Cutting-edge special effects highlight X-Men: The Last Stand, but they never build excitement because the movie has no style. Director Brett Ratner’s lack of visual imagination can’t rise to the potential of distinctive comic book adaptations by Alex Proyas, Warren Beatty, Sam Raimi, Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro. Ratner doesn’t place himself alongside Bryan […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Dream a little dream
Sports fans put their rosters together. Office gossips match-make and project affairs upon innocent couples. Film snobs, for their part, allow their fantasy cast and crew to play out some masterwork in their heads. Ever read a book and cast a famous actor in your imagination as the lead character? That is the best analogy […]
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Generation X-Men
Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics superheroes such as Spider-Man, The Hulk and The Fantastic Four, claims he and artist Jack Kirby wanted the X-Men to be different. He says that the X-Men were intended to be allegorical, a super-heroic symbol for the civil-rights movement in the ’60s. They were mutants, born with genetic […]
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Pedalling performance
Mary Ellen MacLean is rehearsing her new play, Velocipede, in the Dalhousie Arts Centre. Studio Two is a large cavernous cube. A metal grid is suspended from the ceiling, just above a catwalk which wraps around the room. Far below on the studio floor, about 20 cycles are parked, a herd of rust, rubber, chrome, […]
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The Da Vinci Code
Nothing is more vital in film reviewing than the necessity of standing up for the integrity of a good movie other critics are trashing. Early reports of critics hissing at The Da Vinci Code at the Cannes Film Festival set off alarms of highbrow distaste for American blockbusters. (The Dan Brown novel is just too […]
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Silver screen summer
June A Prairie Home Companion (directed by Robert Altman) Eighty-year-old Altman had director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) as an insurance-required understudy on this project about the last broadcast of a beloved country music radio show. Expect the usual exquisite ensemble cast, the overlapping dialogue and rambling narrative. Nacho Libre (Jared Hess) Hess follows his […]
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Visions of Greater things
After David Woods was publicly named as the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s first associate curator of African Canadian art in February, he joked that it messed up his friends at Tim Hortons, where he goes to write. “They don’t know what associate means, but they know it’s big. It’s comical because I might not […]
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Poseidon
As kids, the first mystique of movies was that they’re something bigger than we are. It’s mandatory to believe in the thrill of giant spectacle to get anything out of Poseidon. At most basic levels of character and drama, it’s a subpar work of fiction. There’s no reason to see it on DVD or in […]
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Monster men
Thomas Harvey and Josef Beeby are guerilla filmmakers with a dream, a video camera and the support of friends and family who will go far to see them make their movies. They met at Halifax Grammar School in grade seven and bonded over their love of film, especially low-budget straight-to-video horror. “There’s a special quality […]
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Ode to bondage and joy
Bettie Page is being photographed. The photographer—a police officer by day—speaks to her kindly, and she has not seen much kindness lately. He’s clicking his shutter quickly, directing Bettie’s facial expressions. “Give me ‘scared,’” he says. Bettie opens her mouth wide, mock-screaming in terror. “Give me ‘pert,’” he says. Bettie thinks about it for a […]
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Akeelah and the Bee
Don’t be put off by the Starbucks Entertainment credit at the beginning of Akeelah and the Bee. Writer and director Doug Atchinson’s personalized genre movie evades corporate mentality. It’s the kind of assured work that should be a filmmaker’s breakthrough, but is so good-natured it’s at risk of going unrecognized. After all, where’s the edge […]
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Brick
There’s growing attention on the teenage noir Brick. The low-budget debut (shot for only $500,000) of writer and director Rian Johnson has been anticipated as the next big thing since its 2005 Sundance premiere. It’s easy to foresee impressionable filmgoers holding it up as definitive, but Johnson doesn’t deliver much beyond the initial novelty. @body […]
