“Just watch and report back, it’s that simple,” intones the rather tenebrous and passive voice of Parker’s employer over the telephone. Parker (Lindsay Farris) is a rather plebeian private investigator who is a bit of a wreck as of late, owing to the death of his young son and the failed marriage that accrued after […]
Month: September 2015
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10 Lesser-Known 1960s European Films Worth Your Time
While terrific boutique labels like the Criterion Collection have done wonders to educate the film watching public on many of the heavy hitters of 1960’s European cinema like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, there are still large swathes of the decade that are relatively undiscovered by Western audiences. The French nouvelle vague has reached household […]
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon – VIFF 2015 Review
Refracted through a wistfully nostalgic lens, Douglas Triola’s wonderfully titled documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is an entertaining and often aggrandizing look back at the once popular publication. Fans of the now defunct satirical counterculture magazine that reached its zenith in the 1970s, and fizzled out by the late […]
Slackjaw – VIFF 2015 Review
What begins as a baffling yet amusing string of non sequitur vignettes, shot rough and strenuous in a camera-verite fashion, eventually and astonishingly is made coherent in Zach Weintraub’s audacious arthouse alternative, Slackjaw. Something of an anomaly on the American indie scene, Weintraub (Bummer Summer, You Make Me Feel So Young) delights in awkward social […]
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20 Alternative Romantic Comedies You Must Watch
As a genre, romantic comedies are rather unloved, if not downright hated. Occasionally commercially successful but rarely critically acclaimed, they are a guilty pleasure, something to you dare not admit to actually liking. Blame the over sentimentality, the rigid commitment to formula but the majority of rom-coms are tired and uninspired. But when the genre […]
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The 15 Greatest Cross-Gender Performances in Movie History
Throughout the history of acting, cross-gender performances used to be a common thing. From ancient Greek chorus to Japanese theater kabuki, the performers used to cross-dress and portray a character of the opposite sex. Nowadays, many things may have changed but cross-gender portrayals are not extinct from theatrical nor filmic representations and are very likely […]