NOW SHOOTING
Ron Foley Macdonald
Movies Editor Ron Foley Macdonald is a freelance writer and film programmer based in Halifax.
Now Shooting features serious film and video industry news, salacious gossip, vicious rumours, Ron's musings and any other tidbits or contributions you would like to contribute.
Click on the gray New Post link in the far left column.
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Now Shooting Archive
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Vicky Cristina Slight, Delightful |
AUGUST 16, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
After a brief filmmaking exile in England, Woody Allen's European tour continues with a side-trip to Spain. The result is the slight but occasionally delightful comedy Vicki Cristina Barcelona.
Powered by two delicious performances by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz--who lift the rest of the not-terribly great cast--VCB rehashes many of Woody Allen's superior 1970s themes, particularly that of infidelity, the importance of art, and the adventures of rich, airheaded Americans all together in a sometimes lumpy, secondhand stew.
What saves VCB are the sun-drenched Barcelona locations and the wonderfully overdone sub-plot of Bardem and Cruz and manic painters who are in the midst of a mess...
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Brideshead Revisited Once More |
AUGUST 5, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
A remake of Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel Brideshead Revisited would seem to rather unnecessary. After all, that landmark 1980s British TV series made a star out of Jeremy Irons and provoked copycat fashion mini-revivals of 1930s Oxford scarves and sweaters in the trend-happy United Kingdom just before The Smiths turned pop culture inward again.
Shockingly, director Julian Jarrold’s (Becoming Jane, Kinky Boots) 135-minute feature film reduction of Waugh’s book actually works quite nicely. Sumptuously filmed (in Oxford, Yorkshire and Venice, Italy) and sparked by two surprisingly strong supporting turns by Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon (as the estranged aristrocratic Anglo-Catholic couple...
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Dark Knight: A Cinematic Event |
JULY 24, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Rarely has a film lived up to its advance hype as has The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s remarkable revival of a once dead cinematic comic book franchise.
There were so many people at the Tuesday night 8:00 pm screening I witnessed the audience spilling onto the very front rows of the theatre. It’s clear that The Dark Knight is more than just a great popcorn movie. It’s the pop-culture event of the summer.
Reviewing the film seems to rather pointless. It’s great from start to finish. Nolan’s a fabulous, plot-driven director. If you’ve seen his first two small-scale features (Following and Momento) you’ll know he’s a master at compressed, accelerated story...
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del Toro's Hellboy II A Masterpiece |
JULY 15, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army seems to have picked up only a grudging nod from the critics over its opening weekend. Perhaps the double trouble of being a sequel of a comic book franchise had something to do with it. Or it might be that many opinionmeisters just didn’t bother to actually sit through the whole film.
Because Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a drop-dead fabulous piece of filmmaking, a canny cross between pop pulp and lush fantasy. Think of Harry Potter rewritten by Elmore Leonard and you might get the idea.
Director Guillermo del Toro’s script keeps the action fast and furious, making this second Hellboy seem like a brisk B-Movie masquerading as Hollywood A List. At two hours...
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Kimball Preps 'Eternal Kiss' |
JULY 9, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Halifax filmmaker Paul Kimball is gearing up to shoot his first feature script, Eternal Kiss.
A contemporary Vampire flick to be lensed in the Shelburne Studio Complex in September, it’s a story that deftly balances humour and romance. Montreal’s Joe Gallaccio is slated to star as David Manners, an intrepid documentary maker on the trail of some suspicious characters who may or may not be real vampires.
Gallaccio - who spent a season with Shakespeare By the Sea and starred in Kimball’s as yet unfinished film version of MacBeth entitled Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow - is a charismatic and forceful actor who will undoubtedly give his Manners character a real edge.
The name David Man...
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WALL-E's Half-Great, Half Bland |
JUNE 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Some critics have gonzo over the new Disney/Pixar animated flick WALL-E.
That only proves that if you throw in a few references to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001, film snobs eyes tend to glaze over.
The reality is that WALL-E does indeed have some lovely moments, particularly in its first half when the little robot of the title wanders an abandoned, garbage-strewn Earth with only a cockroach for company.
Once he blasts into the void following an ingenue-like female robot from the future, the film drops into dross; it’s Shrek in space full of ugly candy colours and the same voice-over schtick that makes most computer-animated movies these days not much more than marketing oppo...
