Results tagged “cameronbailey”

In an earlier TIFF post, we joked that the film Five Hours From Paris won our award for the "worst summary we've ever seen from TIFF" with: "In a suburb of Tel Aviv, an Israeli cab driver who longs to fly and a Russian music teacher who is soon to board a plane find out that romance is only a cab ride away."

Photo by Reza Vaziri from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

MUSIC: David Berman and the rest of his Silver Jews are stopping by Lee's Palace tonight as part of their North American tour. They're joined by Boston rock group Hallelujah The Hills. Lee's Palace (529 Bloor Street West), 9 p.m., $15.

We don’t think we’ve ever lead with the same film two weeks in a row, but there’s a first time for everything. Did you get a chance to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut this week? We did. It was amazing. We really can’t think of a film we’d rather lead with (and there’s some good stuff this week). If you didn’t get a chance to see it, consider yourself massively lucky, because it’s still on at the Regent. Basically, you have to see it. It’s a cinema experience that you’ll regret missing for the rest of your life, probably.

How unusual! Not a lot of festivals this week. Just the Indie Can Film Festival this weekend, and the Toronto Arab Film Festival starting on Wednesday.

Torontoist already has a documented history on disliking Death of a President (including arguing with a FIPRESCI jury member about it) and we don’t really need to go into it again, so let’s hear what the critics have to say. Eye’s Liz Clayton gives it three stars, but doesn’t seem that enthused; “ultimately doesn't insinuate anything more creepy and despairing than what turns up in the real news every day”, while NOW’s Cameron Bailey finds it more interesting to talk around the film rather than about it, finally admitting the film is “not paranoid enough to be really interesting”.

We know, we know; you’re bloody sick of reading about films. But the frank fact is that films continue to be released, and, well, you might still want to go and see them in the next week. Quite a lot of stuff has come out, after all!

Ah, another week, another Film Friday. But wait! There’s something special this week to break up the monotony! An extra special review of the (heavily delayed) Pulse brought to us by our superhuman photographer and co-editor David Topping. What do you have to say about it, David?

We’re all still busy basking in the warm glow of the revelation that the Royal, at least, will live again, and we know we mentioned it last week, but Superman Returns has been getting good enough word of mouth it might actually be worth checking out. Eye’s Jason Anderson claims “it's the rare blockbuster that lives up to advance hype”, but thankfully, good old trustworthy John Harkness of NOW gives it a kicking because the cast are too young and “here's still the big problem with all Superman stories, which is that he's kind of dull”.

So, we’ve been busy enough with Hot Docs to almost forget that they, you know, are releasing films which aren’t documentaries this week (madness!) Indeed, craziness of craziness, they’re even holding other festivals this week! So we’d feel terrible if we forgot to mention the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, opening tomorrow night with a showing of Jesus is Magic, Sarah Silverman’s concert film which, to our memory, did rather well as a Midnight Madness showing at TIFF 2005. An unusual choice for the fest, however! All thoughts of her ethnicity aside, do we (that’s Torontoist) actually like Sarah Silverman? We can’t tell. She was in Mr. Show, okay, so she gets a million points for that. But her solo shtick (“I’m sexy and say horrible things!”) is a bit… I mean, yawn, right? I guess if you found The Aristocrats funny this might float your boat.

promises to do for 1970s porncapades what Morgan Spurlock did for McDonalds - reveal the obvious, and make big waves. Still, when the big waves involve highbrow analyses of Ms. Linda Lovelace's particular powers (by the likes of Erica Jong, Dennis Hopper and Jon Waters), how could it but make for an interesting movie? Ebert spices up his review with some cute little factlets about the U.S. Presidential Porn commissions, saying that while most people remember that the Reagan presidential commissions deemed porn harmful, that was only done in response to a 1970 panel that found porn was not linked to any particularly anti-social behaviour.