FREE CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISE BLOGS

BLOGS

Search
NOW SHOOTING
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.



LINKS

Now Shooting Archive
Whit Stillman Sputters Back With 'Damsels'
MAY 8, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American Indie filmmaker Whit Stillman returns to the big screen with Damsels In Distress, his first feature since 1998.

The comedy stylist--who specializes in portraying witty college-age twentysomethings who channel the 1930s while living from the 1990s onward--found the alternative movie funding well coming up dry for more than a decade.

How Damsels In Distress got made is a mystery. The script is a mess. Stillman simply gives up on the storyline towards the end, staging two hopeless--and very different--dance numbers to rush the film to a close.

Still, his trademark deadpan humour is abundant throughout, making the rambling narrative amusing enough to occasionally sparkle.

A...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Detention Is Brilliant, Innovative And Hilarious
APRIL 24, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Former Coast Film writer Mark Palermo has realized what most critics can dream about: co-writing a major Hollywood movie.

And what a movie. Detention can be described as a high-school slasher comedy drama with a time-travel element. That is, however, barely adequate to encapsulate an exceptionally intelligent, genre-blending teen comedy whose scope challenges many of the conventions of moviemaking itself.

Music Video director Joseph Kahn co-wrote and directed Detention, and the filmmakers lucked out in casting The Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson as the leading man. Consequently, the film bristles with energy, wit and a sense of quivering up-to-dateness that accelerates well past the ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

A Separation Chronicles Two Hours Of Pettiness
MARCH 20, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, A Separation left me with a definite case of wanting a little less.

With its descriptions rather strangely running to ‘mystery’ and ‘thriller’, audiences might want to know what they are in for in A Separation. What they get is endless squabbling in an oppressive, backward country that ultimately leads nowhere.

On the other hand, Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhad does manage tight formal control over the film; the actors are very convincing; and its story does linger right up to the end of its rather lengthy 123 minutes.

So don’t be fooled by the synopsis that states that A Separation is a story about a couple who must ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

John Carter Is One Of the Great Sci-Fi Fantasies of the Decade
MARCH 9, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The first big blockbuster of 2012, John Carter has been hit with some real turbulence in a slew of terrible reviews from across several continents.

Attacked as long, fatuous, silly, bloated and just plain ridiculous, the 250 million dollar Disney epic might just be all of those things. It’s also a vastly entertaining trip into the Edwardian Imagination, complete with some utterly ravishing fantastical visions that reveal a startling originality derived from Edgar Rice Burrough’s vivid imagination.

At 132 minutes--complete with a framing device set in the 1880s that looks back even further to the American Civil War--John Carter sometimes takes time to achieve liftoff. There’s no questio...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Coriolanus Is Brisk And Brutal
MARCH 4, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Ralph Fiennes stars in and directs one of the most potent Shakespeare adaptations in recent memory, Coriolanus.

Set in modern-day costume with plot points revealed in flash video a la CNN or You Tube, the tale of a military leader spurned and banished by his own populace comes to life in brisk, brutal fashion, complete with glorious Shakespearian poetry intact.

That means this particular Bard-On-Screen effort might be tough going for mass audiences. Coriolanus is hardly a sympathetic character, and his attitude shifts are almost as shocking as the unsparing violence depicted in the film.

Still, this is bracing stuff, filmed in Belgrade, Serbia where NATO bombs from more than a deca...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Goon Is The Best English Canadian Hockey Move Ever
FEBRUARY 25, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Goon is the best English-Canadian hockey movie ever. With a muted reaction from the likes of urban alternative presses across the country--who generally hate or ignore sports--the fiesty feature is getting a rough ride in its initial release from critics all across the board.

Too bad, I say. Sure, it’s got violence--what bigscreen movie these days doesn’t, from The Iron Lady to Albert Nobbs--but what sets Goon apart is its sweetness and humour, and its absolute dead-on depiction of Canada’s obsessive hockey culture.

From the tacky team uniforms to the beer-drenched after-game parties to the endless travel amidst swirling snowflakes and displaced multicultural players, Goon captures the...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Wim Wenders' Pina Is A Classic Dance Movie
FEBRUARY 10, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Wim Wenders latest feature-length non-fiction film has already picked up enough acclaim to warrant an Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary.

Entitled Pina, after the late German choreographer Pina Bausch who died in 2009 when the film was in pre-production, the movie just happens to be one of the all-time great dance films of all time.

In fact, it might also happen to be one of the best docs of any sort of all time. Shot in 3-D to make more vivid use of the extraordinary spaces where the dances are set, Pina is an entrancing film that sees Wenders breaking new ground just like he did in the Buena Vista Social Club, the first major doc to be shot on video.

Delivering some of Pina’s b...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Albert Nobbs Is Poignant, Provocative
FEBRUARY 4, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American actress Glenn Close is seeing her reverse drag drama Albert Nobbs pick up some serious steam now that the gender-blending costumer has snagged an Oscar Nomination for her sinuous, stoic performance.

Playing a woman dressed as a male waiter in a cosy Dublin Hotel sometime back in the murky days of the pre-automobile world, Albert Nobbs blends elements of Upstairs, Downstairs with a frank examination of Ireland’s various layers of repression in the lead up to independence from Britain.

The result is a curious and unlikely story that begins with issues of gender, moves over to questions about class, and ends in a flurry of furniture and finery.

Director Rodrigo Garcia--not on...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Artist Is A Fun But Slight Throwback
JANUARY 22, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Artist is one of those films that can’t help not living up to its own avalanche of hype. Sure, it’s silent--mostly--and in black and white. Yes, it’s lively and at times kinda fun, in an in-joke, wink-and-nudge-way. Mostly, however, The Artist is a tepid retelling of the old A Star Is Born story that is ultimately pretty slight.

The tale of a capital-E Entertainment personality declining while a youngster rises all wrapped around their love story has been filmed three times before (in 1935, 1954 and 1976) and is itself based on the true-life biographies of Halifax’s Ruby Keeler and The Jazz Singer star Al Jolson, who were married for 18 years. Making the story fresh would be a challen...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

A Dangerous Method Disappoints
JANUARY 18, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) David Cronenberg’s latest feature film A Dangerous Method is a curiously under-powered and reverential bio-pic that seems more Masterpiece Theatre than mainstream movie.

A true story set at the dawn of psychoanalysis in Vienna when Sigmund Freud and his then follower Carl Jung were charting out a whole new understanding of human behavior, A Dangerous Method is beautifully crafted but only occasionally engaging.

Alas, for such a groundbreaking and strikingly original filmmaker like Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method seems tame and restrained to the point of cinematic lethargy.

Even with some discreet kinky sex and a jaw-jutting performance from Keira Knightley, this historical drama seem...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Iron Lady: Streep's Amazing, Script Is Not
JANUARY 12, 2012 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Meryl Streep’s astonishing performance in The Iron Lady is sure to gain her the usual torrent of acclaim. She’s more Thatcher than Margaret herself.

Arch, sharply poised, and encased in a dollop of hair that looks like it could survive a nuclear attack unmussed, Streep’s Margaret Thatcher is a remarkable physicalization of a modern-day icon.

The film, alas, is a hopeless muddle of feminist cliches pitched against cartoon history. The result is an unbalanced mess that reduces the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain to a two-dimensional sketch.

Director Phyllida Lloyd--who somehow made a watchable movie out of the scrambled ABBA musical Mamma Mia--makes Margaret Thatcher seem...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Almodovar's Disaster: The Skin I Live In
DECEMBER 7, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has delivered the first real dud of his mature career in The Skin I Live In.

A stiff venture into stale genre filmmaking, this Mad Scientist-gone-wrong flick features recycled storylines from previous Almodovar films, along with lots of really bad sex.

Starring a completely lost Antonio Banderas--who is much more entertaining as the voice of the animated hero Puss In Boots--The Skin I Live In puts forth a barely comprehensible narrative of a brilliant surgeon who kidnaps a young man, gives him a sex change and turns him/her into his captive lover. Yuck.

While there are echoes of films like Bad Education (identity transformation) and Talk To Her (love a...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Hugo A Holiday Delight
DECEMBER 1, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Master Cineaste Martin Scorsese’s latest feature, Hugo, is a fascinating detour into family film territory. Leisurely paced, thoughtful and visually dazzling, it’s the kind of movie that makes for ideal holiday viewing.

And while it might be a bit slow for today’s kids, there’s no question that the film--based on Brian Selsnick’s Caldecott-Winning 2008 graphic novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret--is a beautifully rendered piece of cinema that acts as a love letter to the early days of the movies.

Set in 1930s Paris at The City Of Light’s main train station, Scorsese weaves a dense visuality of clocks, watches and mechanical knicknacks to establish a breathtaking physicalization of time....  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Melancholia A Masterpiece
NOVEMBER 25, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Lars Von Trier’s latest, Melancholia has been overshadowed by some unfortunately comments he made at this year’s Cannes Festival.

