Author: Jason Gorber

A DANGEROUS METHOD

Cronenberg has spent much of his career delving into the darker depths of cinematic expression, from exploding heads to stomach vaginas, from typewriters talking out of their assholes to the fetishisation of car accidents. Over the decades, then, audiences have been conditioned as to what to expect from a Cronenberg film. What’s most interesting about […]

A FUNNY MAN

Humour is a funny thing, as it were. Too broad or slapstick, it appears childish and fatuous. Too dependent on wit and the charm can get lost in translation. A FUNNY MAN betrays its title in a number of ways. This is a high concept biopic of Dirch Passer, a celebrated post-vaudevillian that seems, in […]

AIRIRANG

I admit upfront to having a soft spot for Kim Ki Duk – ever since THE ISLE showed me things I’d never seen before (and images too brutal and beautiful to forget), I’ve followed his releases as they’ve shown up year to year at TIFF. DREAM, his most recent fiction film, was made in 2008. […]

MELANCHOLIA

In Von Trier’s latest, we’re greeted again with another luminous, cinematic prologue shaped in a similar fashion to his previous work ANTICHRIST. Sweeping, poignant scenes play out to a balletic score, with super slow motion giving and eerie, monstrous quality to many of the images. When we finally see the world consumed in a fiery […]

NEIL YOUNG – GREENDALE Q&A, TIFF2003

From the Filmfest.ca archives, this little slice of TIFF history as NY talks about his favourite album, musical film, and pirate (without cheating and picking himself for all three!), and discusses his love for the Uptown theatre where his 8mm epic played to a packed house. [Review of the film HERE]

Roger and Me

Well, the treats from TIFF10 keep coming – months after giving up, the kind person that took the shot above finally sent me the photo below, taken just after the Twitter-oriented event that Mr. Ebert was conducting wrapped up. This was not my first introduction to the man – Since the late 90s, I’d fairly […]

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector

This made-for-BBC doc is a strange beast indeed, as compelling for what it doesn’t show as for what it does. It is basically several films in one, the first a protracted and rather revealing interview with the man that more than almost anyone shaped popular music production at the heyday of Rock and Roll (Spector […]

Star Wars coming to Blu Ray

A nicely edited piece on the forthcoming release of the “Holy Hexology”, coming to Blu in September, 2011.

Psycho

Even if you’ve not seen the scene as part of the film, it’s near impossible some 50 years on to not know what happens:  The woman is taking a shower, a shadow forms on the other side of the curtain, she screams, a knife is raised, then STAB! CUT! SLICE! Blood is trickling down the […]

RED

If there are two genres that have been well tread in the last few decades they’re comic book movies and post-cold war Spy flicks.  With RED we get a bit of both worlds, a tounge-in-cheek action flick based on graphic novel source written by Warren Ellis (I’m assured by my comic nerdy friends this is […]

Breathless

Qu’est ce que c’est “dégueulasse”? It seems almost churlish some half century later to be picking apart Breathless (À bout de souffle) If there’s a film that’s critic proof, it’s this; after all, it’s the brain child of Truffaut and Godard, esteemed critics themselves who decided to rewrite the language of cinema.  These mavericks got […]

Balada Triste

With an 11th day tacked onto the end of the fest, the last Midnight Madness screening no longer provides the same sense of closure. Instead, my final film of TIFF10 was this delightful, intense, batshit crazy clown film from Spain. Set in the late 30’s, a man in full clown garb is pulled from a […]

Submarine

SUBMARINE is a Welsh coming of age film involving a precocious 15-year old who’s trying simultaneously to keep his family together and lose his virginity to his pyromaniac love interest. From first time director Ayoade, the film mixes a cool soundtrack (there are a slew of Arctic Monkeys tracks littered throughout) with the same type […]

The Conspirator

If there’s an award at this year’s TIFF for the most strained allegorical film, THE CONSPIRATOR would take the cake. Ostensibly about the trial of the conspirators who committed the Lincoln Assassination, the work focuses on Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the burdened mother of some of the key participants and former landlady to John Wilkes […]

