A brief aside; The London Film Festival is currently running and our sister site Londonist are covering it, and have already given a sterling review to one of our favourites from TIFF, Reprise. You might want to check it out.

But back here on home turf (well, if not Toronto’s, at least making our way across the Atlantic as far as Nova Scotia) Trailer Park Boys has made it to the big screen, and the word is… “Meh.” Simply a case of tall poppy syndrome? Or does it really suffer from the transfer? Eye gives it a brilliant cover image, but there’s not much to the 3-star article; Jason Anderson at least notes, “the show has made the transition with its personality largely intact”, though NOW’s Barrett Hooper takes the tact “a sitcom episode stretched to 90 minutes” which are two sides of the same coin, perhaps.

(In terms of funny drunk Canadians, Torontoist will forever like Bob and Doug McKenzie more, we’re afraid.)

We’ve had opinions already on a couple of other films released this week, The Last King of Scotland, “Powerful and disturbing viewing.”, and Shortbus; “rather disjointed… most of the plot threads seem to peter out”. We stand by that, considering it one of those films that you shouldn’t believe the hype on; it’s fun at points, but not really meaningful. Oh well.

Skipping past Alex Rider: Operation Stombreaker and Employee of the Month (because we can’t think of anything to say about them) brings us to The Departed, Scorsese’s remake of Infernal Affairs. We don’t doubt that this is probably a fairly different film from the original, but a remake from Scorsese? How depressing. And it’s got all of our least favourite actors in it. DiCaprio. Wahlberg. Damon. Nicholson (post-1981).

We’re tempted to say “get the original!” because then you’ll at least be watching Andy Lau (swoon) and Tony Leung (double swoon) but the people who’ve actually seen the film (um, other critics) are far nicer than us; even John Harkness! He gives it a lengthy web-only review on NOW’s website, our pick for an out of context quote is definetly, “Scorsese has made good crime films - here's another one, big deal”. Jason Anderson is just as nice, but like Harkness he notes the lengthy running time; “hardly fat-free”.

Outside of the multiplex the best stuff is, of course, Cinematheque Ontario, but tickets are scarce for a few shows; Andy Warhol and Gerald Malanga’s The Chelsea Girls tonight, for example, but there’s more Warhol throughout the week. Sunday a 1pm they’re showing all 8 hours of Empire, which is a single shot of the Empire State Building. There’s probably plenty of tickets for that, eh? Brave programming indeed. No tickets left for Gilliam presenting his director’s cut of Brazil on Saturday (We can’t wait!) but you can still see him when he presents Tideland on Monday, if you’re quick.

The Year of Languages Film Festival continues, and the Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor W.) is showing some films presented by the Fair Trade Clothing Co-Op, including Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, on Sunday and Monday.