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 (****) 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…
By Alan Hurst I remember reluctantly sitting in a movie theatre in the spring of 1980 to watch Michael Apted’s film version of Loretta Lynn’s autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter”. At that point I didn’t know a lot about the singer except that we shared a birthday (April 14), she sometimes showed up on the TV…
By John H. Foote (****) When one thinks of films that explore time travel, most would think of special effects extravaganzas or tightly written stories such as Back to the Future (1985), most with a tinge of science fiction in them. There is nothing of the kind in Woody Allen’s superb Midnight in Paris, as…
By John H. Foote (*) In the spirit of Battlefield Earth (2000), Cats (2019, and Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977), this was a truly dreadful film, created by great artists, with seemingly everything going wrong. From the creation of what was obviously an ugly place to exist within, the bizarre bad performances of gifted…