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 […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
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 […]
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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 […]
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Soundtown
When sitting beside audio artists Eleanor King and Stephen Kelly, the surrounding sounds in the room become more noticeable. Almost on cue, as King is talking about how she instinctively connects sound to personal memories, someone drops a dish on the cafe counter, its tinny boom resonating across the floor. “See,” she says, pointing to […]
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The Producers
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 […]
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The fun of horror
Eli Roth doesn’t like the cold. On the phone from Toronto he bitches about weather he finds a great deal less comfortable than the mild California breezes to which he’s grown accustomed. “I grew up in Boston,” he says, “but it’s clear how much of a pussy I’ve turned into.” Roth isn’t one to couch […]
