Results tagged “dvd”

The Victorian Era, when the city gained its nickname Toronto the Good, is usually thought of as a time of staid social order upheld by unwritten laws of morality. In the name of propriety, boarding houses had a strict ten o'clock curfew. And keeping up public appearances was paramount. There was, however, another side of the city beneath this prim and proper surface, as journalist C.S. Clark describes in Of Toronto the Good (1898)—which despite its name is actually an excursion into the bars, brothels, and gambling dens to uncover the city's underbelly of vice.

After last month’s inaugural open-mic-esque short film program at the Revue was so chock-a-block full of awesome, Tim Bourgette and co. wasted no time looking ahead to a sequel. Thus, Drop Your Shorts 2 (electric boogaloo) opens for submissions this Sunday.

Every day this week, Torontoist is exploring the future of repertory cinema in Toronto. We spoke to the theatre managers of four major rep cinemas to hear if rep cinema is dying, what it's like to exist in a YouTube society, and what original programming has them most excited. Today, we look at the fall of Festival Cinemas, which sparked fears that rep cinema would disappear from the city.

Today we celebrate Ontario's first ever Family Day. Banks and government offices are closed, but many malls and stores are open for last-minute Family Day shopping.

Is 1996 retro yet?

It's Boxing Day! Go spend money! If you don't, Canada's economy will suffer and it will all be your fault! You probably don't even own all the seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD yet, do you? You slacker.

Sarah Polley is having a kickass month as her debut directorial feature, Away From Her, racks up the accolades. On Sunday, the Los Angeles film critics gave Polley a New Generation Award for up-and-coming directors. Then, on Monday, the New York film critics felt Away From Her was 2007's Best First Film. In addition, earlier this month Polley was named one of the "50 Smartest People in Hollywood" by Entertainment Weekly. She's the youngest...

Torontoist is sad to report that the Annex's doc-driven underdog moviehouse, the Brunswick Theatre, is closing up shop (tonight!) before even being able to celebrate its first birthday.

Last Wednesday, legendary Canadian music retailer Pindoff Record Sales sold off their 72-store Music World chain. Two days later, the new owners filed for bankruptcy protection and and will likely lay off 648 employees by the end of January. And so it goes. According to court documents, Music World plans an "orderly wind down," including closing stores and liquidating inventory. The retailer has been in dire straits for years, propped up by the Toronto-based...

On Sunday afternoon, over 150 independent publishers, writers, artists and bloggers from across the continent will pack Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel for Canzine, Canada’s largest celebration of small press publishing and alternative culture.

Slightly different beginning to our Film Friday today, because we’d like to highlight the fact that our favourite film in ages, Reprise (pictured above), was released on DVD this week. We really feel it should have been given the same kind of cinematic release it’s getting right now in the UK, rather than an astonishingly bare-bones DVD transfer with burned-in subtitles, but what are you going to do? You really have to see it anyway. It was one of our top picks from TIFF 2006, and is still as vital as ever (and Eye’s Jason Anderson agrees).

It’s always strange to write a Film Friday column in the week before the Toronto International Film Festival, since by this point it’s hard to think about anything else. We’ll be previewing the festival on Monday, so be sure to check back if you can’t think of anything else, either. In the meantime, have you had a chance to enter our Canadian Retrospective contest? You could win one Canadian Retrospective ticket package containing tickets for six screenings featuring nine Michel Brault films. It closes on Sunday!

The Real Toronto's hook is relatively simple. Filmed in the summer of 2005 by a now-24-year-old Russian immigrant nicknamed Madd Russian, it aims to show that "Toronto, known to most as a world class city has another side to it. This movie shows the reality of living in housing projects and some of the most run down areas in the city. This footage includes interviews with gang members, drug dealers and some of the realest street rappers in Toronto. From Scarborough to Etobicoke this movie will take you through hoods in 9 different locations to show you."

When it premiered at TIFF last year, Radiant City, ostensibly a documentary about urban sprawl, stirred up a bit of controversy. Its portrayal of the soul-rotting effects of the suburban environment on one aggressively average family was met with a variety of bemused reactions, some positive, others less so. (End of Suburbia this wasn't.) Torontoist's Mathew Kumar, for example, savaged it in his spoiler-happy review. But three months later a panel of "filmmakers, festival programmers, journalists, and industry professionals" decreed it one of the ten best Canadian films of the year. And when it opened in New York last May, even the hard-to-please Village Voice seemed to like it, deeming it "enlightening and disturbingly funny."

Enormous DVD piracy bust in Missisauga. Investigators believe it was making over twenty million dollars a year. This is a huge blow to professional movie piracy in Canada. (Well, at least to that one piracy ring. Other movie pirates probably don't care. And in fact are kind of happy about the loss of competition.) Of course, this is not so much the case to people who just want to pirate movies for their own use, because they can just download them off the internet—oh wait, we're not supposed to mention that bit!

Amidst the swirl of sensationalism surrounding the death of a "caretaker" at the Brentwood home of actor Ving Rhames last week, many Torontonians were unaware that the victim, 40-year-old Jacob Adams, was a local actor and screenwriter.

While the Bicycles filled the Tranzac’s main space with their own glorious indie-rock racket (and a forty-five minute "interactive gaming session" of their new DVD board game!), this Friday found an even weirder sort of noise-making taking place inside the little glassed-in room just beside the venue’s main entrance.

It's not entirely clear how or when R. Kelly's hip-hop opera "Trapped in the Closet" became a Zeitgeist. Part music video, part soap opera, it—while verging on self-parody throughout—has spawned parodies by everyone from South Park (which used it to make fun of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, among others) to Weird Al (who used it to make fun of fast food. Oh Weird Al!). What is clear is why it's been embraced by seemingly everyone in the entire universe: it's simultaneously the greatest and most confusing thing that any mainstream rap artist, nay, any musician, has ever done.

Torontoist has been saying for years that City Council provides better bang for your buck than any other piece of live entertainment in this city. At absolutely no cost (unless you count, you know, taxes), you can attend this extravaganza that combines the spectacle and epic scale of a mega-musical with the manic energy of a really good Fringe show.

Do you love this city? Of course you do! And here's your chance to profess your undying love to the world.

With the Images Festival and Hot Docs just around the corner, AGYU has another event to add to your undoubtedly awesome viewing calendar. Hot…New…Video…Art is a one-evening screening that will focus on Canadian and International experiments in short film and, appropriately, video art. Featured artists include Gwenael Belanger, Nadine Bariteau, Lesley Loksi Chan, Joe Hambleton, David Han, Miriam Heller-Sahlgren, Jesika Joy, Scott Kildall, Alison S.M. Kobayashi, Su-Ying Lee, Julie Lequin, Otto Mogren, Rasmus Albertsen Ottosen, Candice Purwin, Mariel Rosendahl, Clare Samuel, James Sayers, Christopher Walsh, Natalie Wei and Megarrah Woodland.

Hey fan boys and girls! Are you still gushing over comic book legend Stan Lee’s cameo on last Monday's episode of Heroes (pictured left)? Well get ready to get giddy again. Lee will be appearing at an autograph session this afternoon at HMV (5:30 – 6:30 at 272 Queen St. W.).

All right, time to face reality: Valentine's Day is 2 days away, and you're still single. Dateless. Planless. You got nothin'.

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing.

Dear Drivers,

What do you think of Vice Magazine, readers? Do you like it or hate it?

Friday, we caught the 9:15 pm show of at the Bloor Cinema.