Results tagged “dundasw”

Well, after what could be considered a bit of a drought, there’s enough movies to choke a horse on release in Toronto this week; and that’s a horse which had previously won speed movie-eating competitions.

Can you believe that Unaccompanied Minors features three out of five Kids in the Hall? Neither can we! Or that the film is directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig and features lots of other excellent folks such as The Office’s BJ Novak. We can still believe it sucks, though. Which, apparently, it does. Called “a generally lousy movie” by Now’s Deirdre Swain, she notes, oddly, that Tyler James Williams is a “particular standout, as uncomfortable as it is to see the black kid turned into a clown.”

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.

Apologies for the lack of listings last week. The combination of the previous night’s Halloween party and an encroaching deadline on another project left little time for me to gather all the literary happenings in the city.

A couple of Sunday night events to kick-off or end your week, depending on how you see it. Gypsy Eyes, who is all over the place this week, hosts Last Call Poets at the Cadillac Lounge – 1296 Queen W. – tonight at 8pm. Admission is $7.

Oh man! We’re really disappointed here at Torontoist towers as it’s really far too late in the week to make any jokes about a crazy drunken Mel Gibson. I mean, what is there left to say? Still, we suppose, it’s only increased our frothing anticipation for Apocalypto, particularly the great reveal at the end where it turns out that all the evil priests, drenched in the blood of their gory, despicable (and numerous) human sacrifices are actually evil Jews.

A quick update to an old story before we get onto all the new releases that are going to make us as depressed as ever – Remember You, Me and Dupree? We hypothesised that movie-execs came up with the title “while explaining what was going to happen during some sick, cocaine fuelled orgy”. Turns out we were right, as long as during the sick, cocaine fuelled orgy was to the tune of Steely Dan’s Cousin Dupree! Steely Dan have written an incredibly amusing letter to Luke Wilson to tell him to sort his little/bigger brother out. It reads like exactly the kind of rambling nonsense old rocker burnouts would write when annoyed/amused about possibly being ripped off, and is almost completely unquotable, so you should just read it all.

M. Night Shyamalan sure has painted himself into a corner, when you think about it. When we first heard about Lady in the Water we imagine we reacted the same way everyone else did, buy sighing “I wonder what the twist is.” Eye Weekly’s Adam Nayman has actually given the film some hefty (spoiler free) coverage, with a lovely little article about Shyamalan’s possible credibility implosion with the release of Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger’s The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, which, by the sounds of things, is even more damaging than how awful Lady in the Water is.

So we’ve already covered Who Killed The Electric Car? then. That’s good. Unfortunately, in the world of general release movies, there’s basically nothing happening, so…

Torontoist isn’t paid by the word, which is why we can allow ourselves long, rambling posts where we complain about the things that annoy us. Sorry, did we say “allow ourselves?” We meant “subject you to”. And here we go again.

The Scream Literary Festival is back and we decided to highlight a few of the lit's festival choice events for your perusal:

Right. Well, first up, a quick reminder to you about the post which lies a bit below this one – the most pleasing way to say goodbye to the Revue and the Royal will be to check out tonight’s Kung Fu Friday at the Revue (Crippled Avengers, people! The Wu-Tang Clan like it! What’s stopping you?) And then checking out Dion Conflict’s Trailer Trash 2 at the Royal on Saturday. And then cry buckets of tears, probably. Torontoist expects to have a bit of a bubble at the end of the final Kung Fu Friday, anyway (hey. It means a lot to us.)

So, for cinema goers who aren’t moved by the idea of Sprockets as described below (perhaps you don’t have children, perhaps you hate children, perhaps you hate children when they’re in cinemas, which Torontoist can understand), what is on offer for you loves?

, but they’ve changed everything, changing it into yet another film in which an idealistic teacher fixes the lives of disenfranchised teenage ruffians who not only are impossible to understand, but are resistant to even the possibility of being understood!

This week the Hot Docs box office has opened, and with luck we’ll soon have some early coverage of our picks of the festival to help you with your ticket buying decisions, advising you to find 37 uses for a dead sheep, perhaps?

When it comes down to it, we should all be glad Niagara Falls exists. Yes, it’s a gash in the landscape surrounded by tack, but on the other hand, it’s a guaranteed day you don’t have to look after your friends or relatives when they come to visit. Just put them on a bus and forget about them. The George F. Walker penned film, Niagara Motel could probably do some damage to this tourist trafficking, featuring Glaswegian (and Drew Carey renegade) Craig Ferguson as a drunken janitor, lamenting the death of his wife, who fell off the Maid in the Mist. Intriguingly, the film faces direct competition from Escape from Happiness, the George F. Walker penned play starting on Saturday at the Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst) that has far better reviews.

The only major release particularly worth recounting this week is the Wachowski brothers' V for Vendetta, and though it comes so shortly (you’d almost think they planned it!) after Natalie Portman’s sweary rap from Saturday Night Live went viral, the current reaction seems to be that even dudes who like bald chicks with dodgy English accents should just save up for a trip to Camden instead. The New York Times has a particularly nice piece on the beef Alan Moore, the author of the original graphic novel, has with the film, and it should clearly remind everyone to run out and buy everything he’s ever written, because it’s all the brilliant work of a genius.

Torontoist was distraught to learn that two fatal hit and runs happened over the last couple of days, the 14th and 15th traffic fatalities of the year, respectively.

The Oscars are next weekend! And much like the fact that most people will skim over, or simply ignore the categories that don’t interest them, Torontoist is going to have to admit defeat to mentioning every single film out each week, particularly on a week like this one, with something like 12 new releases in the city this week. We mean, honestly. Some of it just isn’t worth reporting. Does anyone need to be told that Meda’s Family Reunion is clearly a pile of old ladies’ pants? That Spymate stars a monkey and is unlikely to interest anyone with an IQ higher than that of it’s star? That Doogal is an astoundingly inappropriate localisation of a beloved British children’s television classic, The Magic Roundabout, and should be ignored by everyone in the name of good taste? (Even if Jon Stewart is in it?)

Let’s open with an image. By far our favourite image of film in the past...Ooh, ages, Date Movie’s unique take on Napoleon Dynamite. I can almost hear the two (count ‘em) writers from Scary Movie in the pitching office.

Well, we’ve already mentioned the Australian Film Festival today, but, of course, there’s still space for our little round up of cinema’s new releases and indie and rep film for the week.

We can’t all be humanitarian celebs, donating US$1M to the Red Cross’s good work (Sandra Bullock) or warbling on a fundraising single (Boy George, Cliff Richard et al.). Enter Nathalie-Roze Fischer, go-getting local columnist (and chief glamazon of her accessories fempire).