In a final interview with Rolling Stone, Johnny Ramone reflects on his band, his hair and his relationship with Joey Ramone.

The Toronto Star offered up this piece in tribute to unofficial Canadian poet laureate Leonard Cohen on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Happy Birthday, Leonard. His new album Dear Heather is out October 26.

So I’m not going to go Macha and Mahjongg tonight. Just can’t justify spending $10 to see one band I’ve never heard of and another who I only sorta like, especially not with a killer October schedule bearing down on me. Sorry, Macha. Good luck to you.

I have, however, made an addition to the calendar as I’ve decided to hit Nu-Music Nite at the Horseshoe next Tuesday (the 28th) which will feature Winnipeg’s Telepathic Butterflies (Rainbow Quartz guitar pop) and The High Water Marks (Hilarie Sidney from Apples In Stereo’s side project) for the lovely admission price of zero dollars.

Yeah, just a quickie today. I’m entitled to a light day every now and again.

np – Iron & Wine / Our Endless Numbered Days

Movie number six in nine days was Takashi Miike’s Zebraman. I’ve never seen any other of Miike’s films, but I know he’s got quite the reputation for over-the-top concepts and gratuitous violence. So while his latest film qualifies as ‘over-the-top’, it’s not especially violent – it’s a children’s movie at heart, more than anything else. The story plays out as follows: Mr Ichikawa is a third-grade teacher who seeks to escape the tedium of his life by dressing up as Zebraman, the lead character from a barely-seen 70s television show, but make-believe falls by the wayside when he finds himself not only possessing Zebraman’s powers but also having to repel and alien invasion centered around the school where he works. Got it? Good.

The film is big and goofy and outrageously cheesy, but all deliberately so – anyone whose seen an old episode of Ultraman or even Mighty Morphin Power Rangers will know exactly where it’s coming from. Sure, little things like plot and logic take more than a few Zebra Back Kicks, but it’s silly and fun enough that you don’t especially care. A good and lighthearted way to wrap up the Festival.

And so that’s it for the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival – essentially my first, despite being essentially a lifelong Torontonian. It was pretty tiring but lots of fun. It was pretty amazing being in sold-out film after sold-out film with a theatre full of enthusiastic filmgoers – It made me appreciate the amount of passion some people have for cinema. And for all the movies I did see, there were dozens more I would have liked to have seen. You can bet your sweet bippy I’ll be doing this again next year, though I may split the coupon book with someone and try to fit a gala or two in. Just to hang with the beautiful people instead of the great unwashed, ya know.

So yeah, after like nine non-stop days of go go go, the upcoming week looks like… nothing. I got nothing going on. I will probably have to hit the video store to get my movie fix.

Popmatters presents a requiem for Guided By Voices. What, everyone’s already linked this? Well where the hell was I?

The Belfast Telegraph catches up with Steve Earle. I have to say, I’m liking The Revolution Starts… Now a LOT. It’s really got some fire behind it. From Coolfer.

np – A.C. Newman / The Slow Wonder

My penultimate TIFF film was Shane Carruth’s Primer. I don’t know why I chose this film. I mean I honestly don’t remember how or why it got onto my list of choices – even when I got my tickets a couple weeks ago, I couldn’t figure out what this film was or why I chose it. Convenient scheduling, I guess. Anyway, I went into this knowing only the barest of information and moderately low expectations, and left mildly and pleasantly surprised.

Synopsis: Four engineer friends are moonlighting as inventors, trying to come up with a new product or technology that will net them a big payday. Two of them stumble across something they don’t fully understand, but which appears to loop time back on itself. The extrapolate this technology into time travel devices that allow them to set a ‘bookmark’ in time and then later on travel back to that point and relive the day. The two protagonists start out utilizing their newfound toy for predictable ends, playing the stock market and making money, but things inevitably begin to spiral out of hand. Time travel stories generally start out with two strikes against them as even the most casual of sci-fi afficionados (or anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Star Trek) knows that the genre is fraught with plot-hole peril, a veritable minefield of causality and paradox. While not garnering a perfect score, Carruth manages to navigate these issues reasonably well. By grounding the entire film in as realistic a situation as possible and using a lot of technical jargon, he almost makes the invention seem plausible.

