Writer Blogs
If you scroll through my DVD collection, you will come to one conclusion: I have terrible taste in movies. And you know what, I’m damn proud of it. I love me some duds. Let me be clear, I’m not saying that I love bad, bad movies, I love good, bad movies. Here are my five all-time favourite movies: Flash Gordon Hairspray (1988) Masters of the Universe Army of Darkness The Fifth Element Please feel free to use the comments section below to place judgment. Here are some random film credits of notable TV stars: Josh Charles – Hairspray You may...
Movies are a product of technological innovation and storytelling. The camera captures the images that create what we see, but where does what we see come from? Typically movies are written specifically for the screen. They have also been created by adapting novels and plays. In recent history, there have been a vast amount of movies that are sequels. These titles get more and more distilled as they go along and the need for creating any originality is lost. There are also numerous films that have been remade/re-imagined, Evil Dead being the most recent (unless you count Star Trek: Into...
Well, I was going to write an article about my fave films by musical genres, but as I have a hard enough time picking favourite anything, I decided to simplify for your benefit (and mine) and limit the list to Japanese films. You might not be into Japanese films (and if you’re not, you should be, as they’re amazing) so in that case hopefully this list will spark a bit of an interest, and if you are, well then my friends, here’s some more for you to enjoy. Classical - Nodame Cantabile I and II (2009, 2010) and Shindo (2007) Righto, right at the start,...
No really… think about it. There are literally no movies that center around the sport of tennis. OK, there’s actually one. But honesty, who’s actually seen it? Fun fact: I haven’t. The French Open is coming to an end and in between cheering for Maria Sharapova and Jo-Wilfred Tsonga, I’ve come to realize that there aren’t actually that many movies on my beloved sport of tennis. The question is why? When it comes to sports movies, it seems that baseball, basketball and football have a whole crop of movies that have touched the hearts of millions and have inspired many...
Stage productions have been adapted from everything from books to folklore and even non-musical movies over the years. There have been screen to stage musical adaptations of Billy Elliot, Catch Me If You Can, Legally Blonde, Grey Gardens and even the amazing Toronto production of Evil Dead: The Musical. Most famously there has been The Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady (adapted from the stage play and movie Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw), Little Shop of Horrors, Sunset Boulevard, Sweet Charity (based off Nights of Cabiria), Carrie, The Wedding Singer and Gigi. Even though it wasn’t a musical, there was...
Faith is an ingredient in the movie-going experience. Faithfulness and accuracy is in the heart of most movie-goers, especially when the movie is an adaptation. When a film represents an era, a director faces the challenge of getting everything right from accents, costumes, makeup (if any), and set design. Then there’s the music. The sounds of the film are just as important, because they’re chosen to justly represent an entire time period. A film’s score has the power to connect audiences to experiences beyond the theatre. When directors choose to stray from the path of accuracy, I’ve decided to not...
I’m sure you’ve all been there. You watch a movie, maybe it’s great, and then the music starts and you have to fight to silence a groan or a chuckle. Sometimes even the best films choose the wrong music, and sometimes they choose amazing music that happens to be hilarious. Either way, here are some of my favourite culprits, five weird (and sometimes wonderful) movie soundtrack moments: Fantastipo – Fantastipo Okay most of you probably haven’t seen this film. I’m sure of this because I mention it to everyone and no one’s ever heard of it, and they should have...
One of the most important aspects to a film’s success is the music. That sounds simplistic, maybe, but it’s very true. Most people respond to music on a purely emotional level, and knowing that, filmmakers are easily able to exploit the audience reactions to get the desired effect. This can be done in a heavy handed way sometimes, but generally the composers who are recognized as being masters of the film score understand subtlety. John Williams is able to create music for almost any situation, and he’s written some of the most memorable film scores of all time (Jaws, Star...
Hopefully you read this month’s TFS List concerning movie characters who are more than just their LGBT status. Writing great, well-rounded people to populate your film is always a challenge for a screenwriter, no matter how they identify, let alone creating a character who one should aspire to be like in their real, not-at-all-like-a-movie, life. Here are just a few who rise to the occasion: Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), Scott Pilgrim Vs The World A lot was done by screenwriters and directors alike to preserve the witty and gritty humour that Wallace Wells exudes. Luckily for the film-goer, it all paid...
In 1991 LGBT themes weren’t terribly prominent in film and television. There were gay characters in movies and TV shows, usually relegated to comic relief or to be used as a dramatic way to prove a point, but the characters were often flat and unformed. Gus Van Sant did a great deal to change that situation with My Own Private Idaho. His mash-up of Shakespeare and youth culture presented a more human approach to gay characters in films and was widely recognized as a great cinematic achievement. His film continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers, having been released in...
He was unmistakably eye catching. There on my computer screen was a gun bearing goddess in a glittering mermaid shaped dress. His hair was wildly teased to the heavens. Divine’s photograph made everything else on my tumblr dashboard completely irrelevant. Was he a character? A murderer? A style icon? He was scary and beautiful. I had to know more about this man dressed in tulle. I found that I had something in common with Divine. In fact, I would argue that a part of Divine is in all of us. Born Harris Glenn Milstead, Divine is mostly known for his...
Remember the Canadian band Rusty? You probably need a little bit of a memory jog, but they had a music video about 1995 or 1996 called Misogyny, it was on heavy rotation on MuchMusic for a while (back when they played music videos more than shitty TV shows), and the song was pretty catchy. But what caught my attention more than the song or the grungy good looks of lead singer Ken MacNeil, was the video itself. The video opens with flashes of a topless, tanned and smooth bodied, male model and Madonna ex-lover Tony Ward. The video moves between...
