Other Articles
I’ve had to hold my face in my hands for several reasons while watching a movie; grief, fear, happiness, disgust. Usually an overflowing of one or all of the above. Despite the many good releases this year, I found myself feeling just okay after watching. My top 3 for 2012 are films I felt like watching several times after seeing them in theatre. I remembered them afterwards and I was engaged to the point of holding my face. That’s a good movie for me. A Werewolf Boy Making its Canadian debut at Toronto International Film Festival, A Werewolf Boy was...
Life, employment, and a need for 7 hours of sleep every night tend to interfere with my ability to see every movie I really want to. It didn’t help that I was living overseas from 2005 to 2009, so had unreliable access to movies for a few years. With alarming frequency, I stumble across films I have never heard of, that should have been on my radar. I am constantly reaching into the world cinema back catalogue to catch up on those movies I haven’t been able to get around to, for one reason or another. So, here’s my...
As we learned in this week’s cover story, the holidays are the time to stay in your pyjamas all day, settling in for a long winter’s movie marathon. Over the last twelve months, the team here at TFS put in a lot of time researching and watching an endless litany of the best and worst that cinema has to offer and as a result, has put together a whole host of suggestions that you’d do well to consider when programming your own personal mini-film festival. Here are a few of our favourite themed lists – feel free to pick and...
We continue our look back at 2012 with a handful of articles that, in our opinion, highlight some of the best aspects of the Toronto film community. From cutting edge filmmakers to some pretty awesome organizations that ensure we’ll always have a fresh supply of up-and-comers to cover here at Toronto Film Scene, it’s clear that Toronto has some true film-related treasures worth talking about. Spotlight On: Canadian Film Centre’s Short Dramatic Film Program Most people have a very vague notion that something called the Canadian Film Centre (or the “CFC” to those up on the lingo) exists within the...
Every October, there is an explosion of horror-related material available to the world. Halloween manages to bring out the kid in so many people, and it’s impossible to turn your head without seeing a Top 10 Horror Movie list, a late night screening of Halloween, or those giant boxes of tiny chocolate bars that many of us buy for ourselves, and not the kids. Paranormal Activity has become a yearly tradition now, and the theatres are always full of frightening film offerings. Horror-related events in October will never change, but there is one aspect that has been shrinking over the...
In May of 2012, writer/producer/director Ingrid Veninger of pUNK films, attended DIY Art and Life: A Day with Joe Swanberg, a screening and filmmaking masterclass with American indie powerhouse Joe Swanberg, engineered by our very own TFS contributor Katarina Gligorijevic. Veninger was so inspired by Swanberg and his DIY approach that she had an epiphany, one of those inspired “what if” moments. What if a group of filmmakers challenged themselves to make a feature film on a budget of just $1000? “Joe Swanberg was just so inspiring and I got really turned on about how we should all challenge ourselves...
It may surprise you to hear anyone who writes about film say this, but when I sat down in Theatre 4 at TIFF Bell Lighbox recently to watch a lovely new print of Dial M for Murder in 3D, it was the first Hitchcock movie I had seen in a theatre. Some may consider this blasphemous, but it’s fair to say that some people’s film tastes run to the more popular fare. And I am one of those people. While I have not seen very much classic film, I am extremely well versed in popular and genre film, which is...
This started out as a blog post in conjunction with our review of Savages and how Oliver Stone has a thread of less than flattering portrayals of women in many of his films. I spent a weekend re-watching some of his filmography and was alarmed by what I found. Before I got a chance to start writing though, I attended the final night of the Toronto After Dark Summer Screening Series and had the displeasure of sitting through V/H/S, a horror film that had such a weird attitude towards women that I thought it might fold very easily into what...
To the casual observer, conventional wisdom dictates that short films must be easier to write, produce and create than feature films; shorter running time means less money required, less time, and most importantly, less ideas that need to be generated. In short (pun intended), less effort required, right? …Right? Well, no, not really. Though short films can be an effective introduction, or gateway art form for a director who eventually wishes to make the jump to features (check out our David Cronenberg retrospective for proof), it would be a hasty generalization to suggest that the former are easier to make...
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,...
Now that we’ve gotten past the formality of those “other awards†it’s time to get down to business on some meaningful trophies.
Canada has never cranked out as many films at such a high level as it has over the past few years, and the ability of the most successful of those titles – films like Incendies, Polyetechnique and Away from Her – to permeate into the National popular consciousness shows that the public is starting to get how great our National Cinema has become....
