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Ron Foley Macdonald

Movies Editor Ron Foley Macdonald is a freelance writer and film programmer based in Halifax.

Now Shooting features serious film and video industry news, salacious gossip, vicious rumours, Ron's musings and any other tidbits or contributions you would like to contribute.

Click on the gray New Post link in the far left column.

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Now Shooting Archive

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tim Burton's 'Alice' Bombs

MARCH 5, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Tim Burton fans should be properly forewarned that his major studio take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland is more Disney than Burton. With a truly horrifying girl-power script by Linda Woolverton--who penned Beauty And the Beast and The Lion King for the Mouse Factory--this particular Alice is major disappointment.

Sure, there’s a raft of wonderfully whimsical imagery and some startling visuals that are Burton’s trademark. And a couple of performances--Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, in particular--provide evidence that this Alice might have been an extraordinary vehicle for the visionary director’s outsized originality had he had more control on t... Read More.
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The Crazies A Vibrant Zombie Variant

FEBRUARY 26, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sahara director Breck Eisner has tackled the modern-day remake of one of horrormeister George Romero’s most neglected films, The Crazies.

Built around a star-making performance by Deadwood actor Timothy Olyphant--who was so effective in the terrific recent Canadian heist flick High Life--The Crazies is a less resonant but still vibrant variant on Romero’s ongoing Zombie franchise (from 1968’s Night Of the Living Dead to 2009’s Survival of the Dead).

With a storyline that echoes the rash of apocalyptic narratives that have been breaking out in theatres lately--from The Book Of Eli to the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road--The Crazies is a simpler, more direct thriller delivered... Read More.
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Shutter Island: Twisted Plot, Visual Poetry

FEBRUARY 19, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Paramount has fiddled with the release date for Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island for almost a season and a half, putting off the potentially difficult film’s launch for at least six months.

Well it’s finally here, and there’s no question it’s essential cinema for anyone who considers film to be the greatest popular art form of the 2oth and 21st centuries.

That doesn’t mean Shutter Island is an ‘easy’ film. Densely plotted with enough twists and turns to derail the most surefooted of audiences, this may not rank amongst Scorsese’s absolute masterpieces after only a single viewing.

On the other hand, the film sees the New York-based filmmaker getting closer to the style of a clutch o... Read More.
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Crazy Heart: Blazingly Great

FEBRUARY 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Scott Cooper’s debut feature Crazy Heart has build up a fine surge of hype mostly due from the extraordinary performance of Jeff Bridges as a broken-down Texas-based country writer and performer named Bad Blake.

The film is surprisingly straightforward and bittersweet. While the songs reflect the poetic simplicity of work of Don Williams and Leonard Cohen, Bad Blake’s life and appearance draws upon real-life legends such as Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.

A gentle love story between Blake and a Santa Fe journalist played with firm determination by Maggie Gyllenhaal provides the core of the redemptive storyline.

Supporting turns from Colin Farrell and Rober... Read More.
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Broken Embraces: Good But Not Great

JANUARY 31, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar’s latest feature film, Broken Embraces, is regularly referred to as a letdown after his brilliant and vastly entertaining 2004 entry Volver.

Sure, it has an overly dense plot that again returns to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, for its inspiration. And at 128 minutes, Broken Embraces is in need of a little trimming.

That said, Broken Embraces is still the work of a cinema-maestro at the top of this game. Every frame of the film is arresting; it’s worth a viewing on the big screen for the vibrant red-and-yellow art direction alone.

The storyline is almost impossible to encapsulate. As told in a difficult to follow flashback structure, ... Read More.
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A Single Man Is Utterly Ravishing

JANUARY 22, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Fashion designer Tom Ford’s first feature film, A Single Man, is just about as ravishing a movie that’s ever hit the big screen.

Adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s landmark 1964 novel of the same name set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film tells the story of an English professor at at State college in Los Angeles struggling with news that his same-sex lover has just died in a car crash.

Sporting two staggering performances from Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, A Single Man joins the small canon of films such as The Slender Thread, Goodbye Solo and A Taste Of Cherry about a person dangling on the verge of suicide.

And while not much happens plot-wise during this single day/s... Read More.
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Book Of Eli A Great Read

JANUARY 15, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) have entered the post-apocalypse-du-jour sweepstakes with the Denzel Washington vehicle, The Book Of Eli.

Seemingly using some of the same locations and sets as the recent film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Book Of Eli is the more satisfying movie mostly because there’s a plot this time out.

No mere literary translation despite its title, The Book Of Eli also channels several cinematic spirits--Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, and Sam Peckinpah, to name three--to deliver a dusty futuristic actioner that blends 1980s music video touches with its sci-fi apocalypse flair.

Matching the swooningly blasted landscapes ... Read More.
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Daybreakers: Apocalyptic Vampire Zombie Fun!

JANUARY 8, 2010 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Aussie Spierig Brothers have delivered a surprisingly solid blast of imaginative entertainment in their just-opened horror flick Daybreakers.

And while it’s a bit wobbly at times, like an overstuffed triple decker-sandwich--Daybreakers is, after all, a Vampire/Zombie/Sci-Fi Apocalypse flick--the sprightly second feature from the Downunder Brothers bubbles over with bright ideas, whooshing action sequences, cool art direction, and not a little gore.

Those bright ideas include the notion that vampires have taken over the world, and that the world is running out of human blood. These two very clever turnarounds are more than enough to fuel a single narrative. When you throw in a human... Read More.
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High-Flying Dud: Up In the Air

DECEMBER 26, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Cynically calculated and yet virtually unwatchable, Up In the Air is one of those movies whose reputation gets inflated on the hothouse film festival circuit.

As writer/director Jason Reitman’s follow-up to the quirky hit Juno, it reinforces the notion that the son of legendary Canadian producer Ivan Reitman fluked out with that sprightly Ellen Page/Michael Cera teen mom comedy.

Now it seems no critic wants to state the obvious about Up In the Air. The truth is it’s the vastly unsympathetic story of a man called Ryan Bingham whose job it is to fly around the US firing people.

And guess what. It’s film of unimaginable cruelty, wretched novelty, and glib emotions capped off with gha... Read More.
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James Cameron's Eye-Popping Avatar

DECEMBER 20, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sensory overload sci-fi epic. Landmark nerdland technical breakthrough. Masterful video-game-movie hybrid. Exhausting eco-fable wrought large. Rip-snorting revisionist actioner. James Cameron’s Avatar is all of these things, and more.

Created with a new Fusion 3-d camera system, the excess of swirling movement sometimes overwhelms the eyes, but beyond that, Avatar is just about as thrilling a movie you’re going to experience in a single lifetime.

Starting out with a straightforward neo-colonial storyline of exploiting resources on a faraway moon, Avatar pits some exceptionally terse dialogue (from narrator and lead Jake Scully, played by Sam Worthington like some Samuel Beckett charact... Read More.
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Orson Welles Is Worth Watching Again

DECEMBER 12, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) A must-see for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the performing arts, Me And Orson Welles might just pull in a few more members of the greater moviegoing public due to teen heart-throb Zac Efron’s involvement.

And considering the elf-like Efron mostly has to gaze admiringly at the amazing re-creation of Orson Welles by British Actor Christian McCay, it’s really not that much of a stretch for High School Musical Trilogy actor, as he seeks to define himself as a post-Disney personality.
Me And Orson Welles joins the small but gro... Read More.
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Precious Is Everything You Expect And More

NOVEMBER 28, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Calling Precious a ‘brave’ movie is selling it short. The word that more aptly
describes it is ‘ferocious’.

You could throw around other words too, like ‘groundbreaking’, ‘innovative’ and ‘original’. Whatever the case, Precious is one terrific flick.

Everything you’ve heard about it is true, from the stunt casting of Lenny Kravitz as a male nurse and Mariah Carey as a frumpy social worker to the fact that title character--Precious herself--is indeed played by an overweight unknown, Garbourey Sidibe, who is so quietly charismatic you can’t take your eyes off her.

And the storyline does in fact deal frankly and directly with incest, family violence, grinding urban poverty and ignora... Read More.
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Fans Will Love It Might Get Loud

NOVEMBER 23, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The new electric guitarist feature documentary It Might Get Loud is getting a very strange pre-DVD release: a couple of latenight weekends only before a December 22nd street date. The film premiered at the 2008 Toronto Film Fest.

It’s a strategy that would seem to encourage punters to wait for the DVD, which will undoubtedly include some extras to spice up the rather thin package that is this non-fiction feature about a just-for-the-cameras meeting of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’s Jack White.

Rabid fans of any of these groups will want to stay up, of course, and watch their heroes up there on the big screen. They are fascinating, innovative musicians... Read More.
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The Box Fascinating But Frustrating

NOVEMBER 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Richard Kelly has returned to wide release with his third film, a supernatural thriller called The Box, adapted from the classic Sci-Fi author Richard (I Am Legend) Matheson’s story ‘Button, Button’.

Kelly--whose debut 2001 outing Donnie Darko has become the definitive film about youth culture in the 1980s--slipped with his ambitious but little-seen sophomore attempt, Southland Tales.

And while the combination of Kelly and Matheson was enough to send me off to the multiplex to catch The Box, the film is far from totally successful. Balanced against an intoxicating sense of cinematic style is a confused narrative that is occasionally rather hard to follow.

The premise, however, is el... Read More.
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An Education Is Superior Filmmaking

NOVEMBER 7, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) An Education is one of those must-see films that has gotten a tad inflated from expectations and hype that come with dazzling the denizens on the festival circuit.

A product of the wonderful British novelist Nick Hornby--who wrote the script, but not the story, while his wife produced--An Education is a precise and pointed cautionary tale steeped in pop culture details.

Beautifully crafted and deftly executed, it’s only flaw is Hornby’s abrupt ending which closes off the extraordinary story just a little too soon.

