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 16, 2012
Some plays are so insightful, so vivid and so entertaining that they demand to be turned into films. Or so some producers must think. Unfortunately, what works in the theatre may not always work in the cinema.
Such is the case with Carnage. I suspect the Tony Award-winning play by Yasmina Reza may be far more hard-hitting and hilarious than its cinematic counterpart. Nevertheless, while it may not be as vicious as it tries to be, Roman Polanski’s Carnage has enough dark humour and mischievousness to make up for whatever was lost in translation.
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 Nicholas Kindrachuk February 3, 2012
When the words “true story” are associated with any film, particularly one with the name of a historical figure in the title, I tend to be overcome with weariness. The fear with biopics of this nature is that they are going to be completely dry and run on for an excessive amount of time. Sometimes watching a biopic feels more like reading a textbook than experiencing actual entertainment.
Luckily, Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn does not fall into this nasty trap that similar movies often find themselves in.
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 Jenna Mann January 27, 2012
Pink Ribbons, Inc. emphasizes the realities behind corporate breast cancer awareness campaigns.
Directed by Léa Pool and produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the documentary explores breast cancer culture and what happens to all the funds raised from pink-ribbon products. It focuses specifically on the marketing schemes big corporations use on a public frightened by the realities of the disease and eager to be comforted and reassured that if victims fight hard enough they will beat the odds. At the same time, they irresponsibly imply that those who die of cancer do not try hard enough.
By Helana Rosales January 21, 2012
Fred Allen, the former captain of the Death House in Huntington, Texas, sat across from acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog during an interview, telling him that he had overseen over 125 executions in his time.
“We were doing about two per week,” Allen said heavily, “and that was getting tiresome.”
It’s hard enough to imagine a crime fit for capital punishment, or the state having a legal right to end a human life for such a crime, but to consider everyone else involved — not just the family, but the people that seem to fade into the background of the situation — is something unexpected.
By Bethany Godhe January 21, 2012
Although Redline is the craziest kind of anime film, you don’t need to be into anime to like this movie. You just need to be a fan of insane movies.
The film screened Jan. 7 at the Broadway Theatre, sponsored by the Dark Bridges Film Festival. The screening coincided with the release of Redline on Blu-ray on Tuesday Jan. 10.
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.