NOW SHOOTING
Ron Foley Macdonald
Movies Editor Ron Foley Macdonald is a freelance writer and film programmer based in Halifax.
Now Shooting features serious film and video industry news, salacious gossip, vicious rumours, Ron's musings and any other tidbits or contributions you would like to contribute.
Click on the gray New Post link in the far left column.
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Now Shooting Archive
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Tim Burton's 'Alice' Bombs |
MARCH 5, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Tim Burton fans should be properly forewarned that his major studio take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland is more Disney than Burton. With a truly horrifying girl-power script by Linda Woolverton--who penned Beauty And the Beast and The Lion King for the Mouse Factory--this particular Alice is major disappointment.
Sure, there’s a raft of wonderfully whimsical imagery and some startling visuals that are Burton’s trademark. And a couple of performances--Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, in particular--provide evidence that this Alice might have been an extraordinary vehicle for the visionary director’s outsized originality had he had more control on t...
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The Crazies A Vibrant Zombie Variant |
FEBRUARY 26, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sahara director Breck Eisner has tackled the modern-day remake of one of horrormeister George Romero’s most neglected films, The Crazies.
Built around a star-making performance by Deadwood actor Timothy Olyphant--who was so effective in the terrific recent Canadian heist flick High Life--The Crazies is a less resonant but still vibrant variant on Romero’s ongoing Zombie franchise (from 1968’s Night Of the Living Dead to 2009’s Survival of the Dead).
With a storyline that echoes the rash of apocalyptic narratives that have been breaking out in theatres lately--from The Book Of Eli to the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road--The Crazies is a simpler, more direct thriller delivered...
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Shutter Island: Twisted Plot, Visual Poetry |
FEBRUARY 19, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Paramount has fiddled with the release date for Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island for almost a season and a half, putting off the potentially difficult film’s launch for at least six months.
Well it’s finally here, and there’s no question it’s essential cinema for anyone who considers film to be the greatest popular art form of the 2oth and 21st centuries.
That doesn’t mean Shutter Island is an ‘easy’ film. Densely plotted with enough twists and turns to derail the most surefooted of audiences, this may not rank amongst Scorsese’s absolute masterpieces after only a single viewing.
On the other hand, the film sees the New York-based filmmaker getting closer to the style of a clutch o...
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Crazy Heart: Blazingly Great |
FEBRUARY 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Scott Cooper’s debut feature Crazy Heart has build up a fine surge of hype mostly due from the extraordinary performance of Jeff Bridges as a broken-down Texas-based country writer and performer named Bad Blake.
The film is surprisingly straightforward and bittersweet. While the songs reflect the poetic simplicity of work of Don Williams and Leonard Cohen, Bad Blake’s life and appearance draws upon real-life legends such as Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.
A gentle love story between Blake and a Santa Fe journalist played with firm determination by Maggie Gyllenhaal provides the core of the redemptive storyline.
Supporting turns from Colin Farrell and Rober...
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Broken Embraces: Good But Not Great |
JANUARY 31, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar’s latest feature film, Broken Embraces, is regularly referred to as a letdown after his brilliant and vastly entertaining 2004 entry Volver.
Sure, it has an overly dense plot that again returns to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, for its inspiration. And at 128 minutes, Broken Embraces is in need of a little trimming.
That said, Broken Embraces is still the work of a cinema-maestro at the top of this game. Every frame of the film is arresting; it’s worth a viewing on the big screen for the vibrant red-and-yellow art direction alone.
The storyline is almost impossible to encapsulate. As told in a difficult to follow flashback structure, ...
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A Single Man Is Utterly Ravishing |
JANUARY 22, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Fashion designer Tom Ford’s first feature film, A Single Man, is just about as ravishing a movie that’s ever hit the big screen.
Adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s landmark 1964 novel of the same name set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film tells the story of an English professor at at State college in Los Angeles struggling with news that his same-sex lover has just died in a car crash.
Sporting two staggering performances from Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, A Single Man joins the small canon of films such as The Slender Thread, Goodbye Solo and A Taste Of Cherry about a person dangling on the verge of suicide.
And while not much happens plot-wise during this single day/s...
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Book Of Eli A Great Read |
JANUARY 15, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) have entered the post-apocalypse-du-jour sweepstakes with the Denzel Washington vehicle, The Book Of Eli.
Seemingly using some of the same locations and sets as the recent film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Book Of Eli is the more satisfying movie mostly because there’s a plot this time out.
No mere literary translation despite its title, The Book Of Eli also channels several cinematic spirits--Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, and Sam Peckinpah, to name three--to deliver a dusty futuristic actioner that blends 1980s music video touches with its sci-fi apocalypse flair.
Matching the swooningly blasted landscapes ...
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Daybreakers: Apocalyptic Vampire Zombie Fun! |
JANUARY 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Aussie Spierig Brothers have delivered a surprisingly solid blast of imaginative entertainment in their just-opened horror flick Daybreakers.
And while it’s a bit wobbly at times, like an overstuffed triple decker-sandwich--Daybreakers is, after all, a Vampire/Zombie/Sci-Fi Apocalypse flick--the sprightly second feature from the Downunder Brothers bubbles over with bright ideas, whooshing action sequences, cool art direction, and not a little gore.
Those bright ideas include the notion that vampires have taken over the world, and that the world is running out of human blood. These two very clever turnarounds are more than enough to fuel a single narrative. When you throw in a human...
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High-Flying Dud: Up In the Air |
DECEMBER 26, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Cynically calculated and yet virtually unwatchable, Up In the Air is one of those movies whose reputation gets inflated on the hothouse film festival circuit.
As writer/director Jason Reitman’s follow-up to the quirky hit Juno, it reinforces the notion that the son of legendary Canadian producer Ivan Reitman fluked out with that sprightly Ellen Page/Michael Cera teen mom comedy.
Now it seems no critic wants to state the obvious about Up In the Air. The truth is it’s the vastly unsympathetic story of a man called Ryan Bingham whose job it is to fly around the US firing people.
And guess what. It’s film of unimaginable cruelty, wretched novelty, and glib emotions capped off with gha...
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James Cameron's Eye-Popping Avatar |
DECEMBER 20, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sensory overload sci-fi epic. Landmark nerdland technical breakthrough. Masterful video-game-movie hybrid. Exhausting eco-fable wrought large. Rip-snorting revisionist actioner. James Cameron’s Avatar is all of these things, and more.
Created with a new Fusion 3-d camera system, the excess of swirling movement sometimes overwhelms the eyes, but beyond that, Avatar is just about as thrilling a movie you’re going to experience in a single lifetime.
Starting out with a straightforward neo-colonial storyline of exploiting resources on a faraway moon, Avatar pits some exceptionally terse dialogue (from narrator and lead Jake Scully, played by Sam Worthington like some Samuel Beckett charact...
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Orson Welles Is Worth Watching Again |
DECEMBER 12, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
A must-see for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the performing arts, Me And Orson Welles might just pull in a few more members of the greater moviegoing public due to teen heart-throb Zac Efron’s involvement.
And considering the elf-like Efron mostly has to gaze admiringly at the amazing re-creation of Orson Welles by British Actor Christian McCay, it’s really not that much of a stretch for High School Musical Trilogy actor, as he seeks to define himself as a post-Disney personality.
Me And Orson Welles joins the small but gro...
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Precious Is Everything You Expect And More |
NOVEMBER 28, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Calling Precious a ‘brave’ movie is selling it short. The word that more aptly
describes it is ‘ferocious’.
You could throw around other words too, like ‘groundbreaking’, ‘innovative’ and ‘original’. Whatever the case, Precious is one terrific flick.
Everything you’ve heard about it is true, from the stunt casting of Lenny Kravitz as a male nurse and Mariah Carey as a frumpy social worker to the fact that title character--Precious herself--is indeed played by an overweight unknown, Garbourey Sidibe, who is so quietly charismatic you can’t take your eyes off her.
And the storyline does in fact deal frankly and directly with incest, family violence, grinding urban poverty and ignora...
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Fans Will Love It Might Get Loud |
NOVEMBER 23, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The new electric guitarist feature documentary It Might Get Loud is getting a very strange pre-DVD release: a couple of latenight weekends only before a December 22nd street date. The film premiered at the 2008 Toronto Film Fest.
It’s a strategy that would seem to encourage punters to wait for the DVD, which will undoubtedly include some extras to spice up the rather thin package that is this non-fiction feature about a just-for-the-cameras meeting of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’s Jack White.
Rabid fans of any of these groups will want to stay up, of course, and watch their heroes up there on the big screen. They are fascinating, innovative musicians...
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The Box Fascinating But Frustrating |
NOVEMBER 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Richard Kelly has returned to wide release with his third film, a supernatural thriller called The Box, adapted from the classic Sci-Fi author Richard (I Am Legend) Matheson’s story ‘Button, Button’.
Kelly--whose debut 2001 outing Donnie Darko has become the definitive film about youth culture in the 1980s--slipped with his ambitious but little-seen sophomore attempt, Southland Tales.
And while the combination of Kelly and Matheson was enough to send me off to the multiplex to catch The Box, the film is far from totally successful. Balanced against an intoxicating sense of cinematic style is a confused narrative that is occasionally rather hard to follow.
The premise, however, is el...
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An Education Is Superior Filmmaking |
NOVEMBER 7, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
An Education is one of those must-see films that has gotten a tad inflated from expectations and hype that come with dazzling the denizens on the festival circuit.
A product of the wonderful British novelist Nick Hornby--who wrote the script, but not the story, while his wife produced--An Education is a precise and pointed cautionary tale steeped in pop culture details.
Beautifully crafted and deftly executed, it’s only flaw is Hornby’s abrupt ending which closes off the extraordinary story just a little too soon.
A true-to-life narrative derived from a Granta Magazine memoir, An Education tells of a 16-year-old British schoolgirl’s affair with an older, more sophisticated man name...
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Paranormal Activity: Domestic Banality as Terror |
OCTOBER 31, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Paranormal Activity is one supremely scary film. Reportedly made for ten grand by writer/director Oren Peli, the brilliant bargain basement supernatural nail-biter has already endured some really dumb comparisons to shaky-camster thrillers such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield.
Those critics and commentators might just be missing the point of Paranormal Activity. The camera--thankfully--doesn’t actually move that much, leaving much of the suspense to the static, minimalist nature of the shots.
Consequently Paranormal Activity evokes minimalist filmmakers such as Robert Bresson and Carl Dryer in its style. The content, on the other hand, is an astonishing examination of contem...
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Amelia Not Quite Airborne |
OCTOBER 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
While the real Amelia Earhardt disappeared in the South Pacific in 1937, her bigscreen counterpart is crash-landing in cinemas this weekend in the Mira Nair-directed, Hillary Swank-starring bio-pic that was partly filmed in Nova Scotia.
Nair--a talented but erratic director who’s completely lost in handling a conventional, 1950s style biographical film--makes so many mistakes with Amelia it’s hard to find a place to start discussing the film’s drawbacks.
First off, the Oscar-Winning actress Hillary Swank seems locked into channeling Katharine Hepburn in constructing her Amelia Earhardt. Latching on to the aviatrix’s 100-watt smile, Swank misses out otherwise on the famous flyer’s enigm...
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Where The Wild Things Are Is Wonderful |
OCTOBER 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The long-awaited bigscreen version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book Where The Wild Things Are has finally arrived in theatres after years of development starts and stops, and even more trouble from the production end.
Directed by the visionary Spike Jonze--who helmed two of the most startling original movies of the last decade, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich--Where The Wild Things Are is yet another deftly left-field film. And while it might be a bit slow and scary for younger kids, it’s a film that should dazzle audiences of all ages. Already critics are lining up for huzzahs. Pardon me if I join the cue.
The wisp of a story--the original book is only 43 pages--gets so...
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Zombieland's A Decent Time-Waster |
OCTOBER 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sure, Zombieland might be only a throwaway film that barely whets the hunger for the next installment in George Romero’s template-making Living Dead series.
Seemingly built out of spare parts leftover from flicks such as Trainspotting and Shaun Of the Dead, it relies a little too heavily on fetishized slow-mo shots of zombies being dispatched while the main character stitches the skimpy narrative together with a too-rich voiceover.
Still, there’s lots to like in Zombieland. First off, it’s full of trashy jokes, deliberately crappy music and delightfully under-developed ideas. Second, it sports Woody Harrelson giddily spoofing his own redneck screen persona. Third, it contains one of th...
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Bright Star Bright Indeed |
OCTOBER 4, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Jane (Sweetie, The Piano) Campion’s new film Bright Star is a fluid and fascinating attempt to refashion the traditional costume drama bio-pic.
Based on the three-year affair between British poet John Keats and clothes maker/designer Fanny Brawne, Bright Star is remarkably restrained filmmaking, with little flashy camera work along with some seriously underplayed characterizations.
The result sees a reverse of expectations usually found in historical drama.
Campion deliberately makes the female lead--played with stern deliberation by Abbie Cornish--the active partner in the romance. Ben Whishaw’s John Keats plays the object of desire as a mostly passive figure who courts doom as much ...
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Trailer Park Countdown A Classic |
SEPTEMBER 27, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Trailer Park Boys: Countdown To Liquor Day is supposed to be the swansong of the popular and influential Showcase TV series set right here on the East Coast of Canada.
Half an hour in and the film seems like a shrug, with everyone involved having their minds on something else. But then something very strange happens. Director Mike Clattenburg virtually hands the film over to the classically trained powerhouse actor John Dunsworth, who as the Trailer Park Supervisor Mr. Leahy spends most of his time severely soused and clad only in his skivvies.
It’s then that you start to realize that Trailer Park Boys: Countdown To Liquor Day is actually the final coda to Canada’s answer to the great ...
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This Animated 9 Is Indeed a 9 |
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Shane Acker’s debut animated feature 9 is getting a rough ride from many critics who simply don’t recognize the filmmaker’s extraordinary achievement.
The terse 79-minute computer-graphic film tells post-apocalyptic story of a clutch of burlap-bag creatures who battle a montrous machine. And while 9 is driven by a conventional action heroic story arc--full of occasionally klutzy bits of unleavened dialogue--there’s no question that every frame of the film is a miniature visual masterpiece.
Taking the rubbish-heap aesthetic of great stop-motion animators such as The Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer and adapting it for a mass audience, Acker has managed to blend the existential terror of...
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Taking Woodstock Slight, Sweet And Fun Indeed |
AUGUST 26, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Ang Lee’s latest, Taking Woodstock, is a slight but strikingly original take on the legendary 3-day hippie musical festival held in 1969.
Surprisingly funny and often very sweet, Taking Woodstock tells the tale of the delapidated Jewish family resort that hosted the army of logisticians that put together the event, and the terminally uptight family who owned and ran the fourth-rate summer getaway.
James Schamus’s script is full of bright moments. And while some of the elements never really come together, there’s enough balance between the small-scale domestic turmoil and the yawning fulcrum point of cultural change to make Taking Woodstock compelling.
Like all of Ang Lee’s films, th...