A true-to-life narrative derived from a Granta Magazine memoir, An Education tells of a 16-year-old British schoolgirl’s affair with an older, more sophisticated man name... Read More.
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Paranormal Activity: Domestic Banality as Terror

OCTOBER 31, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Paranormal Activity is one supremely scary film. Reportedly made for ten grand by writer/director Oren Peli, the brilliant bargain basement supernatural nail-biter has already endured some really dumb comparisons to shaky-camster thrillers such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield.

Those critics and commentators might just be missing the point of Paranormal Activity. The camera--thankfully--doesn’t actually move that much, leaving much of the suspense to the static, minimalist nature of the shots.

Consequently Paranormal Activity evokes minimalist filmmakers such as Robert Bresson and Carl Dryer in its style. The content, on the other hand, is an astonishing examination of contem... Read More.
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Amelia Not Quite Airborne

OCTOBER 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) While the real Amelia Earhardt disappeared in the South Pacific in 1937, her bigscreen counterpart is crash-landing in cinemas this weekend in the Mira Nair-directed, Hillary Swank-starring bio-pic that was partly filmed in Nova Scotia.

Nair--a talented but erratic director who’s completely lost in handling a conventional, 1950s style biographical film--makes so many mistakes with Amelia it’s hard to find a place to start discussing the film’s drawbacks.

First off, the Oscar-Winning actress Hillary Swank seems locked into channeling Katharine Hepburn in constructing her Amelia Earhardt. Latching on to the aviatrix’s 100-watt smile, Swank misses out otherwise on the famous flyer’s enigm... Read More.
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Where The Wild Things Are Is Wonderful

OCTOBER 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The long-awaited bigscreen version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book Where The Wild Things Are has finally arrived in theatres after years of development starts and stops, and even more trouble from the production end.

Directed by the visionary Spike Jonze--who helmed two of the most startling original movies of the last decade, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich--Where The Wild Things Are is yet another deftly left-field film. And while it might be a bit slow and scary for younger kids, it’s a film that should dazzle audiences of all ages. Already critics are lining up for huzzahs. Pardon me if I join the cue.

The wisp of a story--the original book is only 43 pages--gets so... Read More.
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Zombieland's A Decent Time-Waster

OCTOBER 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sure, Zombieland might be only a throwaway film that barely whets the hunger for the next installment in George Romero’s template-making Living Dead series.

Seemingly built out of spare parts leftover from flicks such as Trainspotting and Shaun Of the Dead, it relies a little too heavily on fetishized slow-mo shots of zombies being dispatched while the main character stitches the skimpy narrative together with a too-rich voiceover.

Still, there’s lots to like in Zombieland. First off, it’s full of trashy jokes, deliberately crappy music and delightfully under-developed ideas. Second, it sports Woody Harrelson giddily spoofing his own redneck screen persona. Third, it contains one of th... Read More.
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Bright Star Bright Indeed

OCTOBER 4, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Jane (Sweetie, The Piano) Campion’s new film Bright Star is a fluid and fascinating attempt to refashion the traditional costume drama bio-pic.

Based on the three-year affair between British poet John Keats and clothes maker/designer Fanny Brawne, Bright Star is remarkably restrained filmmaking, with little flashy camera work along with some seriously underplayed characterizations.

The result sees a reverse of expectations usually found in historical drama.
Campion deliberately makes the female lead--played with stern deliberation by Abbie Cornish--the active partner in the romance. Ben Whishaw’s John Keats plays the object of desire as a mostly passive figure who courts doom as much ... Read More.
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Trailer Park Countdown A Classic

SEPTEMBER 27, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Trailer Park Boys: Countdown To Liquor Day is supposed to be the swansong of the popular and influential Showcase TV series set right here on the East Coast of Canada.

Half an hour in and the film seems like a shrug, with everyone involved having their minds on something else. But then something very strange happens. Director Mike Clattenburg virtually hands the film over to the classically trained powerhouse actor John Dunsworth, who as the Trailer Park Supervisor Mr. Leahy spends most of his time severely soused and clad only in his skivvies.

It’s then that you start to realize that Trailer Park Boys: Countdown To Liquor Day is actually the final coda to Canada’s answer to the great ... Read More.
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This Animated 9 Is Indeed a 9

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Shane Acker’s debut animated feature 9 is getting a rough ride from many critics who simply don’t recognize the filmmaker’s extraordinary achievement.

The terse 79-minute computer-graphic film tells post-apocalyptic story of a clutch of burlap-bag creatures who battle a montrous machine. And while 9 is driven by a conventional action heroic story arc--full of occasionally klutzy bits of unleavened dialogue--there’s no question that every frame of the film is a miniature visual masterpiece.

Taking the rubbish-heap aesthetic of great stop-motion animators such as The Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer and adapting it for a mass audience, Acker has managed to blend the existential terror of... Read More.
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Taking Woodstock Slight, Sweet And Fun Indeed

AUGUST 26, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Ang Lee’s latest, Taking Woodstock, is a slight but strikingly original take on the legendary 3-day hippie musical festival held in 1969.

Surprisingly funny and often very sweet, Taking Woodstock tells the tale of the delapidated Jewish family resort that hosted the army of logisticians that put together the event, and the terminally uptight family who owned and ran the fourth-rate summer getaway.

James Schamus’s script is full of bright moments. And while some of the elements never really come together, there’s enough balance between the small-scale domestic turmoil and the yawning fulcrum point of cultural change to make Taking Woodstock compelling.

Like all of Ang Lee’s films, th... Read More.
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District 9 Eye-Popping Moviemaking

AUGUST 15, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) District 9 is one heck of a movie, a wicked Sci-Fi flick so full of ideas, humour and action that it makes the whole genre feel fresh again.

Directed by Peter Jackson acolyte Neill Blomkamp, District 9 tells the tale of end-of-their rope crustacean-like aliens getting marooned in South Africa as their spaceship runs out of fuel. Treated like refugees for 28 years, their experience resonates greatly with that country’s recently departed Apartheid system; there’s elements of bureaucratic nepotism, gangsterism, privatization and corporate greed all thrown in for good measure.

Like the recent apocalyptic Children Of Men, District 9 has a furious sense of pacing that never lets the exposito... Read More.
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Julie And Julia A Double Dud

AUGUST 10, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) No reviewers seem willing to admit just how horrible Nora Ephron’s new movie Julie And Julia is.

Part bio-pic and part contemporary chick flic, Julie and Julia completely wastes the considerable talent of Meryl Streep along with the extraordinary story of American TV chef Julia Child.

What Nora Ephron was thinking, I don’t know. Whatever the case, Julie And Julia is a shrill, trite and infinitely annoying double-narrative women’s wish-fulfillment movie that piles up plenty of food and sex but leaves out character, plot and drama.

And while the story of Julia Child starts out promisingly, with Streep in Paris with her diplomat husband played solidly by Stanley Tucci, her cartoon char... Read More.
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Hurt Locker An Unreserved Masterpiece

JULY 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Hurt Locker might just be the one Iraq War movie that finally connects with audiences. It certainly is making a connection with critics. Especially this one.

Directed by the legendary female action helmer Kathryn Bigelow--who made not one but two of her features in Halifax, The Weight Of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker--this is one bomb-squad movie that stays with you.

Working independently from the studio system and utilizing a tight cast of unknowns, Bigelow pushes her own fascinations to the absolute breaking point in The Hurt Locker. Previously in films like Strange Days and Point Break, she pursued a study of masculinity in crisis well beyond the parameters of the most male of ... Read More.
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Moon A Classic In Miniature

JULY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Duncan Jones’s feature debut, Moon, has been attracting glowing reviews and modestly growing audiences in the midst of all the summer blockbuster hoopla.

The son of David Bowie, Jones has fashioned a fascinating chamber sci-fi flick that harkens back to the early 1970s for its style and execution. Forgoing computer-generated graphics, he’s made use of miniatures, giving Moon a delightfully anachronistic look that perfectly captures the moon’s bleak and haunting character.

And while the story occasionally seems built out of spare parts--you can check off the influences from Solaris to Silent Running to Logan’s Run right up to Alien and Blade Runner--there’s a knotty originality at the c... Read More.
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Depp Charges Public Enemies

JULY 2, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Michael Mann’s highly anticipated Johnny Depp 1930s gangster vehicle Public Enemies is a curious disappointment.

Badly shot on hi-def video, it runs 143 minutes, 43 minutes too long.

And yet any movie about the famous real-life bank robber John Dillinger is going to be worth seeing. Add Depp--and Billy Crudup as a young J. Edgar Hoover--and you get a film that is still worth watching.

Mann’s track record with the original Miami Vice TV show would seem to have guaranteed him a chance to match the heights of great latterday gangster films such as The Godfather and Goodfellas. While he never reaches those heights--the shallow image of HD video forces him into endless actor closeups and... Read More.
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Away We Go Not Quite There

JUNE 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American Beauty director Sam Mendes has taken up with hipster writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida to create the shaggy and slightly unsatisfying road movie Away We Go.

It starts promisingly. The sweet and sometimes silly stay-at-home thirtysomething couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) who want to move to a good place to raise their forthcoming baby are, well, very sweet and very silly. The first half of the film features their adventures visiting nutty friends and loose relations in Phoenix and Tuscon.

The austere desert locations work nicely with the portraits of lifestyle-crazy couples--from wacky academics to hippie dimwits--who make Krasinski and Rudolph look positively norm... Read More.
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Outlander Out Of This World

JUNE 19, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Film Nova Scotia did everyone a big favour by screening the long-awaited
locally made Viking/Sci-Fi flickt Outlander at the Oxford Theatre last Thursday.

Not only did they score a 35mm film print, they brought writer/director Howard McCain and two of his producers to introduce and speak afterwards.

And what a surprise! Outlander turns out to be a brisk, gripping and vastly entertaining genre film that has deservedly been building a big buzz on the online Sci-Fi ‘geek’ community.

