We talk to Rob Meyer, director of the coming of age film A Birder's Guide to Everything (now available on DVD and VOD in Canada, and on DVD in the US this coming Tuesday and starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ben Kingsley) about the energy his young stars brought to the production, how he pulled unlikely inspiration from Monty Python, why it’s impossible to look cool while birdwatching, and why he was actually really excited to fight his film’s initial R-rating in front of the MPAA.
We play catch up with the DVDs we've accumulated over the past month with Phil looking at Criterion releases for Riot in Cell Block 11 and Breaking the Waves, the recently remastered Sorcerer, a re-cut version of the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, the fourth and final season of Eastbound and Down, and the latest Paranormal Activity film. Dave looks at straight-to-video efforts Mr. Jones and Bad Country, along with new discs for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Seven Warriors. And Andrew looks back on A Birder's Guide to Everything and Big Bad Wolves.
A Birder’s Guide to Everything If one were to cross a low-key modern American indie with a 1980s coming of age road comedy, you would get something close to the amusing and thoughtful debut feature from Rob Meyer, A Birder’s Guide to Everything. Both a better breed of teen movie than audiences normally get and […]
There’s almost nothing that I can say about Carlo Carlei’s big screen staging of Romeo and Juliet. It would be redundant to say there’s nothing here that you haven’t already seen before, and yet it’s worse than that. This is EXACTLY what you have seen before. It’s a drab, lifeless Shakespearean melodrama perked up ever so slightly by a few decent performances that does absolutely nothing whatsoever to warrant its existence.
From top to bottom, ParaNorman is a little genre gem for longtime fans and pint-sized newcomers. This is an animated film that refuses to talk down to children, packs in more entertainment value than should be legally allowed, and actually has something to say to the impressionable viewers.
In the age of the omnipresent CG animated film and vapid big budget spectacle, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a lovingly handcrafted stop-motion animated movie like ParaNorman come along. We had a chance to speak with directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell earlier this year, and talked about the talented young cast of the film, the directors' own experiences with bullying, ParaNorman's relationship to the horror genre, the importance of zombies, and much more.
In the age of the omnipresent CG animated film and vapid big budget spectacle, it's incredibly refreshing to see a lovingly handcrafted stop-motion animated movie like ParaNorman come along. We had a chance to speak with directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell earlier this year, and talked about the "John Carpenter meets John Hughes" origins of the film, how technology has helped make stop-frame animation more practical, and much more.
Enter to win one of five family four packs of passes to see an advance screening of the 3D animated zombie comedy ParaNorman in Toronto on Saturday, August 4th at 10am from Dork Shelf and Alliance Films!
I really don’t like remakes. Like many film fans, I believe that they should be avoided at all costs, particularly when they are Hollywood remakes of excellent foreign films. However, Hollywood being what it is, remakes are inevitable. So when I heard that there were plans to remake the excellent Swedish film Let The Right […]
Tomas Alfredson’s excellent Let the Right One In is the kind of film that you really don’t want to see get remade. The original was such a pitch perfect genre film that remaking it feels kind of presumptuous. Unfortunately, the Swedish vampire film became such an international phenomenon that it was only a matter of […]