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District 9 Eye-Popping Moviemaking |
AUGUST 15, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
District 9 is one heck of a movie, a wicked Sci-Fi flick so full of ideas, humour and action that it makes the whole genre feel fresh again.
Directed by Peter Jackson acolyte Neill Blomkamp, District 9 tells the tale of end-of-their rope crustacean-like aliens getting marooned in South Africa as their spaceship runs out of fuel. Treated like refugees for 28 years, their experience resonates greatly with that country’s recently departed Apartheid system; there’s elements of bureaucratic nepotism, gangsterism, privatization and corporate greed all thrown in for good measure.
Like the recent apocalyptic Children Of Men, District 9 has a furious sense of pacing that never lets the exposito...
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Julie And Julia A Double Dud |
AUGUST 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
No reviewers seem willing to admit just how horrible Nora Ephron’s new movie Julie And Julia is.
Part bio-pic and part contemporary chick flic, Julie and Julia completely wastes the considerable talent of Meryl Streep along with the extraordinary story of American TV chef Julia Child.
What Nora Ephron was thinking, I don’t know. Whatever the case, Julie And Julia is a shrill, trite and infinitely annoying double-narrative women’s wish-fulfillment movie that piles up plenty of food and sex but leaves out character, plot and drama.
And while the story of Julia Child starts out promisingly, with Streep in Paris with her diplomat husband played solidly by Stanley Tucci, her cartoon char...
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Hurt Locker An Unreserved Masterpiece |
JULY 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Hurt Locker might just be the one Iraq War movie that finally connects with audiences. It certainly is making a connection with critics. Especially this one.
Directed by the legendary female action helmer Kathryn Bigelow--who made not one but two of her features in Halifax, The Weight Of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker--this is one bomb-squad movie that stays with you.
Working independently from the studio system and utilizing a tight cast of unknowns, Bigelow pushes her own fascinations to the absolute breaking point in The Hurt Locker. Previously in films like Strange Days and Point Break, she pursued a study of masculinity in crisis well beyond the parameters of the most male of ...
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Moon A Classic In Miniature |
JULY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Duncan Jones’s feature debut, Moon, has been attracting glowing reviews and modestly growing audiences in the midst of all the summer blockbuster hoopla.
The son of David Bowie, Jones has fashioned a fascinating chamber sci-fi flick that harkens back to the early 1970s for its style and execution. Forgoing computer-generated graphics, he’s made use of miniatures, giving Moon a delightfully anachronistic look that perfectly captures the moon’s bleak and haunting character.
And while the story occasionally seems built out of spare parts--you can check off the influences from Solaris to Silent Running to Logan’s Run right up to Alien and Blade Runner--there’s a knotty originality at the c...
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Depp Charges Public Enemies |
JULY 2, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Michael Mann’s highly anticipated Johnny Depp 1930s gangster vehicle Public Enemies is a curious disappointment.
Badly shot on hi-def video, it runs 143 minutes, 43 minutes too long.
And yet any movie about the famous real-life bank robber John Dillinger is going to be worth seeing. Add Depp--and Billy Crudup as a young J. Edgar Hoover--and you get a film that is still worth watching.
Mann’s track record with the original Miami Vice TV show would seem to have guaranteed him a chance to match the heights of great latterday gangster films such as The Godfather and Goodfellas. While he never reaches those heights--the shallow image of HD video forces him into endless actor closeups and...
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Away We Go Not Quite There |
JUNE 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Beauty director Sam Mendes has taken up with hipster writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida to create the shaggy and slightly unsatisfying road movie Away We Go.
It starts promisingly. The sweet and sometimes silly stay-at-home thirtysomething couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) who want to move to a good place to raise their forthcoming baby are, well, very sweet and very silly. The first half of the film features their adventures visiting nutty friends and loose relations in Phoenix and Tuscon.
The austere desert locations work nicely with the portraits of lifestyle-crazy couples--from wacky academics to hippie dimwits--who make Krasinski and Rudolph look positively norm...
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Outlander Out Of This World |
JUNE 19, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Film Nova Scotia did everyone a big favour by screening the long-awaited
locally made Viking/Sci-Fi flickt Outlander at the Oxford Theatre last Thursday.
Not only did they score a 35mm film print, they brought writer/director Howard McCain and two of his producers to introduce and speak afterwards.
And what a surprise! Outlander turns out to be a brisk, gripping and vastly entertaining genre film that has deservedly been building a big buzz on the online Sci-Fi ‘geek’ community.
With its audacious scenario of a alien warrior landing on Earth--Norway just after 700 AD, in fact--to join together with Vikings to battle a voracious off-planet creature, Outlander would seem initially to...
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Easy Virtue Easy On the Eyes |
JUNE 13, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Easy Virtue is one 1920s-written drama that seems far more durable than it should. Based on Noel Coward’s play, it features a dissolute English aristocratic family on an estate it can’t afford and an American interloper that marries uncomfortably into the clan. The result is a costume flick that blends corrosive wit with great furniture.
Sure, it’s a formula that worked for much of Merchant-Ivory’s output, so director Stephan Elliott (Priscilla, Queen Of the Desert) can hardly miss. His two leads--Yankee Actress Jessica Biel and recent Prince Caspian star Ben Barnes--are so distractingly beautiful that they could probably carry the picture dressed in overalls and pitchforks.
It doesn’...
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Drag Me To Hell: Gross, Funny and A Genuine Scare |
MAY 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Legendary Evil Dead director Sam Raimi has paused long enough from counting all the money he’s made from helming the three Spider Man movies to crank out a small-scale horror tale entitled Drag Me To Hell that returns him to his shock-a-rama roots.
Scripted and co-produced with his brother Ivan, DMTH is a fiesty chamber piece that mixes by-the-book thrills and chills with cheesy dramatics. The result is a genuinely scary film that will probably inspire yet another generation of film fanatics to pick up cameras themselves.
Unlike the smooth but operatic Spider Man films--which still rank as the finest of all cinematic comic book adapatations--Raimi’s horror work blends gross-out images ...
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Terminator Perfectly Serviceable |
MAY 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Terminator Salvation certainly doesn’t deserve the truckload of crappy reviews it’s piled up since it opened wide in the spring rush of popcorn movies.
Two stars here, one star there. You’d think these were critiques of the last Alien Vs Predator installment, now the tin standard for movie franchises that have run out of steam.
Sure, director McG is no James Cameron. But this fourth Terminator movie easily matches Cameron’s rather bloated but still effective sequel, T2.
And while Christian Bale seems to be everyone’s favorite whipping boy these days--no doubt for his leaked to the internet rant that exposed the busy actor as a bit of an onstage cad--there’s no question he’s effectiv...
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Wolverine Just So So |
MAY 15, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is 2009’s first big summer comic book movie--it opened a week before Star Trek--but it certainly won’t be the best.
Sure, it’s better than the clunky third X-Men installment, directed by Hollywood journeyman Brett Ratner after Bryan Singer had established the franchise with the first two stylish episodes of what will undoubtedly be an endless franchise.
The real problem with the X-Men empire is that there are too many characters to be contained on the big screen, each blessed with a defining super-power that often takes too long to explain. With all the hallmarks of big-budget action movies filling up the space with explosions, cool CG effects and apocalyptic ...
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Star Trek Revitalized |
MAY 8, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
You could say that TV’s Lost creator JJ Abrams’ retooling of the Star Trek franchise is cheesy, shrill and short on some of the weighty Sci-Fi ideas that drove the original series and consequent follow up shows and films.
But you might just be missing the point of this vibrant and entertaining bigscreen exercise that has confidently revitalized a tired franchise.
Sure, Abrams relies a tad too much on time travel to knit his unlikely story together. But with a cast of young, sexy Star Fleet recruits on their first big mission to save the universe, this vision of Star Trek is the freshest since the original series hit the small screen from 1966 to 1969.
Pinning the narrative on the o...
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Thom Pain A Bracing Theatrical Blast |
APRIL 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Halifax has a new theatre company that has come roaring out of the gate with a fresh-from New York City dramatic sensation.
The company’s name is The Safety Position. The play is Will Eno’s acclaimed
one-man work Thom Pain (Based On Nothing). And the single actor onstage is the award-winning Stewart Legere.
It all makes for 75 minutes of wonky, poke-in-the-eye drama that treads the line between self-conscious satire and disturbing personal escavation.
Legere’s wide-eyed persona combines elements of confessional poet, timid stand-up comedian and gleeful game show host as he delivers Will Eno’s caustic text.
It’s a marvelous performance, full of red herrings that both engage and re...
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Two Lovers An Unexpected Pleasure |
APRIL 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Two Lovers is an unexpected cinematic pleasure. The third collaboration between writer/director James Gray and actor Joaquin Phoenix (after We Own The Night and The Yards), it is a measured romance vividly anchored in the subculture of New York City’s modern day Jewish community in Brighton Beach.
Almost old-fashioned in its narrative intention of telling the story of a young man torn between a pair of potential girlfriends, Two Lovers adds some unique contemporary touches that bring the film neatly into the 21st century.
Phoenix’s character Leonard is the bi-polar son of a retiring dry-cleaning family who has returned to live home after his former girlfriend bailed on him. His two po...
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Wendy And Lucy: An American Indie Classic |
APRIL 28, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The next installment in AFCOOP’s Monday Night Movies (May 4th) series is a must-see.
American Indie writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s heartbreaking Wendy And Lucy rates as one of the truly great films of 2008.
Seeing it on the big screen, then, becomes imperative, even if Wendy And Lucy gets its DVD release the very next day. The deeply poetic story of a female drifter and her dog on their way from the Pacific Northwest to a possible job in Alaska delivers narrative minimalism braced against some extraordinary landscapes that combine to create an utterly original cinematic experience.
Reichardt’s third feature--after 2005’s acclaimed Old Joy and the now almost forgotten 1994 flick ...
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17 Again: Effervescent Efron, Dead Perry |
APRIL 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Everybody’s out to get Zac Efron this weekend, with a virtual torrent of rotten reviews for his leading man debut in the high-school body switch comedy 17 Again.
Sure, it’s soggy premise has been done before (Like Father Like Son, Freaky Friday, Big and countless others) but 17 Again hardly rates such adverse reactions. Few critics have mentioned that director Burr Steers handled one of the great indie debuts of the last decade, Igby Goes Down. Or that this new film delivers a unique portrait of contemporary American high schools as technologically accelerated torture chamber doubling as funhouse.
And with Efron himself looking like an overgrown imp, what are people expecting, Shakespe...
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Sunshine Cleaning Can't Live Up To Its Hype |
APRIL 11, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sunshine Cleaning is one of those alleged quirky indie comedies that has a surprising lack of quirk or comedy. A determined tale of lower-class sisters struggling through young adulthood in the New Mexico and Arizona cleaning up other peoples messes while creating their own, it piles on the pathos to deliver some cringe-worthy moments in contemporary American Cinema.
The film, directed by Christine Jeffs, does have its moments. The two sisters--Amy Adams’ Rose and Emily Blunt’s Norah--are quite fetching to look at as failed waitresses and maids who stumble into tidying up crime and trauma scenes.
There’s some spirited cameos from the likes of Alan Arkin, Paul Dooley and Steve Zahn. And t...
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Adventureland Funny And Poignant |
APRIL 5, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Greg Mottola’s latest feature Adventureland is one of those heartbreakingly definitive films that absolutely nails a time of life that’s been badly served by North American Popular Culture.
Following a group a trio of recent lower-middle-class university grads in 1987 as they attempt to transition from useless arts-related degrees to the nasty real world of employment and post-graduate aspirations, Mottola sets his story in a ghastly summertime amusement park. It’s a horrifying place where ambition bites the dust, and young hopes and idealism get ground into day-to-day misery.
Adventureland’s premise is so sure-footed that the film simply can’t fail. The New York City based director--w...
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Trelawny A Must See |
APRIL 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Dalhousie Theatre Productions’ staging of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1898 play Trelawny Of the Wells is just about the best thing I’ve ever seen by the regions’s largest post-secondary drama school.
It’s a beautifully measured rendering of a classic by an unfairly neglected playwright who once dominated his field over the likes of his better remembered contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
Pinero’s work is now rarely revived on stage. The only significant cinematic adaption bearing his name is the creaky and mystical 1945 romance The Enchanted Cottage directed by John Cromwell and starring Dorothy MacGuire.
Otherwise, Pinero’s beautifully crafted dramatic writing remai...
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Finding Lost Song A Classic |
MARCH 25, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
New Brunswick-based director Rodrigue Jean’s third feature, Lost Song, has already captured two major Canadian Film Awards. Lauded with a prize at last year’s Toronto Festival, it also managed to cop a place on this country’s Top Ten Films of 2008.
Film Fanatics who couldn’t catch the Atlantic Film Festival screening last September will get another chance to see the Quebec-shot Francophone domestic drama at AFCOOP’s Monday Night Movies on March 30th at 7:00 pm at the Park Lane Theatre.
An apt choice for kicking off the the latest installment of the Halifax Independent Film Festival--which will feature the filmmaker giving a noontime director’s talk at the NSCAD Film School the next day...
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Pontypool Channels Cronenberg |
MARCH 21, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Maverick Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s follow-up to his experimental multi-screened Elaine Page vehicle The Tracey Fragments is a ferocious genre tour-de-force. Shot on a single location, Pontypool is a Canuck Zombie flick par excellence, channelling 1970s David Cronenberg for a new millennium.
Revolving around a forceful performance by Stephen McHattie as a newly-landed small-town DJ named Mazzy caught up in a SARS-like viral outbreak spread by language and understanding,
Pontypool matches a cool blue-green colour scheme against a growing sense of hysteria.
McDonald maintains and builds the tension right up until the film’s final minutes, making for a cinematic thrill ride that t...
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Watchmen Wild And Arresting |
MARCH 9, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Zack Snyder’s bigscreen adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel The Watchmen is just about as good as anyone could expect.
Dark, cynical, and studded with black humour and wild leaps of imagination, Watchman is a visual feast. It looks like a racier version of The Dark Knight, with lots of pulpy blood, violence, gore and at least one sex scene that is hilariously over the top (played out to the original version of Leonard Cohen’s 1984 recording of his now-standard ‘Hallejah’).
The film’s one drawback--a convoluted plot that is almost as tangled as 1946 Film Noir classic The Big Sleep--makes the storyline just a bit confusing. And Snyder manages to squeeze in two origin storie...
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Cadillac Records Roars |
MARCH 4, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Cadillac Records is one terrific bio-pic. Director Darnell Martin--one of the few black women filmmakers working in mainstream Hollywood--shoehorns the story of Chess Records into a tight 108-minute running time, catching all the glory of how acoustic American Blues from the South went north to Chicago, became electrified and eventually morphed into Rock and Roll.
The cast of characters is sprawling, and even then there a crucial couple left out. Yes you get Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Etta James (Beyonce), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Little Walter (Columbus Short), Chuck Berry (Mos Def) and improsario Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody). Each performance is a fascinating impersonation, and...
