We live in a world that's in a constant and sprinting pace of putting us ever closer to actually living in what we would consider a sci-fi like future. The taken for granted magic that is the smart-phone was something that a few short years ago would have been something that only James Bond or Batman might have had.

All forms of media are in the midst of a giant upheaval. It seems that sooner or later all form of literature will be read on a tablet, music will only be listened to via an mp3 player, and TV and internet will be officially smashed together into one form of interactive entertainment.

The same technological shift has hit the theatrical movie game. Despite any and all respectable indie repertory cinemas fighting against the evolution away from film, the future is upon us. We at the Mayfair won't get rid of our 35mm stuff, especially because we have an awesome 35mm library hidden away in the Mayfair catacombs. The issue is, that by the end of the year, pretty much everything movie related will be distributed in a digital manner. Not just the big-budget mainstream kind of stuff that we've shown in the past like say Harry Potter, but everything. Whether it be a kids movie, an alternative documentary, a foreign offering or an Oscar winner...none of it will exist on film-stock anymore. Meaning that anything that we've screened in the past lil' while that has had success, would be unable to be played in our current format. We wouldn't be able to screen The Muppets or The Artist or Monsieur Lazhar.

Now, we get by and pay the bills and pay the employees, but the harsh fact is that none of us are ever going to get rich off of running the Mayfair. Hence, we don't have tens of thousands of dollars in the bank to pay for something like a fancy new digital projector. Throughout our 80th Anniversary, we're holding an ongoing fundraising event to raise cash to be able to afford such an immensely expensive piece of equipment. We're having a number of special screenings and events, there will be auctions and prizes and poster sales, and even good ole' fashioned banks for you to give us your hard earned spare change in.

It's going to be an uphill battle of work, but already patrons have been very kind in their charitable offerings. Every time I'm in the box office and someone donates some cash it makes my soulless Grinch heart grow three sizes too big. And local Ottawa places have already been kind enough to donate prizes that we will auction off, stuff like tickets to see the Lord of the Rings concert at the NAC. So keep an eye out for our various fundraising events that we're having throughout 2012, and most importantly, come watch stuff at the Mayfair for the greatest movie theatre going experience of all.

My comic book stash delivery this-morning reminded me that we are a mere week away from the greatest holiday of the year, Free Comic Book Day. It's a day so staggeringly amazing that when I explain it to non-geeks they don't believe that such a thing could possibly be a true event. The Avengers, Simpsons, Transformers, Buffy, Smurfs, Donald Duck, Star Wars and more...all for the low low price of free! Only seven more sleeps until geeks are blessed with free comic book offerings from all their favorite publishers and stores. Mark your calendar, clear your schedule, and partake in the pure joy that is a world filled with free comic books.

This weekend at the Mayfair we're playing a collection of vintage Columbia Pictures shorts under the banner Three Stooges Follies. Sometimes 35mm print collections like this get a bit mixed up over the years and loose a short or gain a short. According to IMDb the program includes Buster Keaton, Batman and a trio of Three Stooges shorts (and a couple more titles that I'm unfamiliar with).

It's always a great time screening rarely seen classic pieces of cinematic history like this at the Mayfair. Showing stuff like this on the big screen, in a movie theatre that opened 80 years ago, is one of the closest steps you'll likely ever take to time-travel. If you figure out how to actually time-travel in a non-sentimental and literal way, please do let me know so I can accompany you to a Ramones show and to go look at dinosaurs.

I happened to be walking down Elgin Street tonight just in time to witness the sad army of hockey fans shuffle out of bars as the Senators were eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoff contention for another season.

It's amazing that we as a species enjoy watching sports of any kind, 'cause statistically speaking, almost every time it eventually leads to depressive sadness. Many consider Wayne Gretzky to be the greatest player of all time, and he managed to only win the top prize four times in a couple of decades. Those don't equate to an over-all chance coming out in a gleeful spirit at the end of each season. Now-a-days, it seems many a well respected player can make it their whole career without even a single championship. A friend of mine once told me that that was why she would never be a sports fan, she wasn't opposed, but just couldn't handle the stress and heartbreak that inevitably crosses your path.

As I watched the morose jersey clad drunken masses shuffle out of pubs, I felt like maybe I should suggest a less heart-wrenching hobby for them to partake in, like movie watching or scrap-booking.