With its audacious scenario of a alien warrior landing on Earth--Norway just after 700 AD, in fact--to join together with Vikings to battle a voracious off-planet creature, Outlander would seem initially to... Read More.
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Easy Virtue Easy On the Eyes

JUNE 13, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Easy Virtue is one 1920s-written drama that seems far more durable than it should. Based on Noel Coward’s play, it features a dissolute English aristocratic family on an estate it can’t afford and an American interloper that marries uncomfortably into the clan. The result is a costume flick that blends corrosive wit with great furniture.

Sure, it’s a formula that worked for much of Merchant-Ivory’s output, so director Stephan Elliott (Priscilla, Queen Of the Desert) can hardly miss. His two leads--Yankee Actress Jessica Biel and recent Prince Caspian star Ben Barnes--are so distractingly beautiful that they could probably carry the picture dressed in overalls and pitchforks.

It doesn’... Read More.
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Drag Me To Hell: Gross, Funny and A Genuine Scare

MAY 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Legendary Evil Dead director Sam Raimi has paused long enough from counting all the money he’s made from helming the three Spider Man movies to crank out a small-scale horror tale entitled Drag Me To Hell that returns him to his shock-a-rama roots.

Scripted and co-produced with his brother Ivan, DMTH is a fiesty chamber piece that mixes by-the-book thrills and chills with cheesy dramatics. The result is a genuinely scary film that will probably inspire yet another generation of film fanatics to pick up cameras themselves.

Unlike the smooth but operatic Spider Man films--which still rank as the finest of all cinematic comic book adapatations--Raimi’s horror work blends gross-out images ... Read More.
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Terminator Perfectly Serviceable

MAY 24, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Terminator Salvation certainly doesn’t deserve the truckload of crappy reviews it’s piled up since it opened wide in the spring rush of popcorn movies.

Two stars here, one star there. You’d think these were critiques of the last Alien Vs Predator installment, now the tin standard for movie franchises that have run out of steam.

Sure, director McG is no James Cameron. But this fourth Terminator movie easily matches Cameron’s rather bloated but still effective sequel, T2.

And while Christian Bale seems to be everyone’s favorite whipping boy these days--no doubt for his leaked to the internet rant that exposed the busy actor as a bit of an onstage cad--there’s no question he’s effectiv... Read More.
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Wolverine Just So So

MAY 15, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) X-Men Origins: Wolverine is 2009’s first big summer comic book movie--it opened a week before Star Trek--but it certainly won’t be the best.

Sure, it’s better than the clunky third X-Men installment, directed by Hollywood journeyman Brett Ratner after Bryan Singer had established the franchise with the first two stylish episodes of what will undoubtedly be an endless franchise.

The real problem with the X-Men empire is that there are too many characters to be contained on the big screen, each blessed with a defining super-power that often takes too long to explain. With all the hallmarks of big-budget action movies filling up the space with explosions, cool CG effects and apocalyptic ... Read More.
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Star Trek Revitalized

MAY 8, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) You could say that TV’s Lost creator JJ Abrams’ retooling of the Star Trek franchise is cheesy, shrill and short on some of the weighty Sci-Fi ideas that drove the original series and consequent follow up shows and films.

But you might just be missing the point of this vibrant and entertaining bigscreen exercise that has confidently revitalized a tired franchise.

Sure, Abrams relies a tad too much on time travel to knit his unlikely story together. But with a cast of young, sexy Star Fleet recruits on their first big mission to save the universe, this vision of Star Trek is the freshest since the original series hit the small screen from 1966 to 1969.

Pinning the narrative on the o... Read More.
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Thom Pain A Bracing Theatrical Blast

APRIL 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax has a new theatre company that has come roaring out of the gate with a fresh-from New York City dramatic sensation.

The company’s name is The Safety Position. The play is Will Eno’s acclaimed
one-man work Thom Pain (Based On Nothing). And the single actor onstage is the award-winning Stewart Legere.

It all makes for 75 minutes of wonky, poke-in-the-eye drama that treads the line between self-conscious satire and disturbing personal escavation.

Legere’s wide-eyed persona combines elements of confessional poet, timid stand-up comedian and gleeful game show host as he delivers Will Eno’s caustic text.
It’s a marvelous performance, full of red herrings that both engage and re... Read More.
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Two Lovers An Unexpected Pleasure

APRIL 30, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Two Lovers is an unexpected cinematic pleasure. The third collaboration between writer/director James Gray and actor Joaquin Phoenix (after We Own The Night and The Yards), it is a measured romance vividly anchored in the subculture of New York City’s modern day Jewish community in Brighton Beach.

Almost old-fashioned in its narrative intention of telling the story of a young man torn between a pair of potential girlfriends, Two Lovers adds some unique contemporary touches that bring the film neatly into the 21st century.

Phoenix’s character Leonard is the bi-polar son of a retiring dry-cleaning family who has returned to live home after his former girlfriend bailed on him. His two po... Read More.
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Wendy And Lucy: An American Indie Classic

APRIL 28, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The next installment in AFCOOP’s Monday Night Movies (May 4th) series is a must-see.

American Indie writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s heartbreaking Wendy And Lucy rates as one of the truly great films of 2008.

Seeing it on the big screen, then, becomes imperative, even if Wendy And Lucy gets its DVD release the very next day. The deeply poetic story of a female drifter and her dog on their way from the Pacific Northwest to a possible job in Alaska delivers narrative minimalism braced against some extraordinary landscapes that combine to create an utterly original cinematic experience.

Reichardt’s third feature--after 2005’s acclaimed Old Joy and the now almost forgotten 1994 flick ... Read More.
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17 Again: Effervescent Efron, Dead Perry

APRIL 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Everybody’s out to get Zac Efron this weekend, with a virtual torrent of rotten reviews for his leading man debut in the high-school body switch comedy 17 Again.

Sure, it’s soggy premise has been done before (Like Father Like Son, Freaky Friday, Big and countless others) but 17 Again hardly rates such adverse reactions. Few critics have mentioned that director Burr Steers handled one of the great indie debuts of the last decade, Igby Goes Down. Or that this new film delivers a unique portrait of contemporary American high schools as technologically accelerated torture chamber doubling as funhouse.

And with Efron himself looking like an overgrown imp, what are people expecting, Shakespe... Read More.
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Sunshine Cleaning Can't Live Up To Its Hype

APRIL 11, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sunshine Cleaning is one of those alleged quirky indie comedies that has a surprising lack of quirk or comedy. A determined tale of lower-class sisters struggling through young adulthood in the New Mexico and Arizona cleaning up other peoples messes while creating their own, it piles on the pathos to deliver some cringe-worthy moments in contemporary American Cinema.

The film, directed by Christine Jeffs, does have its moments. The two sisters--Amy Adams’ Rose and Emily Blunt’s Norah--are quite fetching to look at as failed waitresses and maids who stumble into tidying up crime and trauma scenes.
There’s some spirited cameos from the likes of Alan Arkin, Paul Dooley and Steve Zahn. And t... Read More.
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Adventureland Funny And Poignant

APRIL 5, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Greg Mottola’s latest feature Adventureland is one of those heartbreakingly definitive films that absolutely nails a time of life that’s been badly served by North American Popular Culture.

Following a group a trio of recent lower-middle-class university grads in 1987 as they attempt to transition from useless arts-related degrees to the nasty real world of employment and post-graduate aspirations, Mottola sets his story in a ghastly summertime amusement park. It’s a horrifying place where ambition bites the dust, and young hopes and idealism get ground into day-to-day misery.

Adventureland’s premise is so sure-footed that the film simply can’t fail. The New York City based director--w... Read More.
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Trelawny A Must See

APRIL 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Dalhousie Theatre Productions’ staging of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1898 play Trelawny Of the Wells is just about the best thing I’ve ever seen by the regions’s largest post-secondary drama school.

It’s a beautifully measured rendering of a classic by an unfairly neglected playwright who once dominated his field over the likes of his better remembered contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Pinero’s work is now rarely revived on stage. The only significant cinematic adaption bearing his name is the creaky and mystical 1945 romance The Enchanted Cottage directed by John Cromwell and starring Dorothy MacGuire.

Otherwise, Pinero’s beautifully crafted dramatic writing remai... Read More.
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Finding Lost Song A Classic

MARCH 25, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) New Brunswick-based director Rodrigue Jean’s third feature, Lost Song, has already captured two major Canadian Film Awards. Lauded with a prize at last year’s Toronto Festival, it also managed to cop a place on this country’s Top Ten Films of 2008.

Film Fanatics who couldn’t catch the Atlantic Film Festival screening last September will get another chance to see the Quebec-shot Francophone domestic drama at AFCOOP’s Monday Night Movies on March 30th at 7:00 pm at the Park Lane Theatre.

An apt choice for kicking off the the latest installment of the Halifax Independent Film Festival--which will feature the filmmaker giving a noontime director’s talk at the NSCAD Film School the next day... Read More.
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Pontypool Channels Cronenberg

MARCH 21, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Maverick Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s follow-up to his experimental multi-screened Elaine Page vehicle The Tracey Fragments is a ferocious genre tour-de-force. Shot on a single location, Pontypool is a Canuck Zombie flick par excellence, channelling 1970s David Cronenberg for a new millennium.

Revolving around a forceful performance by Stephen McHattie as a newly-landed small-town DJ named Mazzy caught up in a SARS-like viral outbreak spread by language and understanding,
Pontypool matches a cool blue-green colour scheme against a growing sense of hysteria.

McDonald maintains and builds the tension right up until the film’s final minutes, making for a cinematic thrill ride that t... Read More.
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Watchmen Wild And Arresting

MARCH 9, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Zack Snyder’s bigscreen adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel The Watchmen is just about as good as anyone could expect.

Dark, cynical, and studded with black humour and wild leaps of imagination, Watchman is a visual feast. It looks like a racier version of The Dark Knight, with lots of pulpy blood, violence, gore and at least one sex scene that is hilariously over the top (played out to the original version of Leonard Cohen’s 1984 recording of his now-standard ‘Hallejah’).

