My LEAST favourite VIFF film this year...

...was The Oxbow Cure. Sure, it has some craft to it, some effective atmosphere, but what is the point, exactly? A pseudo-horror film about how we need embrace death and illness as part of life (the "winter" of life's seasons?). Oh thank you for this wisdom, I really needed to spend money (on a ticket for my girlfriend - thank God I wasn't paying for both of us!) and waste an evening I could have spent in innumerable other ways in order to be taught this valuable lesson, which I already understood from my life experiences, by a low-budget Canadian art film... What a privilege. I cannot believe Curtis Woloschuk recommended this movie to me as one of the standouts this year! Boring, pretentious, blah. And the colours are so muted and images so fuzzy that I was actually concerned at times that the Cinematheque was running its projector bulb at a lower setting or something... A more descriptive, but no more kind, review of the film can be found here, for those who would like to know what actually happens in it (not bloody much). My advice: stay well away!

There, I have proven once again that I am not just a promiscuous, all-embracing shill for the VIFF. (I didn't like Antisocial much either  - Facebook zombies? Please! - but I decided to be kind to it when they whipped out the self-trepanation stuff near the end. A good self-trepanation goes a long way with me).