For any halfway sensible TV viewer, “reality TV” is usually mentioned with a broad verbal wink, since the inference suggested by its very name is a kind of semantic gag that is presumed to tie viewers and the people who make it together in an agreed complicity. Simply put, the stuff is heavily staged, out of economic and dramatic necessity, and has [...]
Before I say anything else about Game Of Thrones, this Spring’s big-budget HBO epic miniseries, it has to be understood that there’s nothing family friendly about the show. Full of blood and sex, full-frontal nudity, incest, animal cruelty and some wildly explicit language, it almost seems like the producers, having seen quality cable push the boundaries with each new series, are attempting [...]
While heroes pay the bills in Hollywood, the creative class labouring in movies and TV are in thrall to anti-heroes, a mad love reinforced in the hymns sung by critics hardwired to prefer a menacing, flawed protagonist to a clear-browed, virtuous one. Batman versus Superman, if you will, and a loaded choice ultimately corrosive to the audience’s moral clarity, especially [...]
Editor’s Note: There are book titles and quotes in this column that use language that some reader’s might find offensive. Despite my wife’s best efforts, I never had much time for the popular parenting textbooks that ended up on our bookshelves – the “What To Expect When You’re...” series and their like, all written in useful gulps of text, with diagrams and [...]
At the end of January of this year, writer Yann Martel mailed his last book to Stephen Harper. For over three and a half years, the prize-winning author of The Life of Pi has sent a biweekly letter to the Prime Minister, enclosed with a book that he hoped our country’s elected leader would read, in the hope that it would – [...]
The opening scene of Mother and Child, a 2009 box office dud recently recalled to life on DVD, opens with a scene that’s pitifully familiar. A boy and a girl – teenagers, and just barely at that – sit on a bed kissing; it’s the bad hair and bellbottom ‘70s, but it could really be any time since what’s next is dramatically [...]
It’s a rare film that justifies its running time, and if over two decades’ worth of movie reviewing has taught me anything, it’s that every film, no matter how good, is probably too long. That proved itself once again with The Social Network, one of the films tipped early on as an Oscar favourite when it was released this fall. It’s just [...]
There are no accidents in popular culture. Trends and fads might crest with seeming randomness, but do not be fooled – every hit movie, TV show or book and the copycats in its wake are meant to scratch some cultural itch. The motivations might be obscure at the time, but hindsight reveals all, so I cannot help but anticipate just what led [...]
“Welcome to Earth – population zero,” goes the ominous tagline at the start of every episode of Life After People, the History Channel-produced documentary series that aired its second season just recently in Canada on History Television. It’s our cue to get cozy and enjoy an hour’s worth of empty cities falling to pieces, if they’re not inundated by rivers and seas, [...]
There’s a scene early on in The September Issue, a recent documentary about Vogue magazine’s doorstopper-sized fall edition, which must have made the filmmakers gasp when they knew they had it captured. At Paris fashion week, an unnamed but very chic-looking woman stage-whispers in French into the ear of a highly improbable man named Andre Leon Talley that “Anna is the most [...]
I envy people who’ve maintained a constant connection to their faith, but not just for the bedrock of moral certainty that’s been beneath their feet their entire life. If you haven’t walked a meandering path all over the political and spiritual landscape, you probably won’t have experienced the panic that overwhelms you the morning after you’ve returned from that tacitly secular, hyperbolically [...]
Esquire magazine’s motto is “man at his best,” but if you only watched movies and television, the last couple of decades would have made it harder for you to figure out just when, particularly, a man could count on hitting his golden years – that plateau where health, wealth and hard-won wisdom combine at a tolerable average. It certainly isn’t the gormless, [...]
The scientist Stephen Hawking recently returned to TV screens with a new miniseries, his first since 1997, and like all eager presenters, he took the time to do some interviews to publicize the show. The series, Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe, is the sort of symphonic, planet-hopping science entertainment that it seems so much easier to produce in an age of flashy [...]
Among most men of my acquaintance – and this probably says more about my friends than anything else – the most eagerly anticipated TV series this year is HBO’s The Pacific, which will started airing last month (after this column was submitted). It’s a companion piece to the critically-lauded Band of Brothers, the 2001 miniseries that followed a group of paratroopers from [...]
There are a few rules about reviewing movies that no one can teach you – that only become evident after you’ve sat through many hundreds of hours of films you probably didn’t enjoy and written reviews that, taken as a whole, provide evidence of a life in the midst of being wasted. Some apply generally to the whole history of moviemaking and [...]