By Alan Hurst (**) One of the few perks of being relegated to our homes over the last few weeks has been the fact that binging a series is no longer a source of guilt. Any new product that pops up on Netflix, Prime or any of the other streaming services is like oxygen these…
By John H. Foote (***) Indulge me. Sit in a chair, hands folded in your lap, sitting erect, head slightly tilted to one side, staring off into space, connecting with no one, making no eye contact with anyone. You gently rock back and forth and speak in a nasally voice. Continue rocking gently, looking at…
By John H. Foote (*) The great classic film King Kong (1933) has been remade twice, once brilliantly in 2005 by Peter Jackson who gave audiences a three-hour adventure with magnificent visual effects and a poignant and heartbreaking Kong. Jackson wisely set his film in the thirties, and recreated the New York of that era…
By Craig Leask In this second in a series on “Corruption in the Movies” I am focusing on movies about Economic Corruption. Economic corruption generally results from the misuse of public power to benefit big business and private interests – generally at a detrimental cost to the average citizen. Although there are countless movies pertaining…
By John H. Foote Val Kilmer has given one, perhaps two extraordinary performances in a career spanning nearly 40 years. In the first he was astonishing as Jim Morrison for Oliver Stone in the film The Doors (1991) which was more a biography of Morrison than it was about the band though, in reflection, what…
By John H. Foote (****) When I saw this masterful film for the first time at TIFF, I believed with every fibre of my being it would dominate the Academy Award nominations, 10, 11, 12 nominations felt right. Rave reviews greeted the film, it seemed to have everything a film needed to be a major…
By John H. Foote (***) In writing about this exceptional Canadian film, I imagined that there are very few readers who have seen it, even more who have never heard of it. I am not in any way trying to be condescending, just honest and realistic, very few Canadian films are known throughout the rest…
By Craig Leask Throughout history corruption has been a major motivating factor in governments, corporations and pretty much any organization that involves money and or power. Historically these acts of corruption have been geographically contained and only negatively affecting the local town, city or region. With globalization, that’s no longer the case. These acts of…
By John H. Foote (**) With the publication of the excellent new book “One Shot – The Making of The Deer Hunter”, I thought I would do two things, the first to go back and re-watch The Deer Hunter (1978), which I did, and the second to revisit Heaven’s Gate, the film which ruined United…
By John H. Foote (****) Arguably the greatest of Canadian novels, Mordecai Richler’s superb study of a young Jewish hustler in Montreal after the Second World War, is a magnificent story about an ambitious, fiercely driven young man to whom the law means nothing, to whom moral decency means even less. Duddy (Richard Dreyfuss) is…