Results tagged “filmfriday”

Technically, the season of films that you may have paid a premium to see early began last week—though admittedly, often with talent in attendance—at TIFF, with Midnight Madness opener Jennifer's Body receiving a full release (while TIFF was still on, too!). This week sees the release of TIFF films Bright Star and The Boys are Back, both of which have received decent enough reviews. But we're not especially interested in that, because there's a film festival currently running that rivals TIFF for its importance, NNAFF—the Nollywood North America Film Festival (though admittedly, it's all the way out in Mississauga). We've previously mentioned our fascination with Nollywood, and the documentary which covers what is reputedly the world's most productive film industry, Nollywood Babylon, plays this afternoon at at 5 p.m.

Quiet week when it comes to film criticism, as all of our major local publications are gearing up for TIFF, which means that most of this week's films are going largely unnoticed—but then pity the films that come out next week, because even we won't pay attention to them.

Last week one of our regular commenters, Derek Jensen, said he'd be going to see District 9 again rather than anything new. Perhaps this week we can convince him (and you?) to go and see In the Loop, because it's still playing and still fantastic. It's at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland Street) daily at 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 7:15 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. The last film we trailed repeatedly was probably the final cut of Blade Runner, so that should let you know how much we like In the Loop.

Officially, there is one film you need to see this week. It is In the Loop. Now, we know you've heard about nothing but Inglourious Basterds for weeks—if not months—by now, and I admit it's easy to be swayed by such an obvious option: a clever, entirely fictional take on a defining moment in history, from a director well known for his skill with dialogue.

If there’s one thing that Torontoist thought when we saw the trailer for District 9, it was “we can’t wait to play that video game; it looks awesome.” It wasn’t until some time later that we put together that the director, Neil Blomkamp, was indeed the director originally attached to direct the (ill-fated) Halo adaptation (and it doesn’t help that there’s a game called Section 8 due out soon, either).

Recently we’ve—rather randomly—been reading someone’s blog reminiscing about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of living with a scholarship basketball player in college, Livin’ Large. It was after reading about ten or so entries we realized that we were, most likely, reading the blog of the film we’ll probably be writing about in five years or so. It kind of dampened our negativity about Julie and Julia, the film version of someone’s blog in which they attempted to chronicle their efforts to cook their way through Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. After all, perhaps the original blog was as pleasingly narrative as Livin’ Large? We certainly haven’t read it, so we can’t say, but concerning the film alone reviews seem to be positive. Susan G. Cole at NOW gives it a nice review, though she does ask us to particularly “watch what she [Meryl Streep] does with her right hand during a scene of sexual play with [Stanley] Tucci.”

Viral marketing, eh? It’s generally annoying, but sometimes genius. In fact, sometimes it’s too genius, because Funny People’s viral pièce de résistance, Raaaaaaaandy is clearly ten times funnier than the film it’s supposed to be promoting. Starring Aziz Ansari and supposedly not a razor-sharp takedown of comedy’s bête noire, Dane Cook (hmm, we’ve gone a bit French today), it's still perfect if you read it that way. God, we hate that guy.

Are you sick about being told to watch The Room, yet? If you'd personally known us across the last few years—and you still hadn't seen it—you would be. An almost personal crusade of Torontoist is to show it to as many people as possible (heck, we even asked Edgar Wright about it, just to be sure), there is no film ranked higher in our esteem as just a real good time (other than possibly Commando), and the only thing that surprises us about there finally being a big screen showing for the film tonight at the Royal is honestly that we didn't set it up (congratulations to the other local fans who did).

The problem with discussing a new Harry Potter film—such as the just-released Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince—is that there’s no way to win. If you’re in favour of the series, you’re an adult in arrested development reading poorly written nonsense for kids. If you think it’s poorly written nonsense for kids, you’re a heartless curmudgeon who can’t see all the hidden depth. So to be honest, we’re just going to leave it completely alone. You pretty much know if you want to see it if you’re a fan or not, right?

