THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
By Aren Bergstrom February 11, 2012
It is very tricky to properly portray children on film. They usually come across as either miniature adults or irritating idiots — both inaccurate portrayals of real-life kids. It takes a film as sensitive and observant as Monsieur Lazhar to portray children as they really are.
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards and based on a one-person play by Évelyne de la Chenelière, Philippe Felardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar is a French-Canadian film exploring grief, education and how teachers influence the lives of their students.
By Aren Bergstrom February 1, 2012
Some people find it impossible to take spy thrillers from the ’30s seriously. Apparently playwright Patrick Barlow is one such person.
Barlow’s latest play The 39 Steps is a comedic take on the 1915 spy novel by John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, who was the 15th Governor General of Canada. His novel was adapted into the popular movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The novel and film were thrillers, meant to captivate the reader or viewer with their classic wrong-man plot and devious German villains.
Barlow’s play may keep the exact plot of the film, but his goal isn’t to thrill the audience. It’s to make them laugh.
By Aren Bergstrom January 28, 2012
There seem to be two different versions of director Steven Soderbergh.
One version is the director of the Ocean’s movies, Out of Sight and Contagion who seems to be able to make standard Hollywood fare better than most other directors. The other is the indie wunderkind who broke onto the scene with Sex, Lies, and Videotape and has continued experimenting with the cinematic form through movies like The Limey, Full Frontal and The Girlfriend Experience.
Surprisingly, Haywire, a female-centric action movie starring mixed-martial arts fighter Gina Carano as a double-crossed black ops freelancer, is a product of the experimental Soderbergh.
By Aren Bergstrom January 19, 2012
Not every upstart band in Saskatoon has an indie music bent and eyes CBC Radio 3 as its goal. Sometimes bands are purely driven by their interest in the music, in the effect it has on an audience and in having a good time doing what they love.
This is the case with Misterfire, a genre-defying band with ska and funk elements who are releasing their debut album at Louis’ on Jan. 21. Refusing to pin themselves down musically and aim only for a niche audience, Misterfire’s hope for their album is just to spread the music and get their product to a larger audience.
By Aren Bergstrom January 11, 2012
The winter movie season in January and February always feels like a letdown. This is to be expected after the abundance of middle-brow, awards season films that flood the cinemas around Christmas. But there’s another, perhaps more obvious, reason for this. Most of the movies the studios release in January are terrible.
Looking at the past three years of January releases, you begin to see a trend for the month’s releases. The winter movie season is filled with cheap horror movies, shallow romantic comedies and bigger films that obviously displeased the studios and have no box office potential.
By Aren Bergstrom January 5, 2012
From alien invasion movies, to documentaries, to classic children’s tales revisited, just because it’s not a huge Hollywood blockbuster, doesn’t mean a film is not worth your time. Here’s a list of movies that skipped the multiplex but still deserve your attention.
By Aren Bergstrom January 4, 2012
It’s hard to imagine a heroine as peculiar and intriguing as Lisbeth Salander. She speaks in brief, monotone monosyllables. She dresses like a member of some kind of underground Goth band. She is a genius computer hacker with a photographic memory. She’s practically a sociopath. She’s anything but conventional. But, basic plot aside, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a conventional film.
By Aren Bergstrom December 19, 2011
In recent years, there have been few national cinemas as intriguing and accomplished as South Korean cinema.
Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, the directors of Oldboy and The Host, are among the world’s finest directors of genre film. While Lee Chang-dong isn’t a genre filmmaker and is not quite the same caliber a director as his South Korean brethren, his latest film, Poetry is the kind of complex, quiet character study that you won’t find in North America.