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Scottish 'Stone' Comes Home |
FEBRUARY 20, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sorry, but it’s simply not possible for someone with the last name Macdonald to give Stone Of Destiny a bad review.
The true-to-life story of how a quartet of patriotic students took back the Scottish Coronation Stone from Britain’s Westminister Abbey on Christmas Day in 1950, Stone Of Destiny is a remarkably engaging story of determination and adventure, one that will delight and haunt audiences of all ages.
Based on ringleader Ian Hamilton’s memoir, this Canadian co-production was helmed by producer/director Charles Martin Smith, an actor and filmmaker best known for all those MVP kids flicks that feature football-playing dogs and hockey-playing chimps.
Consistently Canadian Box-o...
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An Inspirational 'Class' |
FEBRUARY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Cannes Palme D’Or-winning French flick The Class is one of those must-see films that seems a bit underwhelming at first.
Filmed verite-style in the blah Parisian suburbs, it reverses the formula of the 1960s classic To Sir With Love by placing a white teacher in the midst of a mainly immigrant class of Arabic, Oriental and African students.
The tough 13-15 year old kids’ cultural differences clash with the teacher’s immersion in the French traditions of bureaucratic and overly formal order.
Rampant hormones and emotions come right up against ‘Reason over Passion’.
The result is a grinding drama offers no heroics and only a bleak ray of hope that the French Public Educational pr...
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Coraline's A Bore |
FEBRUARY 7, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Stop-motion animation master Henry Selick’s adaptation of graphic novelist Neil Gaiman’s Coraline has piled up many respectful reviews. In what seems to be a growing trend, those critics might not have stayed with the film through to its end. If they had, they might have been less respectful.
That’s because Coraline is a bore. Sure, it’s a neat-looking fantasy, with some brilliant passages of art department design that absolutely dazzle. Trouble is, the main storyline--of an ennui plagued 9 year old girl of the title who battles to save her parents from an evil alternative world--remains limp throughout the whole narrative.
Voice actor Dakota Fanning can carry much of the blame on this...
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Frost/Nixon: Regrets, I've Had A Few |
FEBRUARY 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Ron Howard’s latest film Frost/Nixon is the fourth major motion picture to treat the 37th President of the United States. While it is sumptuously realized picture, with a terrific cast, the film simply cannot escape its origins from Peter Morgan’s slight stage play now inflated into big budget Oscar bait.
Frost/Nixon centres in on the 1977 longform television interviews done with the ex-President by the lightweight British talk-show host, David Frost. The narrative climaxes with the closest Nixon got to an apology for the Watergate scandal. The film claims that the television close-up of Nixon’s face during the interview (when he admitted ‘letting the American People down’) went further...
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Revolutionary Road Good But Nothing New |
JANUARY 23, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Theatre director and occasional filmmaker (Jarhead, The Road To Perdition) Sam Mendes has tackled a prestige novel for his latest cinematic adventure, Revolutionary Road.
Adapted from Richard Yates’ acclaimed 1961 novel which is set in suburban 1955 Connecticut, Revolutionary Road is a beautifully crafted and forcefully acted film that merges elements of the pre-feminist TV series Mad Men, the recent suburban adultery feature Little Children and the feel of realist dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House.
The result is marital breakdown film that delves far down into the realities of domestic unhappiness, revealing a bleakness that is often overpowering.
Dicaprio and Win...
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The Wrestler Well Matched |
JANUARY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is indeed a triumph. Sparked by an absolutely amazing performance from former has-been Mickey Rourke, the film is a wildly redemptive tour through the wreckage of 1980s culture.
Using a surprisingly straightforward script by Robert Siegal, Aronofsky dives into an ultra-realistic approach (long follow shots, tight close ups, sports-style cinematic hyperbole) to deliver a narrative that continuously discovers compassion from the ruins of the domestic and professional life of Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a man who has wrestled long after his prime.
The grotty New Jersey wrestling circuit the director utilizes for the setting of The Wrestler is populated by the...
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Clint's Gran Torino Grand Indeed |
JANUARY 9, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Cinematic Icon Clint Eastwood has delivered a sly elegy to his own looming screen persona with his latest, Gran Torino.
Directing himself in declining inner-city Detroit with a gaggle of non-professional actors from the Hmong Community, the square-jawed actor/filmmaker shamelessly flirts with sentimentality with this redemptive tale that blends elements of Dirty Harry with the legacy of Archie Bunker.
The result is surprisingly sweet and funny. And for all of its angry urban setting, there’s little violence or gore. Its implied threat, however, hangs over the film from the get-go, and while the core of the story rests on cultural issues, there’s no question that Gran Torino i...
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Doubts About Doubt |
JANUARY 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
New York City based playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley has returned to film directing with the big screen adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-Winning play Doubt.
One of the hotly anticipated serious films of the holiday season, Doubt is a strong piece of writing that doesn’t really translate to the movies all that well. Leaving Shanley--who wrote Moonstruck for Norman Jewison and went on to stumble through a major Hollywood disaster directing Joe And the Volcano--in charge of handling his own work was a mistake.
What might work well on stage simply doesn’t translate to the big screen. The narrow bit of business the play balances on--whether a well-meaning prie...
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Button A Xmas Dud |
DECEMBER 26, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The curious thing about the Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is how many great reviews it has amassed in the run-up to its Christmas Day release.
The 2-hour and 47 minute adaptation of a fanciful F.Scott Fitzgerald short story is a bloated mess. And while it begins promisingly as a magic realist fable set in New Orleans, Benjamin Button soon wanders off into chick-flick territory, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett spending inordinate amounts of time gazing longingly at each other as Pitt’s title character grows younger physically in an odd time reversal that should have been the centre of the storyline.
When the film deteriorates into a gooey romance, Benjamin Button’s curious case beco...
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Slumdog's High Pedigree |
DECEMBER 20, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
British director Danny Boyle has built up an impressive head of steam with his latest project Slumdog Millionaire.
The Shallow Grave/28 Days Later filmmaker has piled up some of the most spectacular reviews of his career for his India-set-and-shot coming of age flick. One wag even called it ‘the perfect movie’.
Clearly that reviewer had not seen the recent Brazilian classic City Of God, which Slumdog Millionaire bears some resemblance to. Add in elements of Boyle’s own kid’s flick Millions of a couple of years ago, and his new movie suddenly looks like it has been built out of spare parts.
Still, they are pretty spectacular spare parts. Shot in ravishing deep colours with jumpy Tr...
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Milk A Tasty Bio-Pic Indeed |
DECEMBER 10, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Gus Van Sant’s return to conventional filmmaking, the shockingly traditional bio-pic Milk, is just about what everyone says it is: a triumph of conventional movie-making and a welcome sellout to the mainstream. It sports some tremendous acting from Sean Penn--in the lead role as San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk--along with Josh Brolin as Dan White, Milk’s rival and eventual assassin.
With the narrative already covered by Rob Epstein’s Oscar-Winning 1984 feature documentary The Times Of Harvey Milk, Gus Van Sant had to find a way to tell the story freshly, with mind that another feature drama--The Mayor Of Castro Street--will treat the subject again in 2009.
Using a direct and force...
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Synecdoche Dour & Grey |
DECEMBER 2, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Maverick film writer Charlie Kaufman--the script author of off-beat flicks like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich--had delivered a surprisingly dour but imaginative directoral debut in the 125-minute curio Synecdoche New York.
Starring a humorless Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sad-sack regional theatre director who, after his marriage fails, receives a humungous grant to produce a play about his own unhappy life, Synecdoche, New York begins promisingly as a Checkovian investigation of provincial artistic life bogged down in domestic disappointment.
Twenty minutes in and Kaufman’s flick broadens out into an essay on the act of creation itself, blen...
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Twilight Fearsomely Engrossing |
NOVEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Twilight is a much-anticipated, vastly-hyped and surprisingly strong entry in the post-Buffy teenage vampire sweepstakes.
Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s gazillion-selling book, the film gains traction on its own from the sterling work of director Catherine Hardwick-who made films such as 13 and The Nativity Story- and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg.
Making great use of relative unknowns (Kristen Stewart as the lovestruck mortal teen Bella, Brit Robert Pattinson as the twitchy adolescent vampire Edward Cullen who briskly channels Heathcliffe through James Dean ), Hardwick sustains a dreamy, intense tone throughout the film that neatly matches female romance novels like Jane Eyre with th...
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Bond On Full Throttle |
NOVEMBER 17, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
After Casino Royale singlehandedly revived and re-energized the James Bond franchise, it’s quite natural that the follow up Quantum Of Solace would feel a bit like a disappointment.
Still, Daniel Craig is a formidable clench-jawed 007. And there’s enough bone-jarring action to power five or six movies, all barely contained in Quantum’s rip-snorting 107 minutes. Before the opening credits unroll, there’s one hair-raising car chase followed by an acrobatic rooftop pursuit, all ending in a duel on two wobbly stagings inside a church restoration project.
You get a chance to collect your thoughts while the very cool titles wash over the screen accompanied by Jack White’s even cooler Bond du...
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Passchendaele A Fascinating Mess |
NOVEMBER 7, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Canadian actor/director/writer Paul Gross’s epic vanity project Passchendaele is a fascinating mess of a movie.
At 20 million dollars, it’s also one of Canada’s most expensive. Weighed down with a lumpy love story--complete with an Man With The Golden Arm-style withdrawl episode--Passchendaele stretches credulity well past the breaking point, particularly with its utterly ludicrous conclusion.
One its problems is that Paul Gross’s sardonic persona--honed to perfection on TV series such a Due South and Slings And Arrows--simply doesn’t work when a straight-up hero is necessary to the main storyline.
Furthermore, the First World War saga refuses to portray the Germans as the enemy, ...
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Changeling Is Clint's Masterpiece |
NOVEMBER 1, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American filmmaking Icon Clint Eastwood has had a pretty good run in the last decade with flicks such as Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and the Flags Of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima double header.
So why are reviewers so tepid in their response to the granite jawed actor/director’s latest epic, Changeling?
The film is a marvel of restrained emotion and superb storytelling. Disturbing, powerful and yet so confidently delivered, its 141 minutes seemed like 85.
Built around two mesmerizing performances from Angelina Jolie and John Malkovitch, Changeling tells the story of the Wineland Chicken Coop murders outside of Los Angeles at the end of the 1920s. When telephone operator ...
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Stone's W. Shockingly Fair and Engrossing |
OCTOBER 26, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Oliver Stone’s presidential bio-pic W. has surprised just about everybody with its gutsy and shockingly fair portrait of the two-term US Chief Executive from Texas.
Shot through with Stone’s trademark aggressive filmmaking style--there’s lots of jumping back and forth in time, expressive camera angles and bravura performances--W. shows George W. Bush’s character haunted by his relationship to that other president, his dad George H. W. Bush.
And while that father-son dynamic drives the drama of the film, the director excels at flushing out the all-important cultural milieu of Texas Highlife and family bloodlines that help shape the sitting president.
Anchored by a mesmerizing perfor...
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Burn After Reading A Real Hoot |
OCTOBER 13, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, Burn After Reading, has been hanging around theatres for almost a month now. A slightly under-cooked spy farce set in and around Washington DC, it’s a film that’s built up some surprising staying power.
Dismissed by many as a minor comedy--time-wasting filler after their marvelous Academy Award winner of last year, No Country For Old Men--Burn After Reading does have its problems.
The script is just a little too busy. The acting is uneven. And the energy needed for a true Feydeau-like farce occasionally flags. But there’s no question Burn After Reading is wildly funny and often right on the mark in its ferocious satire on contemporary mores.
Worth a loo...
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Nick & Nora: Yugo, Guys! |
OCTOBER 5, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
To call the new Michael Cera romantic comedy slight is putting it lightly.
Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist attempts to make a leading man out of the po-faced young Canadian actor who was so effective last year in Superbad.
Director Peter Sollet--who has certainly come down in the world since his 2002 indie breakout Raising Victor Vargas--loses his gritty, lyrical style in this gaudy, overblown teen romance. Under-written and exasperatingly glib, Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist runs out of steam well before its 90 minutes comes to an end.
A boy-meets-girl, boy loses girl comedy set over one night in New York City, the film does have some fun set ups. Cera plays the only straight me...
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Spike Lee's New 'Miracle' |
SEPTEMBER 28, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Spike Lee’s latest film, Miracle At Saint Anna, has accumulated some wildly
divergent reviews. Some have acclaimed it as brilliant and insightful; others have denounced it as lumpy and uneven. Currently it’s got a 28 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, hardly a fair consideration of such an important and accomplished film.
A dazzling World War Two epic clocking in a two hours and fourty minutes, I consider Miracle At Saint Anna to be the African American director’s third cinematic masterpiece in a row, after his 2006 one-two punch of The Inside Man and When The Levees Broke.
The mixed critical reaction is certainly puzzling, as if reviewers deliberately ignored the film’s title--Miracl...
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Lakeview Pretty Neat LaBute |
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Lakeview Terrace might initially seem like a standard studio assignment on first view. Surprisingly, it’s topped the box-office charts for its opening weekend.
A creepy neighbour potboiler superbly realized by director/playwright Neil LaBute, it’s a perfect vehicle for character actor Samuel Jackson, who has played second banana for way too long in films as diverse as Pulp Fiction and the second round of Star Wars pictures.
Sure, Lakeview Terrace seems like a crass throwaway, with a mechanical script that devolves into rote plot routine by its end. Along the way, LaBute gets away with some astonishing commentary on contemporary American Race relations.
LaBute also gets it some nice...
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Henning Mankell |
 SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM)
Henning Mankell
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Hamlet 2 Gut Bustingly Funny |
AUGUST 29, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Riotously funny, sharply satiric and tremendously acted, Hamlet 2 might just be the best movie about the witless enthusiasm of theatre ever made.
Driven by a jaw-droppingly effective performance by Brit Actor Steeve Coogan - whose air-headed American attitude and accent are honed to perfection throughout - Hamlet 2 has is larded with so much vicious humour that you often miss out on the sweet silliness at its core.
Coogan plays a barely-paid Arizona high school drama teacher who writes, directs and stars in a sequel to the famous Shakespeare tragedy where everybody dies in the end. Using a time machine, he rescues pretty well everyone in the original play to the strains of Elton John’s...
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Vicky Cristina Slight, Delightful |
AUGUST 16, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
After a brief filmmaking exile in England, Woody Allen's European tour continues with a side-trip to Spain. The result is the slight but occasionally delightful comedy Vicki Cristina Barcelona.
Powered by two delicious performances by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz--who lift the rest of the not-terribly great cast--VCB rehashes many of Woody Allen's superior 1970s themes, particularly that of infidelity, the importance of art, and the adventures of rich, airheaded Americans all together in a sometimes lumpy, secondhand stew.
What saves VCB are the sun-drenched Barcelona locations and the wonderfully overdone sub-plot of Bardem and Cruz and manic painters who are in the midst of a mess...
