By: Trevor Chartrand You’ll be hard pressed to find a more Canadian film than The Grizzlies; the inspiring true story of an impoverished Nunavut community battling mental illness by creating a sports team. Over ten years in the making, this long-time passion project of director Miranda de Pencier is a not only a well-made dramatic film, but also a small taste of the type of media representation First Nations and Inuit citizens deserve.
Netflix’s sports drama High Flying Bird is exactly the film you expect from Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic). Using the experimental “look” of last year’s underrated Unsane and the foreboding “feel” of Contagion, High Flying Bird gives a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a sports agent (André Holland) as he senses fast-forming cracks in his career during an NBA lockout.
Goon: Last of the Enforcers arrives five years after the surprise hit Goon, and it’s as if the audience never left these characters. Even though the film is working under a different director (Jay Baruchel taking over for Michael Dowse), this sequel makes sure it stays within the same surly vein as its delightfully crude predecessor.
The Canadian Sport Film Festival sprints to Toronto for its ninth year. This weekend (Friday, June 9 – Sunday, June 11), audiences will be able to watch a diverse selection of feature films, documentaries, and short films about athletic subjects and themes. Wylie Writes’ Shannon Page received a sneak peek of the festival by watching the Emmy-award winning opening night selection Keepers of the Game, along with a haunting doc titled Hillsborough.
Movie goers waiting for a biopic to blow their socks off shouldn’t rely on Tommy’s Honour, a drama that seems to fulfil its non-fiction requirements procedurally. Tommy’s Honour would be par for the course (ba-dum-tss) if it wasn’t so underwhelming.
The original Goon (2011) was a special thing: an indie sports-comedy that was funny without being over-the-top, and heartfelt without being outright cheesy. It was also indisputably Canadian without relying on stereotypes or clichés. The film made the audience care about Doug (Seann William Scott), a dim-witted but kind bouncer from Massachusetts who uses his better-than-average brawling skills to become a professional enforcer for a minor-league hockey team in Halifax. We were invested in his…
Nice People is a very timely film. In our current state of mass migration of Arabic and African refugees to European countries and the right-wing propaganda that follows such events, it is important for audiences to get a view of the conditions of these people. The fact that Nice People’s view is all wrapped up in a feel-good narrative about a happy-go-lucky sports team is just a smart strategy from documentarians Karin af Klintberg and Anders…
