Necrophilia is the unspoken threat in Just Like Heaven and Corpse Bride. Both are highly accessible. But where Just Like Heaven is soap opera treacle, only the Tim Burton film has the courage to address the lure of dead things as a rejection of established civility. Yeah, Burton went there already with Winona Ryder’s Lydia […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Playing’s the thing
Peter Gabriel hadn’t released a proper album of new material since Us in 1992. He’d staged the international Secret World tour, then for years, silence, broken only by a largely instrumental project in conjunction with the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. When he released Up in 2002 and launched the Growing Up tour, […]
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Festival express
In 1981, the world of film festivals was very different. Sundance wasn’t even known by the title of Robert Redford’s most famous role. It was The Utah/US Film Festival, just moved from Salt Lake to Park City. The Toronto International Film Festival was five years old, also under its former name, The Festival of Festivals, […]
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Girl Talk
A young girl—still a virgin—is called a slut simply because she lives in a group home. At the age of 10, another girl overhears her principal whisper “slut” as she walks by in a pair of short shorts. Yet another makes the mistake of kissing a boy and ends up being shunned by her classmates […]
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Recording soundtracks
Film is a naturally collaborative medium, and much of the best in music is as well. To bring filmmaking bigwigs and music honchos together is such a natural marriage, it’s sort of surprising no one thought of it before. This year’s Atlantic Film Festival dates, September 15 to 24, overlap with the Nova Scotia Music […]
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The Exorcism of Emily Rose
The fight between religion and science in The Exorcism of Emily Rose is mirrored in the movie’s own struggle for respectability. Not content to be “just” a horror movie, the “Based on a True Story” credit is an attempt to legitimize it with a seriousness it doesn’t contain. The effect of applying horror tropes to […]
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Poetry in Motion
November 11, 2004. A couple thousand people come together for a Remembrance Day ceremony at Sullivan’s Pond in Dartmouth. Paul McNeill and Catherine Cooper are among the families and neighbours who have devoted the day to appreciating the men and women who sacrificed everything for their country’s future; or, more precisely, us. After all the […]
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On the line
When Halifax filmmaker Steven James May set out to document the lives of three women working in the phone sex industry, he knew that he would dealing with some touchy subject matter. Sure enough, in the weeks leading up to his film’s premier at the Atlantic Film Festival on September 22, he was busy working […]
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On the line
Laura Linney is the perfect amount of famous. Consider the case of Kinsey, the 2004 biopic of controversial sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, for which Linney received her second Academy Award nomination. She gained 25 pounds to play the doctor’s wife. When Renee Zellweger ate herself to a healthy weight for both Bridget Jones films, the […]
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Screen test
Whole New Thing Co-written by and co-starring Cape Breton’s prodigal son Daniel MacIvor, Whole New Thing is about a sexual awakening of a teenage boy (Aaron Webber, making his screen debut). After he experiences his first wet dream, he writes a 1,000-page book about it (complete with illustrations), so his worried hippie mom (Rebecca Jenkins, […]
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Murderball
The assumptions of fear and pity that keep people from documentaries about the disabled are shattered in the opening minutes of Murderball. Quadriplegic rugby players are introduced against the sledgehammer-to-the-face ferocity of Ministry’s “Thieves.” Rage sidesteps maudlin outsider perspective, readying viewers to accept the subjects as human. At its most basic, Murderball is an Inspirational […]
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Free Form’s function
“Hold on, let me give a quick hurray — we just found out we’re not lost,” says Ryan Wylie, turning away from his cell phone to cheer on his fellow passengers. Navigation woes are inevitable as the co-founder of the Free Form Film Festival travels across North America in a convoy of three vehicles—two vans […]
