Greetings from Toronto ...

The spectacle of a teenage drunk collapsing on the sidewalk in a puddle of her own vomit outside the Ryerson Theater proved an auspicious grindhouse omen for the unruly (by Toronto standards) Midnight Madness premiere of George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. I'll have more to say about this fierce and scrappy indie, about a world so fucked there's nothing left to do but record it, after visiting with the master in his Toronto home next week. There's little to report of Redacted, Brian De Palma's much-anticipated, mucho-disappointing drama of war crimes in Iraq, other than to note its uncanny deployment of the exact same form as Diary, both of which stream their shifting points of view across multiple video platforms (home movies, surveillance videos, blogs, cell-phone cams), but only one of which has bite ... and a deaf Amish badass who detonates the undead with dynamite and decapitates them with a scythe.