Category Archives: Movies

Pour toujours? Not so much

TVA Films has released the trailer for "Pour toujours... les Canadiens", a kinda-fictional movie about the team's 100th anniversary that will be released this Christmas. It stars Saku Koivu, which means it's already out of date.

You had me at “Good Morning Vietnam”

(via Lagacé). Though I really have to disagree for their selection from Die Hard.

But I want interstellar diplomacy to be debated in endless detail


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

You know, as funny as this is, it's also kind of why I'm not crazy about this Star Trek movie. If I wanted to watch Armageddon, I'd ... well, that wouldn't happen.

I'm just not crazy about some hot shot coming into a universe and rewriting its history for a couple of hours of entertainment.

Kind of like in 24, where by Hour 18 they just assume you've forgotten everything that happened at the beginning of the day and why the actions of Good-Guy-Suddenly-Gone-Bad make absolutely no sense.

Still, I'm willing to look past that in 24, let's hope I can do the same for Star Trek.

Slacker

I just finished watching Michael Moore's free-to-web (but only in the U.S. and Canada, wink wink) documentary "Slacker Uprising," about his tour of swing states just before the 2004 presidential election.

Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

I've always had mixed feelings about Michael Moore's work. I liked Sicko, The Awful Truth and Bowling for Columbine, and I was ok with Fahrenheit 9/11.

But Slacker Uprising doesn't explain any issue. It doesn't argue any point. It doesn't actually try to change anything, despite Moore's pleas that the film be screened before the election. It's just a bunch of videos of stump speeches pieced together with a bunch of videos of artists performing protest songs. This review from the Ann Arbor News explains it pretty well.

There are some interesting parts, about how Republicans attempted to stop the speeches, offered money to get student unions to cancel them, and even showed up, chanted and prayed out loud while Moore was speaking, but there's already a documentary about that.

For those used to Moore's passionate, personal arguments about political issues, you'll be disappointed. He doesn't even narrate the movie. Instead, you just hear him speaking to the converted, to the point where the hyperpartisanship of those audiences might turn you off from voting for Democrats.

Michael Moore chanting "one more day" isn't entertaining, moving, inspiring or educational. And it's not worth watching.

Canadiens need extras

TVA Films is doing a movie about the Canadiens for their 100th anniversary, and are filming at the Bell Centre this week. They're looking for extras who want to be a tiny blip on a screen for a split-second without receiving any compensation.

For those who want to show their Habs pride, catch a glimpse of players, and have entire afternoons to blow off, they're filming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.

Le Cas Roberge: Failure

Want to see the feature film based on the online hit Le Cas