Continuing my dialogue with friend Gordon Wilding about the ways in which our relationship to the movies we watch has changed in recent years … I can look back at the years it took me to “possess” the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, starting in 1975 and ending in the late ’80s – not to mention […]
Although I know I’ve enjoyed watching movies pretty much since I can remember, I have few specific memories from childhood. It always amazes me when people have a clear recollection of “the first movie I ever saw” … I know I went to see movies fairly regularly as a child, British B-movies, Carry On films […]
Anyone interested in movies – and particularly anyone who writes about them – had to take note this past week of the death of Roger Ebert, the Chicago-based movie critic who over fifty years became the face and voice of criticism for a large public. He more or less fell into the role in the […]
One of the “advantages” of having a tedious day job which requires a certain amount of concentration but very little thought is that I can spend my shifts listening to my iPod. I’ve recently been addicted to old-time radio shows – among them The Shadow, Gang Busters, Escape, Inner Sanctum, Nero Wolfe, even an excellent […]
As Felix Unger was fond of saying in The Odd Couple, “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.” Based on my experience of Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous films, which have been equal parts exhilarating and irritating, I didn’t bother to go and see The Master, which despite a lot of […]
Filmmaker John Paskievich’s documentary about Winnipeg eccentric and occasional animator Ed Ackerman debuts at the 2013 Hot Docs festival in Toronto.
I’m not sure how I missed the news back in December, but Gerry Anderson died on the day after Christmas. Although he eventually did several live action series and one live action theatrical feature, Anderson was inextricably associated with the string of television fantasy projects he produced using puppets and elaborate miniature effects throughout the […]
I recently picked up a copy of Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils by Richard Crouse (ECW Press, 2012). It’s a breezy read recounting the production history and subsequent fate of Russell’s 1971 masterpiece (perhaps a little too breezy: Rouse confuses Russell’s Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World [1966], […]
In the past few years, something interesting has been happening in the horror genre. After several decades of increasingly graphic movies focused on the torture and destruction of the human body, something more subtle has been re-emerging. Like it or not, one of the key instigators of the trend was The Blair Witch Project (1999); […]
“Inspired by true events.” “Based on a true story” … audiences have had good reason to be skeptical about such claims at the start of a movie at least since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). And as Craig Zobel’s uncomfortably tense Compliance unfolds, the viewer may feel an increasing sense of disbelief … how could […]