Wilnervision!

If you’ve been visiting this site on a semi-regular basis, you may have noticed the link to The Daily Puppy on the right side of this page. You might even have followed it; hopefully you did so on a day when the puppy was not one of those bug-eyed freaks they sometimes feature.

I do not apologize for this; everyone should see at least one puppy per day, and I like to do my part. But if you click over there today — on Tuesday, March 31st — you’ll notice that the site has been overtaken by a virus. Or, more specifically, by viral marketing.

Today’s puppy is Marley the Labrador retriever, as seen in the Fox movie “Marley & Me”, which just so happens to be coming out on video today. Fox has rented the Daily Puppy site to advertise the movie to its ultimate target audience.

I guess it makes sense. Cute puppy movie taking over a website dedicated to cute puppies … why not? And it’s certainly not the worst marketing angle they’ve used to sell the picture; that would be this one, which was either an attempt to make the movie’s ending seem controversial or to retroactively protect the movie from said controversy. (Spoiler alert on that link, obviously.)

Anyway, I hope the site was well-compensated for this. Oh, and “Marley & Me” is out on disc today. I’ll be over here, writing about “Slumdog Millionaire”.

“Monsters vs. Aliens” conquered the box office this wekeend with a gross of $58.2 million — no surprise there, as it had no real competition and it was a giant DreamWorks entertainment machine with Happy Meals and Super Bowl ads and everything.

Expect a flood of industry articles about how Jeffrey Katzenberg’s obsession with 3D will change the face of Hollywood; do not, however, expect it to actually happen. If 3D was the essential element to box-office success, surely “Coraline” would have been the mammoth hit it deserved to be.

And as I’m putting the blog post together, I learn that Maurice Jarre has died, aged 84. Please take a moment to play the “Lawrence of Arabia” soundtrack at full volume in his honor.

“Monsters vs. Aliens” may not have much going on in the story department, but I have to give it serious props for the production design and the fondness the filmmakers clearly have for cheesy 1950s sci-fi movies.

I never pass up a chance to write about monster movies, so this week’s Sympatico/MSN movie gallery –  which name-checks the Golden Age inspirations of Ginormica and her friends — was a no-brainer.

Much like this guy, actually.

The days just fly by, don’t they? One minute I’m making my way through a huge pile of Cinefranco screeners; the next, I’m staring down the complete schedule of the Tibet film festival. Gosh, it’s good to be well-rounded.

But it’s Friday now! Movies are opening! Let’s get to the breakdown!

“Before Tomorrow”: The producers of “Atanarjuat” and “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen” bring you another slice of Inuit life — this one a far more amateurish and obvious construction that seems far more concerned about playing to mainstream tastes than its predecessors. Susan and Jason do not share my assessment, however.

“Hank and Mike”: A pair of cranky and obnoxious Easter bunnies get laid off and look for new work while still wearing their bunny suits. Doesn’t sound like much, but people still love “Bad Santa”, so what do I know? Andrew kinda liked it; Kieran, not as enthused.

“Hansel & Gretel”: A Korean revision of the grim fairy tale; in this telling, it’s an adult who gets taken in by creepy kids. Andrew offers a cautious endorsement.

“The Haunting in Connecticut”: Lamest title in a while. Lamest poster, too. (Attention marketing departments: Ectoplasmic vomit should probably be kept out of your campaign. Let it be a surprise.) Jason and Andrew call bullshit on the whole affair.

“Monsters vs. Aliens“: Some engaging characters and truly magnificent production design very nearly carry DreamWorks’ 3D CG spectacle over the yawning potholes of its confused second half. My review should be online any minute now. UPDATE: There it is!

“Sunshine Cleaning“: In which mismatched sisters Amy Adams and Emily Blunt learn to understand one another when they start cleaning up crime scenes. Sundance-certified edge has never seemed so … dull. And someone really has to tell Alan Arkin to stop playing all those wacky grandpas. He’ll burn himself out, and then what’s left? Musicals?

“Twelve Rounds”: Fox didn’t screen Renny Harlin’s latest movie for us, so all I know at this time is that it stars wrestler-actor John Cena and is, according to the TV spots, very frenetic with the running and the yelling and the blowing up of things. So, a Renny Harlin movie, then.

Lots of stuff to do and watch this weekend, so posting may be sporadic. But I’m around, I swear.

The first week of spring brings rain clouds, a desperate sense of hope and the first of many, many film festivals.

I take a look at Cinefranco in this week’s NOW, and find a mixed bag of genres and themes, with all the attendant highs and lows. The twisted sexual dynamics that defined last year’s festival are mostly absent, which is kind of a shame; those were a lot of fun.

