The dark recesses of TIFF19 and some great expectations
Movies: #TIFF19
Smelling something familiar in the air? It’s the gentle fragrance of auteurism, leavened with the sharp odour of Oscar bait. In other words, it’s the dawn of TIFF19. Jay Stone places his bets on Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman and Ed Norton’s directorial debut as a detective with Tourette’s.
By Jay Stone
SOMEWHERE ON THE WAY TO TORONTO — And here we go again, heading to the Toronto International Film Festival with a suitcase packed with black clothes and a head filled with dark hopes. Will our feet hold up? Can we stay awake through those evening screenings? Will we ever eat dinner before midnight? Did someone remember to pack the Lipitor?
Also: Will the movies be wonderful?
Some of them always are, but you never know: the hot buzz titles can land with a clunk, while the unknown thing you walk into because you have nothing else to do or the title grabs you — I always remember the unheralded documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business as the ...
Canary Islands provide a volcanic perch on life’s big picture
Travel: Canary Islands, Part Two
When you’re a senior tourist, it’s not easy to travel and often harder to trust, but there’s safety in a group -- and often a police escort -- through streets where pickpockets prey upon open backpacks and dangling cameras.
Visiting the Canary Islands without a flap
Travel: Canary Islands
The Spanish archipelago off the coast of Africa offers a unique blend of imported white sand beaches from the Franco era, a 1000-year-old fig tree, and a food mix that includes authentic tapas and branded American burgers.
Welsh movies — yes, and there are a lot of them — come to Ottawa
By Jay Stone
OTTAWA — The most famous Welsh film ever made is probably How Green Was My Valley, the sentimental 1941 portrait of a growing up in coal mining town that was directed by American-born John Ford and starred Walter Pidgeon, the pride of St. John, New Brunswick, and Maureen O’Hara from Dublin. Everyone in the movie spoke English with an Irish accent. It was, however, filmed in Wales.
How Green Was My Valley — which won the Best Picture Oscar that year, beating Citizen Kane — was just one of many movies throughout the years that have been set, or sometimes just filmed, in Wales. Even more have featured Welsh-born actors: the country has contributed a mighty roster of stars to the world cinema, including Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ray Milland and a current Oscar nominee, Christian Bale.
But there’s another Welsh movie industry as well, that tells stories of the country, often in the Welsh language. ...
At #TIFF18, it’s all about the music
Movies: #TIFF18, Toronto International Film Festival
The soundtrack of movies can leave you with the exhilaration of the dance floor, or bring you down into the existential angst of neo-noir
By Jay Stone
(September 8, 2018) TORONTO — There was a great moment at the movies this morning, near the end of Gloria Bell, Sebastian Lelio’s English-language remake of his own 2013 drama Gloria. Julianne Moore, replacing Chilean actress Paulina Garcia in the original, stars as a 50ish divorcee — are they still called that? — who has a productive but somewhat lonely life that she spices up by going to dance clubs and letting herself get lost in the candy sounds of disco. A romance with a divorced man (John Turturro), who seems not quite totally divorced, disrupts her balance, but in the final scene, we see Moore back on the dance floor, raising her arms and swaying from side to side as Laura Branigan sings the old hit Gloria.
You can sometimes forget the importance of music in ...
#TIFF2018: Skipping the lineups
Movies: #TIFF18, Toronto International Film Festival
Our correspondent finds ways to see all the Donald Trump-themed films he wants, and with no waiting required
By Jay Stone
(September 8, 2018) TORONTO — Today we invoked another Toronto film festival rule for the retired critic, which is that we don’t stand in line for anything. This is partly because life is too short, and partly because you might not get in anyway and so you’ve used up some of your precious remaining minutes idly shifting from one leg to the other, indulging in the futile hope of getting a seat that will probably be in the front row, and standing behind people who talk in bored nasal voices about their film festival experiences. One tries not to listen, but one is human, after all, and one is in danger of grinding away all the remaining enamel on one’s teeth.
The downside of this guideline is that one doesn’t get to see a lot of movies that everyone else is dying to see, which is perhaps not ...
TIFF 2018: Wandering in and out of this and that
Movies: #TIFF18, Toronto International Film Festival
In which our retired film critic decides at the last minute what he wants to see and discovers he's chosen an eight-hour epic.
By Jay Stone
(September 7, 2018) TORONTO — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, or, in the case of the Toronto film festival, ceaselessly into the next lineup.
People who come to film festivals to scout movies for other festivals, or who own theatres and are looking for something to show in them, move through Toronto’s cinemas like sharks, dipping their fins, as it were, into this auditorium and that. In a few minutes they can decide whether what they’re watching is worth the acquisition. Then it’s off to feed in the next hunting ground.
Film critics, on the other hand, are expected to do some research, make a schedule, and head off to the likely movies. You stick it out because you might be interviewing the stars, or the director, and they might ...
BlacKkKlansman gets under the all-white hood
Movie Review: BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee's movie, based on the true story of a black policeman who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, focuses on America’s enduring cultural history of racism.
