Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight deadline, I haven’t had a lot of time to write down notes on what I’ve been watching the past couple […]
For several years now, there have been dire predictions of the inevitable demise of movies on disk. In a world rapidly assigning more reality to the digital “cloud” than to actual physical objects, disks are supposedly quaintly old-fashioned. People, we are told, want instant access to everything on whatever device they happen to have closest […]
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
I recently started work on a documentary about the history of movie theatres and movie-going in Winnipeg. A brief article about the project in the Winnipeg Free Press has brought an amazing number of calls and emails from a wide range of people who have quite passionate memories of the old neighbourhood theatres and the […]
In their joint commentary track on the Masters of Cinema DVD/Blu-Ray release of the newly restored Metropolis, David Kalat and Jonathan Rosenbaum express some concern that this new version will cause the disappearance of all previous versions. Why should this be a problem? After all, the “restored” Metropolis is the closest we’ll ever get to […]
I’m addicted to DVDs, and like many addicts I’m somewhat ambivalent about my substance of choice. Back in the day (and I am old enough to use that expression) I got a pleasure out of watching movies that I don’t seem to get so much any more. In some ways this seems strange because in […]