By: Addison Wylie The Trick with the Gun has a lighthearted voice, but the film shouldn’t be discounted. Michael McNamara’s documentary is one of the most enjoyable and exhilarating films I’ve seen this year. Though the film is easy for us in the audience, the same can’t be said for the film’s subjects who face a deadly task. Scott Hammel is a valiant magician whose illusions and motivational speaking have helped inspire young audiences. He…
By: Addison Wylie Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments, Pontypool) is a very busy filmmaker. In 2010 alone, the award-winning director released three films. If I don’t like one of McDonald’s films, I can at least find something I can appreciate about his filmmaking, but his latest horror Hellions suggests to me that the next best thing for his career may be some downtime. The main problem with Hellions, a film about a…
By: Addison Wylie It takes patience to mull thorough Mark Lewis’ Invention. However, even the calmest movie goers may find themselves jiggling their leg and looking at their watch. Invention features visual artist Lewis and a wandering, hovering camera (driven by cinematographers Bobby Shore and Martin Testar) visiting Toronto, Paris, and Sao Paulo. His feature film debut asks audiences to find fascination in minor details. The camera floats, locks in on open, negative space and waits for…
By: Addison Wylie Parents: if you feel your child is too old for those Air Bud movies but too young for Wild America and Alaska, that happy medium you’re looking for can be found in The Journey Home. A boy named Luke (played by Dakota Goyo) attempts to reunite a lost polar bear to its mother by travelling across perilous, icy terrain through flurries of snowstorms and over ice caps. The polar bear (which is eventually given…
By: Addison Wylie Is it just me, or does anyone else find this of coupling of comedic actor Tyler Labine and Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford unusual? I suppose this isn’t any weirder than pairing up Labine with Alan Tudyk (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil) or sending Crawford off to recite puns on FOX’s Family Guy, but just looking at the poster for Mountain Men had me wondering how Cameron Labine’s film would play out. It…
By: Mark Barber The post-apocalyptic Canadian film Turbo Kid has only one audience in mind: kids who grew up on Power Rangers. Yet the film is too gruesome and violent for kids, and too vacuous for anyone else. Set in a desolate post-apocalyptic world, an unnamed kid (Degrassi’s Munro Chambers; character simply billed as “The Kid”) finds a suit that formerly belonged to the comic book/real life superhero character Turbo Man (unrelated to a similar character…
By: Addison Wylie As an experiment and as an escape, Suzanne Crocker and her family packed up necessities (including a video camera) and took to Canada’s Yukon Territory for nine months. Suzanne and her husband Gerard Parsons wanted their children to experience the great outdoors and witness the change of the seasons; illustrating that technology and a fixed schedule doesn’t always capture what’s really going on in the world. The trip, however, was equally refreshing…
By: Addison Wylie American gross-out comedies were so popular during the birth of the 2000s, Canadian cinema hopped on board. I vividly remember Mark Griffiths’ road trip flick Going the Distance and Dave Thomas’ workplace scrub clad comedy Intern Academy being released in 2004, and producing piddly groans. Canadian filmmakers are hitting another “monkey see, monkey do” phase as movie goers flock towards the comedic chops of Judd Apatow and his filmmaking protégés. Just like…
By: Addison Wylie Patch Town is royally ambitious. It’s also incredibly hard to synopsize making it harder to recommend despite it being a highly enjoyable live-action fairy tale. Craig Goodwill, a filmmaker who’s been comfortable making short films, expanded on his original short Patch Town and adapted it into a real nifty feature. He’s drawn on David Lynch’s Eraserhead to define the film’s industrial dystopia where obedient workers withdrawal babies from heads of cabbage. All…
By: Addison Wylie Movies like Debug make me wish I had a notebook handy during screenings. I feel overwhelmed trying to remember all of the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that fills David Hewlett’s futuristic space horror. Let’s just say Hewlett’s self-penned script has expiatory dialoguing of the laziest kind. Science fiction often hosts the worst scenarios since some filmmakers just want to hurl a bunch of technical nonsense towards the audience and expect movie goers will be…