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Brideshead Revisited Once More |
AUGUST 5, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
A remake of Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel Brideshead Revisited would seem to rather unnecessary. After all, that landmark 1980s British TV series made a star out of Jeremy Irons and provoked copycat fashion mini-revivals of 1930s Oxford scarves and sweaters in the trend-happy United Kingdom just before The Smiths turned pop culture inward again.
Shockingly, director Julian Jarrold’s (Becoming Jane, Kinky Boots) 135-minute feature film reduction of Waugh’s book actually works quite nicely. Sumptuously filmed (in Oxford, Yorkshire and Venice, Italy) and sparked by two surprisingly strong supporting turns by Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon (as the estranged aristrocratic Anglo-Catholic couple...
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Dark Knight: A Cinematic Event |
JULY 24, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Rarely has a film lived up to its advance hype as has The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s remarkable revival of a once dead cinematic comic book franchise.
There were so many people at the Tuesday night 8:00 pm screening I witnessed the audience spilling onto the very front rows of the theatre. It’s clear that The Dark Knight is more than just a great popcorn movie. It’s the pop-culture event of the summer.
Reviewing the film seems to rather pointless. It’s great from start to finish. Nolan’s a fabulous, plot-driven director. If you’ve seen his first two small-scale features (Following and Momento) you’ll know he’s a master at compressed, accelerated story...
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del Toro's Hellboy II A Masterpiece |
JULY 15, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army seems to have picked up only a grudging nod from the critics over its opening weekend. Perhaps the double trouble of being a sequel of a comic book franchise had something to do with it. Or it might be that many opinionmeisters just didn’t bother to actually sit through the whole film.
Because Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a drop-dead fabulous piece of filmmaking, a canny cross between pop pulp and lush fantasy. Think of Harry Potter rewritten by Elmore Leonard and you might get the idea.
Director Guillermo del Toro’s script keeps the action fast and furious, making this second Hellboy seem like a brisk B-Movie masquerading as Hollywood A List. At two hours...
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Kimball Preps 'Eternal Kiss' |
JULY 9, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Halifax filmmaker Paul Kimball is gearing up to shoot his first feature script, Eternal Kiss.
A contemporary Vampire flick to be lensed in the Shelburne Studio Complex in September, it’s a story that deftly balances humour and romance. Montreal’s Joe Gallaccio is slated to star as David Manners, an intrepid documentary maker on the trail of some suspicious characters who may or may not be real vampires.
Gallaccio - who spent a season with Shakespeare By the Sea and starred in Kimball’s as yet unfinished film version of MacBeth entitled Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow - is a charismatic and forceful actor who will undoubtedly give his Manners character a real edge.
The name David Man...
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WALL-E's Half-Great, Half Bland |
JUNE 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Some critics have gonzo over the new Disney/Pixar animated flick WALL-E.
That only proves that if you throw in a few references to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001, film snobs eyes tend to glaze over.
The reality is that WALL-E does indeed have some lovely moments, particularly in its first half when the little robot of the title wanders an abandoned, garbage-strewn Earth with only a cockroach for company.
Once he blasts into the void following an ingenue-like female robot from the future, the film drops into dross; it’s Shrek in space full of ugly candy colours and the same voice-over schtick that makes most computer-animated movies these days not much more than marketing oppo...
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The Happening A Brisk & Economical Chiller |
JUNE 14, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick is an enviromental thriller that would make a brilliant B-Movie if we still had those kinds of catagories.
Instead, The Happening (20th Century Fox) is getting a pummelling from critics fed up with the Indian-American’s trademark ‘gotcha’ style of slick chillers.
Oddly enought, audiences don’t seem to mind. Sure, The Happening would have a very nice pedigree indeed if had been produced by Allied Artists in 1959, somewhere between bigscreen creepfests such as Don Siegel’s The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (two films it ultimately resembles). But please don’t mix it up with the mid’60s counter-cultu...
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Strangers Superbly Written&Realized |
JUNE 3, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Texas cinematographer Bryan Bertino has knocked one out the park with his first directoral effort The Strangers. Tense, creepy and minimal, it’s the definitive contemporary scary ‘couple attacked by weirdoes in remote house’ cheepie.
Keeping the cast small, the locations few and the atmosphere oppressive, Bertino deftly links what seems to be a random attack to male disappointment and rage.
The couple--Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both surprisingly effect--arrive at a faraway ‘summer house’ after attending some friend’s wedding. Speedman’s character has proposed to Tyler’s character complete with an engagement ring; she turns him down and the post-wedding romantic preparations in the ho...
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Massively Entertaining Indiana Jones |
MAY 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones flick has arrived, and it offers further proof of the fanchise’s enduring potency.
Indiana Jones And the Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull is edge-of-your-seat filmmaking from Hollywood’s leading producer and directing team, George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg.
Of course the film received the usual ho-hum notices from the gilded cynics in the movie reviewing world. I guess that just means there’s still lots of critics would might want to consider finding alternate employment, even if 200 movie reviewers got laid off in North America over the last two or three years.
The fact that few of them actually like movies might be the problem.
There’s no quest...
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Prince Caspian Pretty Solid |
MAY 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The second installment in the bigscreen adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series is actually a little bit better than the lead-off movie, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Prince Caspian is darker and grander, and director Adam Adamson has a surer grip on how to handle British Author C.S. Lewis’ gentle but persistent Christian allegories.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Adamson has managed shake off the feeling that the Narnia films seem like a pre-teen economy version of the mighty Lord Of the Rings franchise. If LotRs was the gold standard, Narnia only rates a bronze in comparison. Sure, Adamson is no Peter Jackson, and even the Harry Potter flicks have more traction when it come...
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Mamet's Redbelt A Cinematic Miracle |
MAY 11, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American playwright and sometimes filmmaker David Mamet has just delivered his best movie ever in the martial-arts drama Redbelt.
Filled with his trademark elliptical plotting and terse dialogue, Redbelt sees past the opaque cleverness of Mamet’s previous film projects such as The Spanish Prisoner, House Of Games and Heist to delve into a critique of the West’s tendency to exploit Eastern ideas.
The result is a tense, compact narrative that neatly blends a martial arts storyline into Mamet’s own unique universe of deft turnarounds and swerving self-conscious plot twists that explore the dark heart of contemporary life.
With not one but two exposes of the illusions behind mass enter...
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Iron Man Flies |
MAY 2, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The first of 2008’s big budget summer blockbusters, Iron Man is shockingly good.
Powered by a tight, economical script--by two of the team who wrote the riveting sci-fi flick Children Of Men--that cleverly doubles back on itself, delivering a doppleganger-style climactic battle that is a sheer pleasure to watch, Iron Man deserves pretty well all the accolades it’s accumulating, and more.
It’s a brisk, hip, and breezily cynical bigscreen action flick that is completely involving from its opening frames to the closing credits which unspool over Black Sabbath’s immortal title song. With a fabulous cast headed up by the re-born Robert Downey Jr in the title role, Iron Man has just about e...
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The Queen has a slight cold |
 APRIL 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM)
It was the dogs’ fault
Alan Bennett is an award winning writer and actor perhaps best known for having been a member of the legendary comedy group Beyond the Fringe, and for his play and screenplay The Madness of George III. His latest work, although a novel, also deals with a monarch who is overcome by a form of mania.
The story starts at a state dinner at which the Queen is attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to engage the President of France in a discussion about French literature. We are then taken back in time by a number of months to find the corgis’ barking furiously at something on the road behind the palace. When Her Majesty investigates she discovers that the source of the d...
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Snow Angels Haunting, Powerful |
APRIL 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a powerful and haunting drama about contemporary families falling apart.
Filmed in Halifax a few years ago, it represents a shift for the young indie filmmaker from his previous three films, all shot in his native American South.
Green--whose influence on the English-speaking cinema is already profound--also worked for the first time adapting someone else’s story. In this case it’s Stewart O’Nan’s novel, which gives the film a broader context of several families and an intergenerational sweep. Green previously worked with just young people.
Using shorter scenes in a cold Northern landscape, David Gordon Green pushes his trademark close lyrical sty...
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Raw, Funny |
APRIL 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Judd Apatow movie machine just keeps rolling on with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a sprightly sex comedy that is--surprise, surprise--both funny and tender. The Hollywood Megaproducer (40 Year Old Virgin, Drillbit Taylor) seems to release a new film these days about every four months.
Driven by an unexpectedly strong autobiographical script by writer/star Jason Segal as a TV series music composer trying to get over being dumped by the small-screen show’s sexy minx--the Sarah Marshall of the title, pitilessly played by Kristen Bell--the film’s real star is British columnist and comedian Russell Brand. He runs away with the picture playing the louche libertine rock star Aldous Snow, the s...
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Smart People Feeble |
APRIL 13, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Fans of Halifax actress Ellen Page who are expecting the sparkle of Juno in her follow-up film Smart People will probably be disappointed.
In a rather typecast role as a cranky Republican Youth high schooler--and the daughter of an even crankier and supremely unconvincing Dennis Quaid as a Victorian Literature professor at an American University on the Eastern Seaboard--Page simply repeats her industrial strength quirkiness she’s now made into a dangerously close-to-cliche screen trademark.
Page is hardly the main problem in this feeble domestic dramatic comedy dressed up as an eccentric indie bon bon. With too many underwritten characters--Thomas Haden Church repeats his role in Sidew...
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Stop Loss Powerful, Haunting |
MARCH 30, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Kimberley Peirce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss, is getting the same short shrift that almost all Iraq war fictional flicks have received from the antsy American moviegoing public.
That means that like Home Of the Brave, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah and several others, Stop Loss is playing to massively empty theatres across North America.
Too bad, because it’s very close to a knockout film. Peirce’s trademark examination of masculinity, identity and violence--so fascinatingly followed in the gender-bending true story Boys Don’t Cry--is on full display in this fluid, powerful and haunting flick.
Kind of like an Orpheus In the Underworld adapted for the Iraq ...
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Heist Flick Entertains, Overreaches |
 MARCH 22, 2008
Kiwi director Roger Donaldson's heist flick The Bank Job is a slick and entertaining robbery film that revisits a notorious Baker Street bank safety deposit break-in from 1971.
Building in concentric circles of intrigue and suspense, the movie follows a bunch of amateur working-class thieves who are manipulated into stealing some compromising photos of a member Britain's Royal family squirrelled away in the Bank's vault in a swank district of downtown London.
Besides the basics of the robbery itself--which echoes the storylines of great film noirs such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing--you get British mobsters, porn kings, Black Nationalists and sev...
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in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit |
 MARCH 8, 2008
The opening night film of this year's Sundance Festival, In Bruges is the feature debut by London-based Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lonesome West).
Utilizing his trademark collision of irony, violence and wit, McDonagh - who won an Oscar for his 2005 short Six Shooter - takes three hitman from the Olde Sod and places them in the Belgian tourist-trap city for a settling of accounts.
And while McDonagh's writing is characteristically fresh, his screen direction is occasionally choppy.
Colin Farrell, for example, pushes the limits just a little bit too far with his 'revenge of Alexander the Great' characterization - all twitches and unfocused, rapid-change ener...
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Page's Great; Juno Is Just Good |
DECEMBER 22, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The long-awaited arrival of Halifax actress Ellen Page starmaker-film Juno can’t help but be a bit of a letdown.
Page is brilliant in the film. Without her, neither Jason Reitman’s paint-by-numbers direction nor Diablo Cody’s pre-fab indie movie script would add up to anything out of the ordinary.
Oddly calculated, Juno is also not terribly funny. The teen pregnancy/coming-of-age ground it covers doesn’t seem much beyond a 1970s After School Special.
And Page’s character Juno herself seems, at times, wildly overwritten.
It’s a tribute to the elfin thespian that she makes this ultra-quirky, relentlessly articulate young woman come alive. Especially when the last half of the film s...
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Atonement Another Literary-To-Screen Misfire |
DECEMBER 20, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
There are any number of reasons why the big-screen cinematic adaptation of the popular post-modernist novel by Ian McEwan, Atonement, doesn’t really work.
One could be that old saw that great literature rarely makes good movies. The many post-modern effects from the book - the revolving points-of-view, the huge jumps in time, and the raw examination of class and sexuality crossed over issues of guilt and desire - seem ludicrously overblown in the film.
Ultimately, however, it is the unpleasant characters lumbering in the midst of a succession of operatic tragedies that makes Atonement such a stinker onscreen.
Starting with rape on a plummy English Estate in 1935 and ending in the w...
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I Am Legend: Good But Not Quite Great |
DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Director Francis Lawrence almost gets the third screen version of Richard Matheson’s enduring sci-fi story I Am Legend to home base.
After all, the film sports a fine performance from Will Smith in an eerily deserted New York City for the first two-thirds of the movie. Just the suggestion of dread - along with the endless empty streets and incongruous cornfields in Central Park - makes for a creepy and diverting cinematic experience.
The film’s problems begin when Will Smith’s lonely survivor character suddenly is confronted with an army of super-fast, super-smart and super-strong zombies in the final act of the movie.
In a previous version - the superior 1971 sci-fi counterculture ...
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RFM's Best Films Of 2007 |
DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Year-end Best Of lists are always a bit suspect. They tend to shortchange the first part of the year due to chronological distance; acclaimed films that haven’t opened yet further mess up attempts to keep the catalogue in some kind of decent order.
That said, one really can’t help looking at the various peaks and valleys of the year, especially when it comes to movies. And 2007 was indeed a pretty darn good year for the big screen.
Here’s my list, going back to the beginning of the year:
David Fincher’s taut thriller Zodiac was indeed a terrific flick, mixing a murky and quite terrifying wandering narrative about a real-life San Francisco serial killer with a down-in-the-dumps aest...
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Golden Compass Not So Golden |
 DECEMBER 9, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Pie producer and director of About A Boy, Chris Weitz, has made a mess of British author Philip Pullman’s new fantasy movie franchise The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of his popular His Dark Materials series.
The movies is a rampant traffic jam of fantasy tropes, with a dash of trendy girl-power cliches thrown in to differentiate it from all those Narnia and Harry Potter movies.
Trouble is, Weitz - who also wrote the screenplay - has utterly no feel for the greater resonance needed in this kind of fantasy stuff. And considering Pullman’s source material is sort of Lord of The Rings as reduced by a Liberal Atheist, there’s no background of ...
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Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead Strong Stuff |
DECEMBER 2, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a low-key but potent triumph for longtime director Sidney Lumet. It’s a late-in-career revival for a man who’s already committed a clutch of classics to the American Cinema Cannon, including masterworks like 12 Angry Men, Network and Murder On the Orient Express.
A domestic thriller that reveals family connections as a kind of rank poison, the film sports three thrilling performances from leads Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney. The material is relentlessly paced and deeply engaging; it’s also sometimes hard to watch, as the characters are so unredeemable you’d rather not spend much time with them.
The plotline begins with a bun...
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Sci Fi Play Doing Time Gets HFX World Premiere |
NOVEMBER 24, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Halifax will be the site of the world premiere of a new Science Fiction-themed play in the last week of November and the first day of December.
