These are the text messages I received from my wife Rachelle the other day:

Rachelle: I’m not sure I think that’s a good idea.

Rachelle: Look, if you’re putting a pretend cast on our three year-old boy’s arm in order to attract the attention of celebrites at the Film Festival, you truly are a horrible father.

Rachelle: Because you’re using him as bait!!

Rachelle: You are exploiting a child.

Rachelle: Yes, even if he agrees to “play dress up for daddy.”

Rachelle: Jesus. Don’t ever, ever make me type, “play dress up for daddy” again.

Rachelle: Really???

Rachelle: That was actually your tag on Lava Life?

Rachelle: That is maybe the creepiest thing I have ever heard in my life.

Rachelle: I think I might vomit.

Rachelle: No, really. I cannot continue this text conversation.

( TWO HOURS LATER )

Rachelle: Really??!! You got Hugh Jackman to sign Jones’ fake cast for me???!!

Rachelle: That is the best thing you have ever done in your life.

Rachelle: Way better than that prank you pulled on the restaurant manager!

Rachelle: No, it was a good prank.

Rachelle: Yes, a really good one, I don’t think he saw it coming at all, but this, this is HUGH JACKMAN!! What did he smell like? Did he like what Jones was wearing? What did he write to me?? Jesus, did you touch him, did you put your hand on him at any point? What did he feel like? Did he talk to Jones?!

Rachelle: For the love of God, just try to remember what he smelled like!! Try. Try as hard as you have ever tried at anything in your life.

Rachelle. I know you have seasonal allergies and it diminishes your olfactory sense, but just concentrate, goddamit, what did he smell like? Was it the ocean? Was it the moon and stars? Was it roast beef and pumpkin?

Rachelle: Really?!!

Rachelle: Roast beef and pumpkin, I knew it!!

Rachelle: I don’t know how I knew it, I just did.

Rachelle: Yes, sometimes my friends and I talk about that sort of stuff.

Rachelle: Really?

Rachelle: You truly want to know what my friends think you smell like?

Rachelle: Jesus.

Rachelle: Okay then.

Rachelle: Ottilie said she thought you smelled like the interior of an old airplane, one that still carried the ghost smell of crappy sandwiches and cigarette smoke.

Rachelle: Well, if you don’t believe me you’ll just have to ask her yourself.

Rachelle: Just out of curiosity, what do you think you smell like?

Rachelle: Really?

Rachelle: I have to say, that was a very unexpected answer.

Rachelle: Was Hugh very concerned about Jones? Did he want to know how he “broke his arm?”

Rachelle: Okay then, “fractured his wrist.”

Rachelle: Hit by a pitch?

Rachelle: You told Hugh Jackman you hit our son with a hardball?

Rachelle: Jesus, Pickle.

Rachelle: NO FUCKING WAY!

Rachelle: You got him to sign, “Rachelle, play dress up for daddy, love Wolverine?”

Rachelle: OMG, that is the sexisest thing ever, wait until I post a photo of that in my Annex Parents group! That’ll knock Vivian off the front page for a day or two!

Rachelle: And did you touch him? What did he feel like? Was there any give, or was it all rippling, equine power?

We’re related, although the mechanics of this familial connection remain distant and unknown, and we only met once at a huge wedding about 15 years ago in Chicago. I thought we got along entirely brilliantly, but he proved reluctant to continue any sort of correspondence or relationship with me after the fact, growing more and more biting and bitter–as many aging actors who have never won an Oscar do– as the years passed and my career took off while he played the voice of Garfield in some movies.

At any rate, as some sort of promotion associated with the Toronto International Film Festival, Friday was declared Bill Murray Day and I was asked by a local publication if I would use my “special access” to the faded star to secure an interview. This is the result:

Dear Bill:

It’s your cousin Michael here, the funny Murray. Remember me? I was the one wearing the bowtie at the wedding in Chicago in 1998. I requested I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing by Aerosmith at the party and because you were a really big ham and sang it to the wedding couple in that cheesy-we’ve-all-seen-it-a-million-times-way, it became “their song” and everybody thought you were a hero.

Nice one, Bill. Anyway, it didn’t end well for that couple. Botched murder-suicide. Not that you’d care.

I have some questions that a newspaper wants me to ask you, okay?

Here they are:

1. What was it that attracted you to the role of Garfield? Was it because you were horny for Jennifer Love Hewitt? She’s less than half your age, you know.

2. What do you think of the massive nude celebrity leak? Was it a good thing for democracy?

3. Why wouldn’t you ever enter any of my fantasy baseball leagues?

4. Are you sick of making movies with Wes Anderson yet because an awful lot of people are sick of seeing you in movies by Wes Anderson?

5. Do you know any of the details regarding Traci Murray’s alien abduction back in 1987? She didn’t have any tattoos before, but three after—very puzzling. It is a great family mystery and you should perhaps consider making a movie based on it once you’re finished with the Garfield trilogy.

6. You’re a big golf fan. Would you say that’s your greatest embarrassment? If not, please explain.

7. Are you “above” correspondence? My mother always said that your side of the Murray family always thought they were “special.”

8. Did you know that I won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest?

9. Have you won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest?

10. You made some pretty controversial remarks about Jewish people back at the wedding, would you care to take this time to elaborate upon them?

August 15, 2014

Dear J-Law:

It’s me, Michael Murray again, just writing you a quick note to wish you a most excellent and happy birthday! It must feel incredible to be just turning 24, having already won an Academy Award and been nominated for a few others, all the while being utterly adored by absolutely everybody on the planet, including the Chinese, who are known to be cautious with their affection.

