VARIETY PAK
It’s been just over a year since I became a partner in the Mayfair Theatre, Ottawa’s oldest operating cinema. We’ve shown a lot of films in that time (we average about 40 a month), and I’ve written the synopsis for almost every one.
HELLO DOCTOR NAME CONTINUE YESTERDAY TOMORROW
I had really hoped that my list of the top 10 films of the decade would be more surprising. Or perhaps I just assumed that I was less predictable. I thought about a lot of other films, some of which you’ll see in my runners-up rundown at the […]
HIS SOUL’S STILL DANCING
In the course of making The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, Werner Herzog seems to have discovered how to save Nicolas Cage: let him drown. Why am I writing about Nicolas Cage again, after effectively writing him off in a previous column? Maybe because, with his […]
MERE SURMISE, SIR.
If the ending of No Country for Old Men left you unsatisfied, the Coen Brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, will drive you insane. Because, although on the surface it seems like a film about how we tell stories to make sense of life, it reveals itself as […]
MAURICE SENDAK! I’M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND
Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is not, thank god, a film about growing up.
THE LONG WALK HOME
“Now, if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you’ve experienced it. But you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your [adjective deleted] telephone. Get real.”
The Cultural Gutter 