The film’s one drawback--a convoluted plot that is almost as tangled as 1946 Film Noir classic The Big Sleep--makes the storyline just a bit confusing. And Snyder manages to squeeze in two origin storie... Read More.
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Cadillac Records Roars

MARCH 4, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Cadillac Records is one terrific bio-pic. Director Darnell Martin--one of the few black women filmmakers working in mainstream Hollywood--shoehorns the story of Chess Records into a tight 108-minute running time, catching all the glory of how acoustic American Blues from the South went north to Chicago, became electrified and eventually morphed into Rock and Roll.

The cast of characters is sprawling, and even then there a crucial couple left out. Yes you get Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Etta James (Beyonce), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Little Walter (Columbus Short), Chuck Berry (Mos Def) and improsario Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody). Each performance is a fascinating impersonation, and... Read More.
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Scottish 'Stone' Comes Home

FEBRUARY 20, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sorry, but it’s simply not possible for someone with the last name Macdonald to give Stone Of Destiny a bad review.

The true-to-life story of how a quartet of patriotic students took back the Scottish Coronation Stone from Britain’s Westminister Abbey on Christmas Day in 1950, Stone Of Destiny is a remarkably engaging story of determination and adventure, one that will delight and haunt audiences of all ages.

Based on ringleader Ian Hamilton’s memoir, this Canadian co-production was helmed by producer/director Charles Martin Smith, an actor and filmmaker best known for all those MVP kids flicks that feature football-playing dogs and hockey-playing chimps.

Consistently Canadian Box-o... Read More.
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An Inspirational 'Class'

FEBRUARY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Cannes Palme D’Or-winning French flick The Class is one of those must-see films that seems a bit underwhelming at first.

Filmed verite-style in the blah Parisian suburbs, it reverses the formula of the 1960s classic To Sir With Love by placing a white teacher in the midst of a mainly immigrant class of Arabic, Oriental and African students.

The tough 13-15 year old kids’ cultural differences clash with the teacher’s immersion in the French traditions of bureaucratic and overly formal order.
Rampant hormones and emotions come right up against ‘Reason over Passion’.
The result is a grinding drama offers no heroics and only a bleak ray of hope that the French Public Educational pr... Read More.
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Coraline's A Bore

FEBRUARY 7, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Stop-motion animation master Henry Selick’s adaptation of graphic novelist Neil Gaiman’s Coraline has piled up many respectful reviews. In what seems to be a growing trend, those critics might not have stayed with the film through to its end. If they had, they might have been less respectful.

That’s because Coraline is a bore. Sure, it’s a neat-looking fantasy, with some brilliant passages of art department design that absolutely dazzle. Trouble is, the main storyline--of an ennui plagued 9 year old girl of the title who battles to save her parents from an evil alternative world--remains limp throughout the whole narrative.

Voice actor Dakota Fanning can carry much of the blame on this... Read More.
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Frost/Nixon: Regrets, I've Had A Few

FEBRUARY 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Ron Howard’s latest film Frost/Nixon is the fourth major motion picture to treat the 37th President of the United States. While it is sumptuously realized picture, with a terrific cast, the film simply cannot escape its origins from Peter Morgan’s slight stage play now inflated into big budget Oscar bait.

Frost/Nixon centres in on the 1977 longform television interviews done with the ex-President by the lightweight British talk-show host, David Frost. The narrative climaxes with the closest Nixon got to an apology for the Watergate scandal. The film claims that the television close-up of Nixon’s face during the interview (when he admitted ‘letting the American People down’) went further... Read More.
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Revolutionary Road Good But Nothing New

JANUARY 23, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Theatre director and occasional filmmaker (Jarhead, The Road To Perdition) Sam Mendes has tackled a prestige novel for his latest cinematic adventure, Revolutionary Road.

Adapted from Richard Yates’ acclaimed 1961 novel which is set in suburban 1955 Connecticut, Revolutionary Road is a beautifully crafted and forcefully acted film that merges elements of the pre-feminist TV series Mad Men, the recent suburban adultery feature Little Children and the feel of realist dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House.

The result is marital breakdown film that delves far down into the realities of domestic unhappiness, revealing a bleakness that is often overpowering.

Dicaprio and Win... Read More.
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The Wrestler Well Matched

JANUARY 17, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is indeed a triumph. Sparked by an absolutely amazing performance from former has-been Mickey Rourke, the film is a wildly redemptive tour through the wreckage of 1980s culture.

Using a surprisingly straightforward script by Robert Siegal, Aronofsky dives into an ultra-realistic approach (long follow shots, tight close ups, sports-style cinematic hyperbole) to deliver a narrative that continuously discovers compassion from the ruins of the domestic and professional life of Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a man who has wrestled long after his prime.

The grotty New Jersey wrestling circuit the director utilizes for the setting of The Wrestler is populated by the... Read More.
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Clint's Gran Torino Grand Indeed

JANUARY 9, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American Cinematic Icon Clint Eastwood has delivered a sly elegy to his own looming screen persona with his latest, Gran Torino.

Directing himself in declining inner-city Detroit with a gaggle of non-professional actors from the Hmong Community, the square-jawed actor/filmmaker shamelessly flirts with sentimentality with this redemptive tale that blends elements of Dirty Harry with the legacy of Archie Bunker.

The result is surprisingly sweet and funny. And for all of its angry urban setting, there’s little violence or gore. Its implied threat, however, hangs over the film from the get-go, and while the core of the story rests on cultural issues, there’s no question that Gran Torino i... Read More.
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Doubts About Doubt

JANUARY 1, 2009 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) New York City based playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley has returned to film directing with the big screen adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-Winning play Doubt.

One of the hotly anticipated serious films of the holiday season, Doubt is a strong piece of writing that doesn’t really translate to the movies all that well. Leaving Shanley--who wrote Moonstruck for Norman Jewison and went on to stumble through a major Hollywood disaster directing Joe And the Volcano--in charge of handling his own work was a mistake.

What might work well on stage simply doesn’t translate to the big screen. The narrow bit of business the play balances on--whether a well-meaning prie... Read More.
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Button A Xmas Dud

DECEMBER 26, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The curious thing about the Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is how many great reviews it has amassed in the run-up to its Christmas Day release.

The 2-hour and 47 minute adaptation of a fanciful F.Scott Fitzgerald short story is a bloated mess. And while it begins promisingly as a magic realist fable set in New Orleans, Benjamin Button soon wanders off into chick-flick territory, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett spending inordinate amounts of time gazing longingly at each other as Pitt’s title character grows younger physically in an odd time reversal that should have been the centre of the storyline.

When the film deteriorates into a gooey romance, Benjamin Button’s curious case beco... Read More.
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Slumdog's High Pedigree

DECEMBER 20, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) British director Danny Boyle has built up an impressive head of steam with his latest project Slumdog Millionaire.

The Shallow Grave/28 Days Later filmmaker has piled up some of the most spectacular reviews of his career for his India-set-and-shot coming of age flick. One wag even called it ‘the perfect movie’.

Clearly that reviewer had not seen the recent Brazilian classic City Of God, which Slumdog Millionaire bears some resemblance to. Add in elements of Boyle’s own kid’s flick Millions of a couple of years ago, and his new movie suddenly looks like it has been built out of spare parts.

Still, they are pretty spectacular spare parts. Shot in ravishing deep colours with jumpy Tr... Read More.
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Milk A Tasty Bio-Pic Indeed

DECEMBER 10, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Gus Van Sant’s return to conventional filmmaking, the shockingly traditional bio-pic Milk, is just about what everyone says it is: a triumph of conventional movie-making and a welcome sellout to the mainstream. It sports some tremendous acting from Sean Penn--in the lead role as San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk--along with Josh Brolin as Dan White, Milk’s rival and eventual assassin.

With the narrative already covered by Rob Epstein’s Oscar-Winning 1984 feature documentary The Times Of Harvey Milk, Gus Van Sant had to find a way to tell the story freshly, with mind that another feature drama--The Mayor Of Castro Street--will treat the subject again in 2009.

Using a direct and force... Read More.
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Synecdoche Dour & Grey

DECEMBER 2, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Maverick film writer Charlie Kaufman--the script author of off-beat flicks like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich--had delivered a surprisingly dour but imaginative directoral debut in the 125-minute curio Synecdoche New York.

Starring a humorless Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sad-sack regional theatre director who, after his marriage fails, receives a humungous grant to produce a play about his own unhappy life, Synecdoche, New York begins promisingly as a Checkovian investigation of provincial artistic life bogged down in domestic disappointment.

Twenty minutes in and Kaufman’s flick broadens out into an essay on the act of creation itself, blen... Read More.
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Twilight Fearsomely Engrossing

NOVEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Twilight is a much-anticipated, vastly-hyped and surprisingly strong entry in the post-Buffy teenage vampire sweepstakes.

Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s gazillion-selling book, the film gains traction on its own from the sterling work of director Catherine Hardwick-who made films such as 13 and The Nativity Story- and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg.

Making great use of relative unknowns (Kristen Stewart as the lovestruck mortal teen Bella, Brit Robert Pattinson as the twitchy adolescent vampire Edward Cullen who briskly channels Heathcliffe through James Dean ), Hardwick sustains a dreamy, intense tone throughout the film that neatly matches female romance novels like Jane Eyre with th... Read More.
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Bond On Full Throttle

NOVEMBER 17, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) After Casino Royale singlehandedly revived and re-energized the James Bond franchise, it’s quite natural that the follow up Quantum Of Solace would feel a bit like a disappointment.

Still, Daniel Craig is a formidable clench-jawed 007. And there’s enough bone-jarring action to power five or six movies, all barely contained in Quantum’s rip-snorting 107 minutes. Before the opening credits unroll, there’s one hair-raising car chase followed by an acrobatic rooftop pursuit, all ending in a duel on two wobbly stagings inside a church restoration project.