That’s too bad, because Melancholia ranks as one of his very best films, a deeply moving and brilliantly original blend of science fiction, psychological study and inter-family dynamics.

Taking on a musical form--of overture plus two movements--Trier moves from symbolism to realism back to stylization in a mesmerizing two hours and ten minutes. The film itself feels like a crisp 90.

With a stunning cast--which could describe practically all of his latterday films--including Kristen Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the leads, with Kiefer Sutherland, Alex...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

J. Edgar Fascinating But Flawed
NOVEMBER 12, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Clint Eastwood has made yet another flawed but fascinating bio-pic, this one built around a powerhouse performance from Leonardo DiCaprio as longtime FBI director J.Edgar Hoover.

Simply titled J. Edgar and wandering a bit at 137 minutes, the film’s acting and direction are superb. It’s the script--by Harvey Milk’s Dustin Lance Black--that displays the weakness of what could be considered a rather strange narrative strategy.

Lance Black weaves back and forth in time, mostly from the 1920s and ‘30s to the 1960s and ‘70s, with a conceit that the title character is dictating his official memoirs to a series of FBI writers. This jolting approach makes for some nice temporal matches, but oft...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Depp Charges Into Gonzo Rum Diary
NOVEMBER 1, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Rum Diary is not a great film. It is, however, a delightful one that re-establishes a great writer/director--Withnail&I’s Bruce Robinson--under the guise of a Johnny Depp romp derived from an autobiographical Hunter S Thompson novel.

Depp again plays the late Gonzo journalist--as he did in Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas--with a deadpan charm that practically carries the movie by itself. Add an exotic time and location--Puerto Rico in 1960--and plenty of cool cars, sexy girls and an abundance of controlled substances being abused, and you get a surprisingly bouncy adventure tale placed in the year just before the James Bond film series got launched.

Sure, The Rum Dia...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Down the Road Again: Surprisingly Sweet&Satisfying
OCTOBER 21, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Legendary Canadian Filmmaker Don Shebib has done the unthinkable. He’s made a sequel to his 1970 low-budget, ultra-realist Canuck cinema landmark, Goin’ Down the Road.

And surprise, surprise. It’s a pretty darn great ride. Titled Down the Road Again, it ties up all the loose ends of the first film while adding an enormous amount of backstory, all wrapped up in a warm and moving emotional package.

Of course, Down the Road Again is a completely different kind of film. While the characters are the same, this is a reconciliation story rather than an open-ended naturalistic examination of despair. The road, consequently, reverses direction from East to West to West to East. And while the la...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Martin Scorsese Looks At George Harrison
OCTOBER 11, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Martin Scorsese’s latest project is a 208-minute examination and celebration of Beatle George Harrison’s life and Work for the pioneering TV channel HBO.

Like his PBS opus on Bob Dylan entitled No Direction Home, George Harrison: Living In the Material World is a rambling, insightful and absolutely essential slab of non-fiction filmmaking.

And while it’s not quite as stellar as the Dylan--the Harrison family approved it and their fingerprints might have smudged away some controversial parts--there’s no question that seeing the Beatles from George’s point-of-view brings an entirely new vision to what is now an awfully well-told story.

Scorsese’s interest is also not straight biograph...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Herzog's Cave One Of His Best
OCTOBER 4, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) German filmmaker Werner Herzog has hit one out of the park with his latest documentary feature The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams.

Investigating the Chauvet Caves in Southern France using non-professional 3-D video equipment operated by a miniscule crew, the director of Grizzly Man and Encounters At The End Of the World has fashioned a fluid, haunting meditation on cave art, time and the essence of humanity in one of his most beautiful and engaging films.

Unsurprising, I suppose, for a man who brought us such fictional masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but by now Herzog’s output places his own quizzical personality and musings at the centre of the action.

The Cav...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Afghan Luke First Out Of the Gate
SEPTEMBER 27, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Canadian Film first out of the Festival gate is Afghan Luke, Mike Clattenburg’s surreal and intriguing take on the conflict in Afghanistan.

Barrelling out of the Toronto and Atlantic Film Fests, Afghan Luke has piled up an unprecedented amount of buzz. A fascinating trip flick that easily transcends its Trailer Park Boys Goes to the Islamic War Zone beginnings, Afghan Luke is a film that evokes classic ambivalent war flicks such as Mike Nichols’ Catch 22, Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Clattenburg’s been front and centre promoting the film, which in itself is a bit of a first as he stayed well behind the camera in the decade-long-run of his Trai...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Ends Of the Earth at the AFF
SEPTEMBER 8, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Documentaries are usually about people or events. At this year’s Atlantic Film Festival, we have two terrific non-fiction features about places.

These two places couldn’t be more different. In Darwin, a Death Valley, California village of 37 is profiled as a kind of end-of-the-world landscape full of fabulous misfits and eccentrics; in The Pruitt-Igoe Mystery, the famous US public housing complex in St. Louis is profiled from its initial construction in 1952 to the beginning of its demolition two decades later in 1972.

Each place is haunted by its human inhabitants, both past and present. Darwin is a former silver mining town that has declined for nearly half a century; the Pruitt-Igoe...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Prolific Rutger Hauer in The Mill And The Cross at the AFF
SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Mill and the Cross is one of those European Art Films just destined for the Film Festival Circuit. Specialized and utterly unique, this is the kind of one-of-a-kind cinema Festivals excel at exhibiting.

One of the ten films Rutger Hauer made last year--along with Hobo With A Shotgun made right here in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia--it couldn’t be more different than Hauer’s usual offerings of action, adventure and splatter films.

The Mill And the Cross takes the great Renaissance painter Peter Bruegel’s famous painting and releases many of the narratives surrounding the basic Christian story at the centre. With Rutger Hauer as Bruegel himself--along with Michael York and Charlotte Rampli...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Digi Go The Movies
AUGUST 29, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The biggest technological change since the introduction of sound in 1927 is happening in the movie business this late summer and early fall of 2011.

And practically no-one outside the sector knows anything about it.

Yes, the long-awaited changeover to digital projection in cinemas is underway.

So long-awaited, in fact, that non other a personage than George Lucas wanted to shoot and present his second Star Wars trilogy in the digital format more than a decade ago.

Obviously, the industry wasn’t ready.

Many fall film festivals will be projecting mostly in digital this September and October. And that means that the word ‘film’ will no longer apply to the ‘film’ industry. That’s ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Another Earth Juggles Sci Fi and Realism
AUGUST 26, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) 2011 Sundance Prize winner Another Earth has finally made it to metro at the end of a summer crowded with comic book movies, rom-coms and cartoon flicks.

For audiences yearning for stronger stuff, Another Earth might fit the bill, unless you want to hold yourself for this year’s Atlantic Film Festival where the delights--I can attest as I’m the senior programmer there--are fulsome indeed.

As it is, Another Earth is a curious mashup. It’s got a gigantic sci-fi hook that seems irresistible: an alternate Earth comes into view from our planet, offering everyone a second chance.

What’s rarely discussed in the reviews or promo articles is the fact that 90 percent of the film consists of a...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Beginners Original, Funny and Sad
JULY 14, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Beginners is one of those rare films poorly served by its trailer. Written and directed by Mike Mills--not the REM guitarist but rather the man who helmed the art-house hit Thumbsucker a few years ago--Beginners is made to look like a zany cross between Annie Hall and a gay Tuesdays With Morrie in those ubiquitous 2 minute previews that have been around for months now.

The reality is much, much different. Shot with diffuse light so that the leads are often overshadowed by murky settings with less illumination than the walls surrounding them, Beginners is a low-key essay on the nature of melancholy.

With two male leads--Ewan McGregor as the graphic artist son and Christopher Plummer as ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Tree Of Life A True Movie Event
JUNE 25, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Terrence Malick’s Cannes-winning new film The Tree Of Life can be described neatly as Stand By Me as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, minus the plot, with codas from 2001 and 8&1/2.

Gaining any other understanding from the film may be more difficult. It’s long, beautiful to look at, and very meditative. The boys-own-view of growing up in post WWII Texas under a harsh, disappointed father is punctuated by cosmic sequences of microbes, dinosaurs, volcanic eruptions and other ephemera. The result is fascinating, but ultimately a bit unfocused.

Considering Malick only has four other films under his belt--with an new one about Frank LLoyd Wright just finished--there’s some who will blown away ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Midnight In Paris Daring, Delicious
JUNE 20, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Woody Allen’s latest film Midnight In Paris has everyone talking about a late-career resurgence.

The reality is that the New York-based writer and director has never gone away.
And every once in a while--in Vicki Christina Barcelona or Match Point--he knocks one out of the park, reminding us that he is indeed an enduringly great American filmmaker, with a new film every year. His next project, The Bop Decameron with Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg, is already in pre-production.

Meanwhile, Midnight In Paris is indeed a delight. Using an about-to-be-married couple’s visit to the French capital as an excuse to frame a story about the relationship between an artist and his art, Woody Allen...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Super 8 Is Classic Sci-Fi
JUNE 13, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) When jaded film critics start giving dismissive reviews to movies like J.J. Abram’s new Sci-Fi thriller Super 8, you know it’s time for those jaded reviewers to find another line of work.

