Every Thing Will Be Fine, not great
Movie Review: Every Thing Will Be Fine
German filmmaker Wim Wenders turns the Canadian landscape into a snow globe with 3D technology, and a cast that includes Rachel McAdams, Marie-Josée Croze and the near-omnipresent James Franco
Searching for the legacy of Al Purdy
When film critic Brian D. Johnson retired, he became a filmmaker himself. His first project: a documentary about the difficult, brilliant (and strangely forgotten) Canadian poet
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — “You can argue whether he was our greatest poet, but certainly he was our most Canadian poet. No one wrote about the land the way that he did. If the Group of Seven was a bar band, they might sound like Al Purdy.”
It’s a warm September afternoon and Brian D. Johnson is sitting at an outdoor table at a coffee place he likes near the Toronto International Film Festival. He’s in the sun, hatless, and there is sweat on his forehead. Furthermore, people keep stopping to interrupt us because Johnson is a pretty popular guy in the film festival district, and also because, at this year’s festival, he’s a bit of a celebrity.
He was the film critic for Maclean’s magazine for 28 years. Now, at 66, he has retired (“I’ve had a career. I’m looking for the sweeter ...
Movie review: Remember a moving drama
Atom Egoyan's new movie Remember — about an aging Holocaust survivor plotting revenge — is a moving and surprising feat of storytelling, and featuring a great performance
You can vote on climate films
Young filmmakers from around the world enter festival of short movies about the environment shot on mobile devices
By Jay Stone
There’s a film from France in which a man in horror mask chops down a tree — but it’s really a young girl. There’s an Indian movie that illustrates the coming crisis by showing the hands of a person paying more and more money for smaller and smaller bottles of water, until, a few decades from now, there’s none left. There’s a British film about a man who becomes so irritated by the “mad prophet” of climate change that he kills him, only to discover that he has in fact killed the very air he breathes.
They’re all part of the Mobile Film Festival, a competition that challenged young filmmakers from around the world to make one-minute movies about climate change on their mobile devices. The organizers received 765 movies from 70 countries, and winnowed them down to 75 finalists.
It’s an official event of COP21, the Paris conference ...
Truth is stranger than TIFF
Real-life dramas make their appearance at the Toronto film festival, but sometimes in the movies, facts get in the way of a good story
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Truth occasionally makes an appearance at a Toronto International Film Festival, although usually not in the presence of a movie star (“You were great, Kevin!”) It pops up in a few movies, more or less; not just in documentaries, its natural home, but in the Hollywood versions of real-life stories, usually twisted ever so slightly to make it more interesting, or cinematic, or sellable. Sure, truth is stranger than fiction, but the challenge is to make it more lucrative.
The biggest “true” story at TIFF is Spotlight, the Tom McCarthy version of the real-life expose by the Boston Globe of the scandal of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests (the Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer prize for the story.)
Spotlight — the name of the four-person investigative team at the Globe that ...
TIFF report: So far, so exciting
It’s easy to find things to love at the Toronto film festival, especially if you let Alfred Hitchcock be your guide through the movie magic, writes Jay Stone
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — On the sidewalk of John Street, just around the corner from the theatre where most of the Toronto International Film Festival movies are screened, someone has stenciled the instruction, “Find out what you love and let it kill you.”
It’s a line from Charles Bukowski — who found out that he loved alcohol, then died of it, thus proving the authenticity of his advice, if not the wisdom — and it’s an ideal motto for TIFF, where, if you’re not done in by the pace of the films or the parties, you’re also tempted by the unlimited free doughnuts in the hospitality suite of EOne, the distributor that runs a must-visit salon on a high floor of the nearby Intercontinental Hotel.
Mmmm. Doughnuts. I mean, Movies.
It’s also ...
Cameron Labine climbs mountain of manhood
Interview: Cameron Labine
The director and writer behind the new movie Mountain Men explores the nature of masculinity as he sets two brothers into the Canadian wilderness to cope with simmering sibling issues, and a medical emergency
By Katherine Monk
September 3, 2015, VANCOUVER – Like some of mankind’s most classic adventures, it all started with a great fall. Filmmaker Cam Labine was at a full moon party far up the Squamish River on B.C.’s South Coast. He wasn’t “in his right mind,” started wandering, and took a bad tumble in the dark.
“That was sort of a wake up call for me,” says Labine, sitting in a warm and decidedly cozy café in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. “Growing up in BC, in Maple Ridge, you sort of spend a lot of time outdoors. At least, I spent a lot of time camping and snowboarding and hiking… and you end up feeling comfortable in the mountains, like I belong to them. But with the fall came an epiphany: That I am an urban kid ...