Obviously made on a shoestring budget, Primer tries to turn its disadvantages into advantages, successfully using the grainier, overexposed and undersaturated visuals to create mood and atmosphere. It’s less successful in turning the same trick with the sound editing – I found that in several key moments, plot-critical dialogue was inaudible or incomprehensible because of the ambient noise. I will give Carruth the benefit of the doubt that if I had been able to understand those plot points, the final third of the film would have been more coherent. As it was, I only had a tenuous grasp on the plot by the end. Listening to Carruth’s Q&A after the film also managed to convince me that there was indeed a method to the madness and it wasn’t entirely held together with duct tape and string. The film was Carruth’s debut as director, actor, writer, cinematographer and pretty much every other job you could imagine on a film set. And while far from a perfect film, Primer is wildly ambitious and an impressive first effort – I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with in the future.

Apparently Elvis Costello’s new record is a concept album? Canada.com gets a preview of The Delivery Man, out Tuesday. From LHB.

Creative Loafing wonders if Wilco is trying to sabotage their career.

The Calvin Johnson show on September 28th has found a venue that won’t require the K-man to tussle with The Black Keys for control of the Lee’s Palace stage. He will instead be holding court at the Kathedral. Yeah, the place where all the metal bands play. THAT Kathedral.

Kozyndan fans take note – the artists will be at the Magic Pony next Friday the 24th for the opening of their “Lactaid Dreams” art show and is also the launch party for their new colouring book of the same name. I hope they bring some more artwork to sell – I don’t really have any more wall space on which to properly hang stuff, but that won’t stop me from accumulating it anyway. The show will run until October 25th.

np – Versus / The Stars Are Insane

The Toronto Star and eye both ran pieces on The Sadies to pump up their two-night CD release party for Favourite Colours at the Horseshoe tonight and tomorrow. I had originally intended to go to one of these shows but TIFF commitments and the resultant exhaustion are making that unlikely. Yes, they always put on an amazing show but they also play a lot, so I’m sure I can catch them next time.

Apparently ticket sales for the Macha/Mahjongg show are not going so well. This makes me sad. If I do indeed bail on The Sadies, I may go to this show just to offer some support and practice some photography. I don’t know what they were thinking booking them into Lee’s, though. This week’s NOW has an interview with Macha to try and build up some interest in the show. Hope it works.

10:51AM did some legwork that I was not willing to do and has revealed that the Arcade Fire show on October 1st at Lee’s is NOT sold out yet – Rotate This had sold out of their block of tickets and noted this on their website, but now have more and the Horseshoe still has em as well. And SHOT informs us that Bell Orchestre will be opening the show. So anyone who got all panicky that they didn’t get tickets in time has a second chance to set things right, kind of like Bruce Willis in The Kid.

Torontonians may want to take note that Sam’s on Yonge St will have Elvis Costello’s new one The Delivery Man on sale starting on the day of release next Tuesday the 21st until Sunday the 26th for the very nice price of $9.99. And then you can take the receipt in when his orchestral album Il Sogno comes out on the 28th for and get it for $14.99.

eye has a Q&A with Sarah Harmer about her show at Massey Hall tonight as well as a look at her future projects… a new Weeping Tile record? Yes, please?

MTV talks to Ben Gibbard about the little side project that could, The Postal Service. He says the will continue to milk the almost-two year old Give Up for as long as they can since there likely won’t be a second album for some time. But it will be a earnest and sincere milking, because as Ben says, “My heart is in everything I do. I don’t half-ass anything”. From LHB.

