By: Addison Wylie William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg return to TIFF Kids. This time, they’re not here to make me blubber like a baby (see: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore). The filmmakers are here to make me laugh and impress me with wit. Based on an iTunes app also called The Numberlys, the short film features five employees who are fed up with creating the same boring numbers at their factory job. One…
By: Addison Wylie If I have one positive to say about Matthew Pollack’s autobiographical documentary, it’s that the film is rightfully titled. By the end credits, I didn’t want anything to do with Pollack. I actually wished I hadn’t bothered with this icky film in the first place. Run Run It’s Him is supposed to serve as a coping tool and a means of comprehension for Pollack with his obsessive addiction to pornography. Matthew’s fascination…
Out of all the festivals I’ve ever covered, the Hot Docs Film Festival is one of my favourites. It’s a festival that always promises a deep array of different types of documentaries from a variety of different countries. It’s very hard to find one doc that resembles another in Hot Docs. The press conference held at Toronto’s Bloor Hot Docs Theatre on March 18 certainly built the buzz well. The audience had the pleasure of…
By: Addison Wylie Recently, we’ve seen Hansel and Gretel battle witches with steampunk weaponry in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and defeat a nefarious pot-peddling evildoer in Hansel & Gretel Get Baked. I’m still racking my brain as to why these Brothers Grimm siblings got the resurgence they did. Perhaps, the timing of it all makes H&G initially refreshing. It’s nice to see filmmaker Danishka Esterhazy take a low-key approach to this fairy tale and…
By: Addison Wylie North Americans have Will Ferrel’s Ron Burgundy, an on-camera anchorman who’s self-centred arrogance has him chewing down on his own foot often. In Europe, the Brits have Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge. Partridge is an egotistical radio personality obsessed with a celebrity image and a winning smile. Where Burgundy can read on screen as a pompous jerk with a heart of gold steeped in spoof misogyny, Partridge is more endearing. He always finds…
By: Addison Wylie Now that we’ve recognized the bad movies that were slingshot at audiences last year, it’s time to move on and engulf ourselves in the cream of the crop. 2013 introduced a wide variety of great films to audiences. I feel like I say that every year, but as I scour my selected picks, the only thing these movies share are the odd genre they’re grouped in. Take documentaries, for example. Audiences were…
By: Addison Wylie The Human Rights Watch Film Festival has made me exhale an astonished “wow” twice now. That’s a compliment I haven’t admitted to in a while. It’s absolutely true in the case of Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s harrowing doc Saving Face. The mighty film, which deservedly won 2012’s ‘Best Documentary Short’ Oscar, shows audiences how disturbingly frequent and heartbreakingly affective acid crimes are. Every year, numerous Pakistani women are dosed with different forms of…
By: Addison Wylie I find myself in a predicament trying to review Harry Freeland’s documentary In the Shadow of the Sun. Prior to the film, I was oblivious to the subject matter and found myself perplexed by the harsh reality that stalks Tanzanian albinos. In the Shadow of the Sun is a perfectly fine documentary, but I keep feeling as if I’m rating Freeman’s doc on the content represented rather than the film the material…
By: Addison Wylie When the only bad thing about your feature film debut is its marble-mouthed title, it’s a sign that your ambitious film is close to being sublime. When you get past that weak title, AKP: Job 27 is a really good time at the movies. It treads trodden ground by being centred around a private hitman on a mission in unfamiliar territory (the territory being Toronto), but its Michael L. Suan’s vision of…
By: Addison Wylie Personally, my knowledge of the Federal Reserve goes about as deep as a mall fountain collecting pennies and dimes. Naturally, Jim Bruce’s documentary Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve should be the perfect vehicle to educate people like me who need a bit more information about its history and the possibly bleak future it has ahead of it. Jim Bruce seems like the right filmmaker for the job seeing that he’s…