And now a special lil’ guest blog from loyal Mayfair patron and Slaughter Daughter, Sister Disaster

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You know that saying “If I had a dime…”? Well here’s my version:

I am engaged in casual conversation with someone I am just getting to know, and as always it comes out that I play Roller Derby with the Rideau Valley Roller Girls here in Ottawa. Full Disclosure: I am extremely proud to be a part of my League, and I talk about it all the time! The response to this new information about me first causes the individual to exclaim: “There’s Roller Derby in Ottawa? They still do THAT?!?”. Followed by their personal connection with Roller Derby when they were a kid. Here it comes: If I had a dime for every time someone said…”I remember Skinny Minny Miller, she was awesome!”, I would have more than enough money to build a roller rink and open my own derby focused skate shop!  Then I am asked the usual questions about contact and elbows and fighting and banked tracks…and my answer to that is, “Roller Derby sure has changed.”

A Brief History of Roller Derby:

Roller Derby was a depression era pass-time. It started as a marathon like race developed by Leo Seltzer in 1933. It was co-ed, had two teams, and participants wore Dominion Quad Roller Skaters while they whizzed around a banked track made of slate. Over the years personalities of the skaters were developed, team and skater rivalries grew, all becoming very theatrical. The game itself also changed during this time, becoming about points rather than a number of laps to be achieved, this brought on increased occurrences of penalties and fighting on the track. Joanie Weston, Ann Calvello, Gerry Murray, Midge “Toughie” Brasuhun, and of course Skinny Minnie Miller were just a few of the ‘Good’ and ‘Bad-Girls’ of Roller Derby. The last Roller Derby Game was held in 1973. Despite an attempt to revive it with RollerJam in the 1990′s, Roller Derby was no more…until it’s revival in 2000 by Bad Girl Good Woman (BGGW) Productions in Austin Texas. Thank Goodness for that! Over the last 10 years rules of play of developed, and we play on any flat surface we can find. Here in Canada we skate in hockey arenas that have the ice removed for the summer. We still have wonderful names: DDT, Semi Precious, Lady Shambles, Slavic Slayer. We love to wear fishnets, and shiny booty shorts. But we also wear knee pads, wrist guards, elbow pads, helmets and mouth guards as this is a hard hitting full contact sport. The only one developed for women. A place where we can be aggressive, flamboyant and most importantly: Athletes.

The Movie:

Kansas City Bomber was Hollywood’s stab at depicting Roller Derby at it’s height. This is for all those people out there who remember Skinny Minnie Miller! An inspirational story about a skater trying to make good…at least that’s what I think the story is about…I usually get distracted by Raquel Welch skating on a banked track without a helmet! An insurance nightmare, eek!

Sister Disaster

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the Rideau Valley Roller Girls present Kansas City Bomber
at Sunday Night Geek Night – July 4th – 9pm

A rare 35mm print of George A. Romero’s third zombie film Day of the Dead is coming to the Mayfair Theatre for one night only: Friday July 2 at 11pm! Presented by Zombie Info.

Night of the Living Dead showed you a desperate group of survivors holed up in a rundown farm house. Dawn of the Dead showed us a battle for the control of a shopping mall between two groups of survivors with the zombies in between. With Day, Romero puts his human characters deep in a mine, with zombies on land and zombies in captivity as science experiments several feet under as scientists go head to head with an iron-fisted military man and his soldiers. The scientists want to study the phenomenon and find a solution to the problem, the military just want to blast the undead bastards away. Who will prevail? Again, the zombies aren’t necessarily the villains. Especially when one test subject, a zombie nicknamed “Bub” (played brilliantly by Howard Sherman) starts to show rudimentary intelligence and even a sense of humanity.

Day is considered underrated by many of Romero’s fans, especially considering makeup f/x artist Tom Savini’s showstopping gore is among his best work. Romero envisioned this film to be his zombie epic, with his original script featuring a zombie army and major production design. However, he could only get the money to make the film he wanted if he cut down the gore and agree to make an R rated film (Dawn of the Dead was released unrated). Romero then chose to make the film at a lower budget and make big changes to the script in order to have the freedom to make an unrated picture. Many ideas removed from the original script were later utilized in 2005′s Land of the Dead.

With it’s claustrophobic setting, dark humour and eye-popping gore and an exciting action packed climax, Day of the Dead is a must for any zombie film lover.

Day of the Dead trailer

There are a seemingly endless amount of facts about action movie legend Chuck Norris. In fact a book of extensive Norris facts was published in 2007 entitled The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About The World’s Greatest Human, which led to Norris filing a lawsuit claiming “trademark infringement, unjust enrichment and privacy rights”.

Here are a few things about Chuck Norris you might not have known:

Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity – twice.

Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.

If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.

Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck Norris met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK’s head exploded out of sheer amazement.

Chuck Norris has already been to Mars; that’s why there are no signs of life there.

They once made a Chuck Norris toilet paper, but it wouldn’t take shit from anybody.

A blind man once stepped on Chuck Norris’ shoe. Chuck replied, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Chuck Norris!” The mere mention of his name cured this man blindness. Sadly the first, last, and only thing this man ever saw, was a fatal roundhouse delivered by Chuck Norris.

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To see proof of the might and power of Chuck Norris, come see his 1985 thriller Code of Silence on Saturday June 12 at 11:45pm. And to learn more about Chuck visit www.chucknorrisfacts.com

Code of Silence Trailer

In 1977, the comic book magazine Heavy Metal was released in North America, introducing a new audience to Europe’s most amazing batch of artists and writers.