That’s because Super 8 is one of those rare cinematic joys that crackles with action, humour and compassion; almost every frame seems to hold the secret of the universe.

Sure, jejeune types might sniff that Super 8 is some kind of weird tribute to Spielberg classics from three decades ago. Set in 1979--right between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET--the Abram’s new film could even be imagined as a cross between ET and the more recent monster-on-the-loose shaky-cam classic Cloverfield (which A...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Bang Bang Club: Almost There
JUNE 11, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Bang Bang Club is one of those intermittently interesting but ultimately frustrating flicks that manages just to whet the cinematic appetite.

That said, the portrayal of a clutch of photojournalists working in the midst of the final meltdown of South Africa’s segregation--and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1994--has moments of pure, electrifying energy, making it memorable enough to catch on the fly.

With a couple of unexpectedly great performances from ex-boy-band-star Ryan Phillippe and Friday Night Lights mainstay Taylor Kitsch, The Bang Bang Club fleetingly allows audiences a glimpse of the edge-of-your-pants lifestyle that these photogs practiced in the middle of a seething ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Conspirator: Bad Timing, Still Fascinating
MAY 12, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Bad timing might just be The Conspirator’s biggest challenge. The fascinating new feature from director Robert Redford has arrived in theatres just as the elimination of Osama Bin Ladin has been cheered throughout America.

The Conspirator is about following the rule of law, as recalled by one who was caught up in the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination at the end of the American Civil War. Washington Boarding House owner Mary Surratt’s trial and execution is portrayed in vivid detail through close shooting styles and fuzzy atmospherics. The result is pretty bracing big-screen entertainment.

Essentially a courtroom costume drama larded with fill-in-the-holes flashbacks, The Conspirat...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

HBO Revisits Reality.
APRIL 25, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) HBO continues to produce some of the most provocative and interesting stuff for the small screen these days including the audacious Todd Haynes remake of Mildred Pierce and Tommy Lee Jones starring in and directing Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited. Last Saturday’s premiere of Cinema Verite, the dramatization of the famous PBS 1973 documentary series An American Family, was hands down the most engrossing television event of Spring 2011.

While the film--with a terrific cast of James Gandolfini, Diane Lane, Thomas Dekker and Tim Robbins--is lumpy and occasionally structurally problematic, the context it adds to the original groundbreaking 12-hour documentary series makes it a must-...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Of Gods And Men: Faith And Naivete
APRIL 16, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The award-winning and acclaimed French film by Xavier Beauvois, Of Gods And Men, has finally arrived on to a big screen in Halifax.

A film that tells the true story of nine French Trappist Monks in troubled 1990s Algeria--seven of whom were murdered by Islamic Extremists--Of Gods And Men proceeds with a stately sense of doom cloaking its tale of post-colonial naivete.

Its certainly beautiful to look at. Wide, intriguing landscapes alternate with a quiet pacing emphasizing a close-to-the-land, bare-bones spiritual existence. As the tension rises, however, the monks slow-motion debate on whether to leave or stay takes the narrative action down to the lowest gear possible.

As the crisi...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Source Code Fascinating, Frustrating
APRIL 4, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Source Code is a fascinating if frustrating second film from Moon director Duncan Jones.

Another sci-fi thriller, Source Code exchanges the deliberate pacing, minimalism and anachronistic use of models that helped distinguish Jones’ debut for a more upscale, flashy approach complete with a gooey love story.

And while star Jake Gyllenhaal--with his gigantic, cow-like eyes--is definitely a step down from the masterful Sam Rockwell of Moon, the new film does have some assured passages amidst its ‘I need a roadmap’ script.

Clearly, as Duncan Jones--singer David Bowie’s son and absolutely a filmmaker to watch--makes his way onto the Hollywood ‘A’ list, the director might want to beware ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Illusionist: Sweet Melancholy Tati Tribute
MARCH 18, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Illusionist is a sweet, sad bit of animated whimsy that channels the spirit of the late, great French physical comedian and filmmaker, Jacques Tati.

Adapted from Tati’s own screenplay by director Sylvain Chomet, the film’s main character is in fact an extension of Tati’s own screen personality. He appears as an out-of-fashion magician on a fading music-hall circuit taken over by teenage rockers in the late 50s and early 60s. The tall, dapper and deadpan trickster seems deeply out of place, a dignified man in an undignified world.

Astonishingly, many reviewers have not even mentioned these essential facts.
Carston Knox--allegedly one of The Coast magazine’s film experts--left out t...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Another Year Is Another Great Mike Leigh Film
MARCH 8, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) British realist filmmaker Mike Leigh’s latest Another Year has garnered scads of acclaim on the festival ciruit. And no wonder. It’s a great film, period.

While some have carped that it doesn’t reach the heights previous Leigh achievements such as Secrets And Lies, Vera Drake or Topsy Turvy, I think they’re missing the point. Another Year is a dazzling example of Leigh--and his great ensemble cast headed up by Jim Broadbent--at the very top of their game.

Leigh’s unique method of improvising around themes to develop the script gives each of his films a resonance rooted in everyday realities. The issues the characters face are the issues we all face. In the case of Another Year, it’s th...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Biutiful Not So Beautiful
FEBRUARY 25, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) I’ve seem all four of Mexican Auteur Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s films now, each one delivering less than the one before. His latest--the baleful, overlong Biutiful--is clearly the least of his efforts.

That didn’t stop European Critics dumping all sorts of praise on the film, especially its star turn by lead actor Javier Bardem as a hapless low-life criminal logistics operator who causes all sorts of bad things to happen through the film’s endless 148 minutes.

The British have a wonderful word for this kind of stuff: miserablism--the state of being miserable. Biutiful is all that, set in the darkest and dreggiest parts of Barcelona in the winter and featuring displaced African Stree...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Finding Somewhere A Bore
FEBRUARY 20, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sophia Coppola’s early success with her first two films The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation is beginning to look like a fluke, because her latest feature Somewhere is a boring dud.

A dud coming after the unpleasant surprise of her third film, Marie Antoinette means the California-based filmmaker might just be coasting off the family name after all. Her dad Francis Ford Coppola directed The Godfather series.

Somewhere won the big prize this year at the Venice Film Festival. That award probably meant more in Europe where the film deliberately attempts to echo the great Italian Ennui films of 1960, Antonioni’s L’Aventura and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In both cases little happens in...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Eagle Is Brisk And Gripping
FEBRUARY 11, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) A costume drama that makes the world of Roman-era Britain seem unexpectedly close, The Eagle is a surprisingly brisk and and gripping slab of history on screen.

The Eagle is a challenging project by any stretch of the imagination. Set in the early years of the Roman occupation of Britain (approx. 100 AD), the film is a cracking great adventure tale that brings up issues of slavery, imperialism and honour while delivering enough thrills, chills and spills to satisfy mainstream audiences.

It’s also a journey into the dark heart of Celtic Identity that echoes the ancient Scottish concern of exchanging national identity for the larger view of civilization and empire. Adapted from Rosemary ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Nowhere Boy Is Moving and Powerful
JANUARY 22, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The bigscreen appearance--finally--of Sam Taylor-Wood’s John Lennon bio-pic in Halifax qualifies as the movie event of the winter.

The long-awaited film portrays the future Beatle from 1955-1960 when he rediscovered and reconciled with his mother Julia, only to tragically lose her again before he turned twenty.

Lushly shot in amber period tones just as Rock And Roll was becoming a reality, Nowhere Boy is a surprisingly conventional, yet deeply affecting film.

There’s no question director Sam Taylor-Wood almost exactly catches the excitement of a youth culture emerging from Britain’s grey postwar existence.
An associate of some of Britain’s most influential visual artists, Taylor-Wo...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Kimball Co-Writer Profiled in NYT
JANUARY 20, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax filmmaker, Paranormal expert and prolific blogger Paul Kimball is extensively quoted in the January 5th issue of the New York Times Magazine in the article Cyberspace When You're Dead by Rob Walker.

The article profiles Mac Tonnies, Kimball's friend and co-writer who died suddenly October 18th, 2009, at the age of 34. Walker uses Tonnies unexpected passing as a starting point to discuss the issue of a 'digital afterlife'. Friends and online associates have paid tribute to Tonnies' questing intelligence by reviving elements of his provocative, long-running blog.

Kimball's comments are found on the last page of the article.

Tonnies and the Halifax-based film and television wri...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Final Takes Film Retro at Dal Art Gallery
JANUARY 15, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) What can be gleaned from a survey of the last films by leading directors?

That’s a question being asked this winter and spring at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, where the series “Last Takes-Final Films From Great Directors will unspool Wednesday Nights at 8pm from January 19th to May 4th.

It’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask, and having been the Film Curator at the Gallery since 1988, I finally got around to posing it in 2011.