Chinese people never seem to like me. I don’t know why but I’m starting to think it might be because I’m really good at ping-pong and that they’re just a really insecure people. Any thoughts?

I would like to play ping-pong with you- we’d be a great match! ( I am gifted at puns)

At any rate, I have to say, I’d really like to feel incredible like you must feel all the time. It must be pretty cool, that feeling. Sometimes I feel depressed. Like right now, as I think about the insecure Chinese and how they hate me, I’m also realizing that I’m old enough to be your father! Funny, that, because it really feels like there’s great chemistry between us. If we starred in a movie together I think we’d become the next great couple.

Jennichael.

Do you know what helps depression? Touching. If you were to touch me I would feel less depressed. It’s a medical fact. It’s called Touch Therapy.

There’s also Sensual Touch Therapy for the people who really care.

It was a real shame about Robin Williams, don’t you think?

Anyway, I don’t want to be a drag on your big day, my depression isn’t that bad! I only get down because I’m sensitive and feel life more than most people! I just wanted to give you a big shout-out and wish you an incredible birthday full of much happiness, health, joy and success, and to let you know that Touch Therapy really works. It does, it saves lives. You are beautiful, staggeringly beautiful, and I bet you have cool, soft hands that smell like poems.

I would love to hang with you if you’re in Toronto for the Film Festival next month!

Michael Murray

PS: Bradley Cooper (pretentious name) is much older than you. Did you sleep with him when you made Silver Lining Playbook? I have seen that movie 24 times, once for every year you’ve been alive.

And so for first-time director Aaron Wilson, who debuted his film Canopy at the festival, it must have been a validating and exciting experience. The movie has a very simple premise. An Australian pilot gets shot down while battling the Japanese over Singapore and improbably bonds with a Chinese soldier similarly trying to elude capture.

The central characters of this film—which is almost devoid of dialogue—aren’t really the actors playing the roles, but the jungle in which the story unfolds and the hyper-accented soundscape that surrounds them. Wilson is trying to do something different here, but in so doing Canopy comes across as more of a concept of a film than a film itself, an interesting idea in theory, but in practice maybe not so much.

It’s impossible to see this movie and not think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red line.

I don’t think that there’s a film on the planet that compares well to it, and Canopy is no exception. Although Canopy is beautiful to look at, it never establishes an emotional grip on the audience, relying too heavily on the mechanisms of filmmaking rather than the film itself. For instance, after a spell, the wordlessness of the movie becomes burdensome, a cinematic imposition rather than an organic necessity of circumstance and disparate languages. Clearly, the director wants us keenly focused on the canopy of sound covering the silent action, but he points us so intentionally in this direction it’s as if we’re following a neon-signs-lit detour route.  The acoustics swiftly become a clumsy, almost naive contrivance that is master rather than servant to the film, pulling us away rather than in.

Perhaps if the actors were more expressive or physically compelling, the director’s reach wouldn’t have so exceeded his grasp. As it is, in spite of its lyrical flourishes and allusive passages, the movie has a constructed, almost humid weight. As we move from one poetic war trope to the next, as if in some theme park yet to be invented, Canopy does little more than ask you to like it.

When it ended, the near-full house applauded, as if in encouragement, it seemed, rather than appreciation. The director and his key people took the floor, ready for a Q & A, and the last amongst them to do so was the lead actor, Khan Chittenden. As is often the case, he was smaller and more vulnerable than you would have expected after having just seen him up there on the giant screen, and as he youthfully bounded down from his seat, he threw up an arm to the crowd, he too hoping for more than what was received.

But truth is festival not about two-leggers but about movies.

This is list of movies Heidi going to see.

1. The Master.

Sound scary, like about bad two-legger who hate dog and maybe make dog slave, but actually about Scientology and star that guy who everybody say good actor. He kinda fat. Forget name. Complicated name. Heidi into Scientology for a bit when she found out that Christ God say dogs have no soul and no get into heaven! Heidi left church after that! But Scientology weird and expensive, so Heidi ran away after achieving OT II.

2. Rust and Bone.

Heidi LOVE movie about bone!! Hope it about meat bone not chicken bone.

3. Love, Marilyn.

Documentary on famous two-legged sex bomb Marilyn Monroe. Heidi always relate to Marilyn! When she said, “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best,” she could have been talking about Heidi. Poor Marilyn, she was like candle in wind!

4. Hyde Park on Hudson.

Bill Murray favourite of Heidi. He would make good pack leader.

5. Amour.

Heidi no know what this about but given free pass in park when playing fetch. Seat filler, I guess

6. Looper

Star Bruce Willis!!! Two-legger travel in time and shoot himself! Movie made of awesome! Yippie ki-yay, motherfucker! Also star Joseph-Gordon Levitt. Heidi like to lick him, Heidi lick him long time!

7. Silver Linings Playbook.

Heidi dreamer. Believe every cloud have silver lining, so Heidi want to see movie about silver lining. Heidi favourite silver lining leftovers.

8. Bad 25.

About Michael Jackson! He King of Pop and friend to animals! Good father to Bubbles and when he Moon Walk, Heidi think anything possible! Poor Michael, he die far too young. Hope doctor who kill him with horse medicine go to jail forever! He very, very bad dog!

9. On the Road.

Star that bitch Kristen Stewart from Twilight. Can’t believe she cheated on Robert Pattinson! Even though Heidi always on Team Jacob big time, still think Kirsten Stewart bad bitch! Where her pack loyalty? Heidi go to movie just to bark!

10. Argo.

Heidi know dog named Argo.

Only reason Heidi want to see movie.

Also have free pass.