Garry Marshall was once my favourite director. I will admit this only with the accompanying information that I was about 12 at the time, a devotee of the Julia Roberts- Richard Gere oeuvre (Runaway Bride, Pretty Woman) and quite entranced by The Princess Diaries. He’s not an inspired director, but he makes sweet, enjoyable films, […]
Goodbye, 2011. Hello apocalypse. This past year in movies has felt a bit like a holding pattern, a space to get all contemplative and whimsical before the terror of 2012. Despite a few exceptions, it wasn’t a year in which tentpole summer films grabbed a majority of the spotlight (in fact, many of these failed, […]
Martin Scorsese makes the sort of gritty, stylized movies that are objectively effective and subjectively unappealing to me and my butterflies-and-rainbows sensibility. I never quite got what was so impressive about The Departed and I’ve never actually seen Goodfellas, but with Hugo, the legendary auteur of gangster grandeur finally broke through to me, making me […]
I have only repeated two movies since last year, even though it’s been very tempting to pull out some old favorites (I miss you, Elf! See you next year!). Those two repeats were my essential movies. Every year, the Christmas season begins with Love, Actually, and ends when my whole family gets together to watch […]
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Hunger Games fever it’s that YA readers were desperate to move on from the Bella Swan heroine model. Feminists, hipsters and tween girls alike have flocked to the stubbornly flawed but undeniably kickass Katniss Everdeen like she was a breath of fresh air; which, after years of a […]
What if angels were real, and one of them wanted to bang your wife? Also… what if he looked like Cary Grant? For my second to last Christmas movie, I wanted something I knew nothing about. I wanted to be surprised. I wanted… well… Cary Grant. In The Bishop’s Wife, Grant plays Dudley, an angel […]
As I sit down to take in the perennially marathoned A Christmas Story, I realize that I don’t believe I’ve ever actually sat down and watched A Christmas Story before. Normally, it is on the TV in the other room all day Christmas day, and when sullen child/teenager Rachael got bored of hanging out with […]
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favourite singer/songwriters live. I first fell in love with Dar Williams’ quirky lyrics and sweet, folksy guitar melodies back in the days when I used to go to summer arts camp. During something called “unit hour”, my counsellor would pull out her guitar […]