To say that I love Ender’s Game would be an understatement. It is one of the books (along with The Giver, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and The Prydain Chronicles) that really defined books to me back when I was a young budding nerd and JK Rowling was still an unemployed single mom living on the dole. […]
Happy Summer Movie Season Everyone! And no – you’re not imagining it. It really does get earlier every year. I blame global warming. And so we come upon our inaugural summer movie: Oblivion. It has everything that makes a summer movie great: bankable star with charisma to spare (Tom Cruise), outlandish and effects-laden premise […]
Here they are, my absolute favourite films of the year. Read Part I and Part II for the scoop on #6-15. 5. Argo At the Golden Globes on Sunday there weren’t very many standing ovations. Obviously the Cecil B. DeMill recipient got the traditional stand-and-applaud (this time, Jodie Foster), but other than her I […]
2012 has been a Fantastic year for movies. Along the way some of the expected greats fell a little short- The Dark Knight Rises with its twist-oriented plotting turned out to be not even a shadow of its similarly titled predecessor, Magic Mike tried to be two films at once and managed to be neither, […]
There’s an easy way and a hard to explain Cloud Atlas. The easy way: it simultaneously tells six linked stories taking place over the span of five hundred years. Individually these stories are (generally) easy to understand, and, just as importantly, easy to follow, as they weave in and out of one another. However, to […]
We have learned over the years that there are good sequels, and very bad sequels. Men in Black was a great movie, but MIB2 was a royal stinker. I’m pleased to report that MIB3 is the sequel that makes up for the second film. It’s so good that, when I saw it, the audience applauded as […]
I recently read an article on Cracked about the way that many classic sci-fi and fantasy films disguise incredibly straight forward stories with amazing worlds. Take Avatar. The movie itself is incredibly straightforward. Many, many people have criticized the fact that it is essentially the same plot as Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. But the […]
The annual short play festival at The Imperial Pub, put on by “Toronto’s Geekiest Theatre Company” is an adorable event. The tiny back room that houses a makeshift theatre has terrible acoustics and lots of pub noise leaking through the curtain that separates it from the main bar section. The lighting grid is sparse, the […]