This Saturday, 8pm at the Khyber ICA, you’re in for a real treat as the fourth Veni Vidi O, a free night of video-based art and performance, comes to Halifax. A creative project of artists Stewart Innes and Alison Kobayashi, the first three nights were hosted at Toronto’s Lennox Contemporary. Innes tells me that there will be one formal room that will show a loop of narrative-based work, plus installations and more experimental videos in the Ballroom, and a musical performance by electro-demon Snow Picnic, featuring projections by Noah Logan. (There’s a secret late-night performance too. I know what it
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The Last House
When Wes Craven made The Last House on the Left in 1972, he was a recently retired humanities professor who had barely seen any movies, much less directed one. Though the amateur quality and decadence of The Last House on the Left (renamed after original title Sex Crime of the Century failed to sell tickets) […]
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Miss March
An odd thing happens about 15 minutes into Miss March. The comedy, which until that point is desperate and met with uncomfortable audience silence, is suddenly funny. But it isn’t meant to last. Director/writer/star duo Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore (of MTV’s The Whitest Kids U Know) hit when the comedy is physical. But they […]
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Pontypool
Leave it to Toronto auteur Bruce McDonald–adapting the Tony Burgess novel Pontypool Changes Everything–to splice the zombie movie and a light comedy on communication into an entirely new monster. Using a single-location setting and a handful of performers–the community radio station, with a crusty on-air host and producers, akin to Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio–and adding […]
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Watchmen
Most of what’s good about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was already good about Alan Moore’s graphic novel. But give credit: For a generally faithful adaptation, Snyder commendably lets Watchmen feel like a movie. Comic book fans can be as bad as Harry Potter fans for flipping a lid whenever a film adaptation deviates from its source. […]
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Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
Don’t give me the “it’s escapism” defense. Escapism would be welcome. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is purgatory. It’s not really even a movie. It’s barely up to the standards of the narrative scenes between levels of a video game. The success of the Street Fighter games already spawned one movie (a rather unequal […]
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Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Don’t give me the “it’s escapism” defense. Escapism would be welcome. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is purgatory. It’s not really even a movie. It’s barely up to the standards of the narrative scenes between levels of a video game. The success of the Street Fighter games already spawned one movie (a rather unequal […]
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Fired Up!
There’s trouble in a comedy when the preppy bad guy who is going out with the girl the good guy likes is no more intolerable than the good guy who complains how intolerable he is. I don’t care if the bad guy is mocked for listening to Chumbawumba and Lou Bega, Fired Up! has no […]
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Josh Martinez is “Going Back To Hali”
Josh Martinez – Going Back to Hali w Classified, Skratch Bastid Josh Martinez came back to Halifax with a mission in mind, film his new video or freeze trying. Martinez’s “Going Back To Hali” (with Classified and Skratch Bastid, directed by Cazhmere) brought him back east from his Portland, Oregon home for a visit with […]
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The International
It’s the tact of movies like The International that they take work to follow. It’s meant as an engrossing technique, allowing viewers to feel like insiders for keeping track of covert malpractice operations, and differentiating between a multiplicity of referenced people whose names all start with Cs, Ss, and Ws. When director Tom Tykwer wants […]
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Push
A scene early in Push got my hopes up. Nick (Chris Evans) and Cassie (Dakota Fanning, looking tough with Avril Lavigne hair) are being chased through a Hong Kong fish market. Their pursuers are able to scream at such a pitch that it makes ears bleed and windows shatter. As the chase continues, there are […]
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Confessions of a Shopaholic
Give Confessions of a Shopaholic points for being upfront. The flack that “women’s movies” take for promoting consumerism—marry rich, fight for your dream wedding and shop your blues away—is here made front and centre. The adaptation of Sophie Kinsella’s popular novel is sound because it’s willing to look at material excess as its subject. It’s […]
