You’ve heard of a movie “spinning its wheels”, but have you seen a movie that is simply “spinning”? That’s what Orson Welles’ recently recovered The Other Side of the Wind makes its audience feel like – it’s an evening on a sociable, abrasive lazy suzy with Hollywood elites admiring each other just as often as they’re jumping at another’s throat.
There is a police parade walking down the street. Dozens of men in uniform are walking in formation, surrounded by revelers. Suddenly, Andy Kaufman pulls out a gun and shoots someone down. He is subdued and shot. With his last breath, he says “God told me to.” I have only seen one Larry Cohen film, and yet it managed to contain one scene which placed itself directly into my brain. Cohen has spent decades writing…
Stanley Kubrick was a peculiar anomaly. He was a world famous filmmaker with a classic catalogue, yet he lived an elusive life. Allegedly, it was rare to be granted access into Kubrick’s personal life, and it was more rare to find someone who would be willing to put themselves that close to him considering Kubrick’s infamous reputation.
Sook-Yin Lee is currently mystifying Toronto movie goers with her long-awaited return to feature-length filmmaking. Octavio is Dead! gradually reels us in with a dream-like allure as we observe Tyler (Sarah Gadon) rediscover herself through the death of her absent father (Raoul Max Trujillo). From there, Lee strings her audience on a winding narrative that consistently maintains a personal intimacy throughout its run.
News of an upcoming feature from filmmaker Patrick Read Johnson (who had previously directed mid-90’s comedies Baby’s Day Out and Angus) lit up the Internet in the mid-2000s with a fantastic trailer set to music by ELO and Jon Brion. The trailer, centred around an awkward teenager in the 1970s anticipating a unique blockbuster called Star Wars, dropped when I was in high school and working at a video store. However, the film went silent…
Making a movie like Modern Classic requires film experience, and I’m not talking about knowing how to assemble a shot list. It’s a taxing process of compromises that pulls you through the ringer while you remain hopeful and eager. Modern Classic, a flippant film about this love/hate relationship, uses catharsis and dry humour to exhale.
Contemporary cinephilia places – at times – undue emphasis on the auteur in relation to their work and in relation to the works of others. Intertwined authorship and intertextuality are the two most recurrent approaches in film criticism. As such, it’s easy to rationalize the existence of the Hitchcock/Truffaut: Magnificent Obsessions retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, given the sheer amount of discourse written on the famous relationship of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut.
I know Parker Mott as a fellow writer and a friend. We met on the set of Eric Marchen’s television show Cinema Seen years ago (when it was originally titled The Film Slate), and we’ve kept in contact ever since.
De Palma (DIR. Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow) By: Shannon Page Directed by Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha!, Mistress America) and Jake Paltrow (Young Ones), De Palma is a love letter to twentieth-century cinema and an engaging look into the mind of an artist whose career has been nothing if not eclectic.
By: Shahbaz Khayambashi Hitchcock/Truffaut is a perfect example of a book-to-film adaptation that has been made to relieve viewers from having to read. It’s a SparkNotes version of the eponymous book, taking bits and pieces of the writing and spacing it out with interviews so movie goers will be distracted from the lack of attention in the production.