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The Happening A Brisk & Economical Chiller |
JUNE 14, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick is an enviromental thriller that would make a brilliant B-Movie if we still had those kinds of catagories.
Instead, The Happening (20th Century Fox) is getting a pummelling from critics fed up with the Indian-American’s trademark ‘gotcha’ style of slick chillers.
Oddly enought, audiences don’t seem to mind. Sure, The Happening would have a very nice pedigree indeed if had been produced by Allied Artists in 1959, somewhere between bigscreen creepfests such as Don Siegel’s The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (two films it ultimately resembles). But please don’t mix it up with the mid’60s counter-cultu...
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Strangers Superbly Written&Realized |
JUNE 3, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Texas cinematographer Bryan Bertino has knocked one out the park with his first directoral effort The Strangers. Tense, creepy and minimal, it’s the definitive contemporary scary ‘couple attacked by weirdoes in remote house’ cheepie.
Keeping the cast small, the locations few and the atmosphere oppressive, Bertino deftly links what seems to be a random attack to male disappointment and rage.
The couple--Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both surprisingly effect--arrive at a faraway ‘summer house’ after attending some friend’s wedding. Speedman’s character has proposed to Tyler’s character complete with an engagement ring; she turns him down and the post-wedding romantic preparations in the ho...
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Massively Entertaining Indiana Jones |
MAY 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones flick has arrived, and it offers further proof of the fanchise’s enduring potency.
Indiana Jones And the Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull is edge-of-your-seat filmmaking from Hollywood’s leading producer and directing team, George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg.
Of course the film received the usual ho-hum notices from the gilded cynics in the movie reviewing world. I guess that just means there’s still lots of critics would might want to consider finding alternate employment, even if 200 movie reviewers got laid off in North America over the last two or three years.
The fact that few of them actually like movies might be the problem.
There’s no quest...
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Prince Caspian Pretty Solid |
MAY 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The second installment in the bigscreen adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series is actually a little bit better than the lead-off movie, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Prince Caspian is darker and grander, and director Adam Adamson has a surer grip on how to handle British Author C.S. Lewis’ gentle but persistent Christian allegories.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Adamson has managed shake off the feeling that the Narnia films seem like a pre-teen economy version of the mighty Lord Of the Rings franchise. If LotRs was the gold standard, Narnia only rates a bronze in comparison. Sure, Adamson is no Peter Jackson, and even the Harry Potter flicks have more traction when it come...
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Mamet's Redbelt A Cinematic Miracle |
MAY 11, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American playwright and sometimes filmmaker David Mamet has just delivered his best movie ever in the martial-arts drama Redbelt.
Filled with his trademark elliptical plotting and terse dialogue, Redbelt sees past the opaque cleverness of Mamet’s previous film projects such as The Spanish Prisoner, House Of Games and Heist to delve into a critique of the West’s tendency to exploit Eastern ideas.
The result is a tense, compact narrative that neatly blends a martial arts storyline into Mamet’s own unique universe of deft turnarounds and swerving self-conscious plot twists that explore the dark heart of contemporary life.
With not one but two exposes of the illusions behind mass enter...
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Iron Man Flies |
MAY 2, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The first of 2008’s big budget summer blockbusters, Iron Man is shockingly good.
Powered by a tight, economical script--by two of the team who wrote the riveting sci-fi flick Children Of Men--that cleverly doubles back on itself, delivering a doppleganger-style climactic battle that is a sheer pleasure to watch, Iron Man deserves pretty well all the accolades it’s accumulating, and more.
It’s a brisk, hip, and breezily cynical bigscreen action flick that is completely involving from its opening frames to the closing credits which unspool over Black Sabbath’s immortal title song. With a fabulous cast headed up by the re-born Robert Downey Jr in the title role, Iron Man has just about e...
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The Queen has a slight cold |
 APRIL 27, 2008 (POSTED BY: NICHOLAS GRAHAM)
It was the dogs’ fault
Alan Bennett is an award winning writer and actor perhaps best known for having been a member of the legendary comedy group Beyond the Fringe, and for his play and screenplay The Madness of George III. His latest work, although a novel, also deals with a monarch who is overcome by a form of mania.
The story starts at a state dinner at which the Queen is attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to engage the President of France in a discussion about French literature. We are then taken back in time by a number of months to find the corgis’ barking furiously at something on the road behind the palace. When Her Majesty investigates she discovers that the source of the d...
