Perhaps in response to the muted, lackluster reception of last year's festival opener, Score: a Hockey Musical, TIFF programmers have decided to open this year's festival with a musical act that's guaranteed to energize an audience: Irish rock superstars U2. From the Sky Down, a documentary about the making of their seminal 1991 album Achtung Baby (directed by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame), will officially kick off the festival on Sept. 8. It will be the third major U2-related documentary, following 1998's Rattle and Hum and 2007's U2 3D.
The announcement should come as a slight disappointment to Cameron Crowe, whose rival rock doc Pearl Jam Twenty will be relegated to the "Special Presentation" series. The trailer for Pearl Jam Twenty is below. To see the other 50 odd titles in the Galas and Special Presentations line-ups, click here.
On a scorching-hot day such as this, watching films set in snowy locales (think The Shining or Dr. Zhivago) is a solid indoor time-waster. Add to that list director John Carpenter’s classic 1982 Antarctica-set horror The Thing, which will get you psyched and ready for its prequel coming this October.
Ever wondered what a director was trying to achieve or intending to convey when setting up a specific scene in a movie?
While film geeks are already nodding their melons in vigorous agreement, more casual fans might be hooked by this prospect: imagine gaining an insight into a single but defining scene from a favourite film and, in the course of that, learning how ridiculously complex staging even one scene is when taking into account camera angles, lighting, actors, background extras, type of lens and countless other factors BEFORE post-production.
Few filmmakers boast the stylistic range and storytelling prowess of Canada’s Atom Egoyan, who turns 51 today. Doubt it? View our roundup below and then leave your two cents.
Whether unraveling a psychological thriller (Exotica), charting a small town breakdown (The Sweet Hereafter) or examining the dark, labyrinthine relationship of a showbiz team (Where the Truth Lies), Egoyan manages to suspend disbelief while provoking audiences to look inward for similarities – however chilling - to the complex characters portrayed on-screen.
Here’s something you don’t get to write everyday: there is much news in zombie world and not only that, but news with a Canuck bent.
First up, the Toronto Star is reporting that Back to the Future star Christopher Lloyd has joined the cast of Dead Before Dawn, a Canadian zombie feature now shooting in 3-D in Niagara Falls (of course!) and not to be confused with Dawn of the Dead, the quintessential zombie flick.
So OK, the final wizard movie is upon us and pretty much poised to flatten everything in its path, which is cool.
But for those seeking an alternative – and lucky enough to live in Toronto – the Royal Cinema has something cooking that fans of avant-garde/independent cinema, punk rock and that odd no-man’s land in between will regard as appointment viewing.
Often misunderstood in his lifetime yet critically revered posthumously in the now-golden age of independent cinema, American actor-cum-director John Cassavetes is one of those artists who was maybe too far ahead of his time.
You can only wonder what the granddaddy of American cinéma vérité – who cast friends and family and favoured hand-held cameras and everyday lighting – would have made of the pioneering, offbeat and yet wildly successful Sundance Festival, for example. Or even of 21st century reality TV.
It is prophesized that the meek shall inherit the Earth.
But judging by preview episodes of Fanboy Confessional – the brand new, six-episode original series launching tonight at 10 pm on SPACE Network and airing for the next two consecutive Wednesdays – I am beginning to think it’s the geeks who shall inherit the Earth.
Tuesdays are always such a crapshoot at the video store; some weeks there is nothing - just nothing - worth checking out. Other weeks, it’s an embarrassment of riches.
Today is the latter kind of day. In addition to marquee titles such as the Johnny Depp-driven action-adventure animation Rango and the all-star The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei and Ryan Phillippe, the latest film from artist-cum-director Julian Schnabel, Miral, hits stores.
It’s a little piece of Hollywood film history about to be consigned forevermore to the proverbial scrap heap. The original wooden bridge on which John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, was arrested in the classic 1982 movie First Blood is to be torn down.
Local residents of Hope, the tiny British Columbia town around 100 miles east of Vancouver where First Blood was shot, yesterday gathered to celebrate the iconic yet now rickety “Rambo Bridge” before it is torn down and replaced by a new bridge, says the Hollywood Reporter.
June 2011
