Category: Movies

Photo by Ricardo Diaz, used under Creative Commons license

“And so nevermore shall we see you again.”

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Our pattern on each of the first two nights of this final long weekend of summer has been dinner and a movie. Or, rather: a movie and then dinner.

Friday we took advantage of our TIFF memberships and went to the Lightbox to see Jaws (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on the big screen. Seeing the remastered edition of the film on that big screen was like discovering a whole new layer. The clarity was beautiful, especially in the darker shots (Chrissie getting eaten, Quint in the crow’s nest), and the sound mix was sufficiently improved that I heard the same mispronunciation of “Brisbane” my brother heard when he first saw the remaster. Neither of us had heard it before then in all the many times we’ve watched that movie. Anyway, it was well worth the $6 ticket to see it all bright and shiny, with a bunch of people in the audience who’d never seen it. Nellie had forgotten how funny the movie was, and I’m reminded every single time I watch it that Quint’s Indianapolis speech is one of my favourite scenes in movie history.

After dinner we zipped across the street to Paese for some wine and pizza (roasted chicken, hazelnut pesto, green apple, and goat’s cheese for me; genoa salami, green olives, pecorino, chili and tomato sauce for Nellie), and then hit Bar Hop for a dessert beer — Oast House Bucolic Bastard for Nellie, Dieu du Ciel Aphrodisiaque for me. It was a fine evening right up until Nellie’s shoe blew up on the way home.

Yesterday, after tackling a bunch of condo- and travel-related tasks, we decided to keep the 70s blockbuster theme going and watched Lovelace (imdb | rotten tomatoes). It was just okay. All the actors in it were good, it just didn’t blow me away  come together for me  resonate.

After watching that we walked down the street to the recently-opened Woods, where Colborne Lane used to be, and ate an excellent meal. Nellie had wild digby scallops with parsnip purée, roasted heirloom garlic, green alder, corned beef cheek, followed by Lake Huron pickerel with cauliflower purée, sea asparagus, roasted cauliflower, chanterelles and jus. I had a cold smoked tomato soup with duck confit and goat cheese, followed by the roasted Muscovy duck breast with tatsoi, shallot, sourdough, crispy confit, dried cherries, duck egg béarnaise. The mains were great, but the accompaniments were just outstanding. We paired those mains with a 2011 La Crema Pinot Noir, which fit the bill nicely. We left room for dessert, which came in the form of cinnamon sugar donuts with warm chocolate sauce. It was altogether excellent. Pricey, but I’d happily go back and be a bit more restrained.

We came home, sat on our balcony, admired the view that never gets old, and drank a bottle of 2005 Undercliff Chambourcin, a birthday gift from my brother.

.:.

Photo by Ricardo Diaz, used under Creative Commons license

Photo by mlcastle, used under Creative Commons license

“Wanna fight?”

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It turns out sweltering heat tends to drive up our movie-watching frequency, but also more or less limits it to what we can pull up on demand at home rather than going outside.

Hence, we watched Jack Reacher (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last weekend. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but for two hours it was reasonably entertaining and rarely annoying, which is better than I expected. So there you go.

Last night that sweltering heat finally broke as a short but ferocious storm moved through Toronto:

A similar deluge hit us a few minutes later. We ducked and covered down the street to Triple A for some grub, some beers, and a shot of bourbon. Once the rain broke we took the streetcar to Bar Hop for another pint — Ommegang BPA for Nellie, Indie Alehouse Broken Hispter for me. We left to find nearly everyone on King Street staring up at the weird cloud patterns and colourful sky left behind by the storm.

The evening’s plans weren’t centered around the storm, actually, but around a screening of Only God Forgives (imdb | rotten tomatoes), Nicolas Winding Refn’s followup to Drive. Anyone who had only seen that film and not the rest of Refn’s work probably left the Lightbox theatre somewhat confused. It was slow and quiet and textured and incredibly violent and overall pretty weird. Which is to say, like most of Refn’s movies — the ones I’ve seen, at least. Amos Barshad did a fantastic piece at Grantland yesterday about Refn and his latest film (beware: it’s a little spoiler-y) which they refer to as “An inversion of Valhalla Rising’s Scottish Highlands”. I thought that was accurate — like Mads Mikkelsen’s One Eye, Ryan Gosling’s Julian barely speaks in the film, and violence bursts through these long, droning sequences which were gray and earthy in Valhalla Rising, but raging neon here. The film certainly isn’t for anyone, and may not be for anyone expecting another Drive, but good for Refn for making his movie and not chasing what was likely a multitude of offers to make practically the same again.

