“I’m lookin’ at your face and I just wanna smash it,” says Barry. “I just wanna fuckin’ smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You’re so pretty.” “I want to chew your face,” says Lena. “And I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
That Thing he does
Daniel MacIvor likes the use of the word genesis. As co-writer and co-star of Whole New Thing, opening February 10 in Halifax, he’s well-aware of the good fortune that brought this project together. Working on the script with the movie’s director, Amnon Buchbinder, Whole New Thing was written in two weeks. In an industry where […]
Posted inArts + Music
Lying in wait
Long before Oprah bitch-slapped James Frey for the semi-truths in his memoir Million Little Pieces, confessional poetry—made famous in the 1960s by Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton—tinkered and toyed with autobiographical truth-telling. Written in “I,” confessional poetry draws on the author’s own deeply personal and often painful experiences. Some critics claim these wordsmiths […]
Posted inArts + Music
Under snow
The dark, cold months of January and February are traditionally slow ones for the Canadian movie business. There may be the odd series that shoots right through to March, but it’s rare that an American production will shoot anywhere in Canada right now. Filmmakers would rather not come up here when it’s cold, especially if […]
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The Matador
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 […]
Posted inArts + Music
Lost in translation?
Hollywood does not handle ordinary realities like weddings and relationships very well, so I worried about TransAmerica’s treatment of transsexuals long before the movie arrived in Halifax. In the mid-1990s The Crying Game, To Wong Foo and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert used transgendered people as main characters, but they were either tragic plot devices […]
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Reviews of TransAmerica and The New World
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. […]
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Mock star
After years of couch surfing, Michael Mabbott is giving up his apartment in Vancouver and moving to Toronto. The Alberta-born writer-director put the move off, but he needs to be there for his career, especially as his first feature film is being released in theatres across Canada—the country-rock mockumentary The Life and Hard Times of […]
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Tristan and Isolde
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 […]
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Munich
A hotel bomb has detonated, killing its intended target, but the impact also blew out the wall of the young couple in the room next door. Amid body parts and debris, the girl is frantically complaining to her boyfriend that she’s been blinded. Immediately we’re back into the planning stages of the Mossad operatives, who […]
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Jacob’s letters
The text covering the walls of the Khyber Ballroom looks familiar. Each letter, each word, each sentence, all written in black or hot-pink shiny plastic tape, spreads across an L-shaped portion of the gallery in manic urgency; only after a second or so do the messages become clear. Someone has written direct responses to some […]
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Stars and strife
“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” So says Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, in Munich, Steven Spielberg’s new film about men who hunt down those responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The quote, and the movie, have upset some […]