With entries that range from influential European Cineastes (Ingmar Bergman, Agnes Varda) to Hollywood insiders (action master John Sturges, western maker Budd Boetticher) to auteurist pioneers (John Huston, Jean Renoir, Robert Flaherty), Last Takes takes a p...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Dry Gulch Poetry: True Grit 2010
JANUARY 4, 2011 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Coen Brothers have their first bona-fide out-of-the-box mass audience hit with their remake of Henry Hathaway’s 1969 classic western, True Grit.

The fact that the new film is not quite as good as the original--or that Jeff Bridges’ marvelous performance still pales next to John Wayne’s Oscar-winning turn as the profane, booze-swilling, one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cockburn--won’t likely disappoint the audiences lining up for the latter-day duster.

The Coen Brothers manage to deliver just enough magic in their version to make it worthwhile. Between the haunting photography and endless parade of wacky weirdos, the thrilling Charles Portis storyline still carries the day.

Sure, the...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Can't Miss Must See: The King's Speech
DECEMBER 22, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The King’s Speech is already piling up enough hype to start setting some impossible expectations as the can’t-miss movie of Christmas 2010.

Don’t let all that hot air dissuade you from catching this perfect collision of history and entertainment. It really is a terrific flick from beginning to end.

Taking the real-life story of Bertie, the British Monarch’s second son who would go on to become King George the Sixth on the very cusp of the Empire’s struggle through World War Two, director Tom Hooper and screenwriter David Seidler have fashioned an engrossing tale of friendship that transcended the widest differences of the English Class system.

Hooper--who cut his teeth on episodic T...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Fighter A Great American Movie
DECEMBER 17, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) One of the big Christmas releases of 2010 is The Fighter, a film that is destined to be considered as one of the great boxing movies of all time.

A curious mix of indie brashness and old-style Hollywood storytelling, The Fighter recounts the true story of two boxing half-brothers from hardscrabble industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts (home of Beat Writer Jack Kerouac) who battle for their place on the national and international sports pantheon during the 1980s and 1990s.

Directed by art-film-darling David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings) and executive produced by auteur dynamo Darren Aronofsky--whose latest, Black Swan, opens wide in theatres on t...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Voyage Of the Dawn Treader Due For A Refit
DECEMBER 10, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The third installment in the Chronicles of Narnia series, The Voyage Of the Dawn Treader, sees veteran director Michael Apted taking the helm.

Alas, even the great filmmaker responsible for such memorable works as the 7-21-35 Up series and the recent ‘End-of-British-slavery’ epic Amazing Grace can overcome C.S. Lewis’ narrative challenges concerning a long, wandering sea voyage to the edge of the known world in Narnia.

And while Ben Barnes is back as Caspian--minus the hilarious Spanish accent from the second film Prince Caspian--the star-less series real point of interest is Narnia itself, a land where animals, dwarves, men and various evil spirits talk, fight and act out a vast Chris...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Faith, Fraud&Minimum Wage Held Over!
DECEMBER 7, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Holy Smokes! The Josh MacDonald-penned locally made Indie Movie Faith, Fraud And Minimum Wage is being held over for a second week at the Empire Bayer’s Lake Cinemas!

Helmed by legendary My Bloody Valentine director George Mihalka, Faith, Fraud And Minimum Wage is inspired by real events--literally ripped from the headlines--when the face of Jesus was visualized on a small-town coffee shop wall.

MacDonald wrote a stage version of the situation for the Two Planks and A Passion Theatre Company. After touring the version around the Maritimes, the play has found legs on the community theatre circuit from the American Heartland right across the continent to British Columbia.

The film ver...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

PBS Doubles John Lennon
NOVEMBER 26, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) John Lennon’s 70th birthday is being celebrated by a trio of films, two of which are being shown on American Public Television (PBS) this week at various times on their series Masterpiece Theatre and American Masters.

Lennon Naked is a British TV movie with Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston in the lead. It covers the Beatles founder’s life from 1964 to 1971, after which he left Britain for New York City, never to return.

Directed by producer Edmund Coulthard, Lennon Naked focuses primarily on the four years between after albums Magical Mystery Tour and Imagine, and uses the singer/songwriter/artist’s turbulent personal life as the fulcrum to explain the source of his inspiration....  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Monsters A Creature Feature Treat
NOVEMBER 13, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) First-time director Gareth Edwards has been getting a strange reaction to his ultra-low budget sci-fi creature relationship flick Monsters.

Mostly, critics and audiences are perplexed by the listless sense of action and heavy atmosphere. When the gigantic squid-like aliens appear, they seem more interested in getting into a love clutch with other aliens rather than ravaging the earth.

Consequently, we’re left with a fascinating series of connect-the-dot exercises. Are the aliens a metaphor for the Mexican Drug War? Or illegal immigration?
Perhaps the reluctant couple--underplayed, angsty-style by Scoot McNairy and Witney Able--are really stand-ins for the audience, who have very littl...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Maddison Avenue Sweet New CD
NOVEMBER 10, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax musician Keith Maddison isn’t afraid to think big. Or to feel big emotions for that matter.

The singer/songwriter/guitarist heads up the East Coast Americana R’n’B outfit Maddison Avenue, who will shortly release their blazing first full-length CD, entitled Sweet Renegade, by the middle of November.

Evoking the early 1970s when the likes of Joe Cocker and Van Morrison led widescreen pop/soul ensembles such as the Mad Dogs And Englishmen across North America or the epic Caledonia Soul Orchestra gigs that stretched clear over the Big Pond to Europe, Maddison Avenue have captured a joyous, unapologetically passionate, and very, very big sound on their new disc.

Each of the ten ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Conviction Surprisingly Gripping
OCTOBER 29, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The gripping true-to-life story told in Tony Goldwyn’s Convicted may seem like a downmarket, Boston-based version of Erin Brockovich, but it has a rhythm and uniqueness all its own.

What initially appears to be a just a run-of-the-mill star vehicle for Hilary Swank--she’s one of executive producers--turns out to be a far more involving tale of sibling dedication to a seemingly hopeless cause. And while Swank does indeed turn in a riveting performance as Betty Anne Waters, it is Sam Rockwell that steals the show as her earthy, out-of-control brother who ends up spending years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit.

Driven by a brisk script by Pamela Gray that only occasionally stoops to ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

A Probing Life During Wartime
OCTOBER 17, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Maverick American Indie filmmaker Todd Solondz’ latest, Life During Wartime, might just be his best film yet.

Derided by blase critics, the 94-minute contemporary tale of families awash in guilt, desire and the quest for forgiveness is actually a tight, disciplined essay into modern-day ethics that neatly balances black humour with gusts of probing despair.

Shot through with filters that drench the film in an intense yellow, the tri-coastal setting (New Jersey, Florida and LA) gives the story a scattered, epic feel.

Revealed at its conclusion, however, is the fact that the three narratives are really reflections of the same extended family. It’s a fascinating conceit that reveals mu...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Social Network Is A Dazzler
OCTOBER 2, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Social Network is impossibly good. The only recent film that can compete with small-screen masterpieces like The Wire and Mad Men, it dares to look at contemporary life without rose-coloured glasses. The result is dazzling.

Written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin--and driven by his trademark rat-a-tat pacing, pointed dialogue and widescreen complexity--and directed with precision and ferocity by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac), The Social Network takes the story of the creation of the internet sensation Facebook and makes it into a postmodern fable of envy, friendship, and betrayal.

The film also puts the accelerated minute-to-minute culture of the internet effectively on the big s...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Chanel And Stravinsky Endlessly Fascinating
SEPTEMBER 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Coco Chanel And Igor Stravinsky is a fascinating but opaque examination of two extraordinary figures of the 20th Century as each brought their respective area of the arts kicking and screaming into Modernism.

As biography, Jan Kounen’s film--from screenwriter Chris Greenhalgh’s novel Coco and Igor--is mostly fictional, though rumours do linger that the the designer and composer did really have an affair in 1920 when she was developing her famous perfume Chanel #5.

The story certainly begins with a bang. Re-staged for the cameras is the landmark May 1913 Paris performance by the Ballet Russes of Stravinsky’s genre-smashing The Rite Of Spring, complete with a re-imagining of Nijinsky’s ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Get Low Only Mildly Satisfying
AUGUST 30, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) High profile for a vanity project, Get Low is only a mildly satisfying distraction from Hollywood’s mainstream summertime piffle.

Based on a true story about a Tennessee recluse who wants to have a funeral party while he’s still alive, Get Low is actor Robert Duvall’s second or third indie starring vehicle, after the 1980s music redemption flick Tender Mercies and the 1990s religious redemption movie The Apostle

Unsurprisingly, Get Low is yet another redemption story, this time set during the dark early days of the 1930s Depression. Consequently, the film is a costume drama par excellence, with immaculate art direction and earthy, amber colouring that is ravishing to look at.

And wi...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

12th Night A Summer Theatre Highlight
AUGUST 12, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) I saw Shakespeare By the Sea’s Twelfth Night with a huge crowd Wednesday night, under a clear summer sky with only a slight chill in the overnight air.