Both Nellie and I have been doing work on this Saturday, but watched another dumb action movie before we got started: The Bourne Legacy (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Which was exactly what you think it’s going to be. So, fine, but boring.

.:.

Photo by mlcastle, used under Creative Commons license

 

Photo by Sheila Steele, used under Creative Commons license

“Jack. That’s the name I want.”

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Somehow it’s taken us six years to see Boy A (imdb | rotten tomatoes) after not quite making our cut list at the 2007 TIFF. I really wish it hadn’t taken so long. Not simply because it’s an amazing — moving, troubling, beautiful, unsettling — film, but because it might have been even more jarring to see it before we knew who Andrew Garfield was.

.:.

Photo by Sheila Steele, used under Creative Commons license

 

Photo from BiblioArchives, used under Creative Commons license

“If Spock were here, and I were there, what would he do?” “He’d let you die.”

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I really do love staying in town on May 2-4 weekend. It seems like everyone else in Toronto drives to a cottage somewhere, leaving the downtown core downright civilized for the entire weekend. You can get dinner reservations. Movies aren’t sold out (more on that in a minute). Patios have elbow room. We almost always spend this weekend in the city, and we always love it when we do.

Friday night I grabbed drinks with a few work people on the back patio at The Oxley, which was somehow all but empty. On the way home I stopped for a few more at Volo, which incredibly was not rammed full on a Friday night.

St. Lawrence Market was busy when I got there around 11 on Saturday, but nothing like it’s normal levels of craziness at that time. The Scotiabank theatre — which I’d expect to be a mad house on the opening weekend of a big movie like Star Trek: Into Darkness (imdb | rotten tomatoes) — was fairly sensible. The movie was very good too…I can’t say much without giving away important plot points, but the audience loved. It maybe wasn’t quite on the same level as its predecessor (perhaps because that one was such a surprise) but it was still highly entertaining.

Then a few flights at the Beer Academy (almost empty!), then home, then grilled steaks and a bottle of Tawse 2010 Laundry Cab Franc.

Thanks, Queen Victoria.

.:.

Photo from BiblioArchives, used under Creative Commons license

Photo from Wolf Gang, used under Creative Commons license

“I’m just a little more used to Americans than he is.”

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Django Unchained (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was violent and profane and funny and long, like most Tarantino films. It was also pretty uncomfortable to watch, and I kept thinking about how hard it must have been for the actors to say those lines. It was convincing, though, since I felt pleased every time a slave owner met his end. If you’re not overly sensitive about skulls exploding from gunfire and people being torn apart by dogs, I’d recommend this. And yes, that felt like a very odd sentence to write.

.:.

Photo from Wolf Gang, used under Creative Commons license

 

“Friends, relations, tribe, nation, common people.”

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

I spent most of last week at a conference just outside of Phoenix. This was my view each morning:

Not bad, right? But with this trip coming right on the heels of the previous week’s trip to Boston, I was ready to come back to Toronto and have a couple of quiet weekends. Fortunately while I was away the long Toronto winter finally breathed its last. I arrived home Thursday to find runners and cyclists swarming the waterfront, leaves finally breaking out on trees, and the Canadiens playing their first playoff game.

As sure as those are signs of spring, so too is Hot Docs. My travel schedule kept us from seeing our usual five screenings this year, but we did manage to squeak in a few. First, after a bite and a beer at The Oxley followed by a few spectacular glasses of wine (my ’99 Peter Lehmann Shiraz really stood out) at Opus we took in a late screening of Blackfish. I get emotional every time I think about Tilikum or Dawn Brancheau or pretty much any other part of that film so I’m not going to describe it much more here. I’m just going to say this: SeaWorld can go fuck itself. So can MarineLand. So can anyone who goes there.

After our customary pre-Hot Docs stop on the patio at the Victory Café…

…we hit our second screening: Which Way Is The Front Line From Here: The Life And Time Of Tim Hetherington. It was directed by the author Sebastien Junger, with whom Hetherington had shadowed an army platoon to create a book called War and a documentary called Restrepo. Not long after the documentary was nominated for an Oscar Hetherington was killed in Libya covering yet another war zone. Junger made the documentary to explain who Tim was, why he was so possessed with telling stories this way, and sharing more of his brilliance than we were likely to ever see otherwise.

After that we needed another drink. We made our way (slowly, happily) down to Bellwoods Brewery, which we’d shamefully not yet tried despite it being named the 3rd-best new brewery in the world last year. We had several tasty pints and ate bread and salumi and rosemary fries, and sat in the perfect inside-but-almost-outside weather.

Spring!

 

Photo by erjkprunczýk, used under Creative Commons license

“Is he a very great wizard, or is he more like you?”