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Snow Angels Haunting, Powerful |
APRIL 25, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a powerful and haunting drama about contemporary families falling apart.
Filmed in Halifax a few years ago, it represents a shift for the young indie filmmaker from his previous three films, all shot in his native American South.
Green--whose influence on the English-speaking cinema is already profound--also worked for the first time adapting someone else’s story. In this case it’s Stewart O’Nan’s novel, which gives the film a broader context of several families and an intergenerational sweep. Green previously worked with just young people.
Using shorter scenes in a cold Northern landscape, David Gordon Green pushes his trademark close lyrical sty...
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Raw, Funny |
APRIL 19, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Judd Apatow movie machine just keeps rolling on with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a sprightly sex comedy that is--surprise, surprise--both funny and tender. The Hollywood Megaproducer (40 Year Old Virgin, Drillbit Taylor) seems to release a new film these days about every four months.
Driven by an unexpectedly strong autobiographical script by writer/star Jason Segal as a TV series music composer trying to get over being dumped by the small-screen show’s sexy minx--the Sarah Marshall of the title, pitilessly played by Kristen Bell--the film’s real star is British columnist and comedian Russell Brand. He runs away with the picture playing the louche libertine rock star Aldous Snow, the s...
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Smart People Feeble |
APRIL 13, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Fans of Halifax actress Ellen Page who are expecting the sparkle of Juno in her follow-up film Smart People will probably be disappointed.
In a rather typecast role as a cranky Republican Youth high schooler--and the daughter of an even crankier and supremely unconvincing Dennis Quaid as a Victorian Literature professor at an American University on the Eastern Seaboard--Page simply repeats her industrial strength quirkiness she’s now made into a dangerously close-to-cliche screen trademark.
Page is hardly the main problem in this feeble domestic dramatic comedy dressed up as an eccentric indie bon bon. With too many underwritten characters--Thomas Haden Church repeats his role in Sidew...
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Stop Loss Powerful, Haunting |
MARCH 30, 2008 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Kimberley Peirce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss, is getting the same short shrift that almost all Iraq war fictional flicks have received from the antsy American moviegoing public.
That means that like Home Of the Brave, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah and several others, Stop Loss is playing to massively empty theatres across North America.
Too bad, because it’s very close to a knockout film. Peirce’s trademark examination of masculinity, identity and violence--so fascinatingly followed in the gender-bending true story Boys Don’t Cry--is on full display in this fluid, powerful and haunting flick.
Kind of like an Orpheus In the Underworld adapted for the Iraq ...
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Heist Flick Entertains, Overreaches |
 MARCH 22, 2008
Kiwi director Roger Donaldson's heist flick The Bank Job is a slick and entertaining robbery film that revisits a notorious Baker Street bank safety deposit break-in from 1971.
Building in concentric circles of intrigue and suspense, the movie follows a bunch of amateur working-class thieves who are manipulated into stealing some compromising photos of a member Britain's Royal family squirrelled away in the Bank's vault in a swank district of downtown London.
Besides the basics of the robbery itself--which echoes the storylines of great film noirs such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing--you get British mobsters, porn kings, Black Nationalists and sev...
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in Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit |
 MARCH 8, 2008
The opening night film of this year's Sundance Festival, In Bruges is the feature debut by London-based Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lonesome West).
Utilizing his trademark collision of irony, violence and wit, McDonagh - who won an Oscar for his 2005 short Six Shooter - takes three hitman from the Olde Sod and places them in the Belgian tourist-trap city for a settling of accounts.
And while McDonagh's writing is characteristically fresh, his screen direction is occasionally choppy.
Colin Farrell, for example, pushes the limits just a little bit too far with his 'revenge of Alexander the Great' characterization - all twitches and unfocused, rapid-change ener...
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Page's Great; Juno Is Just Good |
DECEMBER 22, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The long-awaited arrival of Halifax actress Ellen Page starmaker-film Juno can’t help but be a bit of a letdown.
Page is brilliant in the film. Without her, neither Jason Reitman’s paint-by-numbers direction nor Diablo Cody’s pre-fab indie movie script would add up to anything out of the ordinary.
Oddly calculated, Juno is also not terribly funny. The teen pregnancy/coming-of-age ground it covers doesn’t seem much beyond a 1970s After School Special.
And Page’s character Juno herself seems, at times, wildly overwritten.