Kansas City, Missouri’s Mac Tonnies - a world-renowned author of After The Martian Apocalypse and controversial paranormalist blogger - has adapted his time-travel story Doing Time from his collection Illuminated Black with local filmmaker and theatre director Paul Kimball. The duo share stage writing credits on the hour-long play, which will run from Wednesday November 28th to December 1st at 7:30 at The Wired Monk at the corner of Morris and Hollis Streets in Halifax’s deep South End.
The three-hander play will star Kris Lee McBride as Leda, ...
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August Rush To Musical Overload |
NOVEMBER 21, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
August Rush is one of those films that seems so unbelievable you can’t imagine how it actually got made. A rhapsodic melodrama with a plot that could only fit into a lumbering 19th century opera, it takes the term ‘musical’ into a hyperventilating place that makes greeting card emotions seem sophisticated.
The story of an 11-year-old orphan who re-unites his desperately beautiful parents through the power of his music - I kid you not - August Rush also sports an industrial-strength supporting part by Robin Williams. Blending the character of Fagin from Oliver Twist with the look of Irish rock star Bono from the late 1980s, Williams chomps some significant New Yawk city scenery throughout....
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Coen Bros' No Country: Action And Irony |
NOVEMBER 18, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Coen Brothers have returned to the glories of their greatest films Fargo and Miller’s Crossing with their latest work, a screen adaptation of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country For Old Men.
Dark, taciturn and yet larded with black humour, No Country For Old Men features some bursts of spectacular violence. It also rather daringly leaves out major plot points, while knocking off at least two central characters well before the climax of the film. The result is a contemporary thriller - set in modern day Texas of 1980 - that manages to echo some of the major themes contained in some latter-day Westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and this year’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma.
...
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Ryan Gosling's Lars Is A Real Dud |
NOVEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
London, Ontario-born actor Ryan Gosling has squandered all that momentum and good will he generated from last year’s low-budget hit Half Nelson with his latest film, Lars And The Real Girl.
With a premise that starts out in John Waters’ territory - a morose young man in a midwestern, mid-winter small town falls in love with a mail-order sex doll -
Lars And the Real Girl delivers only sniggers before it collapses into a sentimental stew of Frank Capra-esque cliches.
Limply directed by Craig Gillespie - who gave us the equally bad Mr. Woodcock earlier this year - Gosling is front and centre in this gooey, excessively sentimental story that grossly distorts the contemporary view of menta...
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Norman Mailer, Author, Director 1923-2007 |
NOVEMBER 12, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The various tributes and obituaries of the great American Writer and gadfly Norman Mailer have failed, for the most part, to mention two aspects of his extraordinary contribution to the world of discourse and culture.
Along with his more obvious literary work, Mailer co-founded and co-financed, in 1955, the free weekly The Village Voice in New York City, providing content in the form of a regular column. The template of that paper would reproduced in practically every city in North America, including here in Halifax where The Coast has been a major player on the scene since 1993, directly inspired the Village Voice.
Mailer was also a maverick American Indie filmmaker in an age when it...
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Tracey Fragment Is A Triumph For Ellen Page |
NOVEMBER 11, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Advance praise and Festival Prizes hardly prepare viewers for the breathtaking quicksilver brilliance of Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Tracey Fragments.
Powered by a remarkably precise central performance by Halifax’s Ellen Page in the title role, The Tracey Fragments unfolds over multiple screenlets throughout its 80 minute length.
And while those amazingly fluid and ever-changing frames-within-frames constantly shift perspective, time, and Tracey’s own interiority, the film still adheres to a tough, disciplined storyline that allows for occasional - and quite unexpected - blasts of lyricism, humour and even joy.
Yes, the main storyline is indeed pretty grim -...
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Poor Boy's Game Is Gripping And Powerful |
NOVEMBER 8, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Poor Boy’s Game is finally getting its nation-wide commercial release after performing spectacularly on this fall’s Film Festival circuit.
The best film ever made about Halifax, and certainly one of the top Canadian films of this or any year, Poor Boy’s Game balances raw drama with a refined cinematic sensibility. The result is edge-of-your-seat cinema.
Powered by two extraordinary performances by African American star Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, To Sleep With Anger) and electrifying newcomer Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald, half-brother of 24 star Kiefer), Poor Boy’s Game delves into subject matter that few have dared to explore before.
The script - by co-producer Chaz Thorne an...
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Martian Child Not Quite There |
NOVEMBER 1, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
John Cusack is a wonderful actor. His charm can often lift a mediocre film into a higher zone altogether. Alas, even his abundant gifts falter faced with Martian Child, a drippy, sentimental and manipulative modern-day adoption story set on the West Coast.
Adapted from David Gerrold’s award-winning book, Martian Child has a delightful - if unlikely - premise. A successful Sci-fi writer who recently lost his wife, Cusack’s character is fresh, funny and unconventional. His closest friends are his harried sister (played by real-life sibling Joan Cusack) who is married with two kids and his goofy literary agent (Oliver Platt, in a pleasantly befuddled performance). Beyond that duo, the sci-fi...
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Preminger Bio A Blast |
OCTOBER 31, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Film Academic Foster Hirsch’s new biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King is - astonishingly - the first full-length biographical reconsideration of the great filmmaker ever to appear in book form.
Preminger - the Austrian Jew who assumed the role of director of the great drama impresario Max Reinhardt’s theatre operations in Vienna before eventually establishing a career as the foremost independent producer/director in the United States - has been substantially devalued as a filmmaker on the American scene for years. In Europe, his reputation is much higher.
The director of such classic film noirs as Laura, Angel Face and Whirlpool, and the producer/director of e...
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Darjeeling Disappoints |
OCTOBER 28, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Wes Anderson’s latest feature The Darjeeling Limited pretty well exhausts his slacker cinematic aesthetic. A witless road movie where three Yankee brothers wander through India in search of spiritual healing and their errant mom, the film ultimately loses its tether and floats off into space.
The audience I saw it with barely laughed through its 91 minutes of twee incoherence. Preceded by Anderson’s dour14-minute short The Hotel Chevalier, I’m afraid this former critic’s darling has just about reached the last parking spot in his artistic cul-de-sac. American Hipster film comedy was never so limp.
Shot mostly in India with a flashback side trip to New York City - the only really enjoya...
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Work on TV movie, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, starts next month |
OCTOBER 27, 2007
The film version of the best-selling book by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, will be shot in Halifax as a television movie starting November 18th.
To be directed by Mick Jackson - who helmed the widely seen MOW of the hit inspirational memoir Tuesdays With Morrie - The Memory Keeper’s Daughter will star Dermot Mulroney (Gracie) and Emily Watson, who rose to fame in the art film Breaking The Waves.
The first service production to be announced since the Premier hiked the province’s film production tax credits at the Atlantic Film Festival, this late fall/early winter shoot will keep at least one crew busy until Christmas.
The rest of the industry is waiting with baited bre...
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This Jesse James Is Long, Slow But Engrossing |
OCTOBER 25, 2007
I sincerely hope Warner Brothers isn’t willing to let The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford fizzle out on the exhibition scene across North America in the run up before Christmas.
The epic-length flick - 160 minutes long - debuted well in through the Fall Festival Circuit but can’t quite connect with audiences. That’s a shame because the film is indeed a strong one, with a dynamite cast and a determined, serious air of a substantial revisionist western.
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik and adapted from Ron Hansen’s novel, this particular tale of the James Gang centres in on the first few months of 1881 when Jesse was gunned down by Robert Ford in a landmark a...
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Home Of the Brave's Twilight |
OCTOBER 23, 2007
Hollywood veteran Irwin Winkler’s Iraq aftermath movie Home Of the Brave never really arrived in theatres across North America.
I watched it alone at a press screening a few months ago. Some lonely posters for it lined the hallways of Empire’s Bayers Lake monsterplex a couple of weeks later. Now it’s out on DVD with little fanfare.
Is it terrible? Did it deserve such movie exhibition purgatory? Well, no and yes.
With coverage on the nightly news of the carnage in Iraq providing more than enough distraction, it might simply be the case that there’s no appetite for this kind of stuff on the big screen. Especially when there’s been reams and reams of documentary material available, some...
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Across The Universe Audacious, Brilliant |
OCTOBER 19, 2007
Across The Universe is certainly an audacious idea for a film. Taking a typical love story structure and stringing it against a backdrop of the turmoil of the 1960s told through songs from the Beatles catalogue, director Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) manages to re-invigorate the cinematic form of the musical, almost by accident.
Taymor’s expertise - developed through the ground-breaking Disney Broadway production of The Lion King - in art direction and ensemble dance pieces is what really puts Across The Universe into the realm of cinematic excellence. Those particular mass setpieces - the Yale fratboy dust up set to With A Little Help From My Friends or the Army Induction sequence played o...
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Film Fest Up 18 % |
OCTOBER 18, 2007
The Atlantic Film Festival broke its own box office record in 2007 with an 18% increase in attendance, according to spokesperson Pam Todd.
The annual celebration of cinema - of which this humble correspondent is a senior programmer - brought a total of 33, 500 punters to screenings, workshops, and special events through ten days in September.
3000 people took part in the opening night Argyle Street party alone. Movies with local connections such as Poor Boy’s Game, The Hermit Of Gully Lake,
Shake Hands With the Devil, and Just Buried packed theatres, attracting waiting-list only crowds.
Programs of local shorts, animation and international works also brought in cinema fans from ar...
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Penn's Into The Wild Is Heady Stuff |
OCTOBER 16, 2007
Actor/director Senn Penn’s cinematic adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s extraordinary non-fiction chronicle Into The Wild teeters on the very precipice of cinematic greatness.
Ravishing to look at, powerfully written, and ultimately deeply affecting, its flaws are minor compared to glorious adventure that unfolds in its entirety across the big screen.
Penn’s challenge’s with the film would have seemed insurmountable. Krakauer’s best-selling book details the life and sad death of Christopher McCandless, a willful and naive just-out-of-college grad who wanders around North America after he gets his diploma. Fleeing an unhappy domestic scene and rejecting materialism, careerism and even any rom...
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Chris Marker's Two Masterpieces |
OCTOBER 15, 2007
Chris Marker’s two most important films have been collected together by Criterion. The 28-minute still-picture drama La Jetee from 1962 - it was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys - and the feature-length 1982 documentary meditation on memory, Sans Soleil (Sunless) make one powerful cinematic package indeed.
Marker’s work - mostly non-fiction - has been almost impossible to find on DVD.
A few of his flicks came out in very bad versions on VHS tape in the 1980s. I tracked down a crappy copy of his examination of the mood of Paris in the wake of the end of the Algerian war, Le Joli Mai; otherwise Marker has been a filmmaker more talked about than seen.
Seeing La Jetee and Sa...
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Weirdsville Almost There |
OCTOBER 13, 2007
Allan Moyle’s Weirdsville is one of those not-quite there films that offers almost enough to make the whole trip worthwhile.
Moyle - the Montreal-based director who specializes in intelligent ensemble youth-culture fare such as Pump Up the Volume and New Waterford Girl - tries to marry two genres together in Weirdsville. He begins with a stoner comedy, and then accelerates into an off-kilter caper flick. The result, alas, runs out of gas about three-quarters of the way through.
There are some sublime pleasures along the way, though. The cast - headed up by the former teen-idol from the Felicity TV show, Scott Speedman - sometimes push the film to an unexpected level of craziness. The ...
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AFCOOP Exhumes Arthur Lipsett |
OCTOBER 8, 2007
The Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-Op is offering a rare treat for East Coast experimental film buffs. The entry-level training organization is presenting the works of Montreal ‘found footage’ artist Arthur Lipsett over three nights this week, curated by former Halifax Film Studies teacher and filmmaker Gerda Cammaer.
Lipsett was one of those legendary ‘boy wonders’ who spun an appointment in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada’s headquarters in Montreal into a career of legendary proportions. Beginning as an animator, he fashioned a series of short films through the 1960s that were almost entirely made from leftover footage found in the NFB’s cut-out bins.
The films, beginning with Ver...
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Austen Book Club Slight But Fun |
OCTOBER 5, 2007
The Jane Austen Book Club is a glib bonbon of a movie, a glossy chick-flick that seems more like a niche marking exercise than a real film. It’s fun and diverting for the most part, but ultimately light as a feather.
Taking six characters who read six Jane Austen novels and talk about them - in sunny California, no less - while their interrelationships parallel the plots in the books does seem like identifying your audience before you start. Of course, the film itself is based on the best-selling book by Karen Joy Fowler of the same name, making the sales pitch all the more concentrated.
Calling the film an ensemble piece is being overly generous. It’s a credibility-challenged soap-ope...
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Jarmusch Films At Dal Art Gallery |
OCTOBER 3, 2007
Jim Jarmusch shock of premature white hair only ads to his mystique as one of America’s most unique and consistent cinema artists.
Mainstream movie fans may have just caught up with the laconic New Yorker with his breakthrough Bill Murray vehicle Broken Flowers from 2005. They will get a chance to view the bulk of Jarmusch’s work at a retrospective at the Dalhousie Art Gallery through the fall.
The screenings are free, but seating is limited. The series will resume on Wednesday, October 24th with Jarmusch’s third feature, Down By Law, at the Dal Art Gallery at 8:00 pm. The films Mystery Train, Night On Earth, Dead Man, Ghost Dog and Broken Flowers will follow on consecutive Wednesday...
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Vincent Price Back From The Grave |
OCTOBER 2, 2007
Vincent Price has finally received the box DVD treatment from MGM home video. On four double-sided discs you get some of the iconic actor’s most important onscreen work: seven features and three new documentaries.
The legendary actor - who arose from Studio contract playing through the 1940s and ‘50s to become a campy horror attraction through the ‘60s and ‘70s - has long been neglected by the industry, almost as much as he was loved by fans.
Working with US film pioneer Roger Corman through the aggressive indie studio American Independent Productions (AIP), Vincent Price made a series of unforgettable Edgar Allen Poe adaptations in the early 1960s that cemented both the actor and the ...
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Teshigahara's Incredible Triple Header |
SEPTEMBER 29, 2007
The Criterion Collection has knocked another one out of the park with their new collection Three Films of Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Best known as the Japanese director of the enduring and still intriguing 1964 international art-house hit Woman Of the Dunes, this new package adds 20 minutes to that classic and adds two other feature films - Pitfall and The Face Of Another - to the equation along with lengthy introductions to each film by Toronto Cinematheque curator James Quandt.
The other extras include a new documentary that examines the director’s relationship with the ultra-modernist author Kobo Abe - who wrote the three movies - and Teshigahara’s own lineage in the most important flower...
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Shake Hands Gripping Cinema |
SEPTEMBER 28, 2007
Shake Hands With the Devil is a courageous and radically unconventional film that reveals much about its producer, the Academy Award-winning producer Michael Donovan, as much as it does tell the autobiographical narrative of General Romeo Dallaire and his doomed mission to Rwanda during that country’s genocide during the mid-1990s.
Donovan reaches back to Canada’s documentary traditions to portray the Rwandan Genocide through the depiction of a situation rather than through character. Grasping for a greater veracity, Donovan shot most of the film in Rwanda where the events actually happened; he cast Tutsis and Hutus in their respective roles. Attempting to show as much of the conflict as ...