You get a chance to collect your thoughts while the very cool titles wash over the screen accompanied by Jack White’s even cooler Bond du... Read More.
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Passchendaele A Fascinating Mess

NOVEMBER 7, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Canadian actor/director/writer Paul Gross’s epic vanity project Passchendaele is a fascinating mess of a movie.

At 20 million dollars, it’s also one of Canada’s most expensive. Weighed down with a lumpy love story--complete with an Man With The Golden Arm-style withdrawl episode--Passchendaele stretches credulity well past the breaking point, particularly with its utterly ludicrous conclusion.

One its problems is that Paul Gross’s sardonic persona--honed to perfection on TV series such a Due South and Slings And Arrows--simply doesn’t work when a straight-up hero is necessary to the main storyline.

Furthermore, the First World War saga refuses to portray the Germans as the enemy, ... Read More.
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Changeling Is Clint's Masterpiece

NOVEMBER 1, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American filmmaking Icon Clint Eastwood has had a pretty good run in the last decade with flicks such as Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and the Flags Of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima double header.

So why are reviewers so tepid in their response to the granite jawed actor/director’s latest epic, Changeling?

The film is a marvel of restrained emotion and superb storytelling. Disturbing, powerful and yet so confidently delivered, its 141 minutes seemed like 85.

Built around two mesmerizing performances from Angelina Jolie and John Malkovitch, Changeling tells the story of the Wineland Chicken Coop murders outside of Los Angeles at the end of the 1920s. When telephone operator ... Read More.
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Stone's W. Shockingly Fair and Engrossing

OCTOBER 26, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Oliver Stone’s presidential bio-pic W. has surprised just about everybody with its gutsy and shockingly fair portrait of the two-term US Chief Executive from Texas.

Shot through with Stone’s trademark aggressive filmmaking style--there’s lots of jumping back and forth in time, expressive camera angles and bravura performances--W. shows George W. Bush’s character haunted by his relationship to that other president, his dad George H. W. Bush.

And while that father-son dynamic drives the drama of the film, the director excels at flushing out the all-important cultural milieu of Texas Highlife and family bloodlines that help shape the sitting president.

Anchored by a mesmerizing perfor... Read More.
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Burn After Reading A Real Hoot

OCTOBER 13, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, Burn After Reading, has been hanging around theatres for almost a month now. A slightly under-cooked spy farce set in and around Washington DC, it’s a film that’s built up some surprising staying power.

Dismissed by many as a minor comedy--time-wasting filler after their marvelous Academy Award winner of last year, No Country For Old Men--Burn After Reading does have its problems.

The script is just a little too busy. The acting is uneven. And the energy needed for a true Feydeau-like farce occasionally flags. But there’s no question Burn After Reading is wildly funny and often right on the mark in its ferocious satire on contemporary mores.

Worth a loo... Read More.
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Nick & Nora: Yugo, Guys!

OCTOBER 5, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) To call the new Michael Cera romantic comedy slight is putting it lightly.
Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist attempts to make a leading man out of the po-faced young Canadian actor who was so effective last year in Superbad.

Director Peter Sollet--who has certainly come down in the world since his 2002 indie breakout Raising Victor Vargas--loses his gritty, lyrical style in this gaudy, overblown teen romance. Under-written and exasperatingly glib, Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist runs out of steam well before its 90 minutes comes to an end.

A boy-meets-girl, boy loses girl comedy set over one night in New York City, the film does have some fun set ups. Cera plays the only straight me... Read More.
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Spike Lee's New 'Miracle'

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Spike Lee’s latest film, Miracle At Saint Anna, has accumulated some wildly
divergent reviews. Some have acclaimed it as brilliant and insightful; others have denounced it as lumpy and uneven. Currently it’s got a 28 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, hardly a fair consideration of such an important and accomplished film.

A dazzling World War Two epic clocking in a two hours and fourty minutes, I consider Miracle At Saint Anna to be the African American director’s third cinematic masterpiece in a row, after his 2006 one-two punch of The Inside Man and When The Levees Broke.

The mixed critical reaction is certainly puzzling, as if reviewers deliberately ignored the film’s title--Miracl... Read More.
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Lakeview Pretty Neat LaBute

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Lakeview Terrace might initially seem like a standard studio assignment on first view. Surprisingly, it’s topped the box-office charts for its opening weekend.

A creepy neighbour potboiler superbly realized by director/playwright Neil LaBute, it’s a perfect vehicle for character actor Samuel Jackson, who has played second banana for way too long in films as diverse as Pulp Fiction and the second round of Star Wars pictures.

Sure, Lakeview Terrace seems like a crass throwaway, with a mechanical script that devolves into rote plot routine by its end. Along the way, LaBute gets away with some astonishing commentary on contemporary American Race relations.

LaBute also gets it some nice... Read More.
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Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM) Henning Mankell Read More.
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Hamlet 2 Gut Bustingly Funny

AUGUST 29, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Riotously funny, sharply satiric and tremendously acted, Hamlet 2 might just be the best movie about the witless enthusiasm of theatre ever made.

Driven by a jaw-droppingly effective performance by Brit Actor Steeve Coogan - whose air-headed American attitude and accent are honed to perfection throughout - Hamlet 2 has is larded with so much vicious humour that you often miss out on the sweet silliness at its core.

Coogan plays a barely-paid Arizona high school drama teacher who writes, directs and stars in a sequel to the famous Shakespeare tragedy where everybody dies in the end. Using a time machine, he rescues pretty well everyone in the original play to the strains of Elton John’s... Read More.
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Vicky Cristina Slight, Delightful

AUGUST 16, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) After a brief filmmaking exile in England, Woody Allen's European tour continues with a side-trip to Spain. The result is the slight but occasionally delightful comedy Vicki Cristina Barcelona.

Powered by two delicious performances by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz--who lift the rest of the not-terribly great cast--VCB rehashes many of Woody Allen's superior 1970s themes, particularly that of infidelity, the importance of art, and the adventures of rich, airheaded Americans all together in a sometimes lumpy, secondhand stew.

What saves VCB are the sun-drenched Barcelona locations and the wonderfully overdone sub-plot of Bardem and Cruz and manic painters who are in the midst of a mess... Read More.
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Brideshead Revisited Once More

AUGUST 5, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) A remake of Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel Brideshead Revisited would seem to rather unnecessary. After all, that landmark 1980s British TV series made a star out of Jeremy Irons and provoked copycat fashion mini-revivals of 1930s Oxford scarves and sweaters in the trend-happy United Kingdom just before The Smiths turned pop culture inward again.

Shockingly, director Julian Jarrold’s (Becoming Jane, Kinky Boots) 135-minute feature film reduction of Waugh’s book actually works quite nicely. Sumptuously filmed (in Oxford, Yorkshire and Venice, Italy) and sparked by two surprisingly strong supporting turns by Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon (as the estranged aristrocratic Anglo-Catholic couple... Read More.
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Dark Knight: A Cinematic Event

JULY 24, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Rarely has a film lived up to its advance hype as has The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s remarkable revival of a once dead cinematic comic book franchise.

There were so many people at the Tuesday night 8:00 pm screening I witnessed the audience spilling onto the very front rows of the theatre. It’s clear that The Dark Knight is more than just a great popcorn movie. It’s the pop-culture event of the summer.

Reviewing the film seems to rather pointless. It’s great from start to finish. Nolan’s a fabulous, plot-driven director. If you’ve seen his first two small-scale features (Following and Momento) you’ll know he’s a master at compressed, accelerated story... Read More.
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del Toro's Hellboy II A Masterpiece

JULY 15, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Hellboy II: The Golden Army seems to have picked up only a grudging nod from the critics over its opening weekend. Perhaps the double trouble of being a sequel of a comic book franchise had something to do with it. Or it might be that many opinionmeisters just didn’t bother to actually sit through the whole film.

Because Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a drop-dead fabulous piece of filmmaking, a canny cross between pop pulp and lush fantasy. Think of Harry Potter rewritten by Elmore Leonard and you might get the idea.

Director Guillermo del Toro’s script keeps the action fast and furious, making this second Hellboy seem like a brisk B-Movie masquerading as Hollywood A List. At two hours... Read More.
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Kimball Preps 'Eternal Kiss'

JULY 9, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax filmmaker Paul Kimball is gearing up to shoot his first feature script, Eternal Kiss.

A contemporary Vampire flick to be lensed in the Shelburne Studio Complex in September, it’s a story that deftly balances humour and romance. Montreal’s Joe Gallaccio is slated to star as David Manners, an intrepid documentary maker on the trail of some suspicious characters who may or may not be real vampires.

Gallaccio - who spent a season with Shakespeare By the Sea and starred in Kimball’s as yet unfinished film version of MacBeth entitled Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow - is a charismatic and forceful actor who will undoubtedly give his Manners character a real edge.

The name David Man... Read More.
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WALL-E's Half-Great, Half Bland

JUNE 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Some critics have gonzo over the new Disney/Pixar animated flick WALL-E.
That only proves that if you throw in a few references to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001, film snobs eyes tend to glaze over.

The reality is that WALL-E does indeed have some lovely moments, particularly in its first half when the little robot of the title wanders an abandoned, garbage-strewn Earth with only a cockroach for company.

Once he blasts into the void following an ingenue-like female robot from the future, the film drops into dross; it’s Shrek in space full of ugly candy colours and the same voice-over schtick that makes most computer-animated movies these days not much more than marketing oppo... Read More.
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The Happening A Brisk & Economical Chiller

JUNE 14, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick is an enviromental thriller that would make a brilliant B-Movie if we still had those kinds of catagories.

Instead, The Happening (20th Century Fox) is getting a pummelling from critics fed up with the Indian-American’s trademark ‘gotcha’ style of slick chillers.

Oddly enought, audiences don’t seem to mind. Sure, The Happening would have a very nice pedigree indeed if had been produced by Allied Artists in 1959, somewhere between bigscreen creepfests such as Don Siegel’s The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (two films it ultimately resembles). But please don’t mix it up with the mid’60s counter-cultu... Read More.
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Strangers Superbly Written&Realized

JUNE 3, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Texas cinematographer Bryan Bertino has knocked one out the park with his first directoral effort The Strangers. Tense, creepy and minimal, it’s the definitive contemporary scary ‘couple attacked by weirdoes in remote house’ cheepie.

