Results tagged “thelast”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominations for the Oscars this morning. Canada done good.

They’re trying to hypnotise us, people. They’re trying to brainwash us and subdue us by bombarding the television with adverts and by using the media to confuse us, and they’ll never stop… Until Superbad is the number one movie this weekend.

“What’s going on this week in cinema, Torontoist?” you might be asking, as you normally would when faced with another Film Friday column. “Well,” we'll respond, “If you want to know what is hot, you only have to look at a couple of earlier posts this week.”

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.

Every Sunday at The Rivoli, Laugh Sabbath presents a show featuring comedians from the city's alternative comedy scene. This week's show, "Comedy and The Last Christmas Ever," features Levi MacDougall, Knock Knock. (Who's There?) Comedy!, Bob Wiseman, and Scott Thompson (returning to the same stage where The Kids in the Hall performed 20+ years ago).

Only fifty years left for sea fish. Unless, of course, we do something wacky and start serious conservation efforts immediately. For those interested in eating ecologically responsible seafood, here is help.

Nicole Krauss weaves a tangled yet breathtakingly beautiful web in the History of Love. Her second novel tells the story of precocious 14-year old Alma Singer, busily trying to cope with the loss of her father and her mother's depression. Across town there's Leo Gursky, a Holocaust survivor, writer and man desperately afraid to die alone. Their lives are brought together by a book that miraculously survived war and genocide. The end product is a moving exploration of loss and the heavy toll it has on our hearts and souls.

A brief aside; The London Film Festival is currently running and our sister site Londonist are covering it, and have already given a sterling review to one of our favourites from TIFF, Reprise. You might want to check it out.

The publicity around Death Of A President is much better than the film itself, and this is what's generating the latest buzz: it's an ad for the faux-documentary that both our national newspapers declined to run. According to an article in today's Star, a modified version of the ad will run in that paper which will clearly indicate that it's a theatrical release. CanWest says that their ten other major dailies also rejected the ad. The Globe has yet to make an official comment, but the ad is allegedly against their editorial policy.

A quiet night in yesterday, but then we did go and see four films...

6:00pm – The Fountain (Visa Screening Room (Elgin))

A slightly quieter day, day four, but then it was a Sunday. We didn't really see much on the press and industry schedule that we thought was a good bet during the afternoon so we hit the Canadian Film Centre barbecue, held in the grounds of the Windfields, the home of the Canadian Film Centre. A fair bus trip away, much like a lot of the festival it involved a lot of queueing (this time for food) and true to form it was worth waiting for, with everything from sausages in "pretzel buns" to Indian food on offer. While as we've already stated we're not that great at star spotting, we did notice K'Sun Ray, star of Fido, and Jamie Travis and Courtenay Webber, director and star respectively of the Patterns series (which we love to bits).

5:45pm – Programme 1 (Cumberland 3) – See our Short Cuts coverage. Featuring Ninth Street Chronicles and Patterns 2&3!

This year’s Short Cuts Canada selection was given a rather short shrift by Now magazine, but having seen a selection of the shorts, we consider their opinion rather short-sighted (“cut that short right now”– Ed.). A word to the wise: Much like the Wavelengths programme, we've seen several of the films but not of them, so there may be many gems still hidden.

Unlike usual, this isn't a post about a single programme at TIFF, but we’re going to let this one slip by as it used to be the Planet Africa programme, and the selection is really, really good this year.

Couple of big, big press releases from the hard working TIFF press office today, with a slate of film announcements in their Gala and Special Presentation programmes.

Theatre people often get a bum deal. Humiliating auditions, selling the car for acting classes or singing lessons or to fund a play, producing blood, sweat and tear-filled work and for what? To end up emotionally drained, penniless and with nothing but a collection of tap shoes and wigs to keep them warm at night? So is life on the stage. And, damn it, they deserve recognition for it.

So, another film Friday reached and it is, ahem, a bit of a dull week with everyone obsessed with Cannes. And we’ve shot ourselves in the foot a bit perhaps by having already got a bit too excited about the new Cinematheque Ontario season here. So what is there to talk about, eh?

Individual tickets for shows at the festival go on sale today, and Torontoist will admit that we’re a little behind on our TIFF programme previews (who puts a festival straight after Labour Day, eh?) So we’re going to speed it up a bit, with coverage of the ‘big’ films – the Galas and Masters today and we’ll clear up the rest over the next couple of days. If you seriously fancy any of the films we’re mentioning here you can easily pick up tickets online at the Toronto International Film Festival home page, but we’ve got no idea if there are any tickets left. So if you’ve got your heart set on something and they’re all gone, keep it in mind most of the films below will eventually come out and cost ordinary cinema prices, so maybe check out something that might not instead?

The Last Mogul, the story of MGM's Lew Wasserman, or He Who Never Wrote Anything Down, opens today, and though the previews for this movie are absolutely horrendous (boring talking heads, worse music), we're inclined to say that we won't mind if it's a bit dry. Toast is a bit dry, and we eat it on a regular basis. But movie mogul machinations are something that we don't get to eat for breakfast every day.

, television journalist, and marijuana advocate, has passed away yesterday in Toronto. The CBC reports the cause as heart failure. Watch, listen or read any responsible Canadian news agency for tributes...