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Eastern Promises Strong But No Knockout |
SEPTEMBER 23, 2007
David Cronenberg’s new film Eastern Promises is strong, but it’s no knockout.
Following in the footsteps of a genuine masterpiece in A History Of Violence, the Toronto-based director again uses Viggo Mortensen as his central figure. This time, however, the duo move to the dank milieu of London’s Russian Mafia.
The result is a formula gangster film that sports a mesmerizing performance from Mortensen. Beyond that, Eastern Promises comes in as a mild disappointment.
Ultimately the story - of brutal slayings, sex slaves and the diary of a young woman that falls into the hands of a naive London nursemaid - can’t quite support the rich performances, superb art direction and lingering sen...
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07 Film Fest Winners Announced |
SEPTEMBER 22, 2007
The 2007 Winners at the Atlantic Film Festival have been announced. There are two juries at the Fest, one that considers local (Atlantic) work and another that looks at Canadian films from outside the region.
The Canadian Winners include Ellen Page and Bruce MacDonald, for Best Actress and Best Director in the film The Tracey Fragments. Best Short was the NFB Animated film Madame Tutli-Putli, made by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski. The Documentary winner was Bryan Friedman's portrait of his weightlifting father, The Bodybuilder And I. Quebec's Roy Dupuis picked up the award for Best Actor in the Halifax-made feature Shake Hands With the Devil.
Altantic Awards went to Chaz Thorne (for ...
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Film Classification Board Must Go |
SEPTEMBER 21, 2007
The Censor Board popped up in the news again last week in reference to NDP MLA Howard Epstein sending back a list of appointees because he found them ‘not diverse enough’.
Nova Scotians might be surprised to see that we still have a Censor Board. The reality is, it is officially named the Maritime Film Classification Board, a waste-of-time-and-money former patronage body that can only rate films and videos, not censor them. A battle with the local Canadian Press rep - started in the 1970s when the old Film Censor Board banned Last Tango In Paris - went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Censors lost. Now we can see all of Marlon Brando, whenever we want. The can’t ‘ban’ anything. They ...
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Local Shoots Pick Up |
 SEPTEMBER 21, 2007
Local writer and director Anne Verrall will shoot a low-budget feature this fall in Halifax entitled Nonsense Revolution. The movie will be produced by Halifax - based filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald through his production company Emotion Pictures.
And the Trailer Park Boys team is back in action. Writer/director Mike Clattenburg is shooting a single-hour special for Showcase TV. Meanwhile, the Trailer Park Boys feature film from last year is scheduled to open in the US in the next two months. Response to that opening will determine whether TPB shooting schedule for next year; whether it will be another special or another feature.
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NS Premier Ups Film Tax Credit |
SEPTEMBER 13, 2007
At the launch of the 2007 Atlantic Film Festival Thursday Night Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald announced exactly what many film industry reps in the audience wanted to hear: a rise in the NS Film Tax Credit.
And what a rise. From 35% to 50%, with a 5% frequent flyer bonus and an extra 10% for filming in rural areas (basically, anywhere 30 minutes out of Halifax). The possible total is 65%, something that pretty well guarantees
a competitive edge over every jurisdiction in North America.
The province's Motion Picture Production sector should prepare itself for a massive boom according to one industry insider. Hold on to your hats!
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Friday Night Lights Pretty Bright |
SEPTEMBER 12, 2007
Friday Night Lights was the most acclaimed TV series of last year’s season. Recently released on DVD in the last week of August - nearly 16 hours worth - you can catch up with the critics to by checking out the entire season in one shiny three-disc package.
I managed to catch only a few of the episodes during the season’s run. What I saw was intriguing: a show with an epic scope delivered in a relentlessly intimate shooting style. The resulting tension between the two elements made for unexpectedly vigorous television.
The revolving storylines - about a dog-eared Texas town that has only its winning high-school football team and little else to recommend it - spend more time with the bu...
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3:10 To Yuma A Solid Remake Of A Classic |
SEPTEMBER 9, 2007
James Mangold’s remake of the classic western 3:10 To Yuma has become the surprise hit prestige picture of the late summer. And no wonder. With a terrific cast and a superb script based on the original Elmore Leonard story, it’s a film that broadens and deepens - but doesn’t quite surpass - the Delmer Daves original. Add some modern-day dazzle, however, and the new version turns out to have enough kick to make Westerns matter again.
The first 3:10 To Yuma is one of those iconic ‘50s westerns that bent and stretched the form, adding an existential edge to the basic edge-of-your-seat action. The narrative concerned a dirt-poor Arizona rancher forced by economic circumstances to escort an ou...
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AFF Pick # 3: Common |
SEPTEMBER 7, 2007
One of the most powerful - but neatly restrained - indie flicks I’ve seen for the 2007 AFF is Kansas director Jeremy Fiest’s Common. A road movie that deconstructs the friendships of three twentysomething men on the cusp of adult careers, Common is a playfully formal, mesmerizingly shot and beautifully written film that firmly examines the state of here and now.
Using the dusty landscapes of middle America and shooting through a fluid video lens that plays up the yellows, browns and greens of the US heartland, Common combines a curious compassion for its characters with a love for the healing balm of wide open spaces.
And while the film’s visuals and structure reference great American ...
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AFF Pick #2: Scouts Are Cancelled |
SEPTEMBER 6, 2007
One of the cinematic marvels I watched in the programming run up to AFF ‘07 is ex-Haligonian director John D. Scott’s feature-length literary biography enigmatically titled Scouts Are Cancelled.
It’s a 72-minute portrait of the former Toronto performance poet John Stiles, a longtime friend of Scott’s who has built a minor reputation as the writer and performer of sketches steeped in the vernacular of the Annapolis Valley, where Stiles was raised.
In the main body of Scouts Are Cancelled, Scott follows Stiles on a lonely first-book tour of the Maritimes. Interspersed are some artful studio-concocted dramatic clips, and old footage from 1995 of Scott and Stiles doing the post-university ...
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AFF Pick #1: Over The GW |
SEPTEMBER 4, 2007
Amidst the hidden gems of this year’s Atlantic Film Festival is the gripping New York City rehab drama Over The GW. Written and directed by Nick Gaglia and based on a true story, it’s a powerful disturbing story set amidst the unregulated and rather dodgy sector of practical behavoir modification.
The GW stands for the George Washington bridge in the Big Apple, where a single mom sends her out-of-control teenager in a desperate attempt to get him off drugs through a rigorous 30-day retreat. His stay ends up being 2-and-a-half-years; meanwhile his sister gets sucked into the same vortex and ends up at the same rehab.
The Rehab is run by a charismatic cult-like leader named Dr. Hillier. ...
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Original 1988 Hairspray Still Better |
AUGUST 24, 2007
The movie version of the hit musical Hairspray is indeed a puzzling cinematic experience. Based on John Water’s 1988 trash classic of the same name but drained of its corrosive nature and brilliant garbage can aesthetic, the new flick is a relentlessly happy, song-and-dance simulacra of the original.
With its stunt casting in John Travolta in harmless drag and Christopher Walken doing his weird act in a film that is ultimately weirder than he could ever be, the musical Hairspray eventually declines into a vacuous marketing exercise.
The night I saw it - three weeks after its opening - the theatre was packed with mothers and their very young daughters stuffing themselves silly with ove...
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Superbad's Hilarious Summer Of Seth |
AUGUST 18, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Superbad is the best youth comedy about guys since Dazed And Confused. Relentlessly funny, surprisingly sweet, and powered by a ribald teen longing that is deliciously politically incorrect, it delivers on the comedic promise suggested by this summer’s earlier popular and acclaimed comedy, Knocked Up (which I found only mildy amusing...Knocked UP is definitely one of the season’s most overrated flicks).
In that film actor Seth Rogan portrayed a slacker dad-to-be who must leave his extended adolescence to enter in a family compact with his pregnant, ultra-professional TV host girlfriend in a world controlled by producer Judd Apatow.
Superbad sees Rogan dusting off a screenplay he penned...
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Becoming Jane: A Youthcult Reduction Of Austen |
AUGUST 10, 2007
Becoming Jane represents Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel. Since there are no Jane Austen novels left to film - a few have been already done several times, witness Pride And Prejudice - producers have scampered over the great writer’s scanty biography to concoct a new bio-pic aimed at the youth market.
Compared against some of the more successful recent Austen pictures - Sense And Sensibility or Mansfield Park, for instance - Becoming Jane is a pretty thin gruel indeed. Now I admit it might be something of a guy thing, but at the preview I attended, it was mostly older people who left through the film’s sluggish pacing and flat narrative.
Director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots...
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Vaults Open: More Film Noir |
AUGUST 10, 2007
The Fourth Volume of Film Noir: Classic Collection (just released in the last week of July, 2007) DVD set richens and deepens the Warners Brothers-driven stream of American Studio productions from the 1940s to the late ‘50s.
This batch includes 10 films on five discs, with commentaries and a featurettes both new and old. And while the extras are fun, there’s no question that the films themselves are the main attraction in this superb package.
Made by various studios but scooped up into the massive Turner collection in the 1970s - and then merged into Time Warner AOL Turner just a few years ago - the fourth volume illustrates the form neatly with a bunch of tense, one-word titles: Tensi...
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Singer/Songwriter/Producer Lee Hazlewood Dies |
AUGUST 6, 2007
The Iconic American producer, songwriter and performer Lee Hazlewood has died. He passed away on Sunday, August 4th in his home of Henderson, Nevada, from cancer.
First coming to prominence as a rockabilly writer and producer in 1956 with the hit The Fool, Hazlewood moved on to write and produce the instrumental artist
Duane Eddy, known as the ‘King of the Twang Guitar’. Embarking on his own recording career in 1963 with the bare-bones country album Trouble Is A Lonely Town, Hazlewood’s production techniques were studied by the likes of Phil Spector and Sonny Bono.
Brought in by Frank Sinatra to Reprise Records to rescue his daughter Nancy’s floundering career, Hazlewood wrote and pr...
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Simpsons Fun But Uneven |
AUGUST 2, 2007
The long-awaited Simpsons Movie is fun but uneven. Riding a wave of relief in that it isn’t a disaster, the general critical reaction to the film has been surprisingly favorable. Meanwhile, audiences have been flocking to the flick.
On first look however, the film is not really like 4 or 5 really good episodes of the long-running (18 series and counting) animated Fox series. It’s really like one very big episode, with richer colours, deeper sound design and more ambitious jokes.
With ten screenwriters credited, however, the narrative rocks from one place to another with little to anchor the pratfalls. There’s a great deal of risque humour that can’t be done on the small screen, along ...
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Reflections On Antonioni |
JULY 31, 2007
The passing of the great Italian Film Director Michaelangelo Antonioni comes as less of a shock than that of Ingmar Bergman's death yesterday. Bergman was 89 and had made a film just two years ago; Antonioni suffered a stroke more than a decade ago and could barely speak. He was 94.
Still, Antonioni's loss is a significant one for the world of film. He was a stark poet of the cinema, a courageous narrative stylist who helped expanded film's expressive possibilities.
Having worked under masters such as the Italian Neo-Realist Roberto Rossellini and the French Poetic Realist Marcel Carne, Antonioni broke into international fame with his austere modernist trilogy of L'Aventura (1960), La ...
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Ingmar Bergman Dies At 89 |
JULY 30, 2007
One of the greatest of all modern cinema directors, Ingmar Bergman, has passed away at the age of 89 at his home on the island of Faro off the coast of Sweden.
Bergman rose to international prominence in the 1950s with a string of black-and-white ensemble dramas that explored themes put forth by European existentialism. With his gloomy outlook and philosophical probing, the Swedish writer/director helped to define art-house cinema styles for the next three decades.
A man who directed theatre from September to April full time through the year for more than half a century, Bergman wrote scripts and made movies as a summer pastime. He worked with a company of actors drawn from the theatre...
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Sunshine's Pretty Hot |
JULY 27, 2007
Danny Boyle’s space opera Sunshine has finally arrived in town, trailing a raft of rotten reviews and uninspired media interest.
It might be that Joe Critic is tired of Boyle’s genre-hopping career. Sure, he wowed’em with youthcult classics like Trainspotting and the zombie landmark 28 Days Later.
Film snobs and audiences alike were less enthused with his delightful kids’ flick Millions. And his big-budget Hollywood epic The Beach was a definite misfire.
This time out, however, Boyle’s knocked one out of the park. Crossing Ridley Scott’s Alien with Tarkovsky’s Solaris - with a little bit of Kubrick’s 2001 thrown in - the British director has concocted a visually stunning, heavily p...
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Talk To Me Tops List |
JULY 25, 2007
Kasi Lemmons’ third feature, Talk To Me, is clearly her most immediate and accessible film. A fast-paced bio-pic of the Washington DJ and Television personality Petey Greene, it resembles the great recent cinematic portrait of Ray Charles in its sweeping approach to an African American man’s life and achievements.
I loved every minute of this film. Not only because I’m a big fan of Kasi Lemmons - the only African-American female to carve out a career directing films of distinction and originality in the US today - but because I didn’t know anything about Petey Greene. The film came over me as a kind of revelation.
I was aware of the context in which the story occurs. Talk To Me goes ro...
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The Dwights Delightful Despite the Title |
JULY 20, 2007
The unfortunately-titled Australian Introducing The Dwights is one of the hidden gems of this rather flat cinematic summer.
A contemporary domestic dramady built around the British actress Brenda Blethyn - a favourite of the ultra-realist director Mike Leigh - it’s a flick that summons up the ghosts of Tony Richardson’s kitchen-sink era movies The Entertainer and A Taste Of Honey from 40 years ago. Putting a female twist on the proceedings, director Cherie Nolan manages to plumb the depths of middle-age female despair while retaining something of a game face through the picture.
The result is genuinely affecting. The rather simplistic story of a domineering mother unable to let her son...
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'Just Buried' To Toronto |
JULY 18, 2007
Halifax writer and director Chas Thorne's first directed feature, Just Buried, has been invited to this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The film, shot under the title Pushing Up Daisies but forced to change its moniker when an ABC TV series with a too-close-to-it name was announced for US mainstream broadcast in the spring of 2007, will be Thorne's second script in this year's TIFF.
Earlier the rising filmmaker learned that his screenplay Poor Boys Game - directed by Clement Virgo and shot in Halifax's tough suburb of Spryfield - would also be on Toronto's list for 2007. Just Buried - along with seven other features by new directors - will unspool in TIFF's 'Canada Firs...
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African Canadian/Bermudian Director Dies |
JULY 17, 2007
Canada's East Coast Film Scene has lost one its brightest lights. Documentarian Erroll Williams has died of cancer. His passing occurred Saturday, July 14th.