Though we’ve been known to take a bit of an interest in Susan Cole’s writing in this column, it almost seems untoward to add to any more fuel to the still roaring Susan Cole–fire (see what we did there?). But it’s impossible to talk about any of this week’s film coverage without noting the strange sort of dissonance going on in NOW’s film pages, relating specifically to Sasha Baron Cohen’s Brüno. First, we’ve got Norm Wilner’s overwhelmingly negative review, where he claims that "it’s shock comedy based entirely on gay panic"—a point that a lot of pre-release coverage implied. Then there’s Susan Cole’s "feature" on the movie, which is, ahem, another review of it. Though she admits that there’s a scene that "only reinforces the stereotypes it’s supposed to comment on,” she argues that Cohen’s "ability to comment on gay panic jokes from a queer perspective" is "so impressive."

Though Michael Mann has many fans, it would be inaccurate to call us one. Sure, we consider his version of Manhunter to be pretty much the best (Brian Cox’s chillingly reserved Hannibal "Lecktor" far better than Anthony Hopkins' later scenery chewing). Mann’s recent thrillers have all been turgid, reaching an absolute nadir with Miami Vice—the kind of film you’d imagine would send the series creator into conniptions if that wasn’t, absurdly, Mann himself.

What an incredible week for cinema it is if you've got a genuine interest in the representation of women in film. It's the kind of week you could write an entire research paper on. First of all we've got Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which uses Michael Bay's ever-so-male gaze to stare at Megan Fox with the same kind of lust with which it stares at the vehicles the Transformers turn into—an empty collection of moving parts that are probably good for a ride. It's worth noting that Revenge of the Fallen appears to have been treated as a writing task by the majority of movie critics, taking extreme pleasure in kicking it apart in more and more imaginative ways. Roger Ebert reminds us all why he's still unmissable with his review, but I especially like his later blog post—"The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots and Decepticons must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like."

Weirdest news of the week? That Lars Von Trier's much-talked-about-at-Cannes horror film Antichrist is receiving a video-game adaptation. How utterly bizarre.

Perhaps it’s not handsome, but there’s a weird sort of gratification when you read an article or review that agrees with something you’re already thinking. Such as Jason Anderson’s review in Eye of Away We Go, where he notes that “Even the least discerning and most pliant indie hipsters may have cringed at the poster for Away We Go. That cutesy, post-Juno graphic-design cocktail of photo, illustration and hand-drawn type was more than enough to indicate the movie’s target demographic even if star John Krasinski wasn’t pictured looking like a guy who sells merch at a Fleet Foxes show.” But of course, there’s more to a film than its poster, and Anderson proceeds to do a good job of making us reconsider our hard-set feelings brought up by our distaste for such a pandering poster, arguing for a film that’s well written by writing team Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, if slightly overdone by director Sam Mendes.

This year's blockbuster season seems to have dragged on interminably already, but it's finally starting to look (tee hee) up, with the long-awaited release of Pixar's latest, Up, today. Their first in 3D, we've wondered if they've chosen such a vertically minded project because the form of 3D projection used tends to look better when things are moving up and down rather than horizontally; not that that would make that much difference to the quality of the film. Indeed, most of the reviews we've read barely mention it, with in particular NOW's Norm Wilner providing a deep look at the film that will disappoint anyone who was expecting some dumb fun or (at least) a break from the heartbreaking whimsy of WALL*E—"[Main character] Carl is a widower—and in a truly heartbreaking opening montage, we see how he ended up that way," he explains. "What distinguishes Up … is the fact that it never, ever forgets that Carl’s anger and misery come from a real, raw place of bereavement and helplessness."

It’s Terminator Salvation week! This year’s franchise reboot that we were most looking forward to (we’ve always just liked Terminator more than Star Trek), though when we say “looking forward to” we mean “trepidatious about any new film directed by that glossy hack, McG.” (Seriously—who calls themselves “McG”? And then expects people to call him that even when they know him personally, as heard in that famous Christian Bale tape?)

This week most of the cinematic excitement is kept for Cannes—after all, those lucky sods have already been able to see Pixar’s latest film, Up!—so there’s not very much that is likely to excite us otherwise (apart from the Inside Out festival, of course, as covered by our own Johnnie Walker).

Seems like the only release anyone cares about this week is the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, a release notable simply for the number of people we know that have come out of the woodwork as massive Trekkies—possibly feeling that now it's safe, as with a hot young cast (including the brilliant Simon Pegg, pictured above playing Scotty as a tramp) it may now finally be "cool" to like Star Trek. Or so they can be prepared to yell about how terrible the new film is for featuring a hot young cast. One or the other, probably.

Today is the first full day of Hot Docs, but there are a lot of films out there that aren't documentaries.

