Blog Gone RFM
Writing In the Cyber World
All the bits and pieces that won't fit in the old print world.
No copy editors.
No layout artists.
Just unadorned opinions, unguarded observations, and occasional leaps of faith.
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Nick & Nora: Yugo, Guys! |
OCTOBER 5, 2008
To call the new Michael Cera romantic comedy slight is putting it lightly.
Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist attempts to make a leading man out of the po-faced young Canadian actor who was so effective last year in Superbad.
Director Peter Sollet--who has certainly come down in the world since his 2002 indie breakout Raising Victor Vargas--loses his gritty, lyrical style in this gaudy, overblown teen romance. Under-written and exasperatingly glib, Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist runs out of steam well before its 90 minutes comes to an end.
A boy-meets-girl, boy loses girl comedy set over one night in New York City, the film does have some fun set ups. Cera plays the only straight me...
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Spike Lee's New 'Miracle' |
SEPTEMBER 28, 2008
Spike Lee’s latest film, Miracle At Saint Anna, has accumulated some wildly
divergent reviews. Some have acclaimed it as brilliant and insightful; others have denounced it as lumpy and uneven. Currently it’s got a 28 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes, hardly a fair consideration of such an important and accomplished film.
A dazzling World War Two epic clocking in a two hours and fourty minutes, I consider Miracle At Saint Anna to be the African American director’s third cinematic masterpiece in a row, after his 2006 one-two punch of The Inside Man and When The Levees Broke.
The mixed critical reaction is certainly puzzling, as if reviewers deliberately ignored the film’s title--Miracl...
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Lakeview Pretty Neat LaBute |
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008
Lakeview Terrace might initially seem like a standard studio assignment on first view. Surprisingly, it’s topped the box-office charts for its opening weekend.
A creepy neighbour potboiler superbly realized by director/playwright Neil LaBute, it’s a perfect vehicle for character actor Samuel Jackson, who has played second banana for way too long in films as diverse as Pulp Fiction and the second round of Star Wars pictures.
Sure, Lakeview Terrace seems like a crass throwaway, with a mechanical script that devolves into rote plot routine by its end. Along the way, LaBute gets away with some astonishing commentary on contemporary American Race relations.
LaBute also gets it some nice...
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Hamlet 2 Gut Bustingly Funny |
AUGUST 29, 2008
Riotously funny, sharply satiric and tremendously acted, Hamlet 2 might just be the best movie about the witless enthusiasm of theatre ever made.
Driven by a jaw-droppingly effective performance by Brit Actor Steeve Coogan - whose air-headed American attitude and accent are honed to perfection throughout - Hamlet 2 has is larded with so much vicious humour that you often miss out on the sweet silliness at its core.
Coogan plays a barely-paid Arizona high school drama teacher who writes, directs and stars in a sequel to the famous Shakespeare tragedy where everybody dies in the end. Using a time machine, he rescues pretty well everyone in the original play to the strains of Elton John’s...
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Vicky Cristina Slight, Delightful |
AUGUST 16, 2008
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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Othello Tense, Strong |
AUGUST 10, 2008
Seeing Shakespeare By the Sea deliver a compact, conventional staging of the Bard's challenging late tragedy
Othello is like watching a lion slowly stalk its prey for 90 minutes before it finally strikes and devours it in the final half hour.
Shorn of contemporary pop-culture references and maximizing the text and plot, director Elizabeth Murphy lets the terrible tale of jealousy and rage--shaded by issues of race and gender--build into an almost unbearable dramatic tableau where the tension palpably ripples through the air.
Troy Adams is stoic and magnificent as the Moor of the title whose nobility and grace defines his every word and movement. As he is consumed by rage towards the e...
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Brideshead Revisited Once More |
AUGUST 5, 2008
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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A Midsummer Night's Magic |
JULY 29, 2008
There was a huge crowd Sunday night at Shakespeare By the Sea’s latest production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Point Pleasant Park Sunday Night.
And there should be. It’s a wonderful production, thoughtfully reconsidered by director Jesse MacLean. There’s a bit less earthy repartee and more high-school-style catfights between the two pairs of young lovers. And, most daringly, MacLean has shifted the humour of the Rude Mechanicals from the escapades of Bottom--the man turned into an ass who becomes the beloved of the Fairy Queen-- to that of Peter Quince, the writer of the baleful play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thysbee.
With its triple narrative and opportunity for wild stagecraft a...
