With a week between me and the official end of the Fantasia International Film Festival it’s time to look back on the films that didn’t get a full review from me but that I enjoyed nonetheless… ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but one of things I love about the Fantasia International Film Festival is that it provides me easy (albeit brief) access to “heartwarming Asian movies” I wouldn’t have a chance to hear about otherwise. This year, my craving was fulfilled—and then some—by Split, directed by Choi Kook-Hee. The plot was a comfortable-yet-still-surprising mashup of every underdog sports movie ever, About a Boy and Rain Man, enhanced by its lush colour palette and killer bowling shots. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I can’t say that I 100% knew what I was getting into when I decided to watch Gintama [2017] at Sunday’s sold-out showing at the Fantasia International Film Festival. I will admit that I did not actually know it was an anime adaptation—though I did have my suspicions when a pair of cosplayers showed up. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Breaking my unspoken rule about seeing films I can watch elsewhere, I went to The Little Hours [2017] – John Baena. Its offbeat, profane humour was an entertaining addition to the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Typically, I try to approach Fantasia showings with more curiosity than hype: you never know which film is going to affect you the most! This attitude was thoroughly rewarded during yesterday’s showing of Brigsby Bear [2017] – Dave McCary.
Day 2 at the Fantasia International Film Festival had me attending a sold out showing of the Australian film Killing Ground [2017] –Damien Power, which as its title suggests, has a whole bunch of death. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Yesterday was the very first day of the Fantasia International Film Festival, and I decided to pop in on opening film The Villainess [2017], being screened with director Jeong Byeong-Gil in attendance. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Greetings gentle readers! I’ve spent the last few weeks riding the hype trains for Hamilton (the musical about the ten-dollar founding father without a father) and the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante (UNIVERSAL STORY, EVERYONE
GO READ THEM) and they took me far, far from Montreal. Luckily, I’ve managed to bring my thoughts a little bit closer to home with Z’Isle.
Z’Isle is a comic, game and web series about the Montreal residents who stayed on-island after the zombie apocalypse hits. I guess these are the people who didn’t make plans to meet their buddies in a Canadian Tire parking lot before heading for the hills, and they seem to be doing relatively okay. The scene starts seven years after the disaster begins, and the city has divided into a series of different strongholds that cooperate in order to survive. The recurring motto is “Trust. Trade. Hope.” ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is one of the times I am forced to admit that I have occasionally been terrible at keeping up with our city’s output — or rather, I spent a serious number of years looking at America and Europe instead of my own backyard.
Neil Smith’s first novel won last year’s QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction (beating out, I might add, Heather O’Neil’s latest collection of short stories), and a quick Google search informs me that his collection of short stories was both hyped and acclaimed when it came out in 2007. A Spanish translation of his story “Isolettes” was recently published by K1n – by someone I know, no less – and yet I still hadn’t gotten around to reading him.
So, here I am. I waffled between the two books – after all, sometimes you’re in the mood for a story, and sometimes you want to sink your teeth into something longer – before reading both. I started with Bang Crunch and wasn’t in the mood to let Smith go, so I carried on. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I don’t even know how I ended up finding this week’s piece of pop culture. I have definitely been on a comic book tear lately, though, and am glad to work something new and local into the rotation…
SO. Through a series of clicks and searches, I somehow ended up finding Ice Cream, a comic being published online by Alex Fellows, a Montreal-based cartoonist. This is not Fellows’ first foray into serialized online publication – his graphic novel Spain and Morocco was also originally posted online, albeit on a more consistent schedule. So far, Fellows has posted chapters one and two of Ice Cream, in June and October respectively. I’m hoping that he continues this… “quarterly” publication schedule and that we’ll be seeing something new in January. Because I think I might be **hooked**. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
