Snicker all you like at this runaway freight-train movie, it is really only inspiring your wonder at how it turned out so damn entertaining. Frank (Denzel Washington) and Will (Chris Pine) take it upon themselves to stop a speeding engineer-less train hauling gallons of hazardous, flammable material. The result is one of the most satisfying […]
Hillary Titley
Posted inArts + Music
Due Date disappoints
Father-to-be Peter (Robert Downey Jr.) winds up on a no-fly list at the hands of epic nincompoop Ethan (Zach Galifianakis), days before the birth of his child on the opposite coast. Director Todd Phillips has devoted his career to refreshing portrayals of American dickhole men and their trials and tribulations, without prejudice or sympathy: Downey […]
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Living in the Hereafter
Three people in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter feel the reverberations of their brushes with death: a Frenchwoman miraculously survives a tsunami; a London kid yearns for his recently deceased twin; a genuine medium, played by Matt Damon, tries to avoid employing his abilities. Hereafter is tedious. It portrays characters consumed with notions of an afterlife, but […]
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Jackass 3D purely hilarious
Yes, I will say that Johnny Knoxville and co.—the titular jackasses, accelerating their decrepitude for our amusement—have reached the summit of their art with their employment of 3D technology. If these fellas are receiving lethal-looking levels of force in service to their audience, then it stands to reason that the final frontier of their process […]
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Taking a Return to El Salvador
It’s difficult to assign the right word to describe the aftermath of a brutal, long conflict such as El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992), which claimed 75,000 lives. It is hard to say if El Salvador is recovering—implying that wounds incurred during the war are, in fact, healing—or if it is merely moving on, meaning that […]
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Logging into The Social Network
The Social Network spares us a superficial discourse on Facebook’s influence on human connection and instead immerses us in human experience: inspiration; indignation; the perils of revenge and acting on impulsive anger. This movie is so good because, to borrow a phrase from the film itself, it is “wired into” the brains of its characters […]
Posted inArts + Music
Life as We Know It ends with this rom-com
Of all film’s towering “how’d they do that?” mysteries, I always wonder how they get babies to emote on cue. Do they train a camera on them for hours and edit in the choice cuts, or do they just dab a little pepper paste on the sides of the baby’s mouth and under their eyes […]
Posted inArts + Music
Deciphering Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
In a continuation of the high-financial world parable of 1987’s Wall Street, director Oliver Stone revisits the character that birthed a million sub-prime predators, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), portraying him as a humbled outsider with an insider’s savvy and drive. Amidst pre-and-post crash Wall Street, Gekko mentors a young buck (Shia LaBeouf), taking on a […]
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AFF gives out major prizes
Hey guys, Here’s the list of prizes handed out yesterday at the little awards shindig. Best Atlantic Short ($3,000 in film stock)Sponsored by Kodak Canada Inc. and open to all Atlantic work under 60 minutes.Like Father – Jesse Harley Michael Weir Award for Best Original Screenplay ($1,500)Sponsored by Michael Weir Foundation of ArtsWhirligig – Michael Amo Rex Tasker Documentary Award ($2,500 towards next film project)Sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada and open to all Atlantic documentary films and videos.The Man of a Thousand Songs – William D. MacGillivray Ed Higginson Cinematography Award ($10,000 equipment & service)Sponsored by Sim
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Another Day
So I’m an hour home from the latest Mike Leigh film, Another Year. Leigh’s films always leave me in a place in my head that is both sober and buzzy. This film, like the others I’ve seen, has given me a lot to think about: the nature of happiness; the nature of anxiety and disquiet; what luck has to do with it all. Another symptom of Mike Leigh: that brain burn you get from the veritable tidal wave of familiar faces in his film. Two hours of ‘Hey! It’s that guy!’ I’ve been home for an hour and I’ve spent
Posted inArts + Music
Feeling the beat of The Town
Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner are two of a tight-knit Boston bank-robbing crew. On a job they impulsively kidnap Claire (Rebecca Hall) and let her go with a warning about people who talk to the FBI. Under the pretext of keeping an eye on her, Affleck and Hall begin to date. There are a few […]
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Shorts and Art
So my date and I checked out the Atlantic Short III tonight. Handy program, it was. All the people we knew with films (or who worked on films) in the Fest were all corralled into one program. Way to go, guys! You made a movie. What to say about these films? I kept turning over […]