It’s the third time the outdoor company have tackled the play. Each time the play comes off a winner, with it’s siblings-separated-by-shipwreck plot and its trio of wacky characters--Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Malvolio--who drive its comedy into a wealth of absurdity and whimsy.

This time out STBS lets its mostly Equity--the professional actors union--cast romp away with the play. Sure, there’s the company’s trademark respect for the text (which really means the players actually understand the Elizabethan language they are...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Blackbird Is Edgy, Illuminating
AUGUST 9, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Scottish playwright Donald Harrower’s 2005 play, Blackbird, is one of those theatrical phenoms that has already travelled around the world (productions in NYC, Mexico City, Tokyo) in a mere five years.

We can thank Halifax’s most consistently edgy dramatists--Angels and Heroes, who’ve brought us plays by Martin McDonogh, Jean Cocteau, and Neil Labute amongst others--for giving Harrower’s 75-minute three-hander a brisk, engaging staging at the Living Room performance space on Agricola Street.

Directed by A&H co-founder Richie Wilcox, Blackbird initially seems like David Mamet’s classic he-said-she-said battle-of-the-sexes workout Oleanna. The plot is simple enough: a 27-year-old woman c...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Winter's Bone Is Truly Chilling
AUGUST 7, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) This year’s Grand Jury Winner at Sundance, Winter’s Bone is one heck of a picture. Adapted from Daniel Woodrill’s 2006 novel of the same name and set and shot in his native wandering grounds, the Missouri Ozark Mountains, Winter’s Bone blends raw authenticity with a genuine edge-of-your-seat storyline, resulting in a startlingly original cinematic point-of-view.

The narrative bursts out of the gate with a make-or-break conundrum: 17-year-old Ree Dolly--played with firm determination by Jennifer Lawrence--must find her on-the-lam father or lose the house and lands that she, her two younger siblings and disabled mother currently occupy.

By the end of the movie there will be some resoluti...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Inception A Mind-Blowing Movie Experience
JULY 17, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Inception is sensational. Christopher Nolan’s Sci-Fi thriller is not only the film event of the summer, it might just be the best film of the year.

With a stellar cast headed up by Leonardo DiCaprio and buttressed by Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard and Halifax’s own Ellen Page, this is the epic A-list Hollywood flick everyone has been waiting for.

And Inception delivers. Like Nolan’s other films--Following, Momento, Insomnia, and the revamped Batman franchise--there’s a playful formalism that bends and reshapes the narrative form of cinema, making the film both a challenge and a pleasure to watch.

The actual story revolving--and I do mean rev...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Please Give A Pointed, Compassionate Comedy
JUNE 21, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The most talented female comedy director writer/currently working, Nichole Holofcener, has just released one of her very best films in the urban contemporary drama of manners Please Give.

Sporting a stellar cast (Oliver Platt, Amanda Peet, Catherine Keener and Rebecca Hall, amongst others), Holofcener zeroes in on how city dwellers have lost that edge of humanity and politeness, and how relationships have curdled between family members.

Please Give charts a short time amidst some cramped apartment dwellers who seem to talk to each other in blunt blasts of uncomfortable honesty. One couple (Platt and Keener) resells hideous mid-20th century furniture and knick-knacks at outrageously inf...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Splice: A Fabulous Mess Of A Sci-Fi Movie
JUNE 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Splice is a fabulous mess of a movie, with a dynamite mad scientist start devolving into a silly ‘couples therapy’ finish. Still, it’s loaded with enough wild and wooley ideas to please any sci-fi or techno geek.

And while the cheap-nite audience I saw it with laughed inappropriately all through the final twenty minutes, Splice manages to leave you with a raft of disturbing images concerning gender, sex and parenting that should revolve around your psyche for at least a couple of weeks.

Sort of like a 1980s David Cronenberg movie diverted by a cabal of international co-producers--France’s Gaumont and America’s Warners are on board--this Canadian sci-fi flick is manfully helmed by Canad...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Stones 'Exile' NS Connection
MAY 25, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The media swirl around the re-release of the Rolling Stones classic 1972 album Exile On Main Street has revolved mostly around the 1o new tracks unearthed and polished up for one of the new editions of the landmark double disc.

What’s been missed in all of this is the Nova Scotia connection. The man responsible for the album’s iconic cover art, Robert Frank, was a NS resident by1969, sparking an exodus of influential American artists to this part of the world that included composer Philip Glass, actor/playwright Sam Shepard, sculptor Richard Serra and screenwriter/cult novelist Rudy Wurlitizer.

Frank’s earthy mix of rough Americana photography for Exile On Main Street matched the conte...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Trotsky Is An Insufferable Dud
MAY 18, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Jacob Tierney’s The Trotsky has a genuinely funny premise. And a terrific Canadian cast. So why is it such a bad film?

Championed at Film Festivals across this land last fall, the intermittently humorous comedy charmed critics, film snobs--and most importantly--the Canadian Cultural elite. Cue the wall-to-wall CBC interviews.

Alas, it’s the average Joes and Josephines that are having the last laugh.

Because The Trotsky is an insufferable dud. And audiences can tell.

With the ultra-hot Jay Baruchel in the lead as a wayward Montreal high schooler who thinks he’s the reincarnation of revolutionary Russian Communist figure and Red Army leader Leon Trotsky, the film starts out well w...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Iron Man 2 Sizzles With Action, Fun
MAY 12, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The critical chorus on Iron Man 2 has mostly been a wail of ‘it’s not as good as the first one’. It’s possible that most of those critics either don’t like movies or don’t like comics. Or both.

Perhaps they should find some other form of employment. Because I found Iron Man 2 to be just as wildly entertaining as the first one.

Jammed with whooshing action, snappy one liners and a superb cast--who are all apparently having the time of their lives--Iron Man 2 crackles with energy and fun right from the opening frames.

Director Jon Favreau maintains the delightful tone of the franchise opener, matching a breezy pacing with a deadpan comic-book cheesiness that never takes itself too se...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Stylish, Original
MAY 3, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) A certifiably international publishing sensation, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has made it to the screen as a fascinating contemporary variation on the traditional whodunnit.

As directed in Swedish by Niels Arden Oplev--Hollywood’s remake is already in the works--the two and one-half hour film occasionally bogs down with a few too many moody landscapes balanced against Silence Of the Lambs-style images of brutality.

Still, the paint-by-numbers murder mystery is buoyed by the addition of a fashionably disturbed female sleuth punkette (Noomi Rapace) who plays rather neatly off the usual rumpled male journalist/detective (Mikael Nyquist).

Add in elements of a female revenge fantas...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Runaways Only A Run Of The Mill Music Bio
APRIL 18, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Runaways--the movie of the story of the mid ‘70s allgirl rock band of the same name--is just about as bad as the band itself.

I remember one rock critic describing their music as ‘bang-bang-plop’, virtually confirming the long-held fact that women couldn’t play rock and roll. Luckily Chrissie Hynde would finally crush that cliche by1979 when she rocked out with the Pretenders amazing debut album.

As for the movie, you know you’re in trouble when the most interesting characters in a film about women are male. Particularly, Michael Shannon as the band’s Svengali-like manager Kim Fowley--who is charismatic, contrarian and absolutely magnetic--and Keir Keough as the scenester gadfly Ro...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Cloudburst A Knockout
APRIL 11, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Plutonium Playhouse is the most exciting thing to happen on the Halifax Theatre scene in a decade.

It’s first offering is a sprightly staging of filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald’s latest screenplay Cloudburst, which he plans to shoot this summer as a feature comedy/drama with Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. It’s the story of two elderly lesbians from a seacoast village in Maine who flee to Nova Scotia to obtain a marriage license. The crusty and rather unlikely twosome are on the lam in order to forstall a forced separation when the eyesight-challenged partner of the pair is threatened with detention at a special care facility by a meddling relative.

Part queer road movie, part domest...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Jewison, Stephen King Shoots For NS
APRIL 9, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax Media outlets missed two important announcements about Nova Scotia film projects concerning Stephen King and Norman Jewison for this spring and summer.

The Globe and Mail reported that Haven, a major big-budget science fiction TV series for the SyFy Channel will be shot in and around Hubbards. Based on best-seller Stephen King’s book The Colorado Kid--a story where residents of a seaside village seem to be imbued with paranormal powers--the series apparently is blessed with one of the largest budgets for any television series ever filmed in Nova Scotia.

Also this winter the Toronto Star reported in an interview with legendary Canadian director Norman Jewison that Nova Scotia wa...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

World Premiere Of Eternal Kiss
APRIL 4, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The World Premiere of the Nova Scotia-shot feature drama Eternal Kiss will take place at Park Lane theatres, Halifax, Thursday April 28th from 6 to 9 pm.

Essentially a courtesy screening for cast and crew (and family and friends), remaining seats are available to the public for free by contacting voiceoflondon@aol.com by noon, April 28th in order to guarantee a place.

