Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Movie Review: Meet Me In St. Louis
Meet Me in St. Louis -- one of those big, bold musicals from MGM that, to this day, remains a classic example of how to incorporate song and dance when weaving together a story. The picture itself is a slice of life -- one y...
TIFF 13 Review: Rock the Casbah
Rock the Casbah operates squarely within a couple of familiar categories: national cinema and narratives about troubled family dynamics. Both can, of course, be rich grounds for exploration of identity and relations between ...
TIFF13 Review: Tim's Vermeer (2013)
For years, controversy has smoldered in the art world regarding Johannes Vermeer and his hyper realistic paintings of middle class Dutch life. To be specific, x-ray examination of Vermeer's paintings reveal that there were no sketch marks beneath the...
Monday, 9 September 2013
Review: Generation Um (2012)
Not knowing how to start this review off per-say, I'm choosing to express these very exact dizzying thoughts of indecisive-uncertainty and thereby establish this annoyingly abstract introduction into discussing Mark Mann's New York/soul-searchers sto...
TIFF13 Review: Thou Gildst the Even (2013)
Turkish writer-director Onur Ünlü’s kicks off his mysterious Thou Gilds't the Even with an epigram from Euripides: Man is created from anxiety. Indeed, our protaganist Cemal is a man of anxieties, which we know right away by...
TIFF13 Review: Kill Your Darlings (2013)
Kill Your Darlings, the debut feature from filmmaker John Krokidas, is a love poem to the Beats before they were the Beats. Set in and around the Columbia University campus in the mid-1940's, the film details both the curiou...
TIFF13 Trends: Cumberbatch v. Radcliffe
It happens every year. Some pretty face emerges as the "It" guy or gal of the festival. Oh, how I pine for 2011, when it was the Year of the Gosling and all the local Toronto lady news anchors were dispatched to the red carpet, to giggle their way th...
Sunday, 8 September 2013
TIFF13 Review: MARY Queen of Scots
Occasionally, a film so affecting comes along that even a wordsmith like myself can only manage to babble out a few descriptors in lieu of an actual, full sentence. Stunning! Poetic! Mesmerizing! Perfect! Now, an attempt at a real sentence: Swiss fil...
TIFF13 Review: McCanick (2013)
When an aging narcotics cop Eugene McCanick (David Morse) learns that Simon Weeks (Cory Monteith), a kid he helped put away seven years ago, is back out on the streets, he quickly unravels in a mess of violence and paranoia. Taking place over the cou...
Indie Watch: The Greyness of Autumn
Despite their predominant popularity as Muppet-style children’s entertainment, puppets are often used for more subversive purposes on television and in the movies. From Peter Jackson’s outrageously offensive Meet the Feebles to the sewn-up ser...
TIFF13 Review: Giraffada (2013)
Giraffada, from filmmaker Rani Massalha, is both an entertaining adventure story about young boys and giraffes and a nuanced meditation on the absurdities of life behind the Separation Wall in the West Bank. Plus, it has gir...
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Top 3 Reasons To Watch The Searchers
The Searchers stands as not only one of the greatest Westerns in cinema history, but as one of the greatest films in cinema history. Everyone loves John Wayne, and, more than that, people love a good Western. Not only is
TIFF13 Review: Under the Starry Sky
Dyana Gaye's debut feature Under the Starry Sky is a rich, textured exploration of African diaspora and the fragile hopes of those looking for a new life or revisiting an old one. The drama tracks three separate but intercon...
Four Seasons of Silly Symphonies
There is a season, turn turn turn – Or so the song goes. The changing seasons have always been a source of inspiration for artists, from Antonio Vivaldi to Walter Disney. In 1929 the Disney Studio began a series of cartoons called
TIFF13 Review: Borgman (2013)
The home invasion sub-genre has caught flame recently -think The Purge, You're Next, The Agression Scale - which I assume has something to do with the latent fear of terrorists. In all fairness, I'm an American so I think all trending movie ...
Friday, 6 September 2013
The Netflix Queue: In Time (2011)
In Time is available for streaming on Netflix. Drinking game rules outlined below.