Boing Boing reports that Sony Pictures has made the unprecedented move of pulling Kung Fu Hustle from it’s second screening at the Film Festival, apparently due to security concerns over bootleggers. I want to call them overly paranoid but you if you look at the films that appear on bit torrent within days if not hours of release, you can’t help but admit they’ve probably got a case. Dem bootleggers is crafty buggers. Anyway, I feel fortunate to have caught the only screening IN THE WORLD so far.

So you know that kerfuffle about Warner Bros trying to do PR for The Secret Machines by hitting up various blogs last month? Seems that I was actually on that list – except the email just got to me, uh, yesterday. It was sent on August 4 but has been lost in the cyber-ether for the past six weeks and now the whole thing is just SO played out. For the record, I wouldn’t have minded posting a link if I liked the track but the least Warner’s could have done was host it on their own damn servers and just given me a link. I don’t see why I should use up my own bandwidth to push their artists. Chumps.

np – Elvis Costello & The Attractions / Blood & Chocolate

A man is kidnapped off the street, locked in a room for fifteen years with no word of explanation, is then released with a cellphone and a wad of cash and encouraged to find out who’s responsible and seek his revenge.

That is how Old Boy was sold to me, and it’s technically an accurate description… for the first 30 minutes or so, at least. After that, all bets are off. I admit I had expected something quirky or maybe comedically violent like a Tarantino film, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It veers from whodunnit (though the who is revealed fairly early – the real question is the why) to twisted romance to psychodrama to brutal actioner (there is a single shot fight sequence where former prisoner Dae-su Oh fights his way through a hallway of assailants armed only with a hammer – it’s as far from slick as you can get but completely riveting), but never loses sight of the target – revenge, revenge, revenge.

Sadly, I really can’t reveal any more of the plot for fear of ruining it for you – sufficed to say that even when you think you’ve got it figured out, you really don’t. The climax was one of the most intense cinematic experiences I’ve had in a long, long time – it just builds and builds until you almost can’t take it anymore, but you can’t look away. I think the key to the film’s effectiveness is that as outrageous as the plot seems to become, it never crosses the line into unbelievability so the viewer isn’t granted the luxury of detaching themselves from the experience. It’s a gut-wrenching film with some stellar performances from Choi Min-shik as the vengeful Dae-su and Ji-tae Yu as his icy tormenter.

This was a film that could only have come from overseas – there’s no way in Hell Hollywood could even have conceived of such a plot let alone had the guts to try and make it. Strongly recommended, but not for the weak of heart or stomach – this is an extreme, intense and bloody movie. The violence is crude and the physical toll it all takes on the characters pales in comparison to the emotional one. When it was over I had to sit there for a little while just to decompress. You’ve been warned. Old Boy is actually over a year old – there was no one associated with the film at the screening, or at least none was announced. I don’t know if it will get any sort of theatrical release on this continent but you can probably get it on Korean DVD anywhere with little trouble.

So after films three nights in a row, I’m actually thankful I have a night off tonight from the Film Festival. I’ve been out six nights straight, and while tonight is sort of a night off (still have band practice), I’m getting right back into it with films Friday and Saturday. All this moviegoing is hard work!

Johnny Ramone, RIP.

Bernard Butler has posted some studio pics from his sessions with Brett Anderson on his website.

NOW gives Arcade Fire’s Funeral a five-star review. That’s a perfect score from both Toronto weeklies, if you’re keeping score (eye reviewed it last week). I’m curious what the aggregate Metacritic review score will be. And a note for all the lollygaggers – their show at Lee’s on the 1st of October is sold out.

Ted Leo will make his third Toronto appearance of the year December 5, but this time he’s graduated from the ‘Shoe to the much posher Mod Club. Good on you, Ted! Tickets are $12 advance. It’s had to believe that earlier this year I was afraid he’d never come back to our fair town… The relentless touring machine will be pushing Shake The Sheets, out October 19. Dear Ted, BRING SOME MERCH THIS TIME! Love, Frank.

np – Steve Earle / The Revolution Starts… Now