Results tagged “jackmanhall”

It’s the final day of the festival, which is always rather maudlin one—although for those of us who try to cover it, the festival is largely a far too hectic, busy period of time, once things start to slow down the sudden lack of pressure is terribly deflating. Never mind—we’ll have some wrap up coverage for you next week. Tonight’s closing gala is Emotional Arithmetic, reviewed by Jonathan Goldsbie at the very beginning of our TIFF 2007 coverage. He called it a “highly-polished drama” but noted that it “plays out exactly as one would expect and is only rarely revelatory.” Head along to Roy Thompson Hall tonight to catch your last glimpse of the glamour and pageantry of the festival.

Cinematheque Ontario begins its Pedro Almódovar programme, Almódovar Meets Hollywood’s Golden Age, tomorrow and they’ve been kind enough to give us two pairs of tickets to the opening night, a double feature of Nicholas Ray’s 1954 bizzaro-western Johnny Guitar and Almódovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which pays homage to Johnny Guitar. The screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. at Jackman Hall, the AGO, 317 Dundas West, so if you can make it, to enter all you have to do is answer this simple question before 4 p.m. this Friday:

Cinematheque Ontario’s summer season begins tonight, and we’ve got one pair of tickets to give away to their opening night screening, the celebrated silent film classic Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, argued to be one of the greatest films ever made by countless critics. It’s tonight at Jackman Hall at 6:30 p.m., so if you can make it and you’re randomly selected from the people who email us at contests@torontoist.com, we’ll notify you by 4:30 p.m. today that you’re the winner. (The contest is now closed. Thanks to all who entered.)

Going to see all three films in Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher Trilogy, one after another in one night, is one of this Torontoist’s most treasured cinema memories, and although we did it at 2005’s Toronto International Film Festival, anyone who missed that chance can now do it at the Brunswick Theatre (296 Brunswick Avenue) tonight and tomorrow night starting 7 p.m. It’s $10 for one film or $15 for the lot, so obviously you should see all three.

So, this week's most noteworthy film featuring a horrible zombie is obviously Fido, considering it’s Canadian and stuff, but we’ve talked about it more than enough, so in this week’s column we’ll make do with the next best thing—the horrible freaky visage of Cillian Murphy!

Torontoist officially can’t wait for the first home renovation programme to have its interior designer kick open a door to an empty room and scream "This…Is…SPARTAN!" referencing this week’s biggest release, 300. On the topic of 300, we link you to the best review ever featured on the otherwise not-particularly-good Ain’t It Cool News. Neill Cumpston enthuses, "If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell, and say to the cashier, 'I need some extra sauce packets' guess what? You’re getting twenty sauce packets because your face will punch him in the brain."

This week our attention is almost completely owned by Cinematheque Ontario’s offerings, even with the thought of Christina Ricci chained to a radiator in Black Snake Moan grasping at us.

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.

Excuse me for the lateness of this week’s listing. I’m still on Nuit Blanche time. And yes, I made it until 7am. This is an absolutely fantastic week for word nerds. And check this – if one of your friends is more into sports, you can bring them to a literary event disguised as a boxing match. For a boxing fan like me, it doesn't get any better.

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.

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, did anyone see the article in today’s Eye about the imminent death of the Festival cinemas? A nice article reminding us that it’ll take someone with a good deal more money than business sense to save the Royal (at a cool $2.7 million) but it more timely in reminding us that while our cinemas might be dying, we at least still have the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s Cinematheque Ontario to keep us in going. It might be in the Jackman Hall at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), admittedly not the most exciting of venues, but it might soon be one of our only choices to see some rarely shown films on the big screen.

Well, it’s interesting to note in this week of HotDocs that our favourite film released this week in theatres is also a documentary – The Devil and Daniel Johnston. We happened to catch it at TIFF2005, and noted “The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a powerful documentary with no easy answers. While fans of his music will enjoy it more than those who have never heard of him, anyone who has ever felt life was pain will find meaning in this movie.” A view that we consider validated by the fact that NOW’s John Harkness spends most of his review complaining that he doesn’t ‘get’ Johnston’s music. Still 4 Ns, though!

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.

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.

won’t-be-down-with-that flick, being shown tonight as part of Cinematheque Ontario’s Canada’s Top Ten programme (8:45pm, Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas West). The showing is preceded at 6:30pm by a fascinating panel – Pop Culture as History/History as Pop Culture, featuring Atom Egoyan (of Canada’s Top Ten film Where the Truth Lies) and Jean-Marc Vallee (of the aforementioned C.R.A.Z.Y), curated by Eye Weekly’s Jason Anderson. Sadly completely sold out, you can arrive early and hope for a rush ticket hope there is a ticket scalper outside, but the film is available, sans panel, at the Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor West) all week long.

Right, Torontoist isn’t going to mess about with today’s Film Friday, because there are more important things to be talking about than what’s on at the multiplex.