Ah, French people. They’re just, you know, freaks.

My latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, focusing on “Quantum of Solace” — which is nice, because I didn’t really get the chance to write about it during its theatrical run.

Well, I wrote about it a little. But there’s always more to say.

So I did a phoner with the Canadian Press last week about the latest iteration of D-Box motion chair technology, which is about to make its way into theaters and is already starting to crop up in the Blu-ray realm.

And this is what resulted.

I’m pretty sure I don’t sound like that. I’m usually quite witty and articulate, even. And I use contractions, really I do.

So we caught up to the “Battlestar Galactica” finale over the weekend, and you can put me firmly in the “contented” camp. I think it was a fine sendoff for the show and the characters — and entirely in keeping with the overarching themes of the series, as much as some may wish that were otherwise.

There’s plenty of excellent analysis and debate available at The House Next Door, The Onion AV Club and Salon; don’t forget to check out the comment threads for some relatively polite bickering.

And don’t worry about your Fridays going empty. Remember when the promotional push for “Dollhouse” started to ramp up, and Joss Whedon took all that time to tell people that the show wouldn’t really be awesome until Episode Six? When it would start to pull everything together and take the series in a darker and more complex direction — some might call it “Whedonesque” — after the initial run of stand-alone shows?

Well, Episode Six aired on Friday, and you know what? It totally got awesome. I’m starting to think he may have something great there after all.

And also, it was really weird to see Helo and Romo Lampkin turn up in modern-day Los Angeles just after we’d left them on … whoops, sorry. Never mind, move along, nothing to see here.

I don’t really think Guy Ritchie is willing to take his Sherlock Holmes movie quite that far, but Robert Downey, Jr. could totally pull it off. After “Tropic Thunder”, I’m pretty sure the guy can do anything; hell, if Downey wanted to play Holmes through the filter of Kirk Lazarus, I would be the first in line.

Anyhow, somebody visited the set of Ritchie’s movie for Sympatico/MSN this week, so they asked me for a movie gallery about other famous detectives and their drugs of choice.

Just remember, what works for Sherlock Holmes and that nice Dr. House may not do anything at all for you, so don’t blame me when injecting Tom Cruise’s daddy issues directly into your eyeball doesn’t make you able to Handle The Truth.

You know those weeks where a jillion movies open and I manage to miss out on covering anything, just because of the way the schedule falls? Well, this is not one of those weeks. Let us begin.

“The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins”: Okay, I haven’t actually seen this one. But Susan loved it enough at last year’s Hot Docs to put it on her Top Ten of 2008, and she continues to champion it now.

“Duplicity“: In which Tony Gilroy does for megastar caper flicks what he did for 1970s moral thrillers in “Michael Clayton”, which is to say he throws a lot of money at the production and offers a couple of plot reversals that will be unexpected if you went out for popcorn at just the wrong moment, and then sits back and waits to be called a genius. But aren’t these movies supposed to be entertaining?

“I Love You, Man“: Paul Rudd and Jason Segel turn their brief comedic sparks in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” into a feature-length goof on romantic comedies — and yeah, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost did the man-crush thing two years ago in “Hot Fuzz”, but that was in the context of the buddy-cop genre, so this is different. My review should be online any minute now. (UPDATE: There it is!)

“Knowing”: Thanks to the prophecies on a fifty-year-old scrap of paper, Nicolas Cage knows things! Scary things! Things that man was not meant to know! Okay, I haven’t seen this one, either, but I really want to … even if Adam thinks I shouldn’t.

“The Magic Flute“: In which Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrates the dangers of critics throwing around words like “genius” and “wunderkind” at emerging actor-filmmakers. Because twenty years later, they make us want to eat them. The words, I mean.

“Polytechnique“: After almost a decade’s absence, Denis Villeneuve comes roaring back to features with this harrowing meditation on survivor guilt, viewed through the horrific prism of the Montreal massacre. Gus Van Sant only wishes Elephant was this powerful. (Also, check out my interview with producer-star Karine Vanasse.)

“12“: Nikita Mikhalkov moves “Twelve Angry Men” to modern-day Moscow. (The accused is Chechnyan.) It works better than you’d think, though there’s no reason it needed to clock in at 159 minutes.

“24 City“: Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary fiction about the death and resurrection of the Chinese factory town of Chengdu wowed ‘em at Cannes. No reason it shouldn’t wow you now, right?

Also of note today: Cinematheque Ontario screens a restored print of Max Ophuls’ “Lola Montes“, and “Battlestar Galactica” fraks off forever with a two-hour finale.

No spoilers, please; it might take a day or two to catch up to it. I’m awfully busy right now.