It’s a tribute to the elfin thespian that she makes this ultra-quirky, relentlessly articulate young woman come alive. Especially when the last half of the film s...
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Atonement Another Literary-To-Screen Misfire |
DECEMBER 20, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
There are any number of reasons why the big-screen cinematic adaptation of the popular post-modernist novel by Ian McEwan, Atonement, doesn’t really work.
One could be that old saw that great literature rarely makes good movies. The many post-modern effects from the book - the revolving points-of-view, the huge jumps in time, and the raw examination of class and sexuality crossed over issues of guilt and desire - seem ludicrously overblown in the film.
Ultimately, however, it is the unpleasant characters lumbering in the midst of a succession of operatic tragedies that makes Atonement such a stinker onscreen.
Starting with rape on a plummy English Estate in 1935 and ending in the w...
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I Am Legend: Good But Not Quite Great |
DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Director Francis Lawrence almost gets the third screen version of Richard Matheson’s enduring sci-fi story I Am Legend to home base.
After all, the film sports a fine performance from Will Smith in an eerily deserted New York City for the first two-thirds of the movie. Just the suggestion of dread - along with the endless empty streets and incongruous cornfields in Central Park - makes for a creepy and diverting cinematic experience.
The film’s problems begin when Will Smith’s lonely survivor character suddenly is confronted with an army of super-fast, super-smart and super-strong zombies in the final act of the movie.
In a previous version - the superior 1971 sci-fi counterculture ...
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RFM's Best Films Of 2007 |
DECEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Year-end Best Of lists are always a bit suspect. They tend to shortchange the first part of the year due to chronological distance; acclaimed films that haven’t opened yet further mess up attempts to keep the catalogue in some kind of decent order.
That said, one really can’t help looking at the various peaks and valleys of the year, especially when it comes to movies. And 2007 was indeed a pretty darn good year for the big screen.
Here’s my list, going back to the beginning of the year:
David Fincher’s taut thriller Zodiac was indeed a terrific flick, mixing a murky and quite terrifying wandering narrative about a real-life San Francisco serial killer with a down-in-the-dumps aest...
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Golden Compass Not So Golden |
 DECEMBER 9, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Pie producer and director of About A Boy, Chris Weitz, has made a mess of British author Philip Pullman’s new fantasy movie franchise The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of his popular His Dark Materials series.
The movies is a rampant traffic jam of fantasy tropes, with a dash of trendy girl-power cliches thrown in to differentiate it from all those Narnia and Harry Potter movies.
Trouble is, Weitz - who also wrote the screenplay - has utterly no feel for the greater resonance needed in this kind of fantasy stuff. And considering Pullman’s source material is sort of Lord of The Rings as reduced by a Liberal Atheist, there’s no background of ...
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Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead Strong Stuff |
DECEMBER 2, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a low-key but potent triumph for longtime director Sidney Lumet. It’s a late-in-career revival for a man who’s already committed a clutch of classics to the American Cinema Cannon, including masterworks like 12 Angry Men, Network and Murder On the Orient Express.
A domestic thriller that reveals family connections as a kind of rank poison, the film sports three thrilling performances from leads Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney. The material is relentlessly paced and deeply engaging; it’s also sometimes hard to watch, as the characters are so unredeemable you’d rather not spend much time with them.
The plotline begins with a bun...
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Sci Fi Play Doing Time Gets HFX World Premiere |
NOVEMBER 24, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Halifax will be the site of the world premiere of a new Science Fiction-themed play in the last week of November and the first day of December.
Kansas City, Missouri’s Mac Tonnies - a world-renowned author of After The Martian Apocalypse and controversial paranormalist blogger - has adapted his time-travel story Doing Time from his collection Illuminated Black with local filmmaker and theatre director Paul Kimball. The duo share stage writing credits on the hour-long play, which will run from Wednesday November 28th to December 1st at 7:30 at The Wired Monk at the corner of Morris and Hollis Streets in Halifax’s deep South End.
The three-hander play will star Kris Lee McBride as Leda, ...
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August Rush To Musical Overload |
NOVEMBER 21, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
August Rush is one of those films that seems so unbelievable you can’t imagine how it actually got made. A rhapsodic melodrama with a plot that could only fit into a lumbering 19th century opera, it takes the term ‘musical’ into a hyperventilating place that makes greeting card emotions seem sophisticated.