Parcelling his time between Bermuda, Toronto, Nova Scotia and Fredericton in the last decade or so, Erroll Williams built up an impressive body of work. His films include Echoes Of the Rink: The Willie O'Ree Story (the first black player in the NHL) and the feature-length examination of the end of segregation in Bermuda, When Voices Rise. Both films played to enthusiastic audiences at the Atlantic Film Festival before gaining viewers right around the world.
In the '80s and early '90s Erroll Williams was one of the key figures in N...
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The Host Finally Comes To NS |
JULY 12, 2007
The Korean monster vs family movie The Host has become a genuine world-wide, border-crashing hit. Winning major hardware from the Cannes Film Festival last year and emerging as a box-office giant in South Korea and China more recently, director Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature opened wide across North America this weekend.
Except here in Halifax, of course, where acclaimed international films - the Oscar-wining German flick The Lives Of Others is a good example - often take their time to come to the Province. In this case, The Host will be playing an hour away at the Al Whittle Theatre in Wolfville on Sunday at 8pm.
Lucky for me a film industry insider smuggled in a DVD copy of The Host...
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Book Vs Film: Gods And Monsters |
JULY 9, 2007
Christopher Bram’s 1996 novel Father Of Frankenstein became Bill Condon’s Academy-Award-Winning feature film Gods And Monsters. With a paperback version of the novel - renamed to match the movie - now hitting the remainder bins, fans of filmic adaptations have a chance to compare the two.
The 1998 film remains one of the best ever about the fictional last days of a Hollywood film director. Shot on a shoestring budget in 21 days, it sports three great performances (Sir Ian MacKellan as director James Whale, Lynne Redgrave as his stern Eastern European housekeeper, and Brendan Fraser as the naive gardener) and a remarkably economical storytelling style.
Fascinatingly, the novel is far mo...
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Peter Greenaway To Speak |
JULY 8, 2007
Maverick British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has been announced as the Academy Luncheon speaker at this year’s Atlantic Film Festival Strategic Partner conference scheduled for Sunday, September 16th.
Greenaway - along with the late Derek Jarman - represents the main force of English Avante-Garde Cinema through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s and onward. He often explores the relationship between artforms - his latest film Nightwatching references the Dutch Painter Rembrandt’s most famous work - while using non-linear storytelling styles.
In films such as The Draughtsman’s Contract, In The Belly Of An Architect, A Zed And Two Noughts, Greenaway brings an opaque but ravishing visuality to the sc...
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Transformers Is Big Fun |
JULY 6, 2007
Transformers is one of those films that you really can’t knock. Adapted from the old Saturday Morning TV series - in association with Hasbro for the obligatory toy tie in - it’s long, indulgent and a bit uneven. Transformers is also funny, fast-paced and full of some of the best CG effects you’ll see all summer.
In fact, I hate to admit that I rather enjoyed the movie. And considering that film snobs tend to really detest director Michael Bay for his witless tendency to ‘blow things up real good’ (see his films Bad Boys I&II, The Rock, The Island or Pearl Harbour), Transformers is surprisingy disciplined and and effective thrill ride. It might just be Michael Bay’s best-ever film.
Per...
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Claire Danes Is Stunning In Evening |
JUNE 28, 2007
Evening is like The Hours without Virginia Woolf. Producer/screenwriter Michael Cunningham - who scored such a success with that novel-turned-screenplay a few years ago - has returned to the same territory of juggled timelines and lush romanticism for this new film, which is directed by the veteran cinematographer Lajos Koltai.
Adapted from Susan Minot’s novel - with her gaining a co-screenwriter credit - Evening is a chick flick par excellence. Set in the present and in the mid-1950s in ravishingly beautiful seaside New England, the film tells the story of love fleetingly experienced but not pursued. That puts it in the same territory as Casablanca and The Way We Were.
Mind you, Even...
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A Mighty Heart Mighty Good |
JUNE 23, 2007
Maverick British director Michael Winterbottom may have just moved into the big leagues with his latest effort, A Mighty Heart. Formerly known for a series of highly original (24 Hour Party People, The Claim) and controversial (Nine Songs, Tristam Shandy) art-house films, the English filmmaker co-wrote and directed Angelino Jolie and Brad Pitt’s vanity flick A Mighty Heart.
Well, if this is vanity, then give me more of it. Producer Brad and leading actress
Angelina have allowed Winterbottom his head when it came to style. The result is an utterly engrossing, edge-of-your-seat docu-drama that brings pathos and dignity to one of the terrible side-stories of the aftermath of 9-11.
The ex...
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FF#2: Brainless Fun |
JUNE 15, 2007
In the old Marvel Comics pantheon, the Fantastic Four were one of that company’s premium brands. It was the closest the innovative graphic art entertainment company came to pure Science Fiction; only Doctor Strange went further in its examination of philosophical, scientific and faith-based issues.
In the movie world, the Fantastic Four franchise ranks near the bottom, well below the alienated teen and twentysomething angst of Spider Man and bubbling under the popular but lumpy misfits-are-us X-Men series.
The Fantastic Four #2: The Rise Of the Silver Surfer takes one of Marvel’s most elegant and ambitious narratives - the story of the enigmatic herald to the planet-eating Galactus - a...
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McCartney's Masterpiece |
JUNE 12, 2007
I’ve lived for a week with Paul McCartney’s magnificent new album Memory Almost Full, and I’ve decided it is indeed a masterpiece.
And while Macca has had to juggle a million requests to reminisce about the 40th anniversary of the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band just a week before the release of his new disc - which unfortunately took some of the attention away from his latest release - he has taken some time to discuss the new CD on an extra disc included in the deluxe version of Memory Almost Full.
It’s a revealing discourse that makes the new release all the more poignant and powerful. Even without the 26-minute chat - there’s also a clutch of extra tunes on the bonu...
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Father Of African Filmmaking Dies |
JUNE 11, 2007
Senegalese writer/director Ousmane Sembene has died. His family announced his passing on Sunday. He had been sick since December.
Sembene was univerversally recognized as the founder of sub-Saharan African Cinema. His film Black Girl (1965) is generally considered to be the first feature written and directed by a post-colonial African of Colour. He went on to help establish the Ougadougou African Film Festival in the late 1960s while maintaining a steady output of films right up to 2004.
Born on New Year's Day, 1923, he moved from rural Senegal to the French Colony's capital Dakar when he was 14. Drafted into the French Army, he ended up employed as a dockworker in Marseilles, France, ...
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Petrie's Neptune Factor On DVD |
JUNE 10, 2007
The first of three Nova Scotia-shot films by legendary Hollywood director Daniel Petrie, Sr. has finally resurfaced on DVD. The undersea adventure The Neptune Factor is now available through 20th Century Fox.
And while it’s by no measure Petrie’s best film, it was one of his most financially successful, opening wide in 1973 and continuing on in television broadcasts right up to the modern-day. With a cast that included Ernest Borgnine, Ben Gazzara, Yvette Mimieux and Saint John, New Brunswick’s Walter Pidgeon, the film set the trend for Canadian filmmaking practices for years (use a mix of American and international stars to access co-production money; make a specific action-style genre f...
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Production Slows |
JUNE 9, 2007
2007 is not turning out to be a banner year in Nova Scotia’s film production scene.
There’s a number of factors at work here. The industry is naturally cyclical, and 2006 was very busy - three local features, a major mini-series, three TV movie service productions, and a gigantic sci-fi shoot that lasted into mid-January of this year - so it’s not that much of a surprise 2007 would be an off-year.
Still, things are much slower than your average ‘down’ year. The ACTRA strike didn’t help; neither did the squabbling over the CTF (Canadian Television Fund) which broke out in the winter (it recently flared up again). The giant consolidations of broadcast media certainly casts a shadow over...
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Bluenose Flicks At Spanish Hemp Fest |
JUNE 8, 2007
Two Nova Scotia films have made it into the first World Marajuana Film Festival in Ibiza, Spain. The feature comedy by Afterdark Productions, A Bug And A Bag Of Weed, and director Connie Littlefield’s recent made-for-Global TV documentary ‘The Damage Done: The Drug War Odyssey’ recently unspooled in the Spanish Resort from May 28 to May 30th.
One Halifax actor involved in A Bug And A Bag Of Weed, Shawn Duggan, was overheard to say that he was delighted to have been dubbed into ‘Spanish for the first time!’. The versioning opens up the vast Hispanic market of South and Central America and the southern American states to the raucous controlled-substance comedy.
A Bug And A Bag Of Weed wa...
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Knocked Up: I'm Not Knocked Out.... |
JUNE 4, 2007
Judd Apatow’s contemporary reconciliation comedy Knocked Up has the Hollywood hype machine in overdrive. Even hard-bitten big-city critics are foaming at the mouth over this two-hour and ten-minute cinematic trifle;
it’s truly shocking to see once-sensible people lose their heads when confronted with a film that purports to reveal domestic North American realities.
Just because it doesn’t sport super-heroes or big explosions, Knocked Up is hardly the modern-day version of Italian Neo-Realism. And considering that while it’s a comedy, films in this tradition of marital will-they-or-won’t-they-break-up Amerian cinema narrative (Kramer Vs Kramer,Ordinary People, Terms Of Endearment) usually...
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Severence: One Smart Slasher Flick |
JUNE 1, 2007
The British slasher film Severence follows in the smart-alek footsteps of UK hits such as Shaun Of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It’s a smart, self-conscious popcorn movie that knowingly states its conventions while adding elements of pointed contemporary social criticism.
Severence certainly starts out originally. It savagely satirizes corporate culture before itself descending into the basic ‘kill everybody off’ conventions of the slasher genre.
Still, the humour embedded in film often offsets director Chris Smith’s more obvious eepy-creepy plot choices. The simple story also lets things accelerate nicely, with seven employees of a multi-national munitions corporation taking on a team-build...
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Goodis Resurfaces |
MAY 29, 2007
David Goodis is one of the most intriguing of all serie noire writers. Best known for providing the source material for a string of fascinating movies - Truffaut’s early 1960s French New Wave masterpiece Shoot the Piano Player, the 1948 Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, and Jacques Tourneur’s 1956 noir Nightfall - his work has been out of print for the most part since his death in 1967 at the age of 50.
This year sees the first international Goodis conference on his life and work. And best of all, several of his books are resurfacing. I recently tore through his mid-1950s Jamaican-set marriage meltdown tome The Wounded and the Slain, recently republished after 50 years by the Hard Cas...
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Late Spring Sees Rash Of Live Drama |
MAY 27, 2007
Late Spring is traditionally a slow month for Nova Scotia’s live drama scene. Many of the province’s bigger companies use the six weeks leading up to July for putting together their summer stock programs, usually leaving a bit of a gap in the schedule for theatre fans.
Well, this year is clearly no usual year. Late May will see productions from Neptune’s Pre-Professional Studio Program (Blood Wedding by Lorca), a new piece from the Irondale Company (Deconstructing Work), a couple of new shows from the renowned puppet company Mermaid (Swimmy&Frederick, Inch By Inch) which will play in Windsor in early June and then only come to Halifax in September.
June will see Norm Foster’s musical J...
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NSFDC To Screen Sci Fi Docs |
MAY 27, 2007
The Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation is sponsoring a free screening of two recent sci-fi-oriented documentaries - Best Evidence and Famous Monster - at the Oxford Theatre at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, May 30th.
Both works were made by filmmakers based here in the province. Paul Kimball’s Best Evidence looks at the top ten UFO cases of all time, using experts such as Stanton Friedman, Mac Tonnies and Nick Pope for commentary. The documentary was made for the specialty service Space: The Imagination Channel, and follows in the footsteps of a film Kimball made last fall for the same outlet entitled Fields Of Fear which looked at the phenomenon of cattle mutilations and the possibility of ...
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Nuts & Gum Debut: Glib and Smug |
MAY 26, 2007
The first production of yet another new Halifax-based theatre company is a bit of dud, I’m afraid. One Good Marriage - penned by Toronto television writer Sean Reycraft and directed by Exodus Theatre alumnus Darcy Lindzon for Nuts And Gum Theatre at the Bus Stop space on Gottingen Street - is a plodding exercise in self-satisfied writing and unimaginative stagecraft.
A two-person play which magnifies all the problems of having just two people on stage, One Good Marriage is a wink-wink, nudge nudge sitcom-style piece of writing that has the two characters (a man and his wife, she teaching High School English and he the librarian in the same school) trading lines continuously like an out-of...
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Waitress A Melancholy Masterpiece |
MAY 25, 2007
If Jim Jarmusch remade Like Water For Chocolate in Atlanta, it might look and sound a bit like the late Adrienne Shelley’s marvelous third feature Waitress.
Shelly - once one of indie film icon Hal Hartley’s stock acting company - was tragically murdered last fall in New York City as she was putting the final post-production touches to her latest opus, which she both wrote and directed.
The film stars former Television waif-in-waiting Keri Russell (Felicity) as a deft pie-making waitress named Jenna in a nameless Southern American town. Kind, good-hearted and extraordinarily beautiful, she’s trapped in a abusive marriage with a truly scary brute. Finding herself pregnant, she falls in ...
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Shrek 3: A Franchise Out Of Gas |
MAY 18, 2007
Shrek might just be one feature cartoon franchise that has finally run out of gas. The latest installment, Shrek The Third, is a shrill and shallow exercise in pop culture re-and-deconstruction that takes the iconoclastic tale of the friendly ogre to a place that’s fit only for shilling plush toys and fast-food action figures.
Sure, there’s a couple of funny jokes - along with a trio of send-ups (dinner theatre, new age psychobabble and musical theatre) that are festooned with some juicy statire - but for the most part Shrek The Third looks and sounds second-rate.
MInd you, I’ve never been much of a fan of computerized animated features. The figures still look and move like robots. And...
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Away From Her: A Solid Snooze |
MAY 16, 2007
I must be the only person in the world who thought that Sarah Polley’s feature film writing and directing debut, Away From Her, was a solid snooze.
Sure, it’s got two wonderful actors at its core in Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. And yes, it’s adapted from a deeply moving Alice Munro short story.
But the film looks and sounds like some disease-of-the-week TV movie. Seeing it reap all those hosannas from the media reveals the ugly herd instinct that sometimes affects critics and other sundry film snobs when they search for some non-existent middlebrow middle ground amidst all those comic-book and zombie movies that are monopolizing the multiplex screens nowadays.
Just because Awa...
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Good But Not Great: 28 Weeks... |
MAY 11, 2007
28 Weeks Later is the inspired sequel to the hit British zombie flick of a few years back, 28 Days Later. While not quite as sharply drawn or gripping as that first film, the new movie does have some substantial charms.
Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo concentrates on a fluid, blurry and often very elegant cinematic palette that makes use of many ballet-like aerial shots and a few stark birds-eye-view compositions. And while there’s lots of blood, there’s very little gore, making the film less fixated on the rapid deterioration of bodies than most zombie flicks.
It’s an oddly poetic sci-fi film that trades in elements of the horror genre for that of a military thriller. There’s also s...
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Foghorn's Precise 'Timing' |
MAY 9, 2007
Halifax’s Foghorn Theatre has returned to form with a delightful staging of contemporary New York playwright David Ive’s short play symposium All In the Timing.
