February 2012
27 posts
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Let's build some flats! →
The pretense of handymanability? The desire to buff up my dude-cred and spend some time in the pine-fumed canyons of Home Depot? Nope, building flats is just that easy. Team ‘Stream had me out to the workshop last week to build some flats for the (yet un-re-titled) elevator movie, and we rolled our efforts into the Film Lab’s ongoing desire to teach you how to do everything on a...
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“BECAUSE ‘WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE’ DIDN’T COMPROMISE.
...”
– I could pull out line after line after line of Film Critic Hulk’s epic, monumental “Why You Love Movies” piece. I could pull them out, write an essay about each one, and still not accomplish as much as this writer has achieved right here. And he’s a Hulk.
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Lost and found
It is still very much on my mind, or can be; that show, my favourite show of the decade, the one that has been reduced down, in its two-year absence, from a resonant cultural touchstone and gobble-me-up water cooler addiction, to our current popular shorthand for - yes, pace George R.R. Martin - “fucking up the ending.” I think Damon Lindelof’s therapist is going to be in good...
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Chronicle: The Inevitable Multi-Camera Video... →
Because sometimes my regular fucknuttery isn’t enough.
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Mamo #239: Neesonomics →
2012 is starting out surprisingly strong, isn’t it? We look at the just-released Chronicle, and the notion of “found footage” movies in general, and then step back by a week and examine the reborn career of Liam Neeson, c/o The Grey.
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2-Minute Critic: Chronicle →
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Review: Chronicle →
It seemed enviable and obvious as soon as I saw it, which usually means it’s a good idea. Make a movie about three regular teenaged boys getting superpowers, and follow what such boys would actually do with them; make it “cheap” using the found-footage/we-accidentally-videotaped-a-movie trope of Blair Witch / Cloverfield (though the veneer of “on the cheap” vanishes by Chronicle’s grand finale);...
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My elevator movie needs a new title.
Look, it was called The Sub Stream when I wrote it, for reasons that are actually relevant to the content - i.e. we actually get to see the actual sub stream - but obviously, calling a movie The Sub Stream and making it at The Substream with the guy from The Substream is just fuckin’ confusing.
So: my movie needs a new title. Colloquially we’ve been calling it “the elevator...
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Re-view: The Innkeepers →
The Innkeepers goes wide this weekend. I saw the film in the fall at the Toronto After Dark film festival, and blogged about it for The Substream.
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January 2012
39 posts
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Watched: Kes, Hooper, Kuroneko, Adolescents in the...
I’m hunting and pecking - old film prints and new Criterion disks, not a bad way to burn off the tail end of a bad month. I caught up to Hooper at last, which was satisfying after all the Buddy Joe Hooker love at ActionFest last year, but I found the film inconsequential and broad. I pushed from there to Kuroneko from the Criterion Collection, having been quite thrilled by Onibaba several...
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Review: The Grey →
The Grey is a triumph of mismarketing. It pays off the collateral of Taken and Unknown – Liam Neeson’s late-career, out-of-nowhere, more-than-welcome transformation from Serious Actor into Charles Effing Bronson – by luring Neeson’s new audience into a movie built on slyly different intentions.
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A fracas at the premiere screening of The Woman in...
It goes like this: I find out, at around 4:30 on Thursday afternoon, that I’m going to the Woman in Black screening (screening time is 7:00), Daniel Radcliffe in attendance. The screening, hosted by Alliance-Atlantis and held at the Scotiabank theatre, is besieged upon my arrival by Radcliffe fangirls, but I encounter no trouble entering the theatre, proceeding to Alliance’s ticket...
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Mamo #238: Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud →
The Boys of Mamo return on Oscar Nomination Tuesday to talk about what the hell just happened, i.e. the same thing that happens every year.
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Girl, Interrupted: David Fincher and Jeff... →
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Watched: Solaris, In the Dust of the Stars,...
ATTACK THE BLOC kicked off at the Lightbox this week, the first strike in TIFF’s roaring winter season, which Matty Price* rightly described as being programmed as if they were wondering if anyone was looking. Sasha and I scampered down to the BLB after the Haywire sneak on Thursday night to kick things off rightly with Solaris, which was a goddamned lead-lined prison of a movie for the...
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A Tale of Two Sparrows
This deserves a second look:
This was Bex’s Christmas present to me. (I got her a book or something.) She made this herself. This is a crocheted Jack Sparrow, and it takes me completely aback. I posted a photo of this a couple of days after Christmas, in the dead zone where all of social media was either asleep or drunk. Now I’m posting it again. I’ll post it again and again,...
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The Toy Report: 2011
Being the annual recap of the best toys I bought in the past year.
I was all fixed to post my blah-blah about my new favourite thing ever, when I realized that I’d omitted the customary year-end toy survey, for which the internet is certainly not crying out, but which allows a sense of order to me. And so here they are - the best of my collection, 2011:
#1: Thor - Hot Toys Movie...
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Review: Haywire →
I’ve always assumed the long-mooted, never arriving Wonder Woman feature film was a logistical impossibility for no greater reason than that I simply didn’t believe any human woman could be found who could play her; or at least, I didn’t believe it until I was watching Gina Carano ass-hand her way through Haywire.
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2-Minute Critic: Red Tails →
Video for Red Tails posted at The Substream. Or, read my written review.
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Review: Red Tails →
George Lucas is such a dimwit as a storyteller at this point that he could probably find a way to fuck up a phone call.
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Job update: Senior Learning Specialist
I’m pleased to announce that I have taken a new contract at Telus, through the end of January 2013, as a Senior Learning Specialist. I’ll still be working with Continuous Learning, but will be moving into instructional design for more complex projects, along with driving strategy for social media, social learning, and our e.training site’s development.
As previously reported,...
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Mamo #237: Who Owns What? →
What do Yol, George Lucas, and the Stop Online Piracy Act have in common? They have this episode of Mamo, for one thing.
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