Last Thursday I had the rare opportunity to see one of the best films ever made in Winnipeg. It almost didn’t happen. Since I started a new day job a few weeks ago which requires me to get up at 5:30 every morning, I’m reluctant to drag myself out on weekday evenings. On top of […]
Well, another year has passed and I’m still here. I’m sometimes surprised that I manage to keep up a regular schedule on this blog, adding at least one post a week, sometimes more. Although I still don’t get much feedback on my posts, my readership seems to have grown slowly but steadily over the past […]
Kier-la Janisse has had a varied and colourful career as a film and music programmer in various places, including Vancouver, Austin TX, Winnipeg and Montreal; she initiated and ran a festival of horror and fantasy films in Vancouver called CineMuerte and has connections with Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival. Her first book, a slim, attractively designed […]
Continuing my partial round-up of recently watched movies … The Innkeepers (Ti West, 2011) Ti West is a filmmaker whose work I really want to like, but each film comes as a letdown – except for his second feature, Trigger Man (2007), a terrific exercise in minimalist terror about three buddies out for a day […]
It looks like I haven’t reported on my home viewing in quite a while, so looking back over my notes, there are far too many titles to comment on in detail. Some of these are films I’ve looked at again because of recent Blu-ray releases – the Alien series, for instance, and the Red Riding […]
The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel, The Shining, when it was released in 1980, I lined up for an hour to get into the Colony Theatre on opening night. Just as my friend and I were reaching the door, an usher came out counting heads; she dropped her […]
Pardon me for a moment while I put on my old fogey hat (once again!). This past week, I saw two old ’50s movies – one, a prestige studio production screened digitally on a big multiplex screen; the other a modest studio B production shown from a 35mm print on the smaller Cinematheque screen. And […]
In light of my defense of Paul W.S. Anderson a couple of weeks ago (in the context of my disappointment with Resident Evil: Retribution), I was interested to come across Armond White’s joint review of Retribution and Paul Thomas Anderson’s much-lauded The Master. White is one of the most interesting critics in the U.S. today, […]
My documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres is creeping towards completion – I had a session with the person doing the on-line last Thursday; he’s working on several projects simultaneously, but hopefully mine will be done by the end of the coming week. And the sound files should be going to the person who’ll do clean-up and […]
The British legal system has something called the “appropriate adult”. This is a volunteer who’s brought in to observe interrogations when a suspect is deemed incapable of looking out for their own interests, either through some learning disability or other mental handicap. At the beginning of ITV’s two-part fact-based drama, Janet Leach (Emily Watson), a […]