By: Shahbaz Khayambashi After the saccharine dramatics of Monsieur Lazhar and The Good Lie, Philippe Falardeau has finally returned to his comedic roots – the place where his talent truly shines – with his hilarious new film, My Internship in Canada. In this satirical take on Canadian politics, a Member of Parliament named Steve Guibord (Patrick Huard), holding power over three small Quebecois towns, finds himself as the single deciding vote on whether or not…
By: Addison Wylie Life With Derek’s Michael Seater gets his directorial feet wet with the ensemble dramedy People Hold On. It’s a good place for the budding filmmaker to start. The film itself is contained within few environments and doesn’t call for visual tricks, which leaves Seater a lot of time to draw characters and connect with his tight-knit cast. The filmmaker must’ve also felt another level of comfort and confidence knowing co-star Paula Brancati – whom…
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 Newfoundland receives its own Pootie Tang with Nik Sexton’s rowdy road comedy How to Be Deadly. Hold on though: before you start making snap judgements, that cinematic correlation is a compliment towards how Sexton’s bawdy flick finds a way to fit in. Pootie Tang, Louis C.K.’s infamous cult flick about an incomprehensible crime fighting celebrity, was – ironically – misunderstood. It was a millennial interpretation of the blaxploitation genre that was unfortunately…
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 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…