“Last week one of our regular commenters, Derek Jensen, said he’d be going to see District 9 again rather than anything new. Perhaps this week we can convince him (and you?) to go and see In the Loop, because it’s still playing and still fantastic. It’s at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland Street) daily at 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 7:15 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. The last film we trailed repeatedly was probably the final cut of Blade Runner, so that should let you know how much we like In the Loop.”
“Officially, there is one film you need to see this week. It is In the Loop. Now, we know you’ve heard about nothing but Inglourious Basterds for weeks—if not months—by now, and I admit it’s easy to be swayed by such an obvious option: a clever, entirely fictional take on a defining moment in history, from a director well known for his skill with dialogue.”
“If there’s one thing that Torontoist thought when we saw the trailer for District 9, it was “we can’t wait to play that video game; it looks awesome.” It wasn’t until some time later that we put together that the director, Neil Blomkamp, was indeed the director originally attached to direct the (ill-fated) Halo adaptation (and it doesn’t help that there’s a game called Section 8 due out soon, either).”
“Recently we’ve—rather randomly—been reading someone’s blog reminiscing about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of living with a scholarship basketball player in college, Livin’ Large. It was after reading about ten or so entries we realized that we were, most likely, reading the blog of the film we’ll probably be writing about in five years or so. It kind of dampened our negativity about Julie and Julia, the film version of someone’s blog in which they attempted to chronicle their efforts to cook their way through Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. After all, perhaps the original blog was as pleasingly narrative as Livin’ Large?”
“Viral marketing, eh? It’s generally annoying, but sometimes genius. In fact, sometimes it’s too genius, because Funny People’s viral pièce de résistance, Raaaaaaaandy is clearly ten times funnier than the film it’s supposed to be promoting. Starring Aziz Ansari and supposedly not a razor-sharp takedown of comedy’s bête noire, Dane Cook (hmm, we’ve gone a bit French today), it’s still perfect if you read it that way. God, we hate that guy.”
“Are you sick about being told to watch The Room, yet? If you’d personally known us across the last few years—and you still hadn’t seen it—you would be. An almost personal crusade of Torontoist is to show it to as many people as possible (heck, we even asked Edgar Wright about it, just to be sure), there is no film ranked higher in our esteem as just a real good time (other than possibly Commando), and the only thing that surprises us about there finally being a big screen showing for the film tonight at the Royal is honestly that we didn’t set it up (congratulations to the other local fans who did).”
You should watch The Room. Look, here’s a link to buy it at amazon.com. You have no excuse!
“The problem with discussing a new Harry Potter film—such as the just-released Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince—is that there’s no way to win. If you’re in favour of the series, you’re an adult in arrested development reading poorly written nonsense for kids. If you think it’s poorly written nonsense for kids, you’re a heartless curmudgeon who can’t see all the hidden depth. So to be honest, we’re just going to leave it completely alone. You pretty much know if you want to see it if you’re a fan or not, right?”
“Though we’ve been known to take a bit of an interest in Susan Cole’s writing in this column, it almost seems untoward to add to any more fuel to the still roaring Susan Cole–fire (see what we did there?). But it’s impossible to talk about any of this week’s film coverage without noting the strange sort of dissonance going on in NOW’s film pages, relating specifically to Sasha Baron Cohen’s Brüno. First, we’ve got Norm Wilner’s overwhelmingly negative review, where he claims that ‘it’s shock comedy based entirely on gay panic’—a point that a lot of pre-release coverage implied. Then there’s Susan Cole’s ‘feature’ on the movie, which is, ahem, another review of it.”
“Though Michael Mann has many fans, it would be inaccurate to call us one. Sure, we consider his version of Manhunter to be pretty much the best (Brian Cox’s chillingly reserved Hannibal ‘Lecktor’ far better than Anthony Hopkins’ later scenery chewing). Mann’s recent thrillers have all been turgid, reaching an absolute nadir with Miami Vice—the kind of film you’d imagine would send the series creator into conniptions if that wasn’t, absurdly, Mann himself.”
“What an incredible week for cinema it is if you’ve got a genuine interest in the representation of women in film. It’s the kind of week you could write an entire research paper on. First of all we’ve got Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which uses Michael Bay’s ever-so-male gaze to stare at Megan Fox with the same kind of lust with which it stares at the vehicles the Transformers turn into—an empty collection of moving parts that are probably good for a ride.”
