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Shahbaz Khayambashi

Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2019: ‘Blood Machines’ and ‘Homewrecker’

October 20, 2019Wylie Writes Staff1 Comment

Blood Machines (DIR. Seth Ickerman) The cinema is a visual and narrative medium, but the narrative is often king.  Way too many films will give up on the visuals to tell a story, leading to slightly stagnant results.  As such, it is sometimes oddly refreshing to get a film which will sacrifice narrative cohesion in order to produce a spectacle of light and sound.  Seth Ickerman is such a filmmaker and Blood Machines, a collaboration between…

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Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2019: ‘Extra Ordinary’

October 19, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi1 Comment

Ghosts are just ordinary people who have died.  Surely, that means they are all around us, right?  Extra Ordinary starts with this quirky concept and adds satanism, post-domestic abuse, and driving school experience to turn the weirdness up to eleven.  The film’s weirdness isn’t its only trick, however, because Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s film is roaringly funny despite that.

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Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2019: ‘James vs. His Future Self’ and ‘Making Monsters’

October 18, 2019Wylie Writes Staff0 Comments

James vs. His Future Self (DIR. Jeremy LaLonde) Jeremy LaLonde’s recent movies have truly owned their genre in a unique way.  The Go-Getters was a gleefully foul play on the traditional buddy formula, and How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town was a charming sex comedy.  With James vs. His Future Self, LaLonde takes a swing at crossing science fiction with a romance – it’s a sweet success.

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Festival Coverage

Toronto After Dark 2019: ‘The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale’ and ‘Witches in the Woods’

October 16, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi0 Comments

The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (DIR. Lee Min-jae) The zombie genre has always managed to survive because zombies, as a monster, are wholly dependent on the zeitgeist of the time.  Since they are brainless creatures, their existence can generally be justified by the anxieties of the time (military industrial complex, consumerism, conformity, racism, etc.).  While that is an advantage to sub-genre, most zombie films follow the same template.  The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale is no…

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One-on-Ones

Wylie Writes’ One-On-One with Corey Stanton

October 6, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi0 Comments

Robbery is a solid drama that tells the compelling story of Frank (Art Hindle), a cerebral career criminal suffering from dementia.  When his son, Richie (Jeremy Ferdman), finds himself the target of a dangerous organization to whom he owes money, Frank must come out of retirement and use the remnants of his mind to save his son. I talked with writer/director Corey Stanton to see where this surprisingly unique story came from.

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Festival Coverage

TIFF 2019: ‘The Twentieth Century’

September 7, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi0 Comments

Depending on who you ask, Canadian cinema may well be celebrating its 100th year this year and, despite the general dismay that it continues to attract from some, it is still very much able to be as innovative as any other national cinema.  Why the history lesson?  Because that may be the best way to introduce Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century, at once a great addition to the Canadian cinematic canon and a bitter poisonous…

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Festival Coverage

TIFF 2019: ‘The Lighthouse’

September 6, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi0 Comments

With The Witch, Robert Eggers showed the world that there were untold, new ways to tell horror stories.  So, what can someone who has already reinvented a genre do as a follow up?  Eggers decided to tell a new story based on the research of horrific authentic historical documents, and it works.

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Reviews

Survival Box

August 14, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi0 Comments

What do you do when you live in an age of renewed Trumpian nuclear anxiety and wish to express the doomed future of the youth therein?  If you’re William Scoular, you make Survival Box, a film so navel-gazing in its execution that, by the end of its runtime, it can only be described as an answer to a question no one asked.

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Reviews

Yesterday

June 28, 2019Shahbaz Khayambashi2 Comments

What would happen if you woke up one day and just one seemingly ubiquitous thing had vanished off the face of the earth?  As far as thought experiments go, this formula can lead to a variety of paths, most of them worth a bit of digging.  However, what would happen if the Beatles vanished off the face of the earth and the answer was told by a cheque-cashing Danny Boyle, based on yet another formulaic…

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