This year's One Minute Film & Video Festival is right around the corner - it takes place next Thursday night at the Bloor Cinema. For those who don't want to chance the ticket line on the night of the show (the 2005 show took place in the midst of a blizzard, after all), a limited number of advance tickets will be on sale starting today at Queen Video.

That's the Queen Video on Bloor (480 Bloor Street West), not the Queen Video on Queen. Cripes! Advance tickets are $8; tickets at the door will run ya $10. So there's a coffee's worth of savings in it for you, too.

The theme for this year's festival is "secrets," though as usual, the filmmakers have been encouraged to interpret the theme as broadly as they like and in whatever filmed medium they wish. And yes, all of the films will be exactly one minute long. The films come from all over the world - this year's programme features work from Spain, Estonia, Italy, Denmark, Ireland, Austria, and Big Brother Down South.

There is, of course, also generous local representation: nearly twenty of the 50-odd films in the festival come from Toronto, and not one but two of the one-minute mini-opuses feature Etobicokian supergenius Dave Foley.

It's Monday, it's foggy, and it's cold. Need something to get you through the week? Howsabout the promise of 1,600 people wailing on each other with lightsabers this Friday night, outside the ROM?

Newmindspace is at it again. TheForce.net is reporting on it, the Jedi equivalent of sending up the Bat-signal. (Hmmm, I just crossed my geek wires.) And the order of "blacklight-reactive, meter-long cardboard tubes" has already increased from 1,000 to 1,600, which will be spray-painted this Wednesday night if you want to help out.

A couple of things worth noting if you're planning to attend, after the jump.

After an interminable couple of months of reading exuberant reviews all over the internet of Ridley Scott's final final final (final) cut of his science fiction classic, Blade Runner, the flick is finally coming to Toronto.

Initially opening only in New York and Los Angeles, Toronto film fans were holding out hope that we'd get a release sooner or later - after all, Scott premiered his final final final (final) cut of Alien here a couple of years ago, during the Toronto International Film Festival.

Meagre hopes of a Toronto screening were dashed once again a few weeks ago, when a United States-wide selective rollout of the film was announced - and Canada missed the bill once again. Now, however, we can confirm that BR: Final Cut will start an exclusive 2-week engagement this Friday, on the digital screen at the Regent Theatre (Mt. Pleasant and Davisville).

If you (like me) saw Bruce McDonald's new film, The Tracey Fragments, at the Toronto International Film Festival, then you (like me) might also be of the opinion that the film sucked. We can get into critical responses on McDonald's film, which opens today at the Royal, in a minute - but for the time being, let it never be said that McDonald isn't giving the naysayers the ultimate opportunity to do him one better.

To coincide with the nation-wide release of the highly experimental Tracey Fragments (which stars hottie Haligonian up-and-comer Ellen Page), McDonald has made the complete collection of raw footage from the shooting of the film available on the Tracey Fragments web site, thetraceyfragments.com. The challenge? Do with the film what you will.

The project is called Tracey Re-Fragmented, and like the film itself, it's a journey into the continued plasticity and destructability of the filmed (and/or videotaped) image in the YouTube Decade.

It's a film festival about mental health, run out of the mental health hospital that was once so memorably featured in Timothy Findley's insane-o-palooza, Headhunter. The only thing missing from the Rendezvous with Madness picture is actually running the festival during Hallowe'en. Instead, you'll have to wait until November 8 to begin viewing this year's lineup of short and feature films from all over the world.

I know we're supposed to call it the CAMH now instead of the Queen Street Mental Hospital, but then again, Rendezvous with Madness - which is run out of the CAMH and whose charter is to program films touching on mental health and addiction - is using the "insanely good films" pun in all its promotional materials this year. So maybe the PC boundaries are finally slipping a bit.

Regardless, Rendezvous (which makes use of the CAMH's in-house theatre for screenings, and enlists staff volunteers from the Centre's patients) is one of the most exciting and unique festivals in our already festival-glutted city.

The festival kicks off next Thursday, November 8th with its gala presentation of Carl Bessai's feature film Normal, recently featured at the Toronto Internaional Film Festival. The film stars Carrie Anne Moss and Canadian film standby Callum Keith Rennie among an ensemble cast of people whose lives are rent by the death of a 16-year-old basketball star.

The closing night gala for this year's Toronto After Dark film festival is just a night away, but the flick that really drew my eye in this week's lineup was Shinya Tsukamoto's ode to J-horror, Nightmare Detective. The film screened tonight at the Bloor Cinema.

The festival's international programmer, Todd Brown, introduced the film, starting by chiding anyone in the audience who had failed to take in last night's screening of Alone - which, at almost the exact same moment it was screening here in Toronto, was winning a pantload of awards down at the L.A. Screamfest. He told everyone who had missed the Thai conjoined twins horror movie to slap themselves.

(I slapped myself.)