The 14th annual Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival starts today and runs through November 15th. The festival is Canada’s premier pan-Asian film festival, showcasing the best in Asian and Asian-Canadian cinema. Reel Asian also hosts a number of industry panels, as well as events for film fans.
When Joaquin Phoenix announced he was retiring from acting to pursue a music career in 2008, people were right to be suspicious. Even if substance abuse or mental health issues had been involved, the actor's transformation from clean-cut talent to aloof hobo-chic seemed too drastic and too sudden to stomach. It was sad to see a person self-destruct so publicly, but we watched him do it anyways, and that's where the brilliance of Casey Affleck's mockumentary I'm Still Here comes in.
It is with a combined sense of shame and excitement when I admit that I had only seen one Frederick Wiseman film in its entirety prior to screening his latest gem, Boxing Gym. Shame because I could name a dozen titles of his recommended by as many people, and excitement because this film has motivated me to finally donate some time to the observational cinema of this true auteur.
Windfall is filmmaker Laura Israel’s look at how a small Upstate New York town is nearly torn apart over a proposed wind farm development. The film is not an exposé on the wind power industry, but rather an examination of the effects wind farms can have on small, desperate communities The community of Meredith, NY […]
The causes of the current global economic crisis are incredibly confusing to anyone without advanced degrees in economics or intimate knowledge of business and finance (and even to those with expertise.) It is little surprise, then, that the crisis continues to persist as so few have the expertise to question those responsible for it — […]
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably seen Drew Struzan’s work. He’s the man responsible for some of the most iconic movie posters in film history. When you think of movies like Back to the Future, The Thing, Star Wars, The Goonies, Big Trouble in Little China E.T. The Extraterrestrial or Harry Potter their […]
Celebrities have their picture taken on an almost constant basis. Often by fans, sometimes by professionals, but only occasionally by certain photographers who have a knack for showing a side of the celebrity that is never seen on camera, often they can capture the loneliness that comes from lack of anonymity. For rock stars in […]
The Magnetic Fields are an eclectic but fairly obscure American indie rock band that has been recording for nearly twenty years. While not a household name, they have a fairly devoted following, and many musicians, such as Peter Gabriel, count leader Stephin Merritt as one of the great contemporary American songwriters. In Strange Powers: Stephin […]
New York City has seen its share of artistic revolutions, though any kind of positive revolution might have seemed impossible in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The city was crippled by massive debt with no help from the federal government, and whole neighbourhoods were urban war zones as countless buildings were left abandoned or […]
Before the days of iPods, televisions, and even radio or mass print publications, humans entertained themselves and each other by telling stories. In small groups around campfires, communities would tell each other the stories of their past and present. Fastforward to the 21st century, and Argentinean filmmaker Daniel Burmeister seems to have resurrescted this spirit. […]
Every filmmaker dreams of meeting their favourite director. So when aspiring filmmaker David Sieveking had the opportunity, he begins his film David Wants to Fly with a trip to the United States to hear David Lynch speak about his passion for Transcendental Meditation, a movement founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—who also inspired, among others, […]
It’s appropriate that I am writing this review on May 4th, also known as Star Wars Day—May the Fourth be with you…! *groan* Before I talk about The People vs. George Lucas, let me first qualify my review with a short preamble about my relationship with Mr. Lucas. May 18th, 1999. It’s raining, it’s cold […]
It has been my long-held belief that everyone in North America should work at least one minimum wage job in their life, for a minimum of six months. Not just to understand how impossible it is to live on minimum wage, but also to understand how we treat people who provide us with necessary services, […]
As part of the former USSR, Estonia was geographically closer to (supposedly) democratic Finland than the communist powers in Moscow. When Finland began to broadcast television, they showed not only their own programs, but American ones as well. The north coastal Estonian city of Tallinn was only 80 km from Helsinki, and as much as […]
Rush is probably the strangest anomaly in rock music. They have sold the third most number of albums worldwide of any band (after The Rolling Stones and The Beatles), but have never had a number one single. Their fans are arguably the most devoted in the world, and yet (until recently), Rush has been panned […]
