What’s on Demand
We can’t all get away from the city during the summer. But if you have access to a Netflix account, you can tour some of the most pristine sun-soaked locations in Latin America, albeit during times of violent civil conflict, with that international man of mystery and ubiquitous pop icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. In this the age of the digitally reproduced image, the portrait of Che Guevara has become a part of the visual language and, as a result, the ardent communist has been ironically merchandised onto such capitalist trinkets as t-shirts, hats, stickers, skateboards, dog clothing, bobble-heads and also...
It is the Summer of Italy at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, showcasing two stylistic extremes of Italian cinema; the expressionistic fantasies of Federico Fellini are on display in the gallery collection Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions and the harsh realities and noble beauty of Italy’s postwar plight in a programme of films titled Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neorealism. In the period following the neorealist movement, one of Italy’s favourite leading men was Marcello Mastroianni and what a charmed existence the actor was able to lead: working with some of the medium’s greatest directors like Fellini and Vittorio De Sica while getting...
Centuries before the tabloid train-wreck that defined the parents of our recently visiting Prince William, there was the royal scandal to top them all – Accusations of incest, adultery, bigamy, witchcraft, bastard heirs and a seemingly unending cycle of public beheadings but, bear in mind, they didn’t have violent movies to entertain the masses back then. Henry VIII is so often the subject of films because the King’s blind insistence on marrying his second wife, Anne Boleyn, resulted in England breaking with the Roman Catholic Church which irrevocably changed the international politics of Europe as well as the greater course...
This summer, audiences worldwide are expected to thrill at the sight of a star-spangled superhero clashing against Nazi forces to once again win World War II in Marvel Comics’ highly anticipated Captain America (2011) and, in its circa-1944 wartime fantasy, the comicbook movie is a part of a cinematic tradition which has proved more prevalent than musicals or westerns. A cursory look at the programming on the History Channel will confirm that, 66 years after the end of WWII, the pubic continues to be darkly fascinated with Nazis and the atrocities of the Holocaust. In terms of the visual language...
Movies about rock stars and music legends tend not to make for great documentaries in of themselves, and are usually sceptically regarded as of being part of some elaborate multi-facetted marketing strategy. But a well-made rock doc can stand as a record of an important artistic cultural phenomenon, or event, and lend some insight in an art-form which has profoundly altered the progress of history as well as expanded countless personal consciousnesses, man. A particularly favourite topic for music-related documentaries are those most tragic figures of rock n’ roll who have gone on to the great stadium gig in the...
When first assessing a new video store, examining the silent movie section can give you a good idea to the type of customers that store is comfortable dealing with. A well stocked silent film shelf reflects an overall commitment to the art form of cinema and its history, and if you are a big film geek like me, it probably means you are in the right place. The absence of a silent film section tends to indicate the store’s emphasis on new releases and video games or cellular telephone accessories. So if we are to compare the Netflix service to...
