I think the festival was stronger than ever this year for Los Angeles, both in attendance and in the programs screened. There were lots of great films this year including a 1956 Japanese feature called “Keirin Queen” subbed by BFF staff and brought to the U.S. for the first time. A French film, “Le Dernier Voyage of Maryse de Lucas”, a story of two friends riding out to the countryside to spread on of the friend’s mother’s ashes, had Bronwyn literally in tears. And a redubbed parody of “Midnight Ride”, a Banana Republic and Vanity Fair produced short that takes place during a Midnight Ridazz ride, got uproarious cheers from the crowd. “Midnight Ride” has recently been taken down, I’m guessing because of the negative response it was getting throughout the bike community. How’s that for viral marketing gone wrong? The parody was on YouTube, but was removed because of copyright violations.

Other great things that went on were an opening night concert with Deerhunter, a bicycle art show, goldsprints, and a Sunday block party in the Bicycle District.

Here are the photos I posted on my flickr.

Be sure to check the festival out if it’s coming to a town near you.

Pushing Daisies – Bronwyn’s parents showed us an episode of this in 2007, but we only finally got around to watching it late in ’08. It’s a modern fairy tale, visually stunning and full of great over-the-top characters with a surprising amount of depth. Who knew death could be so entertaining? Such a shame that it’s slated for cancellation. Why does this always happen to the shows I love.

Teminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – I needed something to fill the sci-fi void that Battlestar Galactica had left me with. While this show is far from perfect, it’s still a lot of fun to watch and quite addictive. Plus it stars Summer Glau kicking ass. As a Joss Whedon fan there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Moonlight – An absolute guilty pleasure. The show is long over, but Bronwyn and I only recently finished seeing the entire series. The show was bad. Really bad. But, and again here comes the Joss Whedon love, I can’t say no to a vampire detective in Los Angeles. It was a poor replacement for Angel but a replacement nonetheless. Seriously, though, what good is a vampire show where the vampire can walk around in the sun, isn’t killed by pointy pieces of wood, and can enter houses whenever he pleases? In other words, break all the rules. It’s the rules that make the genre interesting. The series was cancelled, not surprisingly, but if there were more episodes you’d bet I’d watch them.

Finishing the latest issues of those titles, I continued indulging myself in Whedon-y goodness by reading Joss’s run writing The Astonishing X-Men. Being a Whedon fan, I had purchased the trade paperback of the Astonishing X-Men a long time ago when buying my usual Buffy and Angel comics, but had never cracked so much as the shrink wrapping. What a shame. I’m not a huge follower of the X-Men oeuvre – I’m familiar with the major characters, watched the animated series back in the ’90s, and watched the first two live-action movies – but I still found The Astonishing X-Men very accessible, and, more importantly, entirely awesome. The story was rich and engaging, the writing was witty, fun, and full of self-referential humory goodness that is signature Whedon, and the characters textured and complex. This lead me to watch the third X-Men movie, X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Not nearly as… uh… rich, but a fun action and special effects fest nonetheless. I was surprised to see that the character Shadowcat, who had only a token appearance in the previous two films, played a principle role in the movie. Similarly, in The Astonishing X-Men she was the central figure.

Shadowcat’s super power is the ability to “phase” herself and anything with which she comes into contact, making her intangible and allowing her to pass through solid objects. It seems a very passive power. That is to say, it’s unlike many of the more aggressive powers that allow one to blow things up or shoot fireballs or move things with one’s mind. Most often, her power is used self-defensively – protecting herself from physical attacks as the assailant passes right through her – or for reconnaissance, or for search and rescue.

If we wanted to apply a gender to Shadowcat’s power, it would certainly fall on the feminine end of the specturm. On the flip side, you have characters like Wolverine, probably the most famous of all X-Men, who rips and shreds in a berserker rage and whose tenuously tamed aggression seems always on the brink of unbridling. While Shadowcat’s power is undeniably useful, she’s not really a “front-liner” (though correct me if I’m wrong, because again I haven’t really read any of the other X-Men comics). Even in The Astonishing X-Men, one of the super villains labels Shadowcat a “non-combatant.” So knowing Joss Whedon’s most common theme in his works (strong female characters, duh) it’s completely appropriate that he would opt to focus on Shadowcat and feature her powers front-and-center. I wouldn’t want to give up any spoilers, but it should be fairly obvious by the close-up framing of her face in the first frame after the title in issue one that Joss is going to turn the whole “passive, non-combatant” thing on its head and Shadowcat’s going to be the hero at the end of all this.

Anyways, that was kind of a tangent that I didn’t entirely mean to get in to. The point is, more or less, that I really like Shadowcat now. And who should play Shadowcat in X-Men 3 but Ellen Page. I didn’t expect that, because later that evening Bronwyn and I had planned to FINALLY watch Juno. We had yet to see the movie despite the fact that a couple of songs off the soundtrack played a very prominent role in our wedding ceremony music. At any rate, it made for a very Ellen Page-y day, which is not a bad thing because I think she’s friggin’ awesome. We first saw her in Hard Candy and her performance in that was remarkably mature and frighteningly intelligent. Her role in Juno was no less satisfying. She may not have won an Oscar this time around, but give it a couple of years and I think she’s going to be an absolute superstar.

So that’s what I’ve been watching and reading. Anything worth recommending? I suppose having gone the six-degrees-of-separation route of:

• Buffy comics
• Joss Whedon also wrote Astonishing X-Men
• X-Men 3 and Astonishing X-Men featured Shadowcat
• Shadowcat was played by Ellen Page
• Ellen Page was the star of Juno

The next logical step would then be… watching Arrested Development again?

From their web page, they write:

In this video an epic battle rages between ourselves and our nefarious neighbor, Marc Summers. We call on a few friends (some of whom you might recognize from early 90s Nickelodeon shows such as “Pete & Pete,” “Clarissa Explains It All,” and “Salute Your Shorts”) to help us clean house. But all goes delightfully awry. AYE DIOS MIO!

Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.

I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).

At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”