It didn’t take long for the film industry to take notice, and the next year, the animated anthology film went into pre-production. Producer Ivan Reitman (post Meatballs and a couple of years before Ghostbusters) and his Stripes screenwriters Dan Goldberg and Len Blum laid out the concept, based upon stories from Dan O’Bannon (Alien) and men now considered comics masterminds the likes of Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben and Moebius. The film was directed by Gerald Potterson, who had gained experience working on such animated films as Animal Farm and Yellow Submarine. He oversaw an international crew of 1,000 artists from New York, LA, London, Montreal and Ottawa.

The 7.5 million dollar film grossed over $20 million in it’s domestic run alone, and garnered a huge fan-base thanks to the VHS era of home entertainment.

Heavy Metal at the Mayfair for Sunday Night Geek Night, June 6th at 9:30. Featuring DVD prizes to give away from Invisible Cinema, the greatest video store in Ottawa.

What better career move for an actor than to follow up one of the best movies ever, then to take a starring role in a movie about a high school student who becomes a werewolf and plays basketball? And, what’s the bigger suspension of disbelief, that Michael J Fox is a werewolf, or that at 5’4″ he’s a basketball player?

On May 30th at 9:15, for the second week in a row, enjoy the fine talents of one of our greatest Canadians in the setting of Sunday Night Geek Night.

Teen Wolf is presented by Invisible Cinema, with some fine 1980′s themed DVD’s to give away to some lucky teen monster cinema fans in attendance.

Get ready for another cinematic trip into Ed Wood/Tommy Wiseau territory. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (playing May 28 and 29) is a “romantic thriller” about what happens when a software salesman and his fashion model girlfriend find themselves trying to survive an attack of killer birds. Yes, think Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds crossed with The Room.

The film is the work of one James Nguyen, an upstart independent filmmaker who produced Birdemic for $10,000. After the film was rejected by the Sundance Film Festival, Nguyen traveled there anyway to stage a grassroots promotional campaign, which included driving in a van adorned with stuffed birds and banners promoting the film’s website (birdemic.com) This seems to have paid off, as cult DVD label Severin Films picked the movie up for distribution. Word of mouth from fans of bad cinema will inevitably follow.

By the looks of the trailer, the film promises seriously awkward performances, bad dialogue and laughably horrendous CGI birds. Check out the trailer plus a TV interview with the director below and you’ll wonder, who will survive?

birdemic
birdemic director interview

Buckaroo Banzai is a renaissance man, a top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and comic book hero. He and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, his super team of sidekicks / band-members, must save the world by defeating inter-dimensional aliens called Red Lectroids from Planet 10.

Like a lot of great comic book style sci-fi, the movie has the sense that it’s a smaller part of a whole. Like there were dozens of adventures before hand and that there will be more in the future. There’s even promise of more to come in the end credits of the movie…alas, no other movies were ever made (though you can track down some comics).

I’ve been praising up this film the last lil’ while to those poor souls who are unaware of it by saying that if they haven’t seen it, it’s the coolest movie that they’ve never seen. And I’m pretty sure that that statement will ring true for all those who come and check out our second round of Sunday Night Geek Nights.

Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Clancy Brown, Christopher Llyod and Jeff Goldblum dressed as a flamboyant cowboy! What more could you want from a movie!? Plus, we’ve have some cool 80′s action figures and comic book prizes to give away thanks to our friends at the Comic Book Shoppe.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension – Sunday May 16th – 9PM
Only at the Mayfair, only for Sunday Night Geek Night

The Belgian black comedy The Misfortunates opens this weekend and plays until May 6. Jay Stone of The Ottawa Citizen has given it a glowing review. Check it out:

Dysfunction spun into a fine yarn
Belgian boy’s growing-up told as a tragicomedy
By Jay Stone, The Ottawa Citizen; Canwest News Service
April 30, 2010

In the gallery of all-time dysfunctional families, Belgian division, we submit the Strobbes: four brothers who are ribald, shiftless, alcoholic, and aggressive. If they work, they spend all their money on beer. If they don’t, they spend all their money on beer. Their diet consists of french fries with mayonnaise and resentment (and beer). They live with their saintly mother, who is apt to clean off the TV set before it’s repossessed by the bailiffs. They smoke and sing unsavoury pub songs, occasionally stopping to break something. They’re too big for their house — a crowded, weedy little place beside the railway tracks in a Belgian town with the particularly evocative name of Reetveerdegem — and practically too big for The Misfortunates, the movie that tries to contain their boozy, disgusting bulk.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

A very talented editor with a channel on Youtube cut together two montages showcasing the films of Martin Scorsese including clips from his indie debut Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (1968) all the way to The Departed (2006). Accompanying this collage of memorable and iconic cinematic imagery is the great music heard in Scorsese’s films (The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, etc.)

Montages (crude and professionally assembled) are all over Youtube but these particular montages are beautifully and thoughtfully edited together and display not only Scorsese’s eye and talent but the skill of his wonderful collaborators: editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographers Michael Ballhaus and Robert Richardson.

This May, the Mayfair proudly presents The Martin Scorsese Film Festival (May 4-30) which includes seven of his films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Casino, Cape Fear and his latest Shutter Island)

So if you haven’t experienced his great films on the big screen and on celluloid, do yourself a favor and head over to the Mayfair.

But first, to get you in the mood, don’t forget to check out the montage.

Note: Part 1 seems to be missing but Part 2 is equally as great:

The Films of Martin Scorsese Pt. 2<