If it’s possible to feel exhilarated and anti-climactic at the same time, that’s how I feel this evening. It’s been just over a year since I shot Going: Remembering Winnipeg Movie Theatres, my documentary about the experience of going to the movies back when there were real theatres instead of multi-screen bunkers, and the process […]
It was seven years after The Shining before Stanley Kubrick released his next film. Even given that Full Metal Jacket was two years in the making, that still leaves a long gap, perhaps indicating the difficulty he had in both finding the right subject and securing financing, even though the King adaptation had been reasonably […]
These days, the kind of movies that once were made quickly and cheaply for the drive-in circuit are given big budgets and A-list stars. It no longer seems strange that an actor of Liam Neeson’s stature is turning up in something like Taken 2, a formulaic action-revenge movie. But back in the heyday of drive-in […]
Joshua Marston is an atypical filmmaker. After graduating from Beverly Hills High School, an interest in photography led him to internships with Life Magazine and ABC News. But, as he says in a 2004 Indiewire interview, he always felt that a photograph didn’t convey the full story; he thought that film might provide the background, […]
Recent Korean cinema has been suffused with darkness, offering tales of murder, depravity, torture and perversion – Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle and Bad Guy, Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil and so on. While these movies vary in their degree of “realism”, they all have a kind of pulpy grimness. While […]
The critical consensus seems to be that Skyfall is the greatest James Bond movie ever. So, naturally, I had such major problems with it that it left me feeling irritated, despite having sat through all 22 of the previous movies – well, 23 if you count Never Say Never Again, or 24 if you include […]
Kier-La Janisse was in town over the weekend to launch her book House of Psychotic Women at the Cinematheque. To highlight the event, she chose to present a screening of David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), one of the key films in the book. While the print, which Dave Barber obtained from the national archive, had […]
In film, the big difference between pastiche and homage is the underlying attitude towards an original source. Pastiche – often a lazy assemblage of genre elements – is aimed at mocking something the filmmaker feels superior to (like the recent Disco Exorcist). Homage, on the other hand, arises from admiration for the source, respect and […]
While his stories have remained popular for 80 years, H.P. Lovecraft’s work presents difficulties to filmmakers who try to translate his work into movies.
It’s always tough to be original, but I was made nervous last year as I started on my documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres when I learned that local writer Russ Gourluck was working on a book about Manitoba movie theatres called Silver Screens On the Prairie. Russ has written a number of books on local […]