The company has tackled Ives before. A few years back they delivered a sparkling version of the two-hander Ancient History in an upstairs bar on Barrington Street. Now after wandering off into the rather stiff and overly serious theatrical territory of Judith Thompson (White Biting Dog) and Albert Camus (The Just), the no-budget troupe is back where it belongs in the realm of rapid-fire comedy.
Halifax witnessed a spectacular production of All In the Timing almost a decade back when the late Patrick Christopher - to whom this s...
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Jim Pane's Muddled Ballad |
MAY 5, 2007
The Ballad Of Jim Pane at the Eastern Front’s On The Waterfront Festival is a curiously muddled, thinly-disguised fictional retelling of the sad life and moderately successful career of ‘singing journalist’ Phil Ochs.
Standing in for Ochs - whose descendant objected to an earlier version of the play using the folksinger’s name - is ambitious and glib 1960’s ‘protest’ singer named Jim Pane whose showbiz track parallels that of Ochs almost exactly.
Portrayed by West Coast musician and actor Zachary Stevenson, Jim Pane sways and bops to the broadside ballads and political sing-a-longs like a member of the Beatles; ultimately we never get to know who this person really is. With his strong,...
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Spider 3 Swings |
MAY 4, 2007
While the majority of serious film critics seem to have turned thumbs down on Sam Raimi’s third and latest installment in the Spider Man movie franchise,
audiences and populist reviewers have lost none of their enthusiasm for the comic-book flick which constitutes the first of this year’s summer blockbusters.
Oddly enough, I found Spiderman 3 to be the most successful of what many consider to be the best of all motion picture comic book adaptations. Mind you, with three villains, a love triangle, and a thankfully unexplained substance from outer space that takes the titular hero to the dark side, the film is jam-packed with enough plot to power three separate movies.
At 140 minutes, y...
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Disturbia's Arresting Teenage Snoops |
APRIL 30, 2007
Disturbia has been topping the box-office charts for the last two weekends in the big lead-up to the spring blockbusters; Spider Man 3 opens this Friday, sure to end the film’s stratospheric ascendancy.
Cleverly marketed as Rear Window for teens, the film’s premise is indeed pretty darn good. A kid named Kale, on house arrest, thinks he sees a serial killer next door in the leafy suburbs of some nameless American city. He, his goofy Korean-American pal and the sexy girl next door investigate. Thrills and hilarity then take place, along with a mild love story.
Hmm, sounds like Rear Window. But without James Stewart, Grace Kelley, Raymond Burr and Thelma Ritter--and Hitchcock’s more forc...
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Thieves Like Us A Classic |
APRIL 26, 2007
One of Robert Altman’s lost 1970s classics has finally resurfaced on DVD.
Thieves Like Us, the Kansas-born filmmaker’s depression-era set love story starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, is now out on a low-budget, no-frills home video version from 2oth Century Fox. The only real extra is a commentary track from Altman, recorded before his death last fall.
Thieves Like Us is actually a remake of Nicholas Ray’s first feature film, They Live By Night, from 1949. The difference between the two films is fascinating.
Ray’s film is in black and white; Altman’s is in colour. They Live By Night is a terse rural film noir that morphs into torrid, tragic love story; Thieves Like Us is a la...
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Hot Fuzz A Comic Masterpiece |
APRIL 21, 2007
For most North Americans, Hot Fuzz is just the follow up film to the quirky British zombie comedy Shaun Of the Dead. Little do many audiences suspect - on this side of the pond, at least - that the dreadfully titled Hot Fuzz is an English comic powerhouse, an inspired cross between the original Wicker Man and all those formula buddy cop movies the big American Studies cranked out and ran to ground through the ‘80s and ‘90s from Lethal Weapon to Training Day.
Considering that Shaun Of the Dead was a charming 20-minute sketch dragged out to feature length, Hot Fuzz should, by rights, have no more than 30 minutes of decent material. Instead, writer/actor Simon Pegg and writer/director
Edgar...
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Bava Box A Horror Gem |
APRIL 21, 2007
Anchor Bay has done horror film fans a big favour by collecting up five cleaned up versions of the Italian master filmmaker and special effects wizard Mario Bava’s most important films.
Dating from the early and mid-1960s, these are some of the most influential of all Italian films. While art-cinema snobs were endlessly discussing the then contemorary and very groundbreaking works of Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini and the like, those directors were actually watching and quoting from Bava’s films for their exquisite art direction and bravura use of colour.
The five titles included in the package - entitled The Mario Bava Collection, Volume One - include Black Sunday, Black Sabb...
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CBC TV to Show 30 Takes |
APRIL 18, 2007
CBC Television on the East Coast will use the schedule interruptions provided by the NHL Hockey Playoffs to broadcast the hour-long omnibus documentary Thirty Takes: Thirty Years of Independent Filmmaking in Atlantic Canada.
Directed by Chuck Lapp and Walter Forsyth, Thirty Takes brings together short films by the likes of Thom Fitzgerald, Bill MacGillivray, Sylvia Hamilton and the late Helen Hill, all to celebrate three decades of the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-Op in Halifax.
Thirty Takes will show on CBC Maritimes from 7:00 to 8:00 pm, Thursday April 19th, 2007.
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Lives Good But Over-rated |
APRIL 18, 2007
By now, the German film The Lives Of Others has piled up enough awards and accolades to make it one of the most acclaimed international movies of the last few years.
And while it’s a solid entry in the long-simmering creative renewal of the German Film scene, The Lives Of Others is edging dangerously into the realm of the over-rated.
Long - two hours and 17 minutes - and glacially paced, it’s a film that is more necessary than good. Exorcising some of the final ghosts held behind the Iron Curtain, the intricate domestic espionage flick reveals just how destructive and coercive Communist regimes were in maintaining control over their populations.
And while it’s hard to believe that o...
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Pathfinder Passes the Comic-to-Screen Test |
APRIL 14, 2007
Pathfinder is the latest entry in the graphic novel to big screen sweepstakes.
Like the Spartans vs Persians epic 300, Pathfinder takes off from a basic historical scenario to follow a relentless action-oriented path.
The result is surprisingly effective. Despite some historical lapses - the film was clearly shot on the West Coast of Canada, even though it’s supposed to be set in Newfoundland or further down the East Coast somewhere around 900 AD - Pathfinder is a tight, exciting rendering of a little-known episode from North America’s murky pre-Columbus history.
Making a film with nearly no dialogue is something of a challenge. Director Marcus Nispel compensates by playing up a cool ...
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Re-Animator Re-Animated |
APRIL 12, 2007
Renowned horror film director Stuart Gordon - who shot a film with Irish actor Stephen Rea in Saint John, New Brunswick, entitled Stuck, last fall - has received the deluxe DVD reissue treatment from Anchor Bay for his 1985 camp gore-fest Re-Animator.
Adapted from an H. P. Lovecraft story, the 85-minute splatter masterpiece has been spiffed up with commentaries, missing scenes and crew biographies. The major extra attraction is a second disc which sports a thorough and engrossing 70-minute documentary detailing the genesis of the project and its ultimate impact. There’s also storyboards, scripts and the original short story included.
Gordon’s background in theatre - he was the longtime...
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Grindhouse Glory |
APRIL 9, 2007
Grindhouse, the long-awaited double-bill collaboration from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, is just about what you’d think it would be. A tribute to and evocation of early-’70s inner-city and drive-in cinema trash, it’s two separate films (Rodriguez’ Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof) with four goofy previews in between. Appended to the prints in Canada is Halifax-based filmmaker Jason Eisenor’s preview contest winner, Hobo With A Shotgun, which is worth the price of admission alone.
Reviews of Grindhouse have generally been mixed. Most state that the Tarantino - the second part of the double-bill - is better than the Rodriguez. I’m betting that many of those reviewers sim...
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Samuel Fuller's 'Face' |
APRIL 4, 2007
There are only a handful of truly great memoirs in the cinema. Chaplin’s My Autobiography is one, going from the Dickensian misery of London’s Poor Houses to the status of an international icon. Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern is another, full of vivid remembrances of a life in theatre and film, illuminated by brutal honesty. Kurosawa, Renoir and Bunuel have written terrific volumes. And so has Elia Kazan, whose 800-page tome is an adventure in itself.
Joining this elite cadre of great cinematic memoirs is Samuel Fuller’s 600-page autobiography titled The Third Face. The globe-trotting American director passed away in 1997 after making 29 tough-as-nails dramatic feature films on ultra-...
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Reaping Cliches |
APRIL 3, 2007
What Hillary Swank and Stephen Rea are doing in a blustery, Devil-By-Numbers clunker like The Reaping only is something only their agents might be able to explain.
Stephen Hopkins’ Louisiana-set contemporary supernatural thriller treads some of the same apocalyptic ground as The Omen and its various sequels and remakes, only this time with a couple of female leads. Hopkins - best known for helming multiple episodes of the hit TV series ‘24’ and for directing a clutch of big-budget bombs like Blown Away, The Ghost In the Darkness and the dreadful bigscreen version of camp ‘60s series Lost In Space - telegraphs almost every scary moment in The Reaping, making the film a tedious series of s...
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Metamorphic Scores |
APRIL 1, 2007
On Saturday I managed to catch Metamorphic Theatre’s 50-minute original 5-person play Creatures Of the Moment at the Space on Agricola Street.
I should declare my conflicts of interests up front. I know several of the people involved in the production; one of the principals of Metamorphic Theatre who starred in the play, Sam Madore, works for the Atlantic Film Festival as I do.
Those entanglements are common in a place like Halifax, where the arts community is really like a gossipy small town.
Still, I’d like to offer a few opinions on the play, which I think is a notable production.
Creatures Of the Moment - written by first time playwrights Ryan Turner and Sarah Mian - was ligh...
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The Host A Superior Creature Feature |
MARCH 29, 2007
The Korean monster vs family movie The Host has become a genuine world-wide, border-crashing hit. Winning major hardware from the Cannes Film Festival last year and emerging as a box-office giant in South Korea and China more recently, director Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature opened wide across North America this weekend.
Except here in Halifax, of course, where acclaimed international films - the Oscar-wining German flick The Lives Of Others is a good example - often go missing in action.
Lucky for me a film industry insider smuggled in a DVD copy of The Host which looks suspiciously like it came directly from South Korea. Whatever its origins, I’m thrilled to say that the wave of hyp...
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Amazing Grace Moving And Powerful |
MARCH 27, 2007
Michael Apted’s genuinely moving and informative movie treatise on the struggle to end Britain’s slave trade - titled Amazing Grace after the hymn - is one of the best historical films of this or any year.
Centred around the charismatic performance of Ioan Gruffudd as tireless dynamo reformer William Wilberforce, the film moves with a fluid grace and powerful forward motion that makes all the political ins and outs of the nearly 20-year campaign seem like swift moves in some strange parliamentary chess game.
Helped along by a virtual army of stellar thespians - Albert Finney as John Newton, Rufus Sewell as Thomas Clarkson, Yossou N’Dour, Michael Gambon, Toby Jones and Bill Paterson amo...
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Donovan's Memoir Brings Back '60s |
MARCH 25, 2007
Once considered the flakiest of ‘60s singer/songwriters, British musician Donovan - perhaps the first to be known by a single name only along with Cher and Melanie - has again followed in Bob Dylan’s footsteps by releasing a vivid volume of memoirs.
The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man sees the artist previously known as Mr. Leitch reaching back to a hardscrabble 1950s Glasgow childhood to kick off his own journey to fleeting international fame and influence.
After initially being tagged as ‘the new Dylan’, Donovan’s jazzy blend of folk, blues and pop eventually formed an original psychedelic style that left a clutch of albums acclaimed as international classics. Four (Sun...
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Irish Civil War Flick Strong But Limited |
MARCH 24, 2007
British director Ken Loach’s latest, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is one of his most anticipated. A big winner at last year’s Cannes Awards, the chronicle of two crucial years in the Irish War of Independence and its immediate aftermath in the early 1920s has been widely acclaimed for its intimate portrayal of the true cost of conflict.
Loach - who cut his teeth along with Mike Leigh in the ultra-realist school of British filmmaking - takes a low-key approach to the story. Consequently, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is bottom-up version of the story told by Neil Jordan’s 1996 Irish Rebellion and Civil War film, Michael Collins. While Jordan used a wider scope (from 1916 to 1922) and...
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Neptune's Season Launch Amidst March Theatre Flood |
MARCH 22, 2007
Neptune’s 2007-2008 Season has been announced. It will consist of
William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, David Hare’s The Verticle Hour, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Dan Needles’ Wingfield’s Inferno, William Nicholson’s The Retreat From Moscow, and the big musical season-closer The Producers from Mel Brooks all on the main Fountain Stage.
The Studio Series will consist of the One Light Theatre co-pro The Veil, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, and the visiting Tarragon Theatre production of Rosa Laborde’s Leo.
The end of March sees a veritable flood of theatre in Nova Scotia. Two Harold Pinter plays (The Lover in Wolfville and Antigonish and Old Times at Neptune’s Studio), Sarah Kane’s ...
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Sharkwater An Edge Of Your Seat Treat |
MARCH 21, 2007
Robert Stewart’s environmentally-minded debut feature film Sharkwater has been getting the big push from distributors Alliance Atlantis lately and no wonder.
A virtually unclassifiable non-fiction film that starts out as a natural history documentary and then develops into an international political thriller, Sharkwater is visually intoxicating, unexpectedly gripping and utterly original.
The film’s irresistible blend of an unlikely argument - the beauty and necessity of sharks in the global ecosystem - mixed with Stewart’s own extraordinary travels and travails, makes the film a fascinating watch.
An underwater cameraman by trade, Stewart’s restrained physical stature, chiselled f...
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This Fido's A Dog |
MARCH 19, 2007
Andrew Currie’s horror satire Fido is one dead dog of a film. Filmed in British Columbia with a couple of American and one British star, it’s a Canadian film that tries a little too hard to be funny and original.
The trouble is, it’s neither. I don’t think I laughed once. I can just imagine how it was pitched to Telefilm Canada: ‘you see, it’s a genre film, sort of a cross between
Dawn Of the Dead with Far From Heaven - a ‘50s domestic satire spoofing corporate control, conformity and the pathetic male in Canadian movies...imagine Douglas Sirk directing Invasion Of the Body Snatchers’.
Unfortunately, the bureaucrats at Telefilm Canada don’t really know what genre films are. No wonder i...
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Lockpick Pornography Opens Doors |
MARCH 18, 2007
Joey Comeau’s internet novel Lockpick Pornography is a genuine hit.
The Halifax author - still in his twenties - put up the first seven chapters of the book online for free. If you want to find out what happens in the end, you can purchase the final few chapters from the web.
I bought a copy the old-fashioned way from a bookshop on Spring Garden Road.
The novel - barely 100 pages of rather large print - is a quick, engrossing read.
Comeau’s storytelling abilities seem to be strongest when attempting to describe the shifting realities of contemporary youth culture. His main character mixes antique punk attitude with modern-day queer theory critiques.
The result is a fast-paced to...
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