Keeping the cast small, the locations few and the atmosphere oppressive, Bertino deftly links what seems to be a random attack to male disappointment and rage.
The couple--Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both surprisingly effect--arrive at a faraway ‘summer house’ after attending some friend’s wedding. Speedman’s character has proposed to Tyler’s character complete with an engagement ring; she turns him down and the post-wedding romantic preparations in the ho... Read More.
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Massively Entertaining Indiana Jones

MAY 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones flick has arrived, and it offers further proof of the fanchise’s enduring potency.

Indiana Jones And the Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull is edge-of-your-seat filmmaking from Hollywood’s leading producer and directing team, George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg.

Of course the film received the usual ho-hum notices from the gilded cynics in the movie reviewing world. I guess that just means there’s still lots of critics would might want to consider finding alternate employment, even if 200 movie reviewers got laid off in North America over the last two or three years.
The fact that few of them actually like movies might be the problem.

There’s no quest... Read More.
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Prince Caspian Pretty Solid

MAY 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The second installment in the bigscreen adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series is actually a little bit better than the lead-off movie, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Prince Caspian is darker and grander, and director Adam Adamson has a surer grip on how to handle British Author C.S. Lewis’ gentle but persistent Christian allegories.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Adamson has managed shake off the feeling that the Narnia films seem like a pre-teen economy version of the mighty Lord Of the Rings franchise. If LotRs was the gold standard, Narnia only rates a bronze in comparison. Sure, Adamson is no Peter Jackson, and even the Harry Potter flicks have more traction when it come... Read More.
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Mamet's Redbelt A Cinematic Miracle

MAY 11, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American playwright and sometimes filmmaker David Mamet has just delivered his best movie ever in the martial-arts drama Redbelt.

Filled with his trademark elliptical plotting and terse dialogue, Redbelt sees past the opaque cleverness of Mamet’s previous film projects such as The Spanish Prisoner, House Of Games and Heist to delve into a critique of the West’s tendency to exploit Eastern ideas.

The result is a tense, compact narrative that neatly blends a martial arts storyline into Mamet’s own unique universe of deft turnarounds and swerving self-conscious plot twists that explore the dark heart of contemporary life.

With not one but two exposes of the illusions behind mass enter... Read More.
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Iron Man Flies

MAY 2, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The first of 2008’s big budget summer blockbusters, Iron Man is shockingly good.

Powered by a tight, economical script--by two of the team who wrote the riveting sci-fi flick Children Of Men--that cleverly doubles back on itself, delivering a doppleganger-style climactic battle that is a sheer pleasure to watch, Iron Man deserves pretty well all the accolades it’s accumulating, and more.

It’s a brisk, hip, and breezily cynical bigscreen action flick that is completely involving from its opening frames to the closing credits which unspool over Black Sabbath’s immortal title song. With a fabulous cast headed up by the re-born Robert Downey Jr in the title role, Iron Man has just about e... Read More.
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The Queen has a slight cold

The Queen has a slight cold

APRIL 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM) It was the dogs’ fault

Alan Bennett is an award winning writer and actor perhaps best known for having been a member of the legendary comedy group Beyond the Fringe, and for his play and screenplay The Madness of George III. His latest work, although a novel, also deals with a monarch who is overcome by a form of mania.

The story starts at a state dinner at which the Queen is attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to engage the President of France in a discussion about French literature. We are then taken back in time by a number of months to find the corgis’ barking furiously at something on the road behind the palace. When Her Majesty investigates she discovers that the source of the d... Read More.
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Snow Angels Haunting, Powerful

APRIL 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a powerful and haunting drama about contemporary families falling apart.

Filmed in Halifax a few years ago, it represents a shift for the young indie filmmaker from his previous three films, all shot in his native American South.

Green--whose influence on the English-speaking cinema is already profound--also worked for the first time adapting someone else’s story. In this case it’s Stewart O’Nan’s novel, which gives the film a broader context of several families and an intergenerational sweep. Green previously worked with just young people.

Using shorter scenes in a cold Northern landscape, David Gordon Green pushes his trademark close lyrical sty... Read More.
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Raw, Funny

APRIL 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Judd Apatow movie machine just keeps rolling on with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a sprightly sex comedy that is--surprise, surprise--both funny and tender. The Hollywood Megaproducer (40 Year Old Virgin, Drillbit Taylor) seems to release a new film these days about every four months.

Driven by an unexpectedly strong autobiographical script by writer/star Jason Segal as a TV series music composer trying to get over being dumped by the small-screen show’s sexy minx--the Sarah Marshall of the title, pitilessly played by Kristen Bell--the film’s real star is British columnist and comedian Russell Brand. He runs away with the picture playing the louche libertine rock star Aldous Snow, the s... Read More.
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Smart People Feeble

APRIL 13, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Fans of Halifax actress Ellen Page who are expecting the sparkle of Juno in her follow-up film Smart People will probably be disappointed.

In a rather typecast role as a cranky Republican Youth high schooler--and the daughter of an even crankier and supremely unconvincing Dennis Quaid as a Victorian Literature professor at an American University on the Eastern Seaboard--Page simply repeats her industrial strength quirkiness she’s now made into a dangerously close-to-cliche screen trademark.

Page is hardly the main problem in this feeble domestic dramatic comedy dressed up as an eccentric indie bon bon. With too many underwritten characters--Thomas Haden Church repeats his role in Sidew... Read More.
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Stop Loss Powerful, Haunting

MARCH 30, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Kimberley Peirce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss, is getting the same short shrift that almost all Iraq war fictional flicks have received from the antsy American moviegoing public.

That means that like Home Of the Brave, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah and several others, Stop Loss is playing to massively empty theatres across North America.

Too bad, because it’s very close to a knockout film. Peirce’s trademark examination of masculinity, identity and violence--so fascinatingly followed in the gender-bending true story Boys Don’t Cry--is on full display in this fluid, powerful and haunting flick.

Kind of like an Orpheus In the Underworld adapted for the Iraq ... Read More.
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Heist Flick Entertains, Overreaches

Heist Flick Entertains, Overreaches

MARCH 22, 2008 Kiwi director Roger Donaldson's heist flick The Bank Job is a slick and entertaining robbery film that revisits a notorious Baker Street bank safety deposit break-in from 1971.

Building in concentric circles of intrigue and suspense, the movie follows a bunch of amateur working-class thieves who are manipulated into stealing some compromising photos of a member Britain's Royal family squirrelled away in the Bank's vault in a swank district of downtown London.

Besides the basics of the robbery itself--which echoes the storylines of great film noirs such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing--you get British mobsters, porn kings, Black Nationalists and sev... Read More.
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in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit

in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit

MARCH 8, 2008 The opening night film of this year's Sundance Festival, In Bruges is the feature debut by London-based Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lonesome West).

Utilizing his trademark collision of irony, violence and wit, McDonagh - who won an Oscar for his 2005 short Six Shooter - takes three hitman from the Olde Sod and places them in the Belgian tourist-trap city for a settling of accounts.

And while McDonagh's writing is characteristically fresh, his screen direction is occasionally choppy.

Colin Farrell, for example, pushes the limits just a little bit too far with his 'revenge of Alexander the Great' characterization - all twitches and unfocused, rapid-change ener... Read More.
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Page's Great; Juno Is Just Good

DECEMBER 22, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The long-awaited arrival of Halifax actress Ellen Page starmaker-film Juno can’t help but be a bit of a letdown.

Page is brilliant in the film. Without her, neither Jason Reitman’s paint-by-numbers direction nor Diablo Cody’s pre-fab indie movie script would add up to anything out of the ordinary.

Oddly calculated, Juno is also not terribly funny. The teen pregnancy/coming-of-age ground it covers doesn’t seem much beyond a 1970s After School Special.
And Page’s character Juno herself seems, at times, wildly overwritten.

It’s a tribute to the elfin thespian that she makes this ultra-quirky, relentlessly articulate young woman come alive. Especially when the last half of the film s... Read More.
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Atonement Another Literary-To-Screen Misfire

DECEMBER 20, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) There are any number of reasons why the big-screen cinematic adaptation of the popular post-modernist novel by Ian McEwan, Atonement, doesn’t really work.

One could be that old saw that great literature rarely makes good movies. The many post-modern effects from the book - the revolving points-of-view, the huge jumps in time, and the raw examination of class and sexuality crossed over issues of guilt and desire - seem ludicrously overblown in the film.

Ultimately, however, it is the unpleasant characters lumbering in the midst of a succession of operatic tragedies that makes Atonement such a stinker onscreen.

Starting with rape on a plummy English Estate in 1935 and ending in the w... Read More.
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I Am Legend: Good But Not Quite Great

DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Director Francis Lawrence almost gets the third screen version of Richard Matheson’s enduring sci-fi story I Am Legend to home base.

After all, the film sports a fine performance from Will Smith in an eerily deserted New York City for the first two-thirds of the movie. Just the suggestion of dread - along with the endless empty streets and incongruous cornfields in Central Park - makes for a creepy and diverting cinematic experience.

The film’s problems begin when Will Smith’s lonely survivor character suddenly is confronted with an army of super-fast, super-smart and super-strong zombies in the final act of the movie.

In a previous version - the superior 1971 sci-fi counterculture ... Read More.
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RFM's Best Films Of 2007

DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Year-end Best Of lists are always a bit suspect. They tend to shortchange the first part of the year due to chronological distance; acclaimed films that haven’t opened yet further mess up attempts to keep the catalogue in some kind of decent order.

That said, one really can’t help looking at the various peaks and valleys of the year, especially when it comes to movies. And 2007 was indeed a pretty darn good year for the big screen.

