We talk to music video maven and Detention director Joseph Kahn about his genre bending, fast paced teen movie labour of love, what films aimed at today's young adults tend to forget, and how it all ultimately ties into our own retro loving culture.
We take a look at the controversial 1981 Amazon cannibal film Cannibal Ferox in advance of it's special screening at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox this Monday night with festival programmer Colin Geddes and director Eli Roth presenting.
Featuring a lineup of comedic heavyweights in-front of and behind the camera, the very hard R sci-fi buddy comedy The Watch works thanks largely thanks to the individual strengths of the cast and crew.
Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance is one of those boilerplate hero worship documentaries that lionizes a subject through interviews with adoring friends, fans and colleagues. It does show why Joffrey was important to the craft, and even the fleeting glimpses of archival footage of his company in action are enough to gain an appreciation for the tremendous influence he had on the art form, but it’s a little ironic and very unfortunate that the doc is so pedestrian in terms of filmmaking craft when compared to the style of dance the movie’s subject shunned throughout his career.
Somehow the dance franchise Step Up has made it to four movies. Don’t ask how, it’s not worth the inevitable brain strain that would go along with trying to answer such a question. Dance movies have somehow become a viable genre once again and we get a few per year. Step Up Revolution is just as ludicrously plotted and boasts the same brand of ridiculous dialogue that we’ve come to expect from the series, and yet it’s also easily one of the most watchable titles in the whole cycle.
It might be a day late, but check out our rundown of some of this week's biggest DVD and Blu-ray releases as looks at Keyhole, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and Extraterrestrial, while Phil Brown looks at a holdover from last week with Casa de mi Padre.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has made many confusing policy choices during the first two years of his tenure. But for the filmmakers behind the new doc Between The Lines, it was his ‘war of graffiti’ that made the least sense. In a city with so many other problems, why was the most powerful mayor in Canada declaring war on ‘kids with paint and anger’? Brian Crosby spoke with producer James Meers about the doc (part of the Hot Docs' Docignite Project), graffiti as art, and getting Mayor Ford involved in the film.
Dork Shelf talks to Winnipeg auteur and recent Order of Canada recipient Guy Maddin about his latest film, Keyhole (out on DVD and Blu-ray this week) and what it's like crafting a deeply personal story about abandonment from his classical inspiration, The Odyssey and how that morphed into being a cross between a gangster film and a haunted house film.
An appropriate end to the Christopher Nolan cycle of serious Batman films, The Dark Knight Rises manages to up the stakes in terms of action, suspense, and even in terms of wit. On the other hand, it’s not hard to say that this third instalment with Christian Bale behind the cowl is the least of the franchise, but most of the problems this time our are fairly nitpicky in nature and come mostly when Nolan seemingly needs to force himself to get serious again when even the director seems like he just wants to have some actual fun for a change.
The story of Joshua Milton Blahyi is a difficult one to peg down, but in Daniele Anastasion and Eric Strauss’ documentary The Redemption of General Butt Naked , the filmmakers examine a man who has found God but who might have been so notorious that no amount of divine salvation could ever help in this life or the next.
In the latest edition of Defending the Indefensible, Will Sloan looks at a modern film that's been maligned almost simply because of how faithful it is to some decidedly unhip source material: The Farrelly Brothers' The Three Stooges.
A loose re-imagining of Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Urbervilles shoved into modern day India, highly prolific director Michael Winterbottom's Trishna has individual moments and images that showcase the filmmaker at his best, but overall it has the rushed and half baked qualities of his most tossed off efforts.
Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg returns to the big screen with Moving Day, a slight, but affable working class comedy that showcases the creator's adeptness at comedy and his awkwardness around sentimental material.
With the Canadian comedy Moving Day opening up in Toronto and Halifax this weekend, we got a chance to chat with director Mike Clattenburg about bringing TV stars to Halifax, a possible return of his greatest creation, The Trailer Park Boys, and the challenges of having a character chug 2L Pepsi bottles on the big screen.
What sets Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s rock and roll documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits apart from other similar films isn’t necessarily the music of defunct post-rock pioneers LCD Soundsystem, but the willingness to explore a deeper human element behind the creative process rather than simply stroking the egos of the people involved.
