Back in the day when I attended the Fantasia Film Fest more frequently, my friend and I would manage to see a good 15 movies crammed into my week visit. As a footnote, on top of watching movies in a festival setting, we would then fill our free moments at his apartment by catching up on horrible at home viewings the likes of Catwoman.

Alas I didn't manage to get that many films in, but during the two day whirlwind visit to Montreal I did get to see a couple off the beaten path gems. Unfortunately didn't get off to a good start with '11/25: The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate', a movie that I disliked so heavily that I don't really want to write about it all that much. It was a boring modern day Japenese political war drama that couldn't have been more boring. It was two hours long and it felt like three. It was uneventful, it was cinematically dull and I kept wishing that it would just end.

The next movie we went to was The Mechanical Bride, a fascinating and overtly creepy documentary about artificial companions...aka life sized mannequin style sex dolls. Like watching Trekkies kicked up to the Nth degree, this doc explored the psychological mindset that would resort to a human being not only having sex with but faking a relationship with an inanimate object. It was handled respectfully, but none-the-less fell under the 'it is so bizarre I cannot take my eyes off of this train-wreck of a human being's story' category. Any problems that you might have in your life pale in comparison to a person so mentally destroyed and anguished and afraid of companionship that they resort to having an expensive hunk of plastic as a girlfriend. It was a very similar style of pick by the fest programmers as the amazing Tiffany stalker doc 'I Think We're Alone Now' that I saw at Fantasia four or so years back.

It was the perfect bizarre, never-heard-of-it, lil indie documentary to see at an awesome film festival. The Mechanical Bride is something that you get to see at a setting like Fantasia that you would be very unlikely to find at a video store (back when they existed more readily) or on TV (back when people actually watched TV). As the credits rolled, I leaned over to my girlfriend as the and exclaimed "Now THAT is a Fantasia Film Fest movie!".