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit is almost a part of my family. I’d had it read to me, in parts, multiple times when I was very little and would get sick. I don’t remember, but suspect I was whining that I wanted someone to read to me, and my dad decided that if he was going to read something it’d be something good. I read it myself later, but forgot most of it. I read it again shortly after I moved to Toronto, not long before Peter Jackson began making his Lord Of The Rings trilogy. I rediscovered those books as well, and fell in love with Jackson’s films. So I was more than a little excited when he announced he’d be making a film version of The Hobbit (imdb | rotten tomatoes) as well.

I’ll admit, though, that a crazy schedule kept me from going the first few weekends after its release, after which middling reviews (of the film, and of the 3Dish technology in which it was displayed) discouraged me further. But once again, family intervened: my brother told me the middling reviews centered mainly around the difference in tone of the film vs. the LOTR trilogy…which shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given the difference in tone between the books. So, armed with that knowledge, the convenience of on-demand TV, and a long weekend we settled in to watch it.

And it was pretty good. Not amazing, mind you…just pretty good. It’s suffering a bit from Jackson’s (or the studio’s?) desire to stretch a small book over three long films, but Tolkien packed a lot in those pages. And while I knew Dwarf songs were coming, that doesn’t mean I liked it. It also felt a little like they’ve fallen a bit too in love with the CGI, but not disastrously so.

I’m quite looking forward to the next adventure now though, so…mission accomplished.

.:.

Photo by erjkprunczýk, used under Creative Commons license

Image by GOTSfile, used under creative commons license

“You think I’m not serious just because I carry a rabbit?”

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Here’s how we’ve spent our last 72 hours (work notwithstanding):

  • Yummy beers at Bar Hop
  • The Game of Thrones exhibit at the Design Exchange, which was small, but free, and not at all bad. Just got me even more excited for March 31st.
  • Meat at Triple A
  • Dinner at Richmond Station, our first time back since Nellie’s birthday. We didn’t have a reservation, but they managed to find us a table upstairs…a cool space, since you can see the kitchen preparing the dishes. Just like the first time the food was good, and the service/servers were excellent. It’s quickly becoming one of my very favourite places in the neighbourhood.
  • Watched Seven Psychopaths (imdb | rotten tomatoes), made by the director of In Bruges. Very entertaining. Christopher Walken, man. Just…yeah.
  • Safe House (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was pretty meh, but at least it gave us an early preview of Cape Town.

.:.

Image by GOTSfile, used under creative commons license

“Who are you killing next? Do you take requests? Because I was thinking maybe some Kardashians.”

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Two recent movie watches, one drawing some laughs intentionally, the other not so much.

God Bless America (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was Bobcat Goldthwait’s third feature in the last few years. It’s a funny, if clumsy, cri de couer against the vanity and banality of reality TV, radio shock jocks, bloviating political pundits, and other forms of celebrated hatefulness in popular culture. The best part was how following each killing of a mean person by the everyman protagonist, the media’s attempt to blame something simple and headline-y (terrorists! violent movies!) rather than look for a pattern. Anyway, it’s a nice — though extremely violent — anti-stupid fantasy for those of us who hate TMZ and Glenn Beck.

Nellie was determined to watch the remake of Red Dawn (imdb | rotten tomatoes), even though it carries a 12% rating and was rewritten and delayed for ages. I like how Rotten Tomatoes summed it up: “The rebooted Red Dawn lacks the original’s topicality, but at least pays tribute in delivering the same short shrift to character development and general logic.” I mean, they didn’t even leave in the iconic scene — the one good thing about the original — of hundreds of parachutes falling quietly to the ground outside the school’s windows. Instead, we get a cutting-room-floor scene from Friday Night Lights and a Camaro with a minigun mounted on top. Blech.

Photo by boyce duprey, used under creative commons license

“It’s all a deep end.”

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Like me, many of you probably remember an awful movie coming out in the mid-90s called Judge Dredd (imdb | rotten tomatoes), in which Sylvester Stallone droned “I AM THE LAW” and all but ruined the character for anyone who’d read the comic book. I wasn’t even aware it had been a comic book — it was bigger in the UK than here — until Dredd (imdb | rotten tomatoes) showed up in last year’s TIFF lineup…Midnight Madness, specifically, which made sense given the violence on offer.

I hesitate to call it a remake — what I remember of that awful Stallone movie bears little resemblance to Dredd, by all accounts a much more faithful depiction of the original character. It was far from a great movie, and will be far too gory for some people’s tastes, but was a solid little Saturday afternoon good(ish)-guy-vs-very-bad-guy flick.

.:.

Photo by boyce duprey, used under creative commons license