By: Trevor Jeffery At Toronto’s Fan Expo (an annual gathering for sci-fi super fans, comic book buffs, anime addicts, gaming geeks, horror… fans), badge-wearing nerds flock from all around, many garbed as pop culture icons, to enjoy a convention of collective interests. It’s a place where people can gather in community, compliment each other’s costumes, bathe in their favourite entertainment cultures and, of course, enjoy the celebrity guests.
By: Anthony King GOING IN: There are a lot of films out there that help us escape our lives and live out a fantasy. For men in particular, some want to be an international spy who always gets the lady, an astronaut exploring the galaxy, a mobster in a fancy suit tossing out the kiss of death left and right… or some of us just want to be able to discard our gross bodies and be…
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…
By: Addison Wylie In the first Back to the Future film, Marty McFly straps on a guitar, turns to a baffled band, and says, “watch for the changes, and try to keep up, okay?” With Coherence, filmmaker James Ward Byrkit is the rascally McFly, and I’m standing on the stage looking absolutely perplexed. It’s because no matter how hard you try to keep up, Byrkit constantly has us on our toes. Great Scott! Ironically enough,…
By: Addison Wylie The Toronto International Film Festival may be in full swing, but Toronto After Dark shall not fall by the wayside. On September 4, the eclectic festival – known for hosting screenings that would please any sort of genre fan – released their first wave of films. The list has it all: toothy zombies, time traveling, werewolves, Elijah Wood, and two highly anticipated follow-ups to recent cult favourites. The ten revealed titles can be viewed here….
By: Addison Wylie The only thing that could be more amazing than Godzilla’s timeless legacy is that Gareth Edwards was given the opportunity to direct a multi-million dollar modernized take on the creature. Seriously, let’s all take a moment and realize how crazy and ambitious the producers had to be to invest so much trust into a filmmaker who doesn’t have a whole lot of feature film experience. Those chancy attitudes have paid off big…
By: Addison Wylie Everyone knows of Richard Curtis’ work one way or another – usually more so with a predominant female audience. Those women have usually caught these films when they’ve wanted to watch a cute chick flick with friends or they’ve caught the films on television during a cozy night in. Fellas, most of you have likely been dragged – er, have volunteered – to watch these romances with significant others. I may sound…
By: Addison Wylie “Bittersweet” is the best word to describe Her. Spike Jonze has taken our bad habits with technology and projected them to frame an original love story with messages of poignancy. It’s a personal film about an impersonal society. The characters on-screen are closed off to everyone around them. Among them is writer Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix who is a spitting image of Napoleon Dynamite’s “womanizing” brother Kip). People are enjoyably…
By: Addison Wylie Much like After Earth, this review is going to be a bit of a confounding thing to endure since the substance behind it is puzzled itself. Will Smith seems like a levelheaded guy outside of movies. I’m sure there was concise logic behind his story to which he’s credited for in After Earth. If so, there’s been a severe case of “Broken Telephone” during the film’s production that eventually led to M….
By: Addison Wylie Drafthouse Films has taken Giulio Paradisi’s director’s cut to his very strange 1979 sci-fi flick The Visitor and are unleashing it to the public in a newly remastered mode. There are a lot of uncanny compositions of malificent behaviour that especially punch out. These set a tone incredibly fast and have the power to make you immediately feel at unease. Confusion runs rampant throughout The Visitor, and for the most part, it’s…