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…
By: Addison Wylie Here’s an interesting proposal. Take the producers behind romantic hits such as Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary and apply their genre knowledge in a direction that turns romantic comedies on their ear. Then, bring in Dan Mazer to write and direct the sweet and salty hybrid. Mazer has plenty of experience shocking audiences with filthy jokes. His résumé consists of behind-the-scenes work on Da Ali G Show as well as lending his penmanship…
By: Addison Wylie Disney has shown again and again that they rise to the occasion with fairy tales. Their fantasies featuring sparkling animation and lively characters always bring out the bliss in audiences and the bacon at the box office. Frozen is no different. It’s charmed movie goers far and wide with its strong female personalities and fetching tunes. Frozen also serves as being one of the only current family films that has stabilized sturdy…
By: Addison Wylie Across the pond, Good Vibrations has been considered a crowd pleaser. During its release earlier this year, its swept audiences off their feet with vivacious music and a profound true story about Terri Hooley’s struggle with individuality in 1970’s Belfast and acquiring peace through music. This holiday season, Toronto gets the opportunity to see this highly regarded movie. Well, call me a Grinch because Good Vibrations didn’t do it for me. I…
By: Addison Wylie Upon watching JOBS for the first time, I had a hunch that it wasn’t going to be received with a wide round of applause. The film about the life and times of Apple’s Steve Jobs didn’t sugarcoat its subject, but the overall product took the form of a typical biopic. I believe movie goers were still riding off the hot licks of the award winning David Fincher film The Social Network. I…
By: Addison Wylie Nicky’s Family is an elementarily formatted documentary using a cluster of different stock footage from the 1930’s, with interviews helping navigate the viewer through a touching real life tale. It’s a structure that’s very simple and we’ve all seen it before. The documentary also appears to have been shot on substandard video, which leads to a dated image that’s generally murky with visible blemishes. Furthermore, the overall feeling of Nicky’s Family is…
By: Addison Wylie Berberian Sound Studio didn’t frighten me. It didn’t creep, weird, or freak me out either. I didn’t get any sort of shivers out of the experience nor did I get any heebies or jeebies. If Peter Strickland’s film is anything, it’s mildly unsettling. It smartly pleads the case that our imaginations can provide strokes of detail if a film supplies the foundation for which our thoughts are built on. It’s absolutely true…
By: Addison Wylie German music composer Richard Wagner is an enigma of sorts and produced music on a grandiose scale. Ralf Pleger’s documentary The Wagner Files explains that Wagner’s lengthy compositions caused a stir in the 20th century and went on to be some of the most revolutionary work to exist in the world of music. Richard Wagner is a provocative subject. His early failures with music erupted anger and vexation in him as he…
By: Addison Wylie Regrettably, I haven’t seen 1981’s My Dinner with André. I believe there’s an unwritten law that states that this is a cinematic crime being in the film critic position that I’m in. This also meant that I wasn’t in tune with the work of the classic’s star and co-writer André Gregory. Gregory is his own renaissance man having taken on duties as a theatre director, an artist, and an actor. You may have caught…
By: Addison Wylie Antisocial is middle-of-the-road fare, which I’m sure director/co-writer Cody Calahan doesn’t want to hear. He wants his film to act as a commentary for how immersed we are with technology and social media. In order to drive home the social satire, he and co-writer Chad Archibald use networking devices as a means to drag the living to a state of infection. Tech junkies start to hallucinate and graphically bleed out of the…