Film + TV

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]