My October Adventures!

Welcome to the October Adventures! Its been a crazy month full of lots of things going on. Suffice to say other than cooler weather and some really windy and rainy days where we got some of the closing gardens and other preparing the house for winter thing going on (which I won’t talk about because I’m not sure anyone wants to know about it), it was a clash for festivals. Let’s look back and see what happened!

Hiking: CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire

I’m not sure how many more hikes we can get in before the season is too cold to go, but we’re taking them as we can between festivals and other commitments and getting the house ready for the winter season and whatnot. After a much debated weekend with bad weather looming over our heads, the weather finally changed and we decided to go for a hike a little closer to us and went to the nearby tourism area and found CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire which had a very reasonable 4km hike. It was steep and rather quick elevation with lots of steps and stairs and rocks to walk over. We took the panoramic trail and got a pretty nice view of the area around.

Festival Du Nouveau Cinema (October 9 to 20)

Festival du Nouveau Cinema kicked off on October 9th with the program mostly starting the next day (since press doesn’t access to opening and closing films). With that said, this is the first day doing media to cover this festival so a little of the jitters as this festival has some rather deeper films and a lot of the films themselves are all about taking chances with the synopsis provided as well as having very limited evening timeslots to fit them all in making the scheduling very time-consuming and constantly going through changes during the festival. However, that is behind us now and things went fairly smoothly. I had wanted to do on average one review per day and overall, I managed to achieve it.

Here’s the full list of films if you missed any of them:

• Little Joe
• Color Out of Space
• Family Romance LLC
• Diner
• Adoration
• Sole
• J’ai Perdu Mon Corps
• Mickey and the Bear
• A White, White Day
• Dirty God
• Carte Blanches Shorts : Aujourd’hui ou je meurs; Pluie sui tole volée

Highlighted are my top 5 in no specific order. If you want to know my top movie, its Diner. Hands down, no competition because while the other films were great, this one has rewatchability in its favor.

Sherbrooke Met La Table & Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook

Like previous years, we take a day out to the Eastern Townships to go check out a restaurant part of Sherbrooke Met la Table. This time, we decided to go back to one of the first ones we tried called OMG Resto which is actually located in a what used to be a church. We went for the lunch menu but ended up getting the normal.

After that, we headed for a little hike at Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook. We had previously gone at night for Foresta Lumina. Its a nice little family trail although has a lot of steep stairs and slopes.

Toronto After Dark Film Festival (October 17 to 25)

Overlapping the last few days of Festival du Nouveau Cinema was receiving the approval for remote coverage for Toronto After Dark Film Festival for its short films, which was a lot of them. About 95% of the films were available and I managed to review almost all of those available. All the movies are above and I’m not going to list them all separately but just in how I batched them in the posts and then share my top 5 (which will be hard).

• Shorts 1: We Three Queens/Eyes Open/Make Me A Sandwich
• Shorts 2 Blood Machines: Turbo Killer/Far Horizon/Flip
• Shorts 3: Ocimokw!!/Grave Sight/Down the Rabbit Hole/Hearth
• Shorts 4: Barbara-Anne/Kakatshat/Schism/A Noise That Carries
• Shorts 5: Dark Before Dawn: Convoy/Patterns/The Changeling
• International Shorts After Dark
• Canadian Shorts After Dark

I don’t review a lot of short films over here but this festival’s shorts definitely opened my eyes to some very creative premises and some outstanding stories. With that said, these are my top picks:

• Turbo Killer
• Hearth
• Barbara-Anne
• La Noria
• Moment
• The Haunted Swordsman

Lambcast: Evil Dead Franchise

Nothing like a little last minute podcast call-up to add into festival season. However, it did help binge watch the Evil Dead Franchise to prepare for the Evil Dead discussion over at The Lambcast with a bunch of people with rather interesting opinions about this one. Its always a fun time at Lambcast recording so head over to check out the episode HERE.

Battle of Ingredients

With the summer and warm weather going away and festivals slowly fading in the background with events and such, we’re back on track with Battle of Ingredients. October Battle of Ingredients is the Fall BBQ. The post is a bit delayed but its currently in the works. Expect it up next week some time.

Other than that, November Battle of Ingredients is always hiatus due to our checking out the MTL a Table event. We will be checking out three restaurants this year if all goes to plan so I’ll be talking about it as it happens!

Game Warp Podcast is Back!

We’ve been on a huge podcast hiatus for Game Warp. While we have been getting back on the blogging side of things, which is always a great start and will continue to be focused on the blog. The podcast is back in our recording schedule. After some changes a few months ago and the festival coverages and such, we have moved ourselves onto Anchor and be an audio podcast from now on. I’m sure I mentioned it before. The episodes will be audio format only available on Youtube as well.

To kick things back into action, and to show our diversity on this whole rebranding thing we’re doing, we start off with something a little different and that is a discussion on Essential Horror Games!

You can check out the episode over on Game Warp HERE.

Halloween Marathon Wrap-up

With all the crazy stuff going on in the final 2 weeks of October, suffice to say that the marathon somewhat didn’t quite happen although Toronto After Dark did work in my favor on that level. I still have one double feature to come out for the marathon and it will be done ASAP. However, in general, things are wrapped up here! Its been a fun month and I actually got quite a bit done in the first half of the month.

Upcoming November Events: MTL a Table, MEGA MTL, Blood in the Snow Festival

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for the October Adventures!
What have you been up to?

Foresta Lumina

This past Saturday was a busy day with one event in the morning, Montreal Independent Games Festival (which I will cover over at That Moment In) and another late evening one, which is this one I’m about to talk about called Foresta Lumina! Foresta Lumina has been an event we’ve been planning to go to since last year but never found the time to last year. Finally, after our first reservation was cancelled due to thunderstorms, it was rescheduled for this past Saturday night. Foresta Lumina is located in Coaticook, Quebec which is about 1.5 to 2 hours depending where you are heading out from.

It is located in the Parc de la Gorge which during the day is a park for hiking and outdoor activities. The Foresta Lumina trail is adorned with lights and visuals telling a story of an enchanted forest which once had a lot of fairies but was plagued by a monster that could turn into a handsome man to trick them into the fairy’s eventual demise. However, before the fairies were taken, a mysterious force from Foresta Lumina appeared and saved them. This is why the forest is magical and protected by enchanted forces.

There isn’t really much to say about the trail and even pictures are hard to judge. Still, here are some more acceptable shots that turned out alright. I need some serious night time photo shooting practice.

The start with Lanterns

The magical wishing spot

Passage to the Bridge

Storytelling with Holograms

The Monster

Foresta Lumina symbol

The storyboards

Lights sparkled everywhere

Along the river

For those that want to go on this Foresta Lumina trail. It is extremely dark in some parts but also quite enchanting and pretty to see. However, those with walking difficulties should be aware that there are some pretty steep slopes and the path winds up and down with tight walkways and stairs also. You do cross the beautiful suspended bridge which happens to be one of the longest in Quebec (I believe). It is also where they create it where it seems like we cross realms into the magical world.

Foresta Lumina is a fun experience however it is only 45 minutes and perhaps the hype of it got the best of us. We were a little underwhelmed while it was still pretty magical for the most part. We did discover that Coaticook may have quite a bit to offer to explore.