Aren’t we all glad, on some level, that Justin Timberlake went back to singing? However you feel about his musical output, at least it’s kep...
Aren’t we all glad, on some level, that Justin Timberlake went back to singing? However you feel about his musical output, at least it’s kep...
TIFF13: A Grand Canal
In Wim Wenders’ lyrical 1980 film, Lightning over Water, the German director engages in an extended grieving process over the loss of his friend, Hollywood auteur Nicholas Ray. As the film nimbly jumps between its documentary and fictional ele...
TIFF13 Review: Hi-Ho Mistahey!
Alanis Obomsawin has made quite a body of work centered around the rights of Canada's native people and she returns in form with Hi-Ho Mistahey!, a look at the deep disparities in the Attawapiskat First Nation's public educa...
TIFF13 Trends: Everything Old is New Again
There is a film in this year's TIFF programme that I will DIE if I don't get to see - Yurusarezarumono, which is Japanese for Unforgiven. YES! A Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Review: Escape From New York (1981)
Escape from New York airs Friday, September 6 on TCM. Check local listings for times.
In 1981, the idea of retro-fitting New York as a prison unto itself seemed far out, but believable. In fact, thanks to director Neil Bl...
In 1981, the idea of retro-fitting New York as a prison unto itself seemed far out, but believable. In fact, thanks to director Neil Bl...
TIFF13 Review: Parkland (2013)
It's an old question (pretty much 50 years old to be precise): Where were you when J.F.K. was shot? In his new star-studded docudrama Parkland, first time feature director Peter Landesman poses this question. Again. While
TIFF 13 Review: Attila Marcel (2013)
To be fair, personal taste shouldn't necessarily be a heavy determinant of criticism, but it no doubt plays a part. To help you decide whether you'd like to see Sylvain Chomet's first live-action feature film,
TIFF13 Trends: The Toronto International Franco Festival
Here's how I launch TIFF-mas - I sit down with the full programme and I read each and every description of each and every film. And then I make a "short" list of the movies I most hope to see. Then I make complicated graphs, and diagrams, and gantt c...
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
Scarlett’s Gowns: Gone With The Wind Costume Restoration
Everything about Margaret Mitchell’s novel and David O. Selznick’s film Gone With The Wind is iconic. Walter Plunkett’s costumes for Vivien Leigh’s character, Scarlett O’Hara, are no exception. In 2010, the Harry Ransom Cent...
TIFF13 Review: Burt's Buzz
Burt's Buzz, from director Jody Shapiro, ends up as the slickest corporate video ever (and only slightly more exciting). The doc tells the tale of Burt Shavitz, former photojournalist (oh, he took that photo of Alle...
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
TIFF13: For Those Who Can Tell No Tales
For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, from director Jasmila Zbanic, tracks the summer holiday of Australian tourist Kym as she treks about Bosnia-Herzegovina. The film is a light, sweet travelouge that follows Kym from souvenir s...
Monday, 2 September 2013
La Maison de la Radio
Radio is an easy medium to take for granted. Even if you're not discussing radio as a delivery means for something else--news, music, opinion, etc--there's always a 'with' or a 'while' involved. It is a beloved accompaniment, something enjoyed while ...
TIFF13 Review: Finding Vivian Maier
In 2007, in an effort to find photos for a book of local history, John Maloof bought a box of photo negatives at a storage auction. There were no photos suitable for his book, but there was a mystery to solve. The box belonged to Vivian Maier, a nann...
TIFF13 Review: La última película
Sigh. Here's the part where a film review is supposed to provide a brief, yet tantalizing synopsis. For the first time (is this my last review?), I'll just give you the one-line summary helpfully provided by the press kit: "A famous American filmmake...
Sunday, 1 September 2013
Indie Watch: Mario the Magician: Building Magic
Let’s face it, despite their best intentions, most human interest stories are boring, predictable pieces of manipulative feel-goodery. The genre, which mostly finds its home on television fluff-piece segments reminiscent of Bart’s People, is easily o...
Overlooked Gems: Annette (1958)
There are many, many stories in popular culture of “the new kid.” After all, even if you never were that, it certainly did tap into our childhood insecurities of being different. But one you probably haven’t seen or heard of is the second and final...
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