When you’re living with the repercussions of baby boomer excess, it’s pretty hard to get excited for their halcyon nostalgia, which makes Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock hard to connect to in a meaningful way. If you are about to shoulder a generation’s enormous health care costs as they wither, do you really want to revel […]
Hillary Titley
Posted inArts + Music
Eli Roth’s personal effects.
When you talk to Eli Roth, there’s a recurring motif in the conversation: he keeps it personal and unapologetic. Roth is on the phone from Vancouver, where he’s talking up Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, in which he plays Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz. He lets the dialogue flit to-and-fro, from his own filmmaking, his relationship […]
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The Baby Formula: Director interview
Married couple Lilith (Megan Fahlenbock) and Athena (Angela Vint) are both pregnant with each other’s children via sperm created through the women’s stem cells. Director Alison Reid extensively investigated the real-life embryonic stem-cell research that inspired the premise, though for the purposes of the film “we assumed the science is further along than it is.” […]
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Food, Inc. sticks to the script
Food, Inc. tells a story we all love to hear: The path to edible salvation lies not in the industrial food chain that supports the abundance and reliability of grocery stores, but in the toil and labour of the small local and organic farmers’ market mainstay, regardless of the limits of their bounty. It’s a […]
Posted inArts + Music
Julie & Julia’s passionate journey
Weary of her stop-gap cubicle job, Amy Adams’ Julie Powell embarks on a year-long quest to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking (and blog her progress). Newlywed in Paris and recently sprung from American government service, Meryl Streep’s Julia Child takes cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu and begins a cookbook […]
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A Hole in a Fence
On DVD for a while now, this brisk film avoids a thesis completely while painting its portrait of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighbourhood in transition. An IKEA is about to move in and various residents and stakeholders ponder what will be lost and gained. But 45 minutes is not long enough to develop the arguments its […]
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The problem with time travel
The success or failure of a paranormal-tinged drama lies in how seamlessly the supernatural elements can cradle the melodrama. In 1991, Truly, Madly, Deeply’s ghost story was able to do this, and, from the sublime to the ridiculous, 2006’s The Lake House was able to compliment its love story with the inherent suspense in dual […]
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Arab Labor: The Complete First Season
Tucked into the box set or foreign section of your local video store you may find this wry 10-episode sitcom straight from Israel, about Amjad, an Arab journalist and his high-strung family. A familiarity with Israel based only on heated headlines will have no bearing on Arab Labor, whose characters seem only indirectly effected by […]
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(500) Days of Summer falls, hard
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tom falls hard for Zooey Deschanel’s Summer, who does not return the sentiment, so naturally, the relationship doesn’t work out. (500) Days, though it has its moments of genuine insight, is more a story of heartbreak for heartbreak’s sake and not a deep emotional journey. The supporting cast all speak the same commiserative […]
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There is such thing as A Perfect Getaway
A suspense movie for people who can’t stand suspense; a thriller for those who can’t bare thrills. However you say it, A Perfect Getaway gets along nicely by eschewing what some would consider to be fundamental to the suspense thriller genre: suspense and thrills. The movie—about a newlywed couple (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) in […]
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Truth be told
When Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland adapted Fifty Dead Men Walking—Martin McGartland’s 1997 memoir of working as an informant against the Irish Republican Army—the events she choose to portray from the non-fiction book were also indicative of the battles she had to fight off-screen. The film Fifty Dead Men Walking tells the story of McGartland’s recruitment […]
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The Great Buck Howard
The Great Buck Howard–a former Tonight Show fixture and mentalist in the vein of The Amazing Kreskin–plugs away at maintaining the fading pulse of his former glory. As played by John Malkovich, Buck is the kind of showman that interprets a half-empty auditorium as half-full. Buck continues to dazzle the audience that does show up. […]