Here’s my list, going back to the beginning of the year:

David Fincher’s taut thriller Zodiac was indeed a terrific flick, mixing a murky and quite terrifying wandering narrative about a real-life San Francisco serial killer with a down-in-the-dumps aest... Read More.
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Golden Compass Not So Golden

Golden Compass Not So Golden

DECEMBER 9, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American Pie producer and director of About A Boy, Chris Weitz, has made a mess of British author Philip Pullman’s new fantasy movie franchise The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of his popular His Dark Materials series.

The movies is a rampant traffic jam of fantasy tropes, with a dash of trendy girl-power cliches thrown in to differentiate it from all those Narnia and Harry Potter movies.

Trouble is, Weitz - who also wrote the screenplay - has utterly no feel for the greater resonance needed in this kind of fantasy stuff. And considering Pullman’s source material is sort of Lord of The Rings as reduced by a Liberal Atheist, there’s no background of ... Read More.
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Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead Strong Stuff

DECEMBER 2, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a low-key but potent triumph for longtime director Sidney Lumet. It’s a late-in-career revival for a man who’s already committed a clutch of classics to the American Cinema Cannon, including masterworks like 12 Angry Men, Network and Murder On the Orient Express.

A domestic thriller that reveals family connections as a kind of rank poison, the film sports three thrilling performances from leads Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney. The material is relentlessly paced and deeply engaging; it’s also sometimes hard to watch, as the characters are so unredeemable you’d rather not spend much time with them.

The plotline begins with a bun... Read More.
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Sci Fi Play Doing Time Gets HFX World Premiere

NOVEMBER 24, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Halifax will be the site of the world premiere of a new Science Fiction-themed play in the last week of November and the first day of December.

Kansas City, Missouri’s Mac Tonnies - a world-renowned author of After The Martian Apocalypse and controversial paranormalist blogger - has adapted his time-travel story Doing Time from his collection Illuminated Black with local filmmaker and theatre director Paul Kimball. The duo share stage writing credits on the hour-long play, which will run from Wednesday November 28th to December 1st at 7:30 at The Wired Monk at the corner of Morris and Hollis Streets in Halifax’s deep South End.

The three-hander play will star Kris Lee McBride as Leda, ... Read More.
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August Rush To Musical Overload

NOVEMBER 21, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) August Rush is one of those films that seems so unbelievable you can’t imagine how it actually got made. A rhapsodic melodrama with a plot that could only fit into a lumbering 19th century opera, it takes the term ‘musical’ into a hyperventilating place that makes greeting card emotions seem sophisticated.

The story of an 11-year-old orphan who re-unites his desperately beautiful parents through the power of his music - I kid you not - August Rush also sports an industrial-strength supporting part by Robin Williams. Blending the character of Fagin from Oliver Twist with the look of Irish rock star Bono from the late 1980s, Williams chomps some significant New Yawk city scenery throughout.... Read More.
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Coen Bros' No Country: Action And Irony

NOVEMBER 18, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The Coen Brothers have returned to the glories of their greatest films Fargo and Miller’s Crossing with their latest work, a screen adaptation of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country For Old Men.

Dark, taciturn and yet larded with black humour, No Country For Old Men features some bursts of spectacular violence. It also rather daringly leaves out major plot points, while knocking off at least two central characters well before the climax of the film. The result is a contemporary thriller - set in modern day Texas of 1980 - that manages to echo some of the major themes contained in some latter-day Westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and this year’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma.

... Read More.
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Ryan Gosling's Lars Is A Real Dud

NOVEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) London, Ontario-born actor Ryan Gosling has squandered all that momentum and good will he generated from last year’s low-budget hit Half Nelson with his latest film, Lars And The Real Girl.

With a premise that starts out in John Waters’ territory - a morose young man in a midwestern, mid-winter small town falls in love with a mail-order sex doll -
Lars And the Real Girl delivers only sniggers before it collapses into a sentimental stew of Frank Capra-esque cliches.

Limply directed by Craig Gillespie - who gave us the equally bad Mr. Woodcock earlier this year - Gosling is front and centre in this gooey, excessively sentimental story that grossly distorts the contemporary view of menta... Read More.
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Norman Mailer, Author, Director 1923-2007

NOVEMBER 12, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) The various tributes and obituaries of the great American Writer and gadfly Norman Mailer have failed, for the most part, to mention two aspects of his extraordinary contribution to the world of discourse and culture.

Along with his more obvious literary work, Mailer co-founded and co-financed, in 1955, the free weekly The Village Voice in New York City, providing content in the form of a regular column. The template of that paper would reproduced in practically every city in North America, including here in Halifax where The Coast has been a major player on the scene since 1993, directly inspired the Village Voice.

Mailer was also a maverick American Indie filmmaker in an age when it... Read More.
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Tracey Fragment Is A Triumph For Ellen Page

NOVEMBER 11, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Advance praise and Festival Prizes hardly prepare viewers for the breathtaking quicksilver brilliance of Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Tracey Fragments.

Powered by a remarkably precise central performance by Halifax’s Ellen Page in the title role, The Tracey Fragments unfolds over multiple screenlets throughout its 80 minute length.

And while those amazingly fluid and ever-changing frames-within-frames constantly shift perspective, time, and Tracey’s own interiority, the film still adheres to a tough, disciplined storyline that allows for occasional - and quite unexpected - blasts of lyricism, humour and even joy.

Yes, the main storyline is indeed pretty grim -... Read More.
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Poor Boy's Game Is Gripping And Powerful

NOVEMBER 8, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Poor Boy’s Game is finally getting its nation-wide commercial release after performing spectacularly on this fall’s Film Festival circuit.

The best film ever made about Halifax, and certainly one of the top Canadian films of this or any year, Poor Boy’s Game balances raw drama with a refined cinematic sensibility. The result is edge-of-your-seat cinema.

Powered by two extraordinary performances by African American star Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, To Sleep With Anger) and electrifying newcomer Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald, half-brother of 24 star Kiefer), Poor Boy’s Game delves into subject matter that few have dared to explore before.

The script - by co-producer Chaz Thorne an... Read More.
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Martian Child Not Quite There

NOVEMBER 1, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) John Cusack is a wonderful actor. His charm can often lift a mediocre film into a higher zone altogether. Alas, even his abundant gifts falter faced with Martian Child, a drippy, sentimental and manipulative modern-day adoption story set on the West Coast.

Adapted from David Gerrold’s award-winning book, Martian Child has a delightful - if unlikely - premise. A successful Sci-fi writer who recently lost his wife, Cusack’s character is fresh, funny and unconventional. His closest friends are his harried sister (played by real-life sibling Joan Cusack) who is married with two kids and his goofy literary agent (Oliver Platt, in a pleasantly befuddled performance). Beyond that duo, the sci-fi... Read More.
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Preminger Bio A Blast

OCTOBER 31, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) American Film Academic Foster Hirsch’s new biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King is - astonishingly - the first full-length biographical reconsideration of the great filmmaker ever to appear in book form.

Preminger - the Austrian Jew who assumed the role of director of the great drama impresario Max Reinhardt’s theatre operations in Vienna before eventually establishing a career as the foremost independent producer/director in the United States - has been substantially devalued as a filmmaker on the American scene for years. In Europe, his reputation is much higher.

The director of such classic film noirs as Laura, Angel Face and Whirlpool, and the producer/director of e... Read More.
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Darjeeling Disappoints

OCTOBER 28, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY) Wes Anderson’s latest feature The Darjeeling Limited pretty well exhausts his slacker cinematic aesthetic. A witless road movie where three Yankee brothers wander through India in search of spiritual healing and their errant mom, the film ultimately loses its tether and floats off into space.

The audience I saw it with barely laughed through its 91 minutes of twee incoherence. Preceded by Anderson’s dour14-minute short The Hotel Chevalier, I’m afraid this former critic’s darling has just about reached the last parking spot in his artistic cul-de-sac. American Hipster film comedy was never so limp.

Shot mostly in India with a flashback side trip to New York City - the only really enjoya... Read More.
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Work on TV movie, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, starts next month

OCTOBER 27, 2007 The film version of the best-selling book by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, will be shot in Halifax as a television movie starting November 18th.

To be directed by Mick Jackson - who helmed the widely seen MOW of the hit inspirational memoir Tuesdays With Morrie - The Memory Keeper’s Daughter will star Dermot Mulroney (Gracie) and Emily Watson, who rose to fame in the art film Breaking The Waves.

The first service production to be announced since the Premier hiked the province’s film production tax credits at the Atlantic Film Festival, this late fall/early winter shoot will keep at least one crew busy until Christmas.

The rest of the industry is waiting with baited bre... Read More.
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This Jesse James Is Long, Slow But Engrossing

OCTOBER 25, 2007 I sincerely hope Warner Brothers isn’t willing to let The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford fizzle out on the exhibition scene across North America in the run up before Christmas.

The epic-length flick - 160 minutes long - debuted well in through the Fall Festival Circuit but can’t quite connect with audiences. That’s a shame because the film is indeed a strong one, with a dynamite cast and a determined, serious air of a substantial revisionist western.

Written and directed by Andrew Dominik and adapted from Ron Hansen’s novel, this particular tale of the James Gang centres in on the first few months of 1881 when Jesse was gunned down by Robert Ford in a landmark a... Read More.
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Home Of the Brave's Twilight

OCTOBER 23, 2007 Hollywood veteran Irwin Winkler’s Iraq aftermath movie Home Of the Brave never really arrived in theatres across North America.

I watched it alone at a press screening a few months ago. Some lonely posters for it lined the hallways of Empire’s Bayers Lake monsterplex a couple of weeks later. Now it’s out on DVD with little fanfare.

Is it terrible? Did it deserve such movie exhibition purgatory? Well, no and yes.
With coverage on the nightly news of the carnage in Iraq providing more than enough distraction, it might simply be the case that there’s no appetite for this kind of stuff on the big screen. Especially when there’s been reams and reams of documentary material available, some... Read More.
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Across The Universe Audacious, Brilliant

OCTOBER 19, 2007 Across The Universe is certainly an audacious idea for a film. Taking a typical love story structure and stringing it against a backdrop of the turmoil of the 1960s told through songs from the Beatles catalogue, director Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) manages to re-invigorate the cinematic form of the musical, almost by accident.

