If ever she once was, Lia Rinaldo is no longer bothered by a new film festival in Montreal. “It became quite clear that we were pursuing different things,” says Rinaldo, the Atlantic Film Festival’s director, of the new event that overlaps with AFF’s 25th anniversary. “So, we haven’t kept in regular contact, as one would […]
Film + TV
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The Brothers Grimm
Two thousand five has been a big year for big-name filmmakers. For me, the auteurist successes have come from Wong Kar Wai, Steven Spielberg, and to a more modest degree, Hayao Miyazaki, Jim Jarmusch and Tim Burton. On the other end of the spectrum is the newest work by Fernando Meirelles, John Dahl, Ridley Scott […]
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Trail Blazing
With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature film with such skill and vision it’s hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived. In the annual guide outlining the programs […]
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Flowers, Plain And Dukes
Broken Flowers Don Johnston is the type of character Bill Murray has played a lot recently—generally indifferent to his surroundings. As Broken Flowers begins, his fed-up girlfriend leaves him. He then receives an unsigned note from an ex, claiming to have mothered his son. Don doesn’t want to get involved. With his mystery-obsessed family-man neighbour […]
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Going, going, Tong
Redemption is massive. It’s part and parcel of screenwriting 101. You put a guy in a tree, you throw sticks and rocks at him and then you get him down. You want to see him survive and get out of it.” Michael Dowse is talking up his movie, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a new […]
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Teenage fan club
Sitting in a quiet corner of the teen genre — away from crude comedies, gory slashers and believe-in-yourself tweeners—is the coming-of-age film. Sometimes it stars a single protagonist, but more often it’s a group at the apex of its adolescence. The end result is always earnest, heartfelt sentiment, and the best ones manage to sell […]
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Extra Credit
In a vast white room lit by hundreds of metres of bright white fluorescent lights, Alvena Poole waits. She sits at one of ten folding tables set in the middle sixth of the room, closest to the door. Empty white walls, a towering white ceiling and floors tiled in dirty white linoleum surround her. The […]
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Rob in broad daylight
Everybody should have at least one hobby. Some people enjoy bird watching—filling their fanny packs with binoculars and guide books in hopes of spotting that rare triple-horned, green-bellied finch. For those who prefer People magazine to tiny pecking beaks and hay fever, there’s another, more urban, pastime sweeping our city: celebrity watching. The relatively low […]
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Roll credit
Shauna Hatt’s best year working in film in Nova Scotia was 2003. It was the SARS and blackout year in Toronto, a city that for years has been the biggest film production centre in North America outside Los Angeles. American producers, believing the paranoid projections of weak-kneed insurance companies and a plague-ravaged city of mask-wearers, […]
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None for the ages
It’s not hard to believe what is said: the Academy Awards were created in the 1920s as a public relations exercise, to boost the California movie business and assuage the egos of the pretty, young stars. Award ceremonies are a coming of age for any industry—it means you’ve arrived, you’re making money and people really, […]
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Best in the land
Look past the Botoxed parade of designer gowns and salivating paparazzi and you’ll find a distinctly Canadian story unfolding on this year’s Oscar red carpet. Canada’s public film producer, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), received two Academy Award nominations this year: one for Chris Landreth’s animated short film Ryan, and another for the […]
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D’oh Christ!
Around 1990, when conservatives and other like-minded squares started shrieking about the crude, sassy new animated series The Simpsons,they of course jumped the proverbial gun. (“I don’t think anybody should be proud to be an underachiever” is how my own grade 6 teacher explained her ban of Simpsons shirts, which then mostly featured Bart spouting […]