For most cinephiles not still captivated by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, this week will simply serve as preparation for Hot Docs—NOW, in fact, used its movie section feature as an vague attempt to help you plan—but if you really can't wait to see a documentary there's always earth, the first film from Disney's new, stomach-turning "Disneynature" brand.

It's a strong week for festivals, as while the ReelWorld Film Festival closes this Sunday with closing night gala Aloo Chaat (6:30 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre), both the Sprockets Film Festival and Toronto Jewish Film Festival open this Saturday.

Sometimes in life things happen and there isn't a clear lesson to learn. Perhaps you'll find yourself absolutely destroyed by a case of the flu for a couple of weeks and think "I should have had a flu shot" is the lesson, and then you'll remember that you were on the other side of the country when you became sick, so the flu shot probably wouldn't have helped. But because you're human, and we humans like patterns, you'll probably come up with something else—be it stress or not eating your vitamins—to blame, "learn from," and feel satisfied.

We become unreasonably annoyed when bands release self-titled (non-debut) albums. With the obvious exception of Beatles-biting Weezer-style colour-coding, this approach strikes us as lazy and uncreative—at best, a misguided attempted at minimalism. We feel the same way about the title of the new Star Trek movie (i.e. "Star Trek"). "Fast & Furious," however, seems to breach through to a new level of demented beauty; following on The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the streamlined title of the new one has become a discussion point in and of itself, with most reviews making sure to allude to it. Certainly that's the only thing about the movie that interests us. Well, that and that it's the fifth feature from director Justin Lin, whose 2002 debut Better Luck Tomorrow (sort of like Goodfellas set in a high school) once marked him as one of the most promising American filmmakers of the early part of the decade. Too bad what happened.

Sounded like another week of largely unimpressive films on offer—from the ridiculous Nicolas Cage flick Knowing(called "the silliest apocalyptic pot-boiler of all time, edging out even M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening" by Eye's Adam Nayman) through the depressingly formulaic Miss March (absurd, considering it comes from people who made their name on YouTube, of all things)—until we remembered that this week saw the release of I Love You, Man.

We're all sick of "torture porn" by now—and just as sick of using the phrase—so the new remake of The Last House on the Left shouldn't even be worth mentioning as an "also playing…" in this column. Except we saw the trailer and—as much as we hate to say this—we were captivated.

One of the films that Stephen McHattie is in this week is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars (well, it’s likely to) after a blanket marketing campaign and on the strength of the source material; the other one isn’t.

In all honesty, Torontoist hasn’t had a lot of space in its brain for film this week—it’s been almost completely taken up with thoughts of Street Fighter IV, the latest (and long awaited) sequel in the premier fighting game series. With our head filled with thoughts of attempting to focus attack cancel Sakura’s super into her air juggle (don’t worry if that makes no sense) it’s entirely likely that there’s a similar group of people—lost in similar thoughts—that might accidentally wander into a movie theatre and purchase a ticket for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

We were recently pleased to see Not Another Teen Movie playing on a basic cable channel recently, because we rather like that film: it's easily the best of the genre-parody genre, because it's knowing, not just randomly gross, and TV—split up by adverts, the swears cut out—always feels like the place where it's most fun to watch these films. You know—you're flicking channels and you find it midway through; you don't really need to invest in it, just enjoy the jokes when you look up from your laptop or whatever. The point we're making? That we're looking forward to catching Fired Up—a cheerleader comedy starring Not Another Teen Movie's antagonist Eric Christian Olsen—when it hits basic cable. After all, most reviewers are happy enough to go as far as not hating it, with Eye's Stuart Berman, for example, noting that it "at least gets the 'comedy' part of that equation right some of the time."

Okay, so you know by now that we often come to our conclusions on the films that we mention in this column after only watching the trailer, but I don't think anyone is going to argue with us when we say that The International has quite easily the most boring trailer ever. There's some kind of conspiracy involving a corrupt bank, and Clive Owen and Naomi Watts have to solve it before you fall asleep! No local reviewers seem to claim that the film is anything other than as boring as the trailer makes it look, with NOW's Barrett Hooper agreeing that the director seems "barely interested in keeping us awake."

February has begun, and it's as if all of the movie distributors have woken up after hibernation, because there's a sudden deluge of films, and astonishingly not all of them have been shoved out just to get it over and done with.