Dwayne Johnson seems too self-aware at this point to convincingly play goofy meatheads, but broadening his horizons would sacrifice his claim to the lucrative kiddie market. Why mess with a winning formula when Vin Diesel makes you look like the Daniel Day-Lewis of age-10-and-under cinema? Johnson plays an astronaut stranded on the titular Planet 51, […]
Hillary Titley
Posted inArts + Music
The Road is harrowing
Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travel south along a road long deserted by humanity, literally and figuratively. It’s an unrelentingly gloomy story and mostly faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece source novel, where dread, despair and desperation amidst the unrelenting dangers of broken civilization made for its own uniquely suspenseful plotting. John Hillcoat’s film […]
Posted inArts + Music
Old Dogs, no new tricks
Maniacally slapstick, utterly charmless and ultimately unfunny, Old Dogs is devoid of merit but slightly unique in PG entertainment. John Travolta and Robin Williams play aging bachelor sports-marketing magnates and co-dependent male BFFs who find their sleek lives up-ended when Williams discovers he has children. When “family” films often boast that old saw about the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Nance Ackerman’s mission
“I guess I try to do stories on people who really need a voice, and need to tell their story,” says Halifax photographer/filmmaker Nance Ackerman, the director of 2006’s Cottonland, a story of addiction and struggle in Cape Breton. Her new NFB-produced film, Four Feet Up, features eight-year-old Isaiah and his family living well below […]
Posted inArts + Music
Pirate Radio play
Richard Curtis’ story of a rock radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored on the coast of England in the 1960s manages to capture an anarchic and anti-authoritarian spirit, without being strident or shallow. By not taking either of the main plots—the rock boat and Kenneth Branagh’s governmental crusade to bring it back into harbour—too […]
Posted inArts + Music
Boom-buster business
With the holidays approaching, Hollywood is rolling out a second batch of blockbusters primed to either capitalize on the spirit of the season (A Christmas Carol) or provide a couple of hours of blissful escapism, like this week’s “rock ’em, sock ’em, world-go-boom!” epic, 2012, from today’s maestro of destruction, Roland Emmerich. The trailer indicates […]
Posted inArts + Music
An Education unsettles
An Education certainly has enough achievements to boast about, namely the star-turn from Carey Mulligan and Nick Hornby’s expertly crafted screenplay. But director Lone Scherfig can’t lift the fog from the creepy undertones of its central relationship. Mulligan’s clever yet sheltered schoolgirl, Jenny, is romanced by the seemingly urbane (and grown up!) David (Peter Sarsgaard). […]
Posted inArts + Music
Real people roles
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which left over a million people displaced and a quarter of a million dead, created some unanswered questions for Halifax filmmaker Rohan Fernando. For his 2007 NFB documentary, Blood and Water, Fernando followed his uncle Anton to Sri Lanka a year after he lost his wife and daughter in the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Take a look at The Men Who Stare at Goats
Goats tells the story of the US military-sanctioned new-age-inspired New Earth Warriors. Led by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges in full aged-hippie mode), the film follows their idealistic origins as a sun-salutating, psychic army, to their eventual disintegration and disgrace at the hands of Kevin Spacey’s clairvoyant Judas. (There is, apparently, one in every group.) George […]
Posted inArts + Music
Amelia a one-note wonder
A quick perusal of the Wikipedia page for Amelia Earhart indicates a complex character best suited for the close analysis of a 400-page book, not a two-hour movie that will certainly include Earhart’s (played here by Hilary Swank) “greatest hits,” like her solo flying accomplishments and the attendant fame and fortune, her lovers—husband George Puttnam […]
Posted inArts + Music
Cirque du Freak a relentless turkey
How do relentless turkeys like Cirque du Freak attract the kind of talent like director/writer Paul Weitz, co-writer Brian Helgeland, actors John C. Reilly, Willem Dafoe, Ken Wantanabe and Salma Hayek? Who got this ball rolling and where can I address my nasty letters? This year has had its share of kiddie movies that play […]
Posted inArts + Music
Rock it out: St. John’s Women’s International Film Festival
“I wish I could go out to every person,” says St. John’s Womens International Film Festival board member and programmer Gay Decker, “and say ‘You should go to this film festival because there is a better likelihood that you are going to hear your story.’” The annual festival featuring films written, produced and directed exclusively by women is hitting screens around the Newfoundland and Labrador capital and boasts entries from Halifax’s better known filmmakers, Eva Madden (Fast Forward in Reverse), Andrea Dorfman (How to Be Alone), Jasmine Oore (Glamor Guts), Lulu Keating (Brain Clever and Dog = God) and Nance