Because the legitimate news media is filled with liars, idiots and immature editorials I naturally go to the fake comedy news sources to get informed about goings on in the world. Last night on The Colbert Report I learned about another thing that secures Canada as the greatest country on the planet. Canada has roughly 85,000 different kinds of quarters in active circulation, ranging from Remembrance Day tributes, to ones drawn by little kids, to sports team logo's. The next quarter added to the roster will be one with a kick-ass dinosaur on it. If that's not awesome enough, the damn thing is glow-in-the-dark so you can see the dinosaurs skeleton. Canada's quarters are better than all your quarters! If they can put glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs on all the money, this totally switches my opinion that currency should get rid of paper and coin and just go 100% virtual.

Tomorrow I get my Kermit the Frog tattoo, continuing my ongoing quest to have the most geekiest of inked up arms in all the land. Now I've got a Banksy piece, a couple DC Comics characters, a Droid, Kim Pine, a dinosaur, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and a TARDIS. Hopefully I won't be sued by Disney, they have a history of suing daycare centres, and getting the image of one of the characters they own added to oneself for display is way more permanent then painting Mickey Mouse on a wall.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is yet another amazing movie with a brilliant performance from Tilda Swinton. Watched it tonight at the Mayfair and it kept me in rapt terrified attention from beginning to end. There's this looming sense that everything is going to go horribly wrong pretty much from frame one, and the horribleness unfolds throughout the story. Impressive turns from Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly is nothing too shocking, but what really stands out are the creepy villainous skills of all three young actors playing the various ages of Kevin. Some wouldn't classify the film as horror, it is though, just not the horror genre that involves a guy in a hockey mask chopping up teenagers. Although this is not the kind of film that you would likely buy on Blu Ray and make a tradition of watching with the family over the holidays, it is a film that is close to brilliance on all sides. It's the kind of film that leaves you a bit shell-shocked as the credits roll as you sink in what you just watched. Don't watch it if you are on the verge of contemplating starting a family.

I thought that mathematically speaking, since I had friends on four of the sixteen teams participating in the fifth annual Beast of the East tournament, that there was a pretty good chance that I'd be cheering on at least one team with friends on it as they made there was to the championship trophy. Alas, the fates were not on my derby-fan side this day. Not to say that it wasn't an action-packed and incredibly dramatic day.

First the Slaughter Daughters had to defeat a Montreal team with one of our beloved former team-mates on it (Assassinista on FDR). The game had so many back n fourths and was so close that I did not breathe for a large portion of the bout. Another couple of similarly stressful bouts were to follow, and next thing you know we were in the Championship bout for the second year in a row. As I wrote yesterday, I won't go into the exact play by play, but we did not win the day. Not out of direct laziness, but watching so many bouts in such a small period of time makes the whole day a blur. There was so much cheering that I kind of lost my voice, I may have choked back tears on a couple different occasions, and I ate delicious vegan taco's and pastries.

The crowd cheered the Slaughter Daughters on to their acceptance of the 2nd Place Trophy. Coming in 2nd out of 16 teams on a year when you've got a bunch of new players and won the year before is not something to be ashamed of. Plus, the 2nd Place Trophy had a dinosaur skeleton in derby attire on the top of it, which is pretty awesome. We all know dinosaurs are great...but winning a dinosaur skeleton wearing roller-skates and a helmet trophy is a prize to be proud of.

The opening bout of Beast of the East involved our Slaughter Daughters, the defending champions. It was scheduled for an insane 8:00am start, and was followed by shortened matches for the rest of the day. I'm not going to have great sports-journalistic skill in reporting the scores and events on the day, it was too much of a blur. I'm sure anyone interested can easily find the score-cards online.

By the end of the day I was completely exhausted, and all I had done was watch a bunch of derby. So you could imagine how my battered and bruised friends who actually partook in an epic day of actual intense athletics felt. My Slaughter Daughters came back to win their next two games, so they get to go on to day two, along with the three Montreal teams that my friends belong to now. Tomorrow at least once a team with a former RVRG member will play against us, and I know it will be a strange experience. As I commented before, it's like seeing Gretzky in a silver and black Kings jersey playing against the Edmonton Oilers.

We walked home through the miserable Montreal weather, we are staying at a derby friends house. We sat around eating some snacks and chatting and feeling quite worn out. Was shocked to look at my phone and see that it was a mere 9:45pm, it felt like we had been up all night and it was 5am or so. I think that starting derby at 8am instead of the more usual 7pm has completely messed with all of our inner-clocks. We will go to bed early, dream of girls skating around bashing each other to the tune of rock n roll and whistles, and wake up ready for another day of derby madness.

