By Mathew Kumar

Films! It feels like we’ve been doing a lot of talking about film on Torontoist this week, but this is a regular column so you’re stuck with it. Of course, with both the Bruce La Bruce retrospective and the Bloor Cinema’s output already covered, that’s a pair of very strong lead stories out of the window, so instead we’ll just rely on what we’ve grown used to: making snide comments about the stuff in the multiplexes.
First up is Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s take on the award-winning play written by Peter Morgan, in which Tony Blair travels back in time and gets Nixon to admit to Watergate. Well, not quite, it just happens that the guy playing David Frost played Tony Blair in both The Deal and The Queen (also written by Morgan), which means he’s burned into our (and we imagine, many others’) brain as “Tony Blair” no matter what he’s in.
Anyway, though the film has been given middling sorts of reviews (blamed on Howard, for example, in Norm Wilner’s review in NOW: “Frost/Nixon suffers from the same uncomfortable neediness that distinguishes most of the director’s work”), it’s interesting, remarkable even, because it’s a nice reminder that the press can sometimes do their job properly and that it might only take about four years before someone browbeats George W. Bush into admitting everything. Actually, who are we kidding? That’ll never happen.
We wanted to segue smoothly into something about Punisher: War Zone, but to be honest our heart just isn’t in it. Because another bad Punisher film is just depressing. But we must send out special thanks to Bryan Lee O’Malley (or at least, his Twitter persona) for pointing out this jewel of a quote from Roger Ebert concerning the film: “It’s the kind of violence the president should fly over in Air Force One and regard sadly through the window.”
Other films out this week include Nobel Son, Chris & Don: A Love Story, Down To The Dirt, Confessions of a Porn Addict, A Touch of Spice and Adam’s Wall.
In rep, Cinematheque Ontario continues and tonight’s Free Friday Film, held by the University of Toronto CINSSU at Innis Town Hall, 7 p.m., is The Last Winter, starring Ron Perlman.