Films That Matter
Déjà Vu
Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, back in 1976, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader, before becoming household names (that would happen later the very same year with De Palma’s Carrie and Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver), attended a screening of an original print of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and were immediately inspired to co-write a story (with the latter polishing off the screenplay) for a movie that would eventually be titled Obsession – not at all related to this year’s box office craze with the same title, or the review posted here last week called Obsession: A Taste for Fear (1987). Like much of De Palma’s work, this too finds its brainchild from Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as mentioned before, most notably Vertigo.
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Star Pick with Nathan Andrew Jacobs
WANTED Someone to Go Back in Time With MeSafety Not GuaranteedJanuary 1, 2016Sometimes it is not easy to qualify exactly what genre a movie is. Safety Not Guaranteed is one of those films. The 2012 picture was recommended to me by Nathan Andrew Jacobs, the writer/director of the independent film Killing Poe, who stated that it was an excellent Indie film that should be seen by more people.
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Star Pick with Nathan Andrew Jacobs
Sometimes Less is MoreRushmoreDecember 30, 2015Nathan Andrew Jacobs, the writer/director of the independent film Killing Poe, spoke to me at the St. Lawrence International Film Festival back in October. According to him, his film, which built up an unbelievable buzz over the four day festival, has been influenced by the work of Wes Anderson. He mentioned two of Anderson’s movies – The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore as being his favourites, and the latter will be reviewed here today.
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Frankly Speaking, See This Great Comedy
Frank and CindyDecember 19, 2015The closing picture of the St. Lawrence International Film Festival was G.J. Echternkamp’s Frank and Cindy; and it may have one of the more unusual pre-production tales to come out of Hollywood in recent history.
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A Wild Ride
The NymphetsDecember 14, 2015Sometimes the opening credits of a film can signal the type of experience you are in for and this is clearly the case with Gary Gardner’s The Nymphets. The credits are large, bold and frantically paced, which, along with the similarly themed musical score, highlights that we are in for quite the ride.
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Audition Mesmerizes
AuditionDecember 12, 2015Matt Herron’s Audition is an exciting and original quasi-documentary that fuses together footage from an audition process where fifty couples (yes, that’s one hundred actors) vie for the final position of being the leading man and woman in a movie; the footage the couples film are then taken and spliced together to form the narrative movie they are auditioning for.
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Mountain of Madness
Black Mountain SideDecember 10, 2015There has long been a history of films that deal with isolation and seclusion – some being big budget blockbusters while others are low-budget flicks. Movies such as The Shining, Cabin Fever and The Thing each created a sense of impending dread by using these two themes effectively. The low budget Canadian film Black Mountain Side continues the tradition.