Road-tripped to Montreal with my girlfriend and a pair of roller-derby girl friends to partake in the madness that is the Beast of the East tournament. Getting into a car with a bunch of girls and traveling to far off lands for derby related events is nothing new for me. I've accompanied my Rideau Valley Roller Girls gang to such exotic locales as diverse as Sudbury, Pittsburgh, Rochester and more.

The girls at Montreal Roller Derby didn't think it was enough to host a giant weekend tournament, they figured they'd also play a bout on Friday night. The New Skids on the Block handily defeated Buffalo's Lake Effect Furies 326 - 62.

Since last season, four of my derby friends moved from Ottawa to Montreal, and they managed to land themselves on three different Montreal teams. Meaning I walked in to the rink, made my way to the merch table and bought three new T-shirts. Being a loyal friend, I'll be costume changing my attire depending on which friends team is in the midst of battle. At the likely event that out of the sixteen teams, sooner or later my friends will play against each other, then I will tape two shirts together and feel stressed.

I hardly ever watch movies at home, being as I go to the Mayfair all of the time to experience movies in all of their big screen repertory theatre brilliance. Seeing how busy I often am, I like to make the most of my free time at home, and catch up on films that we wouldn't be able to screen theatrically. Hence, because I have the interest in all forms of cinema and the cursed skill to watch anything, last night I watched Mega Shark versus Crocosaurus. A really big shark and a really big crocodile cause havoc and kill lots of people, it stars Urkel and that hologram doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, and it was as horribly awesome as it sounds. I also found out that this is the sequel to Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus,which I shamefully have not seen...no wonder it seemed like I was missing out on some aspect of the in-depth story element of big things smashing smaller things.

The new Rideau Valley Roller Girls season starts May 12th! Our long national nightmare is almost over.

Bob's Burgers serves as further proof that Seth McFarlane should wrap up the various versions of Family Guy that he produces. Unlike the trio of McFralane series that clog up Fox's animated time-slots, Bob's Burgers is original, funny, and actually has plot-lines to their episodes. Where-as Family Guy has a mish-mash of non-nonsensical dream sequences and seems to be on a dare-a-thon to see how offensive they can be before being banned from television forever. McFarlane should wrap things up and go concentrate on his live-action endeavors. I'd much rather Fox's animation department budget go towards Bob's Burgers instead of a fourth McFarlane show (which if we're not careful will be a Flintstones re-boot. Seriously!)

When The Simpsons comes up in conversation, some believe that it is past it's prime and should have gone off the air years ago. I've never given up on the show, and although it has had it's peaks and valley's over it's twenty-three years, I think the it is always worth watching. Especially since I've grown completely fed up, disgusted and bored with the animated universe of Seth MacFarlane, I've embraced and appreciated The Simpsons more and more.

The last few years they've gone out of their way to kick their cool factor up a notch as well. Somewhere around the time when they started working on the movie I think is when efforts got kicked up a few factors. I also think that they now have fans working on the show who grew up watching the series, and now have their dream jobs. They've employed writers like Seth Rogan and Ricky Gervais, had weird guest-voices like former comic book writer and current warlock Alan Moore, and opening credit sequences designed by Oscar nominated rebels like Banksy. Last nights opening sequence was a very impressive piece done by one of my favorite animators of all time, Bill Plympton. If they continue at this pace, I have no qualms if they feel like making the show for another few decades. Simpsons at its worst is still much better than watching a Family Guy episode that consists of a bunch of characters barfing for six or seven minutes straight.

Spent a chunk of the day watching The Muppets on Blu-Ray, watched the film with audio commentary and then all of the bonus features. On the disc was the trailer for Brave, which after the sadness and disappointment that a sub-par effort the likes of Cars 2 has re-instigated my worship of PIXAR. Up until Cars and Cars 2, I thought that PIXAR was pretty damn close to movie producing perfection. All of their movies were really good, critically acclaimed, award winning and happened to all make a truck full of profits.

