Results tagged “townhall”

We managed to see Cloverfield a few weeks ago, and with the release of Diary of the Dead (above) this week, we have to say it's rather timely to discuss our opinion of it. As tired as this quote is, there's really no better way to describe Cloverfield than to take from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday.

Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival opens its doors tonight and runs until Sunday at the Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Avenue).

So, what’s scarier: a zombie infestation or the melting of the polar ice caps? This is an urgent and legitimate question! And later this week, Toronto cineastes can compare and contrast, for just as the After Dark Festival winds down, the Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival springs up. Running from October 24 to 28, Planet in Focus is the most acclaimed film festival of its environmentally-minded ilk. This year, to coincide with the International Polar Year (which 2007 is, as you are doubtlessly already aware), the festival’s Spotlight Program is entitled Polar Visions. (Hint: these visions may include the melting of large volumes of ice.)

Have you entered our Hot Rod competition yet, readers? It's still running. You probably should enter, as it’s the most exciting film you could see this week, in our humble opinion. We really like Andy Samberg, you see. It’s so rarely worth struggling through an episode of Saturday Night Live just to see him (he’s so often wasted) but Hot Rod could be good! It really could!

Ah, CINSSU, how we love thee. U of T's Cinema Studies Student Union's free screenings have been a staple of Mathew Kumar's weekly Film Friday posts...and, uh, our hearts. Now, CINSSU has graced us with 20 passes (each of which admits two people) to give away to Torontoist readers for a special advance screening of Andy Samberg's new film Hot Rod. Andy Samberg is awesome (see: The Lonely Island), so we're actually looking forward to it.

What if by chewing gum you could eliminate your body odor, cure yourself of cancer and take pictures with your eyes? You’d do it, wouldn’t you? Of course there may be a few side effects, but you don’t need to worry about that now, do you? Open your mouth and say ah!

Look out! Here comes David Lynch, man!

If you aren't all Hot Docced out yet, there's still plenty of fantastic non-fiction flicks to see (including City Idol, of course). Comrades in Dreams, a film about independent cinema owners around the world has been building up great word of mouth (today at 4:30 p.m. at Innis Town Hall). Tonight, drink in the first screening of Milk in the Land (Innis at 9:45 p.m.), a doc about how the world got hooked on the white stuff. At 11 p.m. at the Bloor, Reverend Billy preaches his stop shopping gospel in What Would Jesus Buy? Tomorrow, check out the macabre and comic Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse (11:30 at the Bloor). Saturday sees a second screenings of audience favourite Lovable (2:15 p.m. at the Isabel Bader), a look at love by local curmudgeon Alan Zweig.

This year, Hot Docs honours Toronto-based film maker Kevin McMahon with its Focus On retrospective. McMahon, whose films are noted for being playfully intellectual, accepts the accolade in that same spirit. "Geoff Pevere said to me, 'a retrospective—now you have to die.'" says the director, "So I'm focusing on the mid-career part."

The University of Toronto really seems to be getting as much as it can out of its relationship with Atom Egoyan. The Canadian film auteur, currently in the first year of his three-year term as the Dean's Distinguished Visitor in Theatre, Film, Music and Visual Arts, will be giving a free lecture at Innis Town Hall tonight (Wednesday, April 11) where he will screen a selection of his short films and discuss "the appeals and limitations of the short film form." Appropriately, the evening is called Short and Sweet (and Sour) and is highly recommended for anyone who loves film.

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from 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.

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."

Without a doubt, this week we’d be letting cheapskate cinephiles down by failing to mention the CNISSU’s Free Friday Film of the week, which isn’t just one but three, starting at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) with the remarkably hard-to-see The Monster Squad, followed by Toronto classic The Brood, and finished off with the excellent blaxploitation nonsense The Human Tornado, starring, of course, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore). Check out the trailer, which is pretty much NSFW –- he uses an earthquake to make his milkshake!

Torontoist has never seen an Alejandro Jodorowsky film! Should we be ashamed to admit that? Possibly. We are, however, not ashamed to say we love that crazy guy anyway. Who couldn’t love a guy who killed three hundred rabbits with karate chops for a scene in his most well known work (and occasionally screened by Reg Hartt’s Cineforum) El Topo? Torontoist suspect we’ve lost everyone who likes rabbits. Okay then, how about his plan to film Dune with Salvador Dali as the Emperor? No? Come on! Be honest. Lynch’s version was rubbish.

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

Let’s start with something everyone likes: free films! Yes, the U of T’s Cinema Studies Student Union has revealed the new Free Friday Films line-up, starting tonight with Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. Next week is Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Feb. 23 features a Cult Night triple-bill, with Monster Squad, The Brood, and The Human Tornado all showing. Screenings are at Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.

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.”

The word on the street is that the hottest ticket in town is The American Astronaut, screening tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) as part of U of T Cinema Studies Student Union’s Free Friday Film. Screening in 35mm, this black and white sci-fi western rock opera is “the best thing ever” according to Todd Brown from Twitch Film.

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.

Torontoist already has a documented history on disliking Death of a President (including arguing with a FIPRESCI jury member about it) and we don’t really need to go into it again, so let’s hear what the critics have to say. Eye’s Liz Clayton gives it three stars, but doesn’t seem that enthused; “ultimately doesn't insinuate anything more creepy and despairing than what turns up in the real news every day”, while NOW’s Cameron Bailey finds it more interesting to talk around the film rather than about it, finally admitting the film is “not paranoid enough to be really interesting”.

Yeesh; another week, another pile of movies which were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Considering there are, oh, 32,064 or so films at each TIFF we should probably get over this as soon as possible, otherwise every week our column is going to sound the same.

You may wish to go to the cinema, but nothing you saw in the Film Friday really tickled your fancy. You may wish to go to the cinema, but you don't actually want to spend money to do it. Or, perhaps, you may wish to go to the cinema, but you actually want to go and see something genuinely good. Starting .

Well, not even a week until the Film Festival is left, and frankly, Torontoist is ever so slightly… No, scratch that, we’re utterly crapping our pants over the enormity of trying to cover the world’s largest film festival. We’re only little!

Oh man! This week’s big news in films comes from a crazy place called Vancouver??? We know! Torontoist have never heard of it either, but apparently it’s in Canada! Wild! So anyway, it’s clearly going to be an exciting place to be come September, as the famous for being terrible German director Uwe Boll wants to have a fight with YOU. Yes, you! As long as in the year of 2005 you’ve written two articles insulting him (and you’re in-shape, male and weigh between 64 and 86 kilograms) you can, apparently, fight him in a boxing ring as an extra in his big screen remake of Postal, the rubbish and intentionally controversial shoot-em-up from Running with Scissors.

Torontoist has mentioned his love for green roofs before so we're happy that Jane Rabinowicz, who helps run Santropol Roulant, a Montreal community group that organizes rooftop gardens, bike workshops and meals on wheels programs, will be lecturing tomorrow night 7:15 at Innis Town Hall.

It's been nearly a week since the Oscars, so the question is, have ? Yes, you'd be a right idiot to watch films on anything but the big screen. Which might beg the question why they now rush DVDs out about two weeks after a film's release with a whole bunch of extras, eh?

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?)