Red Sandcastle Theatre’s holiday pantomime was a silly, boring and painfully unfunny affair full of too-long and uninventive musical numbers, tacky and unfair Rob Ford jokes and truly dreadful writing from the otherwise outrageously talented Rosemary Doyle. Alice in Blunderland– presented as the indie, non-conformist alternative to the more corporate (and vastly superior) Ross Petty […]
I’m not sure Terrence Malick believes in God but he most certainly believes in the power of cinema. After sitting through the two-and-a-half hour non-linear story of existence and how it means nothing in the grand scheme of the universe but means everything to the people existing, I went home, showered, and saw it again […]
Once art-house director now studio comedy auteur David Gordon Green treats us to a not-so-typical night on the town in The Sitter, an R-rated comedy starring Jonah Hill. The basic premise of the film involves Hill as a college dropout stuck babysitting for a buxom brunette for the night. When his girlfriend calls promising sex […]
The Next Stage Festival is the fascinating bridge between a show’s Fringe Festival run and its life beyond the circuit. It’s an inspired idea and a chance for some truly splendid indie theatre to get a little more attention than it did/would amidst hundreds of Fringe offerings in the summer. There are 12 shows this […]
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 […]