Then Cars came along, which was not the worst movie ever made, but was the first movie that they did that left me feeling 'meh' at the end. Then a few years later they hit us with a sequel that seemed for the first time in their history to be done only for financial gain, and not because they had a good story to tell. Toy Story 3 had a great script, Cars 2 seemed to be done to sell Happy Meal toys and car shaped slippers and backpacks to kids. Especially in an animation world that was now producing really good non-PIXAR computer animated films the likes of How to Train Your Dragon, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Puss in Boots, this was just unacceptable.

I think Brave is PIXAR waking up, feeling shame, and wanting to be excellent on all sides again. My faith in the animation studio was happily restored. Then the next trailer was for the Cars straight-to-DVD spin-off, Planes. Meaning that now PIXAR has resorted to producing films the style along the lines of a Simpsons PIXAR parody. And again, I felt sad and angered at the state of most of what goes on in Hollywood film production.

We began our run of A Separation, the excellent Oscar winning Iranian film, last night at the Mayfair and it plays through April 17th. The film is pretty damn near cinematic perfection. If you can't make a movie that is from front to back exceptionally as well made as this film, you should just go home and sit on the couch and waste your own time with a little American Idol. If you aren't going to give it your all and have a great script performed by amazing actors and end up with an over-all impressive product for your audience to sit on the edge of their seats for and be enthralled by, why even bother? I'm looking at you Brett Ratner.

Anime makes a return to the Mayfair tonight with the movie that Speed Racer wishes it was, Redline. Highly praised in animation circles, the movie makes it's Ottawa premiere tonight at 11:30pm with an encore screening Sunday the 15th at 9:00pm. If seeing an excellent cartoon wasn't an inciting enough thought, we will also have some prizes to give away from Lost Marbles. And I promise that it will be much less offensive and insane than previous late night anime offerings like Urotsukodoji: Legend of the Overfiend (Redline isn't banned in any provinces). Just hold on to your seat and get ready to be knocked out with a hell of a lot of speed lines.

I have never been happier as to have avoided trailers and reviews and spoilers than with The Cabin in the Woods. I hate multiplexes, but ventured behind enemy lines thanks to a free advance screening pass that I got a hold of. It was the one film being released this year that I wanted to see as soon as possible in order to avoid finding out anything about the movie and having story-line and plot-twists revealed to me.

All I will say is that The Cabin in the Woods was one of the greatest movies that I have ever seen. I doubt anything else being released this year will come close to matching it as my favorite movie of that year. I walked into it knowing nothing about the movie except for those involved in making it, some of the actors, and that it was very likely something more complicated than a traditional teens killed in the woods story. I thought it was genius, and that's all I want to say. If someone starts telling you about the movie and you haven't seen it yet, punch them and run the other in the other direction. You will not be in the wrong.

I resisted the urge to get more comics from the library while returning stuff today. There's always something more that I want to read, but I really want to try to put a dent in the giant stack of unread comics that I have waiting to be read at home. The bottom drawer of my dresser is filled with three stacks of cheap bin comics that I haven't looked at yet.

There's a lot of great comics being produced currently, but it's hard to match the pure imagination, diversity and insanity of comics that were produced fourty or so years ago. Each cover was a masterpiece, there were heroic war comics, scary ghost comics, and super-hero books were actually fun and of interest to kids. Another plus is that many of the issues are self contained, so you aren't forced to buy dozens of cross-over books to follow a story.

The best part is that these kinds of comics can easily be found in cheap bins at conventions and stores. If you're lucky you can even find them at garage sales, though often people running garage sales are mad with delusional power and think that old comics actually have a monetary value. They're a great cheap option to pick up for kids (or grown-up folks) looking to read a bunch of comics. Though not so great if you already have a couple of hundred awaiting you in an unread state at home.

Plus, almost as entertaining as the comics, are the ads. The advertising encouraging kids to behave nicely for their parents so that they will then think they are responsible enough for gun ownership is worth the price of admission alone.

Another round of Fake Trailers Reel Festival makes it's highly anticipated return to the Mayfair in June. The one night only event will feature an hour of original fake trailer programming followed up by an hour of the greatest grindhouse / drive-in / cult classic 35mm trailers from the Mayfair vault.

I've gotta go try and figure out a storyline that doesn't feature derby girls, burlesque girls, swords, guns and random violence. I know that those are all excellent things to put in a trailer, but I can't just repeat last years theme.

Those interested in submitting a fake trailer have until Friday June 8th to do so, and the screening will be on Friday June 29th. Keep an eye out for further updates around the internet at various Mayfair portals (website, Facebook, Twitter), and if you have any questions let me know.