Cinema Revisted
David Cronenberg is arguably Canada’s most famous director. Okay, perhaps he’s not better known than James Cameron, but he’s certainly the auteur most widely known outside of our borders, while still continuing to live and work in Canada. Throughout his career, Cronenberg has featured Toronto as the location for many of his films, and not in a self-conscious, “hey look, Toronto is playing itself” way (as in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe) but casually, as though it was no big deal (dare we suggest even perfectly normal) for Toronto to be the setting for a film. After all, things happen here. In...
For those of us who choose to pack our memory banks with movie trivia, there is a great list of unrealised film projects that we occasionally visit in our minds so we can privately mourn the immeasurable cultural absence left by these masterpieces were never made. I like to imagine it as a highly polished wall of black stone cut into a lonely hillside with a yawning reflecting of motionless water where people can leave celluloid wreaths and empty film cans....
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell uses the example of the Beatles to help define his “10,000-hour rule”. Before becoming unimaginably famous and uncommonly wealthy, the Beatles played over 1,200 gigs in Hamburg, Germany which allowed them to hone their skills in ways that made them noticeably exceptional......
When looking at Woody Allen’s first set of films, I am often surprised how different they are from what I had been expecting. When the soon-to-be prolific filmmaker began his career in film, the nuanced dialogue and cerebral joke-writing that would become Allen’s trademark in masterworks like Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) were nowhere to be found. Instead the writer/director’s early films rely heavily on slapstick, wacky sight gags and jokes that seem pretty corny by today’s standards, up to and including Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) and...
French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès is having a moment. Martin Scorsese’s recent 3D release Hugo pays homage Méliès. The electro-pop duo Air just announced the release of a new album, La Voyage Dans La Lune, inspired by Méliès. The title not only refers to Méliès’s most famous film, but a limited edition of the album will be co-packaged with the movie. And, of course, a production still from that same film, a very annoyed moon with a rocket ship embedded in its eye, remains the most iconic image of the silent era, gracing t-shirts, coffee mugs, and the covers of...
This past weekend, seven thousand of Torontonians gathered covered in fake blood and pale makeup to stagger and moan in the streets for Toronto’s 9th Annual Zombie Walk. Signs such as this, along with an unending array of zombie-themed videogames and postmodern works like Seth Graham-Smith’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, are a good indication that zombie is the new vampire. Granted, sparkly vampires still maintain a deathlike grip on the imagination of tweens and teens, but zombies remain the ghoul of choice for just about anyone who has had to fight their way through rush hour on public...
This past weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. The decade between then and now has seen politicians, commentators and artists responding in various ways to the disturbing new fears and profound uncertainties that inevitably arise from such a traumatic event perpetuated on a previously unthinkable scale. The massive paradigm shift caused by 9-11 has spread out in all directions, from which leaders we elect to what stories we tell to frighten each other – And in many ways the same old tricks filmmakers had previously used to frighten us just didn’t...
Film Noir seems to be more fashionable than ever this summer. Look around the city and you can’t avoid bus advertisements for Rockstar Games’ new detective videogame L.A. Noire, while on TV Kate Winslet is likely to receive an Emmy nomination for a role made famous by Joan Crawford in the Noir classic Mildred Pierce (1945). Since its heyday in the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir has worked its way into all corners of the art-form influencing science fiction like Blade Runner (1982) and providing source material for comedies like The Big Lebowski (1998). Despite its enduring popularity and stylistic...
In October of this year, an elegant 428-page hardcover about the career of graphic designer Saul Bass will be released with the title Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design. The book, which is co-authored by the artist’s daughter Jennifer Bass, compiles over 1,400 illustrations and will include an introduction written by Martin Scorsese....