Eternal Kiss is a contemporary vampire tale concerning a modern-day documentary filmmaker (played by Montreal actor Joe Gallaccio) who investigates whether stories of vampirism are real or not. He ends up getting more than he bargained for.

Triple threat producer/writer/director Paul Kimball shifts the focus back to t...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Egoyan's Plodding And Pretentious 'Chloe'
MARCH 27, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s latest, the contemporary domestic betrayal flick Chloe, is a plodding and pretentious affair that has little to show for all its upmarket gloss.

With a cast headed up by world-class stars Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore and a startling performance by sex-bomb newcomer Amanda Seyfried, Chloe has all the ingredients for to be a powerful and disturbing expose of raw emotion and, particularly, the destructive power of jealousy.

Unfortunately Chloe’s script declines from fraught suspense to sheer unbelievability, landing in the land of ludicrous for its final fifteen minutes.

Worse, Egoyan puts all of his passion into making Toronto look alluring and sexy, ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Polanski's Underpowered 'Ghost'
MARCH 20, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Critics have been rather kind to legendary director Roman Polanski’s latest, The Ghost Writer, as he sits under house arrest awaiting extradition from Europe to the US to face charges dating back to the mid-70s.

Polanski’s extraordinary situation--detailed in the documentary Wanted And Desired--has both boosted and overshadowed The Ghost Writer’s reception. The truth is that a terrific cast, active atmospherics and a looming sense of absurdity and dread simply cannot salvage such a cardboard script.

Adapted by Robert Harris from his own novel, The Ghost Writer returns to the great age of political thrillers--oh uh, the ‘70s again--to evoke the spirit of edge-of-your-seat masterpieces s...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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, ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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’...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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, ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Henning Mankell
Henning MankellSEPTEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM) Henning Mankell  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Queen has a slight cold
The Queen has a slight coldAPRIL 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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Heist Flick Entertains, Overreaches
Heist Flick Entertains, OverreachesMARCH 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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit
in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and witMARCH 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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (1) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Golden Compass Not So Golden
Golden Compass Not So GoldenDECEMBER 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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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, ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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....  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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.

...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 -...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Local Shoots Pick Up
Local Shoots Pick UpSEPTEMBER 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.
  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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!  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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. ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

'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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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, ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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,...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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.  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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-...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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 ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

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...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Merritts On Monday
MARCH 16, 2007 The Merritt Awards will be given out this coming Monday. That means five or six professional Nova Scotia theatre companies will give each other a bunch of awards, congratulating themselves on another stellar year in a sector that continues to struggle to reach audiences and set some very basic standards.

It’s not a very satisfactory set-up. Sure, the province needs some kind of recognition of excellence in the theatre arts sector. The music scene does it.
The motion picture production sector does too.

But the Merritts have never been terribly well thought out. First off, they were named after a notoriously nasty Dalhousie Theatre professor (Robert Merritt) who thought so little of h...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Perfume: An Audacious Epic Indeed
MARCH 14, 2007 Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer has one of those trailers almost deliberately designed to turn potential audiences off.

Emphasizing a rather silly premise - a young Frenchman who has supernatural abilities to sniff fragrances and essence - the preview also plays up Dustin Hoffman’s dreadful cameo as the young man’s perfuming mentor.

What’s missing is the film’s astonishing strengths: its elastic and unpredictable narrative, it’s stunning performances from Alan Rickman (as a nobleman attempting to protect his daughter) and Ben Whishaw in the main role, and the creepy messianic conclusion that leaves the storyline lingering in viewers’ minds well after the film is over.

Based on Pat...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

HFX Filmmakers Win Trailer Contest
MARCH 12, 2007 Jason Eisenor and John Davies from Halifax won the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino contest to make the best 'Grindhouse' trailer.
The decision was made Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas.
Their prize package includes an AVID editing softwear package, along with
bragging rights and, of course, a weekend of hanging out with Rodriguez and his crew at the South By South West Festival this past few days.
Congratulations boys! Remember us when it's time to fill up all those zombie extra positions on your first 35mm feature film, which is certainly coming alot sooner now that you've bagged first prize in an international
cinema competition!  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Singalong Jubilee Still A Work In Progress
MARCH 11, 2007 The Eastern Front’s artistic director Scott Burke’s attempt to shoe-horn the legacy of the Halifax-produced CBC TV series Singalong Jubilee into a single night of dramatic entertainment doesn’t quite work theatrically.

Still, with so much wonderful music on display, and some fine staging effects from lighting director Leigh Ann Vardy and set/costume/projections designer Denyse Karn, the show is bound to be a hit for those that remember the show.

Alas, anyone else who is not familiar with the long-running (1960-1974) musical variety series would be well advised to study Ernest J. Dick’s book on the show, from which the current stage production is partially based. It offers the definitiv...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

300's Battle Lines Are Drawn
MARCH 9, 2007 300 has collected an astonishingly snarky set of reviews considering that it is a cinematic adaptation of a graphic novel retelling the heroic events of the Battle of Thermopylae in the 6th century BC.

Think comic book. Think classic battle at the outset of Greek Culture, at the birth of West. You’re expecting what? Realistic dialogue? Naturalistic situations? Initmate exchanges? Just what planet are these reviewers from anyways?

The film is a visually ambitious realisation of mythic history. It’s the film Troy should have been: heavily stylized, grandly operatic and rather bloody, with definite moral lessons for the audience to consider at its conclusion particularly about collective ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Eisner's Off To Austin
MARCH 9, 2007 Local Filmmaker Jason Eisner and his crew are off to Austin, Texas, for a contest sponsored by legendary low-budget film pioneer Robert Rodriguez.
Rodriguez - the director of Spy Kids, El Mariachi and Once Upon A Time In Mexico - along with Quentin Tarantino will be releasing a new co-directed film in the next few months entitled Grindhouse. It's a tribute to the exploitation films of the 1970s, and to celebrate a contest to create Grindhouse-style trailers was unleashed. The prize is a consultation with Rodriguez in his home town of Austin, Texas, during the legendary South By South West Festival. Finalists will get their way paid, and they'll be guests of the Rodriguez production company....  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Dylan's Verite Revisited
MARCH 8, 2007 Just how much Bob is too much Dylan is one of those questions that comes up whenever the famous minstrel gets another CD or DVD release. In the case of a new Docurama version of his 1965 cinema verite masterpiece Don’t Look Back, I can safely state that fanatics and neophytes alike might just want to rush out to their local record stores - if they can find one, that is - to secure a copy.

Direct Cinema master D.A. Pennebaker’s feature documentary was always one of the cornerstones of the non-fiction film movement known as Cinema Verite. Shot on the fly with at-the-time new lightweight 16mm film and sound equipment, the documentary catches Bob Dylan touring Britain in the mid-60s on one of...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

The Man Who Inspired The Matrix Dies
MARCH 7, 2007 The post-structuralist theorist whose ideas inspired the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix has died. Jean Baudrillard passed away on March 6th, 2007; he was born in the Cathedral town of Reims on July 29, 1929.
Baudrillard's theories proceeded directly from those of Canadian Media specialist Marshall McLuhan. The French academic's most important books included 1977's Forget Foucault and 1981's Simulacrum and Simulation.
His ideas about hyper-reality helped set the stage for what we now know as virtual reality. Baudrillard's playful ideas and post-marxist outlook annoyed and angered hardline structuralists and semioticians who accused the globe-trotting theorist of not taking his subject matter...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

MacIvor's GG-Winning Book A Hard Slog
MARCH 6, 2007 There’s no question that Cape Bretoner Daniel MacIvor is considered to be one of Canada’s most important theatre artists. The fact that he recently won a Governor General’s Award for his five-play collection entitled I Still Love You pretty well confirm’s the actor and writer’s near-iconic status on the avant-garde North American Dramatic scene.

Reading the five plays in I Still Love You, however, brings and entirely different view, I’m afraid. Seeing MacIvor’s plays - and you’ll apparently get a chance as his one-man show House has been booked into the Eastern Front’s On The Waterfront Festival in early May - is often an electrifying experience.

There’s a basic problem, however, with ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Factory Girl Factory Fresh
MARCH 5, 2007 Factory Girl is one of those films which carries quite a big of baggage before it even opens. Directed by ‘Mayor of Sunset Strip’ documentarian George Hickenlooper, it’s a portrait of the relationship between New York ‘It’ girl Edie Sedgwick and her artist/patron Andy Warhol in the mid-1960s. The film also develops a key plot point around an alleged affair between Sedgwick and Bob Dylan in 1965 and 1966.

Faced with non-co-operation from the famous singer/songwriter, the film never utters his name and is forced to let the audience figure out just who he is. Played by Hayden Christensen in a nicely stylized and surprisingly convincing performance, ‘the musician’- as he is listed in the cred...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

A Terrifying Zodiac
MARCH 4, 2007 Zodiac is one of those once-in-a-lifetime films that creates real horror out of the ashes and ruins of everyday life.

