An attempted amalgam Guy Ritchie’s gothic Sherlock Holmes adventures and the grimy serial killer aesthetic of David Fincher’s Seven, The Raven fails to hit either high. Director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) puts alcoholic Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) in the centre of his brisk thriller about a murderer using Poe’s bloodier stories as his […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Things to make you go “Arr”: The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Forgive The Pirates! Band of Misfits for coming along after our culture has already reached pirate saturation. The stop-motion adventure film, based on the comedy books by Gideon Defoe, roars along with considerable charm. In order to win the “Pirate of the Year” award, the deluded pirate captain, Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant), attempts to wow […]
Posted inArts + Music
Safe easily cracked
No one really pauses to talk things out in the latest Jason Statham beat-em-up flick, Safe. Statham plays an ex-cop/ex-cage fighter/ex-special forces operative who vows to keep a Chinese girl safe (get it?) so she can use the combination in her head to open a safe (get it?). The Chinese mob used the girl’s photographic […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Five-Year Engagement nearly feels that long
A shambling rom-com from writers Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and that movie’s star Jason Segel, finds Segel as a San Francisco sous chef who nervously proposes to grad student girlfriend Emily Blunt as the movie opens. As one expects from the title, plans go awry. The couple moves to Michigan when Blunt receives a […]
Posted inArts + Music
We get Detention
A rampant, post-post-modern look at modern life through the lens of the high school slasher film/teen comedy, Detention is relentless in its determination to squeeze laughs (and shocks) from the pulpy guts of our self-aware culture. What does this mean for the average filmgoer? Well, it will help if you have a familiarity with the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Fast Times at Grizzly Lake High
I’m filling in as Cinderhella I’m wearing the costume of an arch-slasher-movie villain come to life—one of several of my Where’s Waldo cameos in the film I co-wrote, Detention. But the botched surgery mask is hot enough to toast marshmallows, it’s incredibly difficult to see through. We’re shooting the movie’s prologue, where Cinderhella slaughters teen-tantrum […]
Posted inArts + Music
Sleeping Beauty
“Jane Campion Presents” gives writer/director Leigh’s first feature an instant whiff of artistic credibility, as does the deliberate, Kubrick-esque chilliness in the tale of a student, Lucy (Emily Browning), who moonlights as a prostitute and gets mixed up with a organization providing unconscious, drugged women to an exclusive clientele. It’s hard to tell what Leigh […]
Posted inArts + Music
Indie Game: The Movie to screen in Halifax
The Canadian premiere of Indie Game: The Movie will be simulcast live nationwide from the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto at 10pm (AST), Thursday, May 3. You can go see it at Empire Park Lane that night. The documentary is a Canadian-made—directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot—crowed-funded film about video game developers who, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Drew Goddard and The Cabin In The Woods
How do you write about a movie when revealing elements of the story will spoil the whole thing? That’s absolutely the case with The Cabin in the Woods—the less you know about it going in the better, especially for horror fans who’ve seen a lot of its antecedents. Drew Goddard gets this. “I admire the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Reviewer not The Lucky One
Zac Efron is a haunted man in The Lucky One, a spoonful of sap tapped from the same source—novelist Nicholas Sparks—as The Notebook. Efron’s Logan is an ex-Marine suffering from post-traumatic stress and a nagging need to connect with the mystery blonde (Taylor Schilling) whose photo he found in Iraq. Efron himself wears a stunned […]
Posted inArts + Music
Think Like a Man splits genders for laughs
Remember that time someone made that He’s Just Not That Into You self-help book (offering oh-so-sage love advice to hapless women) into a movie? Apparently that’s a thing: director Tim Story has adapted Steve Harvey’s love guide for women, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, for the screen. The movie brings the book’s […]
Posted inArts + Music
Chimpanzee straddles a line between drama and documentary
According to Disneynature, chimpanzees are basically people. Though this year’s Earth Day-coordinated release is heavy on the cute factor, it straddles an awkward place between documentary and fiction, ascribing human values to primates—which may not be the best way for people to learn about the species. No doubt there are similarities between chimpanzees and humans—and […]
