“A great weekend was had by all!”

I sat with rapt attention on Friday night to watch the ‘Found Footage Festival’ at the Chicago Cultural Centre downtown. Hosted by two genuinely funny guys, they took us through some of the most excruciatingly bad TV I’ve ever seen. The high brow concept with extremely low brow content came from trawling through hundreds of thrift stores, second hand shops and estate sales to find lots and lots of old VHS tapes. After watching thousands of hours of public access TV, commercials, promotional videos, and music videos, they spliced together two hours of pure TV hell. The result was one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in years. Genius.

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When I heard that the graphic novel “V for Vendetta” (illustrated by David Lloyd) was made into a movie and going to be directed by the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix crapology) I had my reservations. I did hear that Alan Moore was advising on set and everything was kosher. But I also later heard a rumour that he stormed off the set. Not so kosher. So when I went to see it this weekend I was pleasantly surprised that the Matrix brothers managed to keep in line with the original material. All was looking good until the end when a terrible, misplaced love story got tacked on the end.

But the real anomaly appeared when the credits came at the end. After the director and production company credits rolled, the story was said to have been created from a graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd. And then the rest of the cast rolled by. Hold up, what?!

Saying that V for Vendetta was created by David Lloyd (with no mention of Moore the writer) is saying that A Brave New World is published by Harper Classics (with no mention of Aldous Huxley). Did Alan Moore feel so strongly that he had to remove all association with this film? Maybe Moore was a total nightmare to work with on set, but it can’t be a good sign when the original writer of the source material wants nothing to do with the reinterpretation.

For further info about Moore, try Wikipedia.

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Finally, an interesting post about shopping. Ever shopped around town for that special cut of meat, or that particular ball of yarn? Shopping in an item specific manner was the likely way many of us shopped before the rise of mega convenience stores. While it’s certainly convenient to find a pharmacy next to your optometrist and next to your Brussel sprouts, it can make for a less that unique shopping experience.

Read the Curious Shopper’s thoughts about multi-stop shopping vs all-in-one shopping here.