As scary as Stanley Kubrick’s 1979 masterpiece The Shining, David Fincher’s portrait of three men obssessed by San Francisco’s Zodiac serial killer is certainly as good or better than his best films. Considering he made Se7en, The Game and Panic Room, that’s saying quite a bit.

Long (157 minutes), involved (three main characters) and barely concluded (the killer was never charged), Zodiac’s terror comes from the fact that the system - represented by police and newspapermen - fails to catch the murderer.
Of the three pursuers, one is destroyed, and the other two are sev...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Black Snake Moan Boils Over
MARCH 1, 2007 Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is a picture-perfect example of a problematic second film. The follow-up to the acclaimed - and now, in retrospect, probably over-rated - Hustle And Flow is even more strident and determined than its predecessor, which was no slouch in its treatment of modern-day of violence and relationship decay.

Instead of Hustle And Flow’s urban hipster setting and contemporary hip-hop musical atmosphere, however, Black Snake Moan is defiantly backwoods and rural. Its musical basis is blues rather than rap. The result is an engrossing but not totally successful stylistic essay into themes of anger, loss, displacement and ultimately redemption.

If Hustle And Flow was ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Doors 15th Anniversary DVD Rocks
FEBRUARY 27, 2007 Oliver Stone’s psychedelic fable/bio-pic The Doors was released in twilight moments of 1991. Consequently, Maple Pictures has just put out a 15th anniversary DVD that expands and refocuses the 138 minute monsterpiece. Fans of both the band and Oliver Stone might just want to check this one out.

While The Doors - the film that is - makes for pretty questionable musical biography, there’s no question that it is one of the great films about the 1960s. Using the band - and especially its enigmatic lead singer Jim Morrison - to explore some of the many dark corners of a tumultuous decade, director Oliver Stone manages to concoct a terrific ‘trip’ movie that suggests that the excess and extreme...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Music And Lyrics Only Halfway Successful
FEBRUARY 25, 2007 Writer/Director Marc Lawrence’s valentine romance barely made any impact on the heart-weary holiday’s box-office figures. Perhaps that’s because the film - a limp cocktail of musical satire and gooey romance - promises far more than it delivers.

Sure, you do get Hugh Grant gamely sending both himself and ‘80s pop music. And you get some shockingly realistic scenes of the teensy-tiny New York City
apartments that real people inhabit as middle-class workers striving to live in a stratosphericially expensive city.

Beyond that, Music And Lyrics struggles get beyond first base in the drama department. The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl plotline about a faded 80s popster composer (Grant) an...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Oscars Overwhelmed! Here's Infomonkey's Picks
FEBRUARY 23, 2007 The Oscars are being overwhelmed by Anna Nicole and Britney.

Ironic, of course, that a ceremony contrived to build celebrity is being swamped by celebrities no longer required to do anything more than simply be famous.

Still, there’s a curious quietness about this year’s Oscar race. It’s even more disquieting because most of the films up for awards are actually pretty good.

The list for Best Picture, for example, is pretty tight: The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen, Letters From Iwo Jima and Babel. I’d say at least three (Departed, Sunshine and The Queen) all have a decent chance and could be argued to be deserving. My pick: The Departed.

Best Actor nominees include Leo...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

A 21st Century Marat
FEBRUARY 23, 2007 Director/Adaptor Paul Kimball and Le Theatre de Boheme have drifted sufficiently far enough away from Peter Weiss’ famous play Marat/Sade for the production - at the Church this weekend and next - to distill the title down to ‘Marat’ and drop any pretences of resembling the famous Peter Brook production of the play.

The result is a fascinating - and strikingly original - take on what can only be described as one of the great artifacts of 1960s anti-theatre. By dropping most of the self-conscious bombast, adding pop culture elements from music by Aaron Copland and Ravel to snatches of World War One poetry to speeches from Shakespeare’s Henry V and Francis Ford Coppola’s script for the movi...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

US Studios Nix Deal; CTF Foes Knuckle Under
FEBRUARY 21, 2007 The two disputes plaguing the Canadian Motion Picture sector took strange turns this week. The ACTRA strike--which was about to be solved by a deal between producers and screen actors--was KO'd by American Studios, who objected to the new media provisions. The negotiators have now gone back to the table to try to mollify the Americans without derailing the deal.
Meanwhile, the two Canadian cable giants who temporarily dropped their payments to the country's CTF (Canadian Television Fund) have resumed their participation after a humiliating series of exchanges in front of a committee in Parliament.
Shaw Cable and Videotron did win a review of the fund. The review will be administered by the...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Black Actor Raised In Nova Scotia
FEBRUARY 19, 2007 African-American actor Godfrey Cambridge--whose film Cotton Comes To Harlem plays at the Dalhousie Art Gallery Tuesday, February 20 at 5:00pm--grew up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, before heading to New York City to follow a career in acting and stand-up comedy.
Born in the Big Apple in the midst of the Great Depression on February 26th, 1933 to parents of British Guayanese descent, Cambridge was raised by his grandparents in Nova Scotia, where he attended public school.
He finished his high school education back in the USA; by the late 1950s
he studied acting and pursued a career in film, television and engagements in the comedy clubs.
Godfrey Cambridge won an Obie (A Village Voice Theatre Aw...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

NS Flick Sparks Berlin Bidding War
FEBRUARY 17, 2007 The Nova Scotia-shot feature film Poor Boys Game has apparently sparked an international bidding war in Berlin.
The film--distributed by Seville Pictures in Canada--has generated so much excitement at a screening at the Berlin Film Festival that international distributors have been lining up for rights to the film outside of Canada.
Directed by Clement Virgo and written by Nova Scotian actor and director Chaz Thorne, Poor Boy's stars the established African American actor Danny Glover, and features a standout debut performance by another son of Nova Scotia-raised, internationally famous actor, Donald Sutherland, Rossif Sutherland.
Rossif Sutherland had been described as having a 'smoking...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Deal In ACTRA Strike
FEBRUARY 17, 2007 A tentative deal has been struck between the Canadian Motion Picture Actors Union (ACTRA) and Canadian producers. While a few glitches have yet to be worked out and union members must vote on the deal, a resolution to the dispute - ongoing since January 8th in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and just this week here in the Maritimes - seems to be within reach.
Meanwhile troubles with the Canadian Television Fund still loom over the industry. It's already estimated that the strike cost up to $200 million in lost production across the country ($10 million here in Nova Scotia alone).
The cost of CTF troubles has yet to be tabulated.  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

ACTRA Talks Break Off
FEBRUARY 13, 2007 According to a report in Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail, talks between Canadian motion picture producers and the country's film actor's union have broken off. The lead negotiator for the producers has left the country for a commitment at the Berlin Film Festival. Discussions could possibly resume sometime next week.
The Maritimes ACTRA Local could be officially on strike by Valentine's Day. Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec and Saskechewan locals have been on strike since January 8th, although with letters of continuance, many productions have been given permission to go on shooting.
Meanwhile, British Columbia's actors and producers - a separate jurisdiction from the rest of the country - have...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

ThinkFilm Sale Strands Canuck Flicks
FEBRUARY 13, 2007 The sale of the Canadian/American film distributor ThinkFilm has left up to 15 Canuck feature films in limbo.
Sold late last fall, a US company bought out and eliminated the company's Canadian operations. Films that qualified for tax credits and Canadian Telefilm marketing money now no longer qualify; leaving producers responsible for large, unsecured portions of production and distribution budgets formerly covered by Canadian production incentives. One local film is known to be involved: South Shore filmmaker
Camilia Frieberg's domestic envirnmental thriller, A Stones' Throw, which premiered at the 2006 Atlantic and Toronto Film Festivals. Frieberg was quoted in one local newspaper that s...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Fights Over CTF Ramp Up
FEBRUARY 13, 2007 Quebecor chief Pierre Karl Peladeau has intensified the rifts tearing apart the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) by launching a defamation lawsuit against Radio Canada vice president Sylvain Lafrance for allegedly stating that Pelardeau was ‘acting like a hooligan’ for ceasing his company Videotron’s support of the television production fund.
CBC Head Robert Rabinovitch has been named as a co-defendant. Pelardeau has announced Quebecor will set its own fund, increasing its monetary commitment but withdrawing from the Federally-sanctioned fund, set up in 1993 to finance shows such as Trailer Park Boys and This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Meanwhile, major pundits have begun to weigh in on the dispute...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Last Sin Eater Pretty Tasty
FEBRUARY 12, 2007 The Last Sin Eater is an example of the fascinating proliferation of faith-based filmmaking that has been flourishing in the wake of Mel Gibson’s box office monster The Passion Of The Christ.

Earnest and low-budget, this would be an indie sleeper if it didn’t wear its Christian colours so brazenly; a costumer set in Appalachia in the 1850s, The Last Sin Eater has just enough style and discipline to overcome some of its chintzier moments.

