Mark Palermo

What do the makers of Date Movie think their audience wants from a film like this? What does said audience really expect? And what different circumstances would my life have to undergo for me to give this movie a positive review? These are the questions that plague my soul. Since much of what I do […]

Good actors can lend a movie credibility, charisma and merit, but they’re rarely dependable as a stamp of a quality product. Harrison Ford is a weird case. Through the ’80s and some of the ’90s, a Harrison Ford movie would imply a certain calibre of entertainment. He always made an effort to work with A-list […]

At the beginning of the remake of When a Stranger Calls, the camera cranes above a suburban house, where a girl is being attacked inside, until we see an amusement park lit up behind it. A division is made between the agony of being scared and the fun of being scared. That’s as far as […]

Uptight suburbanites feel edgy when they befriend a killer. That shallow but funny joke in The Matador shouldn’t work at all — the target is both easy and exhausted. Movies that poke fun at middle-class values are mostly based in the experience of watching other movies. Kids who grew up in the suburbs develop an […]

Do moviegoers still like movies, or do they just like going to them? I had a curious experience at The New World the other night. The theatre was full almost to capacity. Then, about an hour into the movie, people started filing out. A new group would make their exit every five minutes or so. […]

A screen preface informs us that Tristan and Isolde is set in The Dark Ages. That’s appropriate for a movie whose colour scheme runs the gamut from grey to brown. The glum visuals are a near opposite of the spectacle and sweeping camera movements that have come to characterize movie epics. It’s possible this may […]

The new screen version of The Producers doesn’t establish itself as a distinguished entity from the 1968 film. But it doesn’t disgrace the original either. The success of The Producers on Broadway made the film cash-in inevitable. Unlike when Little Shop of Horrors took the same path, the result of a movie inspiring a stage […]

This is an ordered ranking of every feature length 2005 movie I saw, prior to December 23. Movies first released in North America in 2004 that didn’t open in Halifax until 2005 (eg. Hotel Rwanda) are not counted. Nor are foreign movies released domestically in 2005 that were counted on last year’s list (eg. Oldboy). […]

Jim Carrey, as everyman slob Dick, stands on top of a table in a high-class bar, ranting wildly about how the patrons (corporate employees) are just puppets. His wife Jane (Tea Leoni) tells off the bartender for serving her husband so many drinks to allow him to make such an animated fool of himself. The […]