The story of an 11-year-old orphan who re-unites his desperately beautiful parents through the power of his music - I kid you not - August Rush also sports an industrial-strength supporting part by Robin Williams. Blending the character of Fagin from Oliver Twist with the look of Irish rock star Bono from the late 1980s, Williams chomps some significant New Yawk city scenery throughout....
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Coen Bros' No Country: Action And Irony |
NOVEMBER 18, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The Coen Brothers have returned to the glories of their greatest films Fargo and Miller’s Crossing with their latest work, a screen adaptation of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country For Old Men.
Dark, taciturn and yet larded with black humour, No Country For Old Men features some bursts of spectacular violence. It also rather daringly leaves out major plot points, while knocking off at least two central characters well before the climax of the film. The result is a contemporary thriller - set in modern day Texas of 1980 - that manages to echo some of the major themes contained in some latter-day Westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and this year’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma.
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Ryan Gosling's Lars Is A Real Dud |
NOVEMBER 15, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
London, Ontario-born actor Ryan Gosling has squandered all that momentum and good will he generated from last year’s low-budget hit Half Nelson with his latest film, Lars And The Real Girl.
With a premise that starts out in John Waters’ territory - a morose young man in a midwestern, mid-winter small town falls in love with a mail-order sex doll -
Lars And the Real Girl delivers only sniggers before it collapses into a sentimental stew of Frank Capra-esque cliches.
Limply directed by Craig Gillespie - who gave us the equally bad Mr. Woodcock earlier this year - Gosling is front and centre in this gooey, excessively sentimental story that grossly distorts the contemporary view of menta...
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Norman Mailer, Author, Director 1923-2007 |
NOVEMBER 12, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
The various tributes and obituaries of the great American Writer and gadfly Norman Mailer have failed, for the most part, to mention two aspects of his extraordinary contribution to the world of discourse and culture.
Along with his more obvious literary work, Mailer co-founded and co-financed, in 1955, the free weekly The Village Voice in New York City, providing content in the form of a regular column. The template of that paper would reproduced in practically every city in North America, including here in Halifax where The Coast has been a major player on the scene since 1993, directly inspired the Village Voice.
Mailer was also a maverick American Indie filmmaker in an age when it...
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Tracey Fragment Is A Triumph For Ellen Page |
NOVEMBER 11, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Advance praise and Festival Prizes hardly prepare viewers for the breathtaking quicksilver brilliance of Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Tracey Fragments.
Powered by a remarkably precise central performance by Halifax’s Ellen Page in the title role, The Tracey Fragments unfolds over multiple screenlets throughout its 80 minute length.
And while those amazingly fluid and ever-changing frames-within-frames constantly shift perspective, time, and Tracey’s own interiority, the film still adheres to a tough, disciplined storyline that allows for occasional - and quite unexpected - blasts of lyricism, humour and even joy.
Yes, the main storyline is indeed pretty grim -...
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Poor Boy's Game Is Gripping And Powerful |
NOVEMBER 8, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Poor Boy’s Game is finally getting its nation-wide commercial release after performing spectacularly on this fall’s Film Festival circuit.
The best film ever made about Halifax, and certainly one of the top Canadian films of this or any year, Poor Boy’s Game balances raw drama with a refined cinematic sensibility. The result is edge-of-your-seat cinema.
Powered by two extraordinary performances by African American star Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, To Sleep With Anger) and electrifying newcomer Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald, half-brother of 24 star Kiefer), Poor Boy’s Game delves into subject matter that few have dared to explore before.
The script - by co-producer Chaz Thorne an...
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Martian Child Not Quite There |
NOVEMBER 1, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
John Cusack is a wonderful actor. His charm can often lift a mediocre film into a higher zone altogether. Alas, even his abundant gifts falter faced with Martian Child, a drippy, sentimental and manipulative modern-day adoption story set on the West Coast.
Adapted from David Gerrold’s award-winning book, Martian Child has a delightful - if unlikely - premise. A successful Sci-fi writer who recently lost his wife, Cusack’s character is fresh, funny and unconventional. His closest friends are his harried sister (played by real-life sibling Joan Cusack) who is married with two kids and his goofy literary agent (Oliver Platt, in a pleasantly befuddled performance). Beyond that duo, the sci-fi...
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Preminger Bio A Blast |
OCTOBER 31, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
American Film Academic Foster Hirsch’s new biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King is - astonishingly - the first full-length biographical reconsideration of the great filmmaker ever to appear in book form.