Despite the no-budget special effects, cheap sets and pushy cliches eminating from an annoying ‘tween’ female heroine, the film neatly catches a recidivist pioneer society reviving a creepy Celtic tradition that could provide fodder for a great horror...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

On DVD: Oh! What A Lovely War
FEBRUARY 11, 2007 Oh! What A Lovely War has finally arrived on DVD. One of the most unique films about war ever made - adapted from a vastly unconventional stage show conceived by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Britain during the ‘Angry Young Man’ days - the epic movie blends music, spectacle and oblique commentary into an extraordinary motion picture experience.

Adapted to the screen by actor and filmmaker Richard Attenborough at the end of the 1960s - it was his first directoral effort - Oh! What A Lovely war sports perhaps the greatest British cast ever assembled for a film. Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Ralph Richardson, Susannah York, Michael and Vanessa Redgrave, John Geilgud, Jack Hawkins a...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

NF Novel Good Grist For Movies
FEBRUARY 10, 2007 White Man’s Cotton represents an interesting attempt by Newfoundland’s Jesperson Publishing to broaden its range into the world of contemporary, edgy thrillers.

The first novel by St. John’s bureaucrat and union rep Randy W. Somerton, the book begins with an audacious and utterly original scenario based on reverse racism.

On a private island in the Indian Ocean, a cabal of rich African Americans have created a underground prison where captured white racists are forced to harvest mushrooms - the ‘white man’s cotton’ of the title, also the name of the secret institution itself - in a form of modern-day retribution and slavery.

At 364 pages, however, the book is long and windy at times...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Notes On A Scandal
FEBRUARY 8, 2007 Richard Eyre’s Notes On A Scandal has corralled enough great reviews to make the film a must-see. in the busy pre-Oscar season. And while the Judi Dench vehicle is indeed a compelling watch, Notes On A Scandal shares a fatal flaw with screenwriter Patrick Marber’s play and film Closer: it’s about exceptionally unpleasant people being very bad to each other.

At 92 minutes, however, the film’s astonishing array of talent does manage to put across a compelling contemporary story. With engulfing music by NS resident Philip Glass and ravishing cinematography by Chris Menges, the film is rich beyond description. The cast - driven by an icy, controlled Dench and a loopy, winsome Cate Blanchette ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Birth Of Soul Cinema
FEBRUARY 8, 2007 In the late 1960s the Hollywood Studios - in a belated attempt to deal with the social disruptions of the times - hired three African-American directors to helm black-themed feature productions.

This was a first for Hollywood. Previously films aimed at African American audiences were directed by studio insiders (Vincent Minelli for Cabin In the Sky) or indie figures working on contract (Otto Preminger for Carmen Jones). Outside the Hollywood mainstream, a black cinema had existed right from the silent days until the mid 1950s when television eroded the market. The main figure of that movement was the legendary Oscar Micheux, who financed, wrote, and directed many of his own pictures hims...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Peter O'Toole's Twilight Masterpiece
FEBRUARY 3, 2007 Venus is startling, edgy and ultimately very moving film about a very rare subject: age and desire. It may also be the swansong of a very great actor, Peter O’ Toole, who delivers a performance portraying an unusual screen emotion, elegant lechery. It’s marvelous from start to finish.

Despite being saddled with a unwise generic title and sporting a dreadful deer-in-the-headlight movie poster image of the aged O’Toole, Venus is remarkable on a number of fronts. Written by the formerly corrosive Hanif Kurishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha Of Suburbia) and directed with acute cinematic force by Roger Mitchell, Venus has a muddy, intense look that comes from shooting in 16mm guage an...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

ACTRA STRIKE COUNTDOWN
FEBRUARY 2, 2007 The upcoming ACTRA in the Atlantic Region strike has seen the national dispute taken several fascinating turns. Local screen thespians are set to hit the pavement on or near Valentine’s Day; there’re already out in the centre of the country in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Armed with ‘letters of continuance’ where producers agree to pay a 7% increase to avoid job action - while the larger issues of new media royalties continue to be negotiated - the National Screen Actors’ union has approached the strike in a low-key and imaginative manner, minimizing initial disruption to the industry.
Different juristiction across the country have different start dates; British Columbia rem...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

TV Fund 'Dead'
FEBRUARY 2, 2007 The Ottawa Sun contains a tersely worded announcement today (Friday, February 2nd) that the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) is ‘dead’.
Quoting Shaw cable executive Ken Stein, the report comes after a Tuesday meeting with Federal Heritage Minister Bev Oda that was supposed to fix the fund after both Shaw Cable and Quebec’s Videotron announced the end of their funding last week. The Feds recently announced a two-year, $200 million dollar commitment to the fund.
The article specifically states that the corporate parent of both Videotron and the Sun Newspapers is media and printing giant Quebecor, giving the release the air of an official pronouncement. Other major cable players such as Roger...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

NJ In NS?
JANUARY 28, 2007 Norman Jewison Plans Nova Scotia Shoot...
Tucked away in a wire article promoting a new DVD version of the classic musical Fiddler On the Roof, famous Canadian film director Norman Jewison announced he’s planning a semi-sequel to his raucous 1966 Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming!The Russians Are Coming! to be filmed in Nova Scotia.
Tentatively titled High Alert, the film would make use of the province’s legendary beachfronts. Various New England beachsites provided the setting for the first film, noted for its first starring role for veteran comic actor Alan Arkin (who owns a recreational property on Cape Breton Island). At press time Arkin’s participation in the film has not been c...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Pan's Labyrinth
JANUARY 27, 2007 Guillermo Del Toro’s feature fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth is well on its way to becoming the one of the most over-hyped films of 2007. Given a small-scale release at the end 0f 2006 in order to qualify for a Foreign Film Oscar nomination, the movie has now opened wide while riding a crest of very strong reviews amidst mixed audience reaction.

Far less fantastical than advertised, half of Pan’s Labyrinth is dour adult drama that ends rather badly. The rest of the film consists of frightening and rather unpleasant dream elements that build towards a fatalistic climax.

The result is a film that is visually resplendant but narratively unbalanced. Del Toro - who wrote and directed - has claimed ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Poor Boy's Game To Berlin
Poor Boy's Game To BerlinJANUARY 25, 2007 The Nova Scotia film Poor Boy's Game has been invited to the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, one of the most important cinematic celebrations in the world.
Starring American Icon Danny Glover, Poor Boys Game was shot in Spryfield and Halifax in the spring of 2006; directed by Toronto-based director Clement Virgo, the film's script was penned by Nova Scotia native
Chas Thorne, who only recently wrapped his first directoral effort, Pushing Up Daisies, shot in Halifax in November and December.
This is the second Bluenose shot-film to be invited to a major festival in 2007; David Gordon Green's Snow Angels - shot in Halifax last winter and starring Starring Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell ...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

TV Fund Wobbles
JANUARY 24, 2007 Posing a far greater threat to the Canadian motion picture industry than the ACTRA strike, a second Cable Giant has announced it is pulling out of funding the Canadian Television Fund (CTF).
Yesterday Alberta-based Shaw announced the end of its support; today it is Quebec's Videotron. The Feds pony up $100 million a year for the CTF, the cable companies match and surpass that number to create a financing structure that underwrites most mainstream Canadian TV production
(separate from the closely-named Telefilm Canada, which funds theatrical feature films and new media).
If the CTF dries up - with the two companies' withdrawl, it is down by almost 30% of its total - programming like Corn...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

Outlander Wraps
JANUARY 21, 2007 One of the biggest motion picture projects in recent Nova Scotia history has wrapped. Outlander - the Vikings meet Alien flick starring John Hurt and Jim Caviezel - completed some green-screen interior studio work at William F. White studio in early to mid-January. Shooting began in October at a massive set near Nine Mile River half-an-hour outside Halifax and carried on right through the Christmas holidays, with only a brief break. One week was reserved for exterior photography at a fiord near Corner Brook, Newfoundland; most of the shoot was executed in Nova Scotia.

Produced by legendary filmmaker Don Carmody - who helmed Porky’s, the most successful Canadian film of all time - Outlande...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

New year could be bleak if film and video crowd can't reach agreement
JANUARY 20, 2007 A dispute between Canada’s fim and television actor’s union and producers is now heading for the brink. ACTRA’s membership has voted for a strike mandate, at perhaps the least advantageous time in the production schedule for hard-pressed thespians.

Winter is usually down time in on the Canadian production scene, and in Halifax it would seem that just two major projects - the big-budget sci-fi movie Outlander and the continuing CBC TV series This Hour Has 22 Minutes will be directly affected.

While Outlander is getting close to completion, any picket lines might disrupt the final days of the shoot, which will last until the end of January. With major international stars such as John Hur...  Read More.
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this Post
PERMALINK COMMENTS (0) POST COMMENT EMAIL POST

HOME | ESSENTIALS | NEWS | ENTERTAINMENT | RESTAURANTS+FOOD | SHOPPING | SPORTS | LIVING | BUSINESS
ABOUT US | CONTACT US | INFOMONKEY.NET IN YOUR COMMUNITY | PRIVACY | TERMS OF USE | ADVERTISE WITH US | FAQS
© Copyright 2007 Sutcliffe Media Inc.