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Dark Knight: A Cinematic Event |
JULY 24, 2008
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
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
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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STBS Goes West |
JULY 3, 2008
Shakespeare By the Sea has kicked off its 15th season with revamped staging of its ensemble-written family show, Cinderelly. A Wild West musical retelling of
the classic fairy tale Cinderella, it’s ideal entertainment for kids and adults alike.
Jammed with broad characterizations, opportunities for audience participation, and colourful but economical props and costumes, Cinderelly sees STBS smooth down and broaden its production of a few years ago. There’s roughly double the cast, and two strong cowboy musicians (Amos Crawley and Jonathan Eaton)
who anchor each side of the outdoor production with guitar, banjo, mandolin, and some very fine vocals.
Director Jesse MacLean - who was in...
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WALL-E's Half-Great, Half Bland |
JUNE 27, 2008
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
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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Fewer Emergencies Opaque & Fascinating |
JUNE 5, 2008
The Halifax-based theatre company Angels And Heroes has delivered the work of yet another playwright previously unknown-in-Nova Scotia to the live stage. This time out it is the ferocious British absurdist writer Martin Crimp, whose three-part play Fewer Emergencies is on at the Bus Stop Theatre on Gottingen Street over the next week.
Returning A&H to their trademark austere minimalism after last year’s venture into Southern Gothic territory--there’s only a few stacking chairs and balloons on a bare stage--Fewer Emergencies is a fascinating and beautifully directed piece of theatre. Convincingly acted by Stewart Legere, Ann Doyle and Garry Williams, it defies easy and immediate analysis, ...
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Strangers Superbly Written&Realized |
JUNE 3, 2008
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
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
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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Prince Caspian Pretty Solid |
MAY 19, 2008
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
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
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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Snow Angels Powerful, Unsettling |
APRIL 25, 2008
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
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
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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The Clean House In Dartmouth!!! |
APRIL 7, 2008
It’s not often that a crucial new play debuts in New York City and manages to show up a mere two years later in Halifax.
Well, not exactly Halifax; Sarah Ruhl’s acclaimed The Clean House is actually playing at the Dartmouth Player’s theatre across the harbour until April 19th.
It’s a remarkable piece of dramatic writing. In a recent New Yorker article by John Lahr, Ruhl makes her case that her stage work takes its cue from Ovid rather than Aristotle. In short, she prefers transformation to catharsis. The result--as staged by the Dartmouth Players, anyways--is startling.
Blending elements of magic realism and sheer whimsy, the play delicately dangles all sorts of potent issues over i...
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Stop Loss Powerful, Haunting |
MARCH 30, 2008
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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Page's Great; Juno Is Just Good |
DECEMBER 22, 2007
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
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
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
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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RFM's Best Films Of 2007 |
DECEMBER 15, 2007
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
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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An Uneven Antigone |
DECEMBER 5, 2007
Angel And Hero’s production of French dramatist Jean Anouilh’s World War Two rewrite of Sophocles’ Antigone is a bit of a mess. Mind you, it’s an interesting - if exceptionally uneven - mess.
The chief problem is with Tyler Foley’s herky-jerky direction. While the storyline remains sturdy - and it’s anchored by a mesmerizing performance by Dustin Harvey as Creon that is worth the admission price alone - the tone shifts wildly between the blithely irreverent and the somberly tragic. The result is -theatrically, anyways - all over the place.
With Stephanie MacDonald (no relation) delivering the title character as a kind of distracted and outraged teenager, this particular Antigone leaves...
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Lumet's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead Strong Stuff |
DECEMBER 2, 2007
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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Doing Time A Breath Of Fresh Air |
NOVEMBER 28, 2007
There’s something genuinely thrilling - and unsettling - about Semaphore Theatre’s world premiere of the play Doing Time. First off, it’s unapologetically hard-core sci-fi. Second, it’s a stage piece more interested in ideas that character.
For audiences who despair of the contemporary theatre’s capacity for endless navel-gazing, Doing Time is like a breath of fresh air. Adapted by director Paul Kimball and Kansas City author Mac Tonnies from Tonnies’ short story, the play dispenses with the all those self-conscious notions about the relationship between audiences and players to simply present a space-time mystery that rockets along like a great 1950 pulp sci-fi paperback.
At about one...
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Sci Fi Play Doing Time Gets HFX World Premiere |
NOVEMBER 24, 2007
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
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
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
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
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
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 |
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