two feet and live life as she pleased.
Review.
TANA-NO-SUMI (The Dark Corners Of The Shelves) (REG) (PI) Japan / 2007 / 81 min / Dir.: Hajime Kadoi; Cast : Ren Osugi, Ryoko Uchida, Makiko Watanabe, Hideo Sakaki; Prod.: Kazuhiro Koike, Little Bird (Espero Keikaku). A woman comes into Yasuo's toy shop and, without a word, buys an old toy and leaves. The woman is Yoko, Yasuo's former wife who walked out on him and their son eight years ago...
Review.
Grand Odyssey (REG - Short) (PNA) Japan - France / 2007 / 19 min / Dir.: Tomoyuki Kato; Cast : Yuzo Kayama, Natsumi Okumura.
Review.
Check the
festival's web site for more details. Bon festival!
See the full Event Report in
Protoculture Addicts #96: 71.
See also our quick
overview of the festival and our
Picture Gallery.
[updated 2007/8/20 and 2008/5/13]
Le 25e congrès de la science-fiction et du fantastique, Boréal 2008, se tiendra les 9, 10 et 11 mai à l'Université Concordia de Montréal (Pavillon Henry F Hall, 1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest) sous le thème “Pour une Science-Fiction Citoyenne.”
A couple of weeks ago I bought a new, bigger, network drive as the hard drive plugged to my Airport Extreme was already getting full. This allowed me to free a drive for Time Machine. I had the new Mac OS (10.5, aka Leopard) installed on both my iMacs for months, but never got around setting up Time Machine, Mac's new automatic backup software, because I didn't have any spare hard drive. I first set up Time Machine on my main iMac (Intel latest generation). That's the one I use for work, so it was my first priority. It was quite easy to install: I had just to plug the spare drive (aptly named Tardis) on the USB port and turn Time Machine on. It immediately started to make the first, full backup. After that it makes hourly incremental backups. “Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.” It does that until the drive is full and then it erase the backups and starts again. It really gives you a sense of security. But if backups make you feel safe, it is mostly because you think that you will probably never need it anyway...
A few days later, being quite satisfied with how the software was working (mainly because it was not slowing the system--and therefore my work--when doing backups), I decided to implement Time Machine on my secondary iMac (a pre-iSight G5 that I use for backup, research, testing and download). First, I had to free another, smaller, hard drive by moving content around (to Navi, the network drive plugged to Airport Extreme, and to Tardis). Since it was a smaller drive, I also had to set up TM to exclude some, less important, folders (Music, Movie), while doing its backup. Once turned on, Time Machine started doing it backup quietly and flawlessly. After a while you forget about it. It's part of the system. It's just a safety net...
About a week later, I noticed that my secondary iMac was getting quite slow. I checked to see if one of the softwares was dragging the system down, but couldn't find anything wrong. I rebooted just in case, but nothing changed. The system was still slow to respond to any command. So, last Thursday, in frustration, I decided to turn the computer off, thinking of doing more tests later. When I turned it on again on Good Friday afternoon, it refused to boot. I tried several time and all I was getting was the Apple logo, the spinning wheel, the fan was starting to run like crazy after a while, and sometime ending up with a kernel panic (the multilingual screen of death). My computer was dead! I was busy and there was nothing much I could do, so I left it alone.
I have been using the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) to view video files for a couple of years and I like it very much since it is offering a great variety of settings -- but lately I've been having problem running hi-def video and mkv format. I guess we are slowly approaching the processing limits of the Xbox (unless the XBMC migrates to the 360). Therefore, I started looking for a replacement. The new Apple TV seemed to be a suitable candidate. 
First, it plays only three video format: .mp4, .m4v and .mov (but the latter under very limited conditions; I've not figured out yet what make some .mov work and some not). However, you can use Quicktime or other video converters to convert almost any format into .m4v. I mostly watch .avi (plus a few .mkv) and didn't have any problems converting them, but it is a time consuming process (depending of the video format -- .avi seems faster to convert-- and the computer used to process the file, it can take from 30 min. (on my new iMac Intel 2.4 Ghz) to over ten hours (on my iMac G5 1.8 Ghz) to convert an half-hour episode). [UPDATE: It even converts the .srt files for the subtitles!]
Also today, Apple finally announced the new iMac models! 