Taymor’s expertise - developed through the ground-breaking Disney Broadway production of The Lion King - in art direction and ensemble dance pieces is what really puts Across The Universe into the realm of cinematic excellence. Those particular mass setpieces - the Yale fratboy dust up set to With A Little Help From My Friends or the Army Induction sequence played o... Read More.
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Film Fest Up 18 %

OCTOBER 18, 2007 The Atlantic Film Festival broke its own box office record in 2007 with an 18% increase in attendance, according to spokesperson Pam Todd.

The annual celebration of cinema - of which this humble correspondent is a senior programmer - brought a total of 33, 500 punters to screenings, workshops, and special events through ten days in September.

3000 people took part in the opening night Argyle Street party alone. Movies with local connections such as Poor Boy’s Game, The Hermit Of Gully Lake,
Shake Hands With the Devil, and Just Buried packed theatres, attracting waiting-list only crowds.

Programs of local shorts, animation and international works also brought in cinema fans from ar... Read More.
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Penn's Into The Wild Is Heady Stuff

OCTOBER 16, 2007 Actor/director Senn Penn’s cinematic adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s extraordinary non-fiction chronicle Into The Wild teeters on the very precipice of cinematic greatness.

Ravishing to look at, powerfully written, and ultimately deeply affecting, its flaws are minor compared to glorious adventure that unfolds in its entirety across the big screen.

Penn’s challenge’s with the film would have seemed insurmountable. Krakauer’s best-selling book details the life and sad death of Christopher McCandless, a willful and naive just-out-of-college grad who wanders around North America after he gets his diploma. Fleeing an unhappy domestic scene and rejecting materialism, careerism and even any rom... Read More.
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Chris Marker's Two Masterpieces

OCTOBER 15, 2007 Chris Marker’s two most important films have been collected together by Criterion. The 28-minute still-picture drama La Jetee from 1962 - it was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys - and the feature-length 1982 documentary meditation on memory, Sans Soleil (Sunless) make one powerful cinematic package indeed.

Marker’s work - mostly non-fiction - has been almost impossible to find on DVD.
A few of his flicks came out in very bad versions on VHS tape in the 1980s. I tracked down a crappy copy of his examination of the mood of Paris in the wake of the end of the Algerian war, Le Joli Mai; otherwise Marker has been a filmmaker more talked about than seen.

Seeing La Jetee and Sa... Read More.
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Weirdsville Almost There

OCTOBER 13, 2007 Allan Moyle’s Weirdsville is one of those not-quite there films that offers almost enough to make the whole trip worthwhile.

Moyle - the Montreal-based director who specializes in intelligent ensemble youth-culture fare such as Pump Up the Volume and New Waterford Girl - tries to marry two genres together in Weirdsville. He begins with a stoner comedy, and then accelerates into an off-kilter caper flick. The result, alas, runs out of gas about three-quarters of the way through.

There are some sublime pleasures along the way, though. The cast - headed up by the former teen-idol from the Felicity TV show, Scott Speedman - sometimes push the film to an unexpected level of craziness. The ... Read More.
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AFCOOP Exhumes Arthur Lipsett

OCTOBER 8, 2007 The Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-Op is offering a rare treat for East Coast experimental film buffs. The entry-level training organization is presenting the works of Montreal ‘found footage’ artist Arthur Lipsett over three nights this week, curated by former Halifax Film Studies teacher and filmmaker Gerda Cammaer.

Lipsett was one of those legendary ‘boy wonders’ who spun an appointment in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada’s headquarters in Montreal into a career of legendary proportions. Beginning as an animator, he fashioned a series of short films through the 1960s that were almost entirely made from leftover footage found in the NFB’s cut-out bins.

The films, beginning with Ver... Read More.
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Austen Book Club Slight But Fun

OCTOBER 5, 2007 The Jane Austen Book Club is a glib bonbon of a movie, a glossy chick-flick that seems more like a niche marking exercise than a real film. It’s fun and diverting for the most part, but ultimately light as a feather.

Taking six characters who read six Jane Austen novels and talk about them - in sunny California, no less - while their interrelationships parallel the plots in the books does seem like identifying your audience before you start. Of course, the film itself is based on the best-selling book by Karen Joy Fowler of the same name, making the sales pitch all the more concentrated.

Calling the film an ensemble piece is being overly generous. It’s a credibility-challenged soap-ope... Read More.
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Jarmusch Films At Dal Art Gallery

OCTOBER 3, 2007 Jim Jarmusch shock of premature white hair only ads to his mystique as one of America’s most unique and consistent cinema artists.

Mainstream movie fans may have just caught up with the laconic New Yorker with his breakthrough Bill Murray vehicle Broken Flowers from 2005. They will get a chance to view the bulk of Jarmusch’s work at a retrospective at the Dalhousie Art Gallery through the fall.

The screenings are free, but seating is limited. The series will resume on Wednesday, October 24th with Jarmusch’s third feature, Down By Law, at the Dal Art Gallery at 8:00 pm. The films Mystery Train, Night On Earth, Dead Man, Ghost Dog and Broken Flowers will follow on consecutive Wednesday... Read More.
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Vincent Price Back From The Grave

OCTOBER 2, 2007 Vincent Price has finally received the box DVD treatment from MGM home video. On four double-sided discs you get some of the iconic actor’s most important onscreen work: seven features and three new documentaries.

The legendary actor - who arose from Studio contract playing through the 1940s and ‘50s to become a campy horror attraction through the ‘60s and ‘70s - has long been neglected by the industry, almost as much as he was loved by fans.

Working with US film pioneer Roger Corman through the aggressive indie studio American Independent Productions (AIP), Vincent Price made a series of unforgettable Edgar Allen Poe adaptations in the early 1960s that cemented both the actor and the ... Read More.
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Teshigahara's Incredible Triple Header

SEPTEMBER 29, 2007 The Criterion Collection has knocked another one out of the park with their new collection Three Films of Hiroshi Teshigahara.

Best known as the Japanese director of the enduring and still intriguing 1964 international art-house hit Woman Of the Dunes, this new package adds 20 minutes to that classic and adds two other feature films - Pitfall and The Face Of Another - to the equation along with lengthy introductions to each film by Toronto Cinematheque curator James Quandt.

The other extras include a new documentary that examines the director’s relationship with the ultra-modernist author Kobo Abe - who wrote the three movies - and Teshigahara’s own lineage in the most important flower... Read More.
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Shake Hands Gripping Cinema

SEPTEMBER 28, 2007 Shake Hands With the Devil is a courageous and radically unconventional film that reveals much about its producer, the Academy Award-winning producer Michael Donovan, as much as it does tell the autobiographical narrative of General Romeo Dallaire and his doomed mission to Rwanda during that country’s genocide during the mid-1990s.

Donovan reaches back to Canada’s documentary traditions to portray the Rwandan Genocide through the depiction of a situation rather than through character. Grasping for a greater veracity, Donovan shot most of the film in Rwanda where the events actually happened; he cast Tutsis and Hutus in their respective roles. Attempting to show as much of the conflict as ... Read More.
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Eastern Promises Strong But No Knockout

SEPTEMBER 23, 2007 David Cronenberg’s new film Eastern Promises is strong, but it’s no knockout.

Following in the footsteps of a genuine masterpiece in A History Of Violence, the Toronto-based director again uses Viggo Mortensen as his central figure. This time, however, the duo move to the dank milieu of London’s Russian Mafia.

The result is a formula gangster film that sports a mesmerizing performance from Mortensen. Beyond that, Eastern Promises comes in as a mild disappointment.

Ultimately the story - of brutal slayings, sex slaves and the diary of a young woman that falls into the hands of a naive London nursemaid - can’t quite support the rich performances, superb art direction and lingering sen... Read More.
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07 Film Fest Winners Announced

SEPTEMBER 22, 2007 The 2007 Winners at the Atlantic Film Festival have been announced. There are two juries at the Fest, one that considers local (Atlantic) work and another that looks at Canadian films from outside the region.
The Canadian Winners include Ellen Page and Bruce MacDonald, for Best Actress and Best Director in the film The Tracey Fragments. Best Short was the NFB Animated film Madame Tutli-Putli, made by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski. The Documentary winner was Bryan Friedman's portrait of his weightlifting father, The Bodybuilder And I. Quebec's Roy Dupuis picked up the award for Best Actor in the Halifax-made feature Shake Hands With the Devil.
Altantic Awards went to Chaz Thorne (for ... Read More.
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Film Classification Board Must Go

SEPTEMBER 21, 2007 The Censor Board popped up in the news again last week in reference to NDP MLA Howard Epstein sending back a list of appointees because he found them ‘not diverse enough’.

Nova Scotians might be surprised to see that we still have a Censor Board. The reality is, it is officially named the Maritime Film Classification Board, a waste-of-time-and-money former patronage body that can only rate films and videos, not censor them. A battle with the local Canadian Press rep - started in the 1970s when the old Film Censor Board banned Last Tango In Paris - went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Censors lost. Now we can see all of Marlon Brando, whenever we want. The can’t ‘ban’ anything. They ... Read More.
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Local Shoots Pick Up

Local Shoots Pick Up

SEPTEMBER 21, 2007 Local writer and director Anne Verrall will shoot a low-budget feature this fall in Halifax entitled Nonsense Revolution. The movie will be produced by Halifax - based filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald through his production company Emotion Pictures.

And the Trailer Park Boys team is back in action. Writer/director Mike Clattenburg is shooting a single-hour special for Showcase TV. Meanwhile, the Trailer Park Boys feature film from last year is scheduled to open in the US in the next two months. Response to that opening will determine whether TPB shooting schedule for next year; whether it will be another special or another feature.
Read More.
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