Preminger - the Austrian Jew who assumed the role of director of the great drama impresario Max Reinhardt’s theatre operations in Vienna before eventually establishing a career as the foremost independent producer/director in the United States - has been substantially devalued as a filmmaker on the American scene for years. In Europe, his reputation is much higher.
The director of such classic film noirs as Laura, Angel Face and Whirlpool, and the producer/director of e...
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Darjeeling Disappoints |
OCTOBER 28, 2007 (POSTED BY: FILMGUY)
Wes Anderson’s latest feature The Darjeeling Limited pretty well exhausts his slacker cinematic aesthetic. A witless road movie where three Yankee brothers wander through India in search of spiritual healing and their errant mom, the film ultimately loses its tether and floats off into space.
The audience I saw it with barely laughed through its 91 minutes of twee incoherence. Preceded by Anderson’s dour14-minute short The Hotel Chevalier, I’m afraid this former critic’s darling has just about reached the last parking spot in his artistic cul-de-sac. American Hipster film comedy was never so limp.
Shot mostly in India with a flashback side trip to New York City - the only really enjoya...
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Work on TV movie, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, starts next month |
OCTOBER 27, 2007
The film version of the best-selling book by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, will be shot in Halifax as a television movie starting November 18th.
To be directed by Mick Jackson - who helmed the widely seen MOW of the hit inspirational memoir Tuesdays With Morrie - The Memory Keeper’s Daughter will star Dermot Mulroney (Gracie) and Emily Watson, who rose to fame in the art film Breaking The Waves.
The first service production to be announced since the Premier hiked the province’s film production tax credits at the Atlantic Film Festival, this late fall/early winter shoot will keep at least one crew busy until Christmas.
The rest of the industry is waiting with baited bre...
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This Jesse James Is Long, Slow But Engrossing |
OCTOBER 25, 2007
I sincerely hope Warner Brothers isn’t willing to let The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford fizzle out on the exhibition scene across North America in the run up before Christmas.
The epic-length flick - 160 minutes long - debuted well in through the Fall Festival Circuit but can’t quite connect with audiences. That’s a shame because the film is indeed a strong one, with a dynamite cast and a determined, serious air of a substantial revisionist western.
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik and adapted from Ron Hansen’s novel, this particular tale of the James Gang centres in on the first few months of 1881 when Jesse was gunned down by Robert Ford in a landmark a...
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Home Of the Brave's Twilight |
OCTOBER 23, 2007
Hollywood veteran Irwin Winkler’s Iraq aftermath movie Home Of the Brave never really arrived in theatres across North America.
I watched it alone at a press screening a few months ago. Some lonely posters for it lined the hallways of Empire’s Bayers Lake monsterplex a couple of weeks later. Now it’s out on DVD with little fanfare.
Is it terrible? Did it deserve such movie exhibition purgatory? Well, no and yes.
With coverage on the nightly news of the carnage in Iraq providing more than enough distraction, it might simply be the case that there’s no appetite for this kind of stuff on the big screen. Especially when there’s been reams and reams of documentary material available, some...
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Across The Universe Audacious, Brilliant |
OCTOBER 19, 2007
Across The Universe is certainly an audacious idea for a film. Taking a typical love story structure and stringing it against a backdrop of the turmoil of the 1960s told through songs from the Beatles catalogue, director Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) manages to re-invigorate the cinematic form of the musical, almost by accident.
Taymor’s expertise - developed through the ground-breaking Disney Broadway production of The Lion King - in art direction and ensemble dance pieces is what really puts Across The Universe into the realm of cinematic excellence. Those particular mass setpieces - the Yale fratboy dust up set to With A Little Help From My Friends or the Army Induction sequence played o...
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Film Fest Up 18 % |
OCTOBER 18, 2007
The Atlantic Film Festival broke its own box office record in 2007 with an 18% increase in attendance, according to spokesperson Pam Todd.
The annual celebration of cinema - of which this humble correspondent is a senior programmer - brought a total of 33, 500 punters to screenings, workshops, and special events through ten days in September.
3000 people took part in the opening night Argyle Street party alone. Movies with local connections such as Poor Boy’s Game, The Hermit Of Gully Lake,
Shake Hands With the Devil, and Just Buried packed theatres, attracting waiting-list only crowds.
Programs of local shorts, animation and international works also brought in cinema fans from ar...
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