“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.” Sherlock Holmes was right – such is the reality of being a Watson. No, I am not simply talking about Holmes’ friend, Dr. John H. Watson. As […]
Increasingly, some of the most solid theatre on the Toronto scene has come from companies you could classify as “Indie 2.0” (technically an Equity term but one I’ve decided to allocate a bit more freely). These are companies that operate along indie lines, with small-ish budgets and casts, but use union artists. The effect is […]
Returning once again to the sheer, overwhelmingly anticipatory joy of fans everywhere, The Hunger Games, a popular book series now turned even more popular series of big budget Hollywood releases, returns with the second installment, Catching Fire. Directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Jennifer Lawrence as the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen as well returning rolls from […]
A good movie adaptation of a a good book teases something out of the text. It figures out what is important about the text, what has made it resonate with literary audiences for years. It takes a stand on what it’s adapting, and adds something to it besides just flesh and blood rendering. It’s on […]
I am not a public crier. Of the hundreds of movies and theatrical productions that I have seen in my 26 years on this planet, I can count on one hand the number of times that I cried in a theatre. So, you can imagine my bewilderment when I found myself wiping tears away with […]
First Published: July 12, 2013 There’s something about spectacle. The book version of World War Z was all about the literary spectacle, taking the normally claustrophobic zombie story and blowing it up, writ large across the worldwide campus. I’ve always described it as Contagion with zombies – a world wide, political thriller that just happened […]
As Rachael already found out when she tried to read it a few years ago, The Mortal Instruments (movie) didn’t start out with particularly great source material. Like a certain sparkly vampire story before it, City of Bones was under-written and under-imaginative, with occasionally funny characters and semi-intriguing plot, but completely undone by the author’s […]
Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is a masterpiece. I’m dead serious. So I’m both excited and terrified by the prospect that a movie interpretation of the book will be in theatres November 15, 2013. I always get this way about movie adaptations. I don’t know whether to be scared or excited or both. I usually […]