In preparation for my annual trip to Bermuda and its Film Festival I thought I’d go paperless with Air Canada’s new Mobile Check-in service. And predictably, instead of ending up with a 2D barcode I got the message seen in the screen grab above.

Just so I’m clear on this… I have a phone running the number one smartphone OS in the world, made by the world’s number one handset manufacturer, and yet it’s not recognized by Air Canada.

My bad, clearly…

A testament to the power of new media… I’m apparently listed as an official source for festival coverage on the BIFF website. Take that Bermuda Sun and Royal Gazette!

The penultimate screening in the 2007 Bermuda International Film Festival was Red Road, a tale of vigilante justice in the Big Brother era of CCTV cameras. You know, if I wanted to see unsimulated oral sex I’d probably watch porn instead of being forced to sit through it with a theatre full of similarly uncomfortable cinema-goers. Call me old fashioned, I guess…

And what can you say about Eagle vs. Shark, a quirky Kiwi entry that takes Napoleon Dynamite and turns it into a romantic comedy? All I can think of is: “nailed it!”

A trip to New Zealand may soon be in the works for yours truly, if for no other reason than to seek out the awesome soundtrack for the film. The only low point in going to this, possibly the perfect first-date movie ever, was seeing it by myself — when the lights came up and all the smiling couples left the theatre hand-in-hand I went home alone to clean dog shit off of my brother’s living room carpet. Fuck.

Paris, je t’aime is a collection of short films by various directors linked together by their location — every romantic’s favourite City of Light. There is some passing (and very arbitrary) intersection of characters at the end of the film, but its biggest shortcoming is the lack of an “uber-director” to nix some of the weaker material, like the story with an almost incomprehensible Nick Nolte, or the one with the mimes.

Yes, this film has mimes.

Had someone like Terrence Malick directed Ten Canoes we would have been treated to a lyrical period piece with stunning photography and a plot to match. Instead, we get ancient storytelling at its absolute worst. The film’s narrator frequently reminds us of the slow-as-molasses pace with quips like “you’re getting impatient, aren’t you? You want to know the end of the story?” Damn right we do, SO GET THE HELL ON WITH IT YOU ABORIGINAL FUCK!!!

Last night I sat through 102 Minutes of Shorts. I say “sat through” because it was amazing to me, someone who makes his living within the constraints of five or so minute-scenes at The Second City, that so few of these films actually worked.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A5tT4p_n-U]

Here’s the YouTube trailer for Jokers are Trumps, a made-in-Bermuda short and (therefore somewhat obviously) crowd favourite. It’s basically a home movie, and I mean that in the best possible way — a testament to the power of digital filmmaking, able to speak to a very specific audience in a way that no mass market Hollywood film ever could.

One thing, though… One of the end credits read “Shot on Location in Bermuda and Toronto”, and I’m pretty sure this got hisses from the audience. What’s that about?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08I5YrqD5EU]

The other big success for me was t.o.m., a simple and absolutely ridiculous idea for a story, and I mean that in the best possible way.

The rest of the films suffered from at least one of the following symptoms:

1. Poor acting
2. Bad direction
3. Trying to cram a feature-length idea into a short

Maybe I’m biased because the short I submitted to the festival a few years back never made it in, but the lesson to be learned here is this: Shooting something in 70mm widescreen doesn’t automatically make it good, whether it’s a short or a feature!