Marshall McLuhan’s birthday was July 11. Had he not died in 1980, the Canadian communications and media scholar would’ve been 95 this year. Imagine the party. There’s always one whose gifts outdo the rest. In McLuhan’s case, Terry Gordon—who teaches French, Italian and linguistics at Dalhousie—and his body of work on the “media analyst and […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Think Linklater
For a generation-defining film, Slacker is a bit of a bore. The meandering, aimless, over-philosophizing tone of the film doesn’t resonate now as it would have in 1991, when Richard Linklater’s debut feature—with its endless characters, car crash and Madonna’s pilfered pap smear—quietly revolutionized independent filmmaking, for better (structural risk-taking) and worse (unknown writer-director as […]
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Turn down the hype
There’s a great moment in Superman Returns, a variation of an effect that opens Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, that’s an unintended summary of the present blockbuster season. The Man of Steel looks down on Earth from outer space, and is inundated by a cacophony of the planet’s sound waves. So many movies emit so much loud […]
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Neighbours
Don’t mess with Amanda Kilcoyne. Young, beautiful and driven, she’s the daughter of the owner of the biggest construction company in Halifax, as well as its chief operating officer. She does what she likes. For example, she has a flagrant affair with a man weeks away from saying his vows to another woman (who happens […]
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Superman Returns
Most movies that don’t identify themselves as remakes are still retreads. What counts is when old material is revamped, made fresh again. Superman Returns and Click acknowledge their predecessors and that viewers are probably familiar with them. Superman is pitched alternately as the first of a new series and a throwback and extension of the […]
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Walken talk
The release of Click this week brings with it the annual Christopher Walken summer appearance in a large studio comedy. In Click he stars opposite Adam Sandler as a mad scientist. Last summer had him as the dominating patriarch of a kooky rich family in Wedding Crashers (one could argue that he was the most […]
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Nacho Libre
The shared outlook of Nacho Libre and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is that foreigners are indeed very foreign. The white-centric stance of both movies is unsophisticated, but not uninteresting. By moving away from US soil, these films aim for exoticism, not understanding. Only Nacho Libre, with its good-natured storybook tones, really gets […]
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Divisionary tactics
Andrew Hines and Alex van Helvoort live and breathe film, but they find time for other interests. They met at the water fountain at Armbrae Academy on Oxford Street when Hines was in Grade 11 and van Helvoort in Grade 8, and bonded over a shared enthusiasm for dirt biking, leading them to document it. […]
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Cars
The imaginative disappointment of this summer’s blockbusters finds movies less interested in awakening viewers than in rewarding their laziness. In times like this, a movie’s stylistic flair can go a long way against its inert narrative. Unlike The Break Up, X-Men 3 and The Da Vinci Code, Pixar’s Cars lights the screen with images worth […]
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Reduce, reuse, remake
Dear Hollywood, I know we haven’t spoken in awhile. It isn’t because I don’t care about you anymore. I see you around. You’re hard to ignore, what with you being in every multiplex. I have seen your genre movies, the ones you made on a low budget. You’ve often allowed talented and hungry young directors […]
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A Prairie Home Companion
Robert Altman does something tricky in A Prairie Home Companion: He makes a movie about death that’s fully alive in the present. The big ensemble affair doesn’t seem like a departure, except that the 81-year-old director is now visibly preoccupied with the end of things. The real, live-theatre radio show A Prairie Home Companion is […]
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Mark it
“My film is about how I put myself on display in strange ways.” Jeff Coll is explaining Me on Me, his new short film. It details his peculiar exhibitionist tendencies, and is one of 20 pictures to be shown at a June 1 end-of-school-year screening of work by students of the Nova Scotia Community College’s […]