The Debt

Madden crafts a throwback thriller, this one throwing the Mossad/Nazi Hunter genre on its head. Having two sets of cast play in the respective time periods, we follow as the stories of past glories are uncovered to be less than true, with deadly ramifications taking place. There’s a fabulous cast in THE DEBT occupying both […]

Fire of Conscience

Dante Lam closes this year’s Midnight Madness slate with a slick cop drama that owes much to the gloss and energy of Michael Mann’s HEAT. The convoluted plot involves a cop trying to battle the forces that are working to stain the name of his partner, and as he pieces the clues to solve a […]

Tracker

At the turn of the 20th century, as Kiwi troops return home form the Boer War, a Maori sailor (Temuera Morrison) witnesses a murder in a barn and must flee as he’s being framed for the violence. A Boer soldier (Ray Winstone) is enlisted to help track the sailor through the wilderness, making for a […]

Ron Hynes – The Man of a Thousand Songs

It’s telling that one of the more memorable moments of this doc is a pretty sordid joke told repeatedly over the course of it by the subject of the film, Newfie folky Ron Hynes. It’s one of those groaners, chuckle-funny at first, but sad and pathetic by the end. This sentiment fits the subject as […]

Boxing Gym

It’s convenient when the title of the film gives you the entirety of the summary of the film. Granted, knowing a bit about the works of Wiseman. While he dismisses the term as pretentious, the school of verité is at least a convenient short cut to describing his work. As he dismisses those notions as […]

Make Believe

Treading the same ground as the sweet and charming SPELLBOUND (a title which would have served this film just as well), MAKE BELIEVE follows the fates of a number of participants in the Teen World Championship of Magic. We meet the pretty blonde from California, the 19 year old from the Midwest making his last […]

You Are Here

Cockburn’s YOU ARE HERE is the most engaging type of so-called “avant garde” film – sure, it’s full of crazy ideas and bizarre set pieces, but at its core, under the layers of metaphysics and audience-required detective work, it remains a lot of fun. The work is a thought experiment writ large, with strange and […]

Stake Land

Yes, yet another take on the Vampire genre, but STAKE LAND eschews the glitter and silliness that plagues TWILIGHT, and even the gothic lust of TRUE BLOOD, and instead borrows from the likes of Cormack McCarthy. Essentially an “Underground Railroad” trek, we’re thrown almost immediately into mayhem, as the entire family of our protagonist is […]

Beautiful Boy

Set in the same festival as RABBIT HOLE, this “other” film about grieving parents takes a very different tact. This film sets itself apart by setting up an enormous twist – the tragedy that has taken the life of this child was done at the hands of their child. Coming to terms with their own […]

Viva Riva!

TIFF has gone to great lengths over the years to bring us cinema from the African continent, much to its credit. We often get glimpses of rustic life, or touching and/or depressing documentaries about this or that plight, but rarely do we get films that on their face can be considered, well, good. With VIVA […]

Dao Jian Xiao (The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman)

Midnight Madness often showcases a number of crazy films originating in Asia, but BUTCHER… is somewhat unique in that it originates from Mainland China. This provides a unique aesthetic to the film, incorporating a number of elements that differ quite a bit even from ostensibly similar films coming out of Hong Kong. The story is […]

Monsters

One of the things that set JURASSIC PARK apart from other monster movies occurs early in the film, when the characters are introduced to the wonders of the animals that they’re encountering for the first time. Sure, the running/biting elements come to play later on, but it’s this sense of wonder that’s often dropped in […]

I Saw The Devil

Returning to TIFF after the gonzo fun that was THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD, Ji-woon Kim brings us a creepy, stylish, extremely impressive take on the serial killer film. Casting the “good guy” from OLD BOY, Choi Min-sik, into a child-stealing psychopath is a small bit of genius, with his cherubic face all […]

Insidious

James Wan, last here for the 2004 Midnight Madness with the first of his SAW films, returns with what amounts to a classic haunted house film. When two young parents moves into their new house, their son gets into an accident and slips into a coma. The parents then feel they have to protect him […]