Articles
The Viscera Film Festival comes to the Projection Booth tonight and some of the shorts being screened include Nursery Crimes, a twisted take on the nursery rhymes we all know directed by Laura Whyte, and Together, a mind-bending tale of a man annoyed by his upstairs neighbour directed by Gigi Romero. Ranging from hilarious to stomach churning, every avenue of the horror genre is covered. From abduction to zombies, these female filmmakers show that women can be just as frightening and bloody as men. It’s hard to pick just a few short films to focus on when each one is...
Last week we clued you in to the Canadian Film Centre’s Short Dramatic Film Program and the fact that every year, they churn out a whole new crop of promising filmmakers and more importantly, great short films that very often make the film festival rounds, introducing some of the country’s best filmmakers to the worldwide landscape. With over 150 CFC shorts to choose from, it’s hard to know exactly where to start delving in. Here are some of the best of the bunch: 1. Evelyn The Cutest Evil Dead Girl (2002) One of the more famous of the CFC shorts, this...
I’ve been a fan of Fifth Column‘s music since a friend introduced me to their song “All Women Are Bitches” many years ago, while I was a student. What self-respecting young feminist wouldn’t be curious about an all-girl punk band with a song title like that? When I found out that they were from Toronto, I was even more intrigued. But there’s more to Fifth Column than just being a ‘girl band’, as Kevin Hegge told me while we chatted about his documentary She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, which is premiered at Hot Docs April 27. When I...
While there has always been an urge to experiment with the medium of film, including such early-to-mid-20th century examples like the works of Maya Deren and Man Ray, a notable increase in the production (and institutional recognition) of so-called experimental film came about in the 1970s. Whether it was the medium-specific concerns of the burgeoning semiotic/psyhoanalytic/Marxist strains of theory emerging at that time, or perhaps the generally daring and unconstrained atmosphere of the post-Vietnam era, the 1970s were a time to break utterly free of the conventions of filmmaking that had been established in the 20th century, and Canadian filmmaker...
If you love awkward outsiders in the movies, from Montgomery Clift and James Dean to Robert Crumb and Hedwig, then you probably have a place in your heart reserved for Crispin Glover. With a fascinating and eclectic onscreen acting resume going back more than 30 years, Glover has left an indelible impression in roles as diverse as George McFly in Back to the Future and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He is a gifted performer, equally adept at light comedy and hard drama. What really sets him apart from other actors, though, is his remarkable capacity for being uncompromisingly weird....
It can be hard to commit to an experimental film. Without the gentle push of a coherent narrative, the moving image assumes a totally different identity. Words like ‘avant-garde’ and ‘non-linear’ tend to push the majority toward the multiplex. But we should all reconsider that thought, because Lewis Klahr’s epic collage film, The Pettifogger, is amazing. Collage has been enjoying somewhat of a renaissance these days. From collage parties like the one at last year’s Art Toronto event to a recently-launched Montreal magazine named Kolaj, all about – you guessed it – collage art, I’ve noticed a real surge in the...
In 2002, Playback magazine did a poll to determine the best Canadian films of all time. It’s an eclectic, but genuinely Canadian list. With Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter at #1, the remainder of the list is a who’s who of classic Canadian film with entries from Don McKellar, Claude Jutra, Donald Shebib and Denys Arcand (Arcand and Egoyan received two spots each). It is not a mystery then, that Bruce McDonald is also on this list, but what might surprise is the film. It wasn’t Highway 61 or Roadkill. It wasn’t even Dance Me Outside. It was Hard Core...



