The world is Thom Fitzgerald’s work-place. He’s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to promote his feature 3 Needles at the city’s film festival, his fourth film to show at the event. The story of 3 Needles spans the globe, presenting three transformative moments of HIV infecting people living in remote China, rural South Africa and […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
It’s hard to notice amid Trailer Park Boys’ prominence, but Mike Clattenburg’s series never took the easy route. At the end of the 1990s, trailer trash culture had reached a gross trend in hipster fashion, movies and magazines—spoiled white kids condescending to lifestyles they’d never come in contact with. Trailer Park Boys’ success came despite […]
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Royal relevance
The formidable cast of this year’s first major Oscar grab, All the King’s Men, stretches across a platform on the fourth floor of Toronto’s Sutton Place Hotel. The line begins with Patricia Clarkson and ends with legendary producer Mike Medavoy. In between are Mark Ruffalo, Kate Winslet, writer-director Steven Zaillian, James Gandolfini and Sean Penn, […]
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Reviews
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen For starters, the title is a bit of a misnomer. One could be forgiven for thinking of it as some kind of biopic of the storied Danish explorer and his Greenland and Northwest Passage adventures. In fact, the film drops the audience into the Inuit culture of the early 20th […]
Posted inArts + Music
not so fast, director-boy
1:27 AM, yawning, rubbing my eyes. Yes, that is the world’s smallest violin, playing just for me. The festival portion of my day began a little over 12 hours back, with After The Wedding, a Danish/Swedish co-production that will be the festival closing gala film tomorrow night. It’s well worth seeing, for those who haven’t […]
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The Spice (and All That)
Viewfinders is the film festival for youth. It’s put on by the Atlantic Film Festival organization in the spring, as well as being one of the programs during the main festival. The big screening is happening Saturday, something called The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang, but I decided to go and see We Shall Overcome, a Danish […]
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AFF-luent
It happens overnight. Halifax goes from being a town where Canadian and foreign language films are an endangered cinematic species to a place where a comedy set in a Newfoundland outport called Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, and Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar’s Volver, both shown at the Atlantic Film Festival, sell out their screenings. […]
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Going home
In 1988 a teenaged boy from Dartmouth named George Stamos won the MT&T award for choreography. It’s all been uphill from there. Not necessarily for the Maritime Telegraph and Telephone company (which merged to form Aliant in 1999), but for Stamos, who has since performed throughout Europe, US and Canada, working as both a dancer […]
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The couple next door
Now I’m getting more than a little anxious. Worried that this warm bath of a sunny September afternoon might be all shot to hell. I am knocking on the front door of a colourful house on a central Halifax street, lined on both sides with late-Victorian style domiciles. So far, nobody inside has been roused […]
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The Black Dahlia
The glib consensus is that The Black Dahlia is a bad movie when it’s really just an easy one to dislike. It brings complexity to genre (not just in the thick plot details—the film’s true weakness). True 1940s noir style is met by director Brian De Palma’s obsessions with guilt surrounding violence and sex. The […]
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Music & Space
I’m showing my geek credentials here, but every day as I ride past the apparatus on the edge of the Common that on Saturday will support all those rockin’ sexagenarians, I think it looks like that bizarre construction from Contact. You know, the one that transported Jodie Foster all the way across the galaxy. This […]
