Realism has a lot to answer for. For instance, the number of raised eyebrows I’ve received when recommending tv shows like Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even when I talk about them in terms of artistic merit, interesting narrative structure and social relevance, more often than not I get a pause followed [...]
Wipeout makes me laugh. It’s absurd and an appalling waste of water, but I’ve been watching it with a friend ever since we stumbled onto the “blind date” episode in season three and were still tuned in two hours later. It reminds me of how much I enjoyed American Gladiators when I was a kid. [...]
Define reality. I’m not a big follower of reality tv shows, although I find myself sucked in to an episode if I start watching. Sometimes I appreciate the talent and sometimes I’m just rubbernecking at the train-wreck drama or the otherness of other people’s lives, but when my favorite contender on The Glee Project was [...]
Every April at the Gutter, the editors write about something outside their usual domains. This month, Comics Editor Carol Borden writes about stars of action cinema. I like ladies of asskickery, women who can throw a punch or wield a sharp pointy weapon, preferably both. Since it’s April and we mix things up here at [...]
Every April at the Gutter, the editors write about something outside their usual domains. This month, Romance Editor Chris Szego writes about animated movies. When I was a kid, cartoons were a real treat. I didn’t watch much TV, but Bugs Bunny and friends were mandatory viewing. We watched the show as a family, [...]
Every April at the Gutter, the editors write about something outside their usual domains. This month Comics Editor Carol Borden writes about movies. This is not even close to a full retrospective, because while Minoru Kawasaki doesn’t have a huge number of films, many of them are not available with English subtitles and I don’t [...]
This last month at the Gutter, we’ve been mixing things up, with the editors writing outside of their usual domains. This week, instead of romance, Chris Szego will talk about movies or comics. Hey, wait! How about movies AND comics? Or rather, comic book movies? Recently, the theatre’s been a good place for comics. Not [...]
This month we’re mixing it up at the Gutter with each editor writing about something outside their usual domain. This week Carol Borden writes about movies. She can normally be found here. The world is clamoring for more Asian Westerns. Or at least I am. I’m talking Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Westerns. They seem [...]
Ext. THE CITY – When you Least expect it You’re walking. The sidewalk is new, still burning moisture out of the concrete in a slow chemical reaction. You’re aimless. Nothing to do.
It’s been just over a year since I became a partner in the Mayfair Theatre, Ottawa’s oldest operating cinema. We’ve shown a lot of films in that time (we average about 40 a month), and I’ve written the synopsis for almost every one.
I had really hoped that my list of the top 10 films of the decade would be more surprising. Or perhaps I just assumed that I was less predictable. I thought about a lot of other films, some of which you’ll see in my runners-up rundown at the foot of this article, but these are [...]
In the course of making The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Werner Herzog seems to have discovered how to save Nicolas Cage: let him drown.
If the ending of No Country for Old Men left you unsatisfied, the Coen Brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, will drive you insane. Because, although on the surface it seems like a film about how we tell stories to make sense of life, it reveals itself as a film about how stories can’t make [...]
Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is not, thank god, a film about growing up.
“Now, if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you’ve experienced it. But you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your [adjective deleted] telephone. Get real.”
As you might know, if you’ve read my bio here on the Gutter, I’m a partner in Ottawa’s oldest surviving cinema, The Mayfair Theatre. In August, we showed two films that on the surface have little in common: Robert Altman’s neo-noir The Long Goodbye and Woody Allen’s slapstick political parody Bananas. Obviously, though, they do [...]
So, Richard Kelly has a new movie coming out. Entitled The Box, it’s based on a Twilight Zone episode written by Richard Matheson, which is in turn based on a short story, also written by Richard Matheson. And I’m pretty sure there’s an entire article in Matheson’s impact on the screen arts, but this isn’t [...]
(Forecast calls for mild spoilers.) Watching Jody Hill’s Observe and Report, you may find yourself experiencing a sensation of disappointment. If you do, that’s a good thing.
It’s about slapstick, yes. Splatstick, too, of course. And Bruce Campbell, mos def. But to me, Sam Raimi’s films have really always been about the camera.
This month we’re mixing it up at the Gutter, with the editors writing about something outside their usual domain. This week Chris Szego writes about movies. Well, mostly movies. I’m a total chicken. This means I don’t watch anything that smacks of horror. In fact, I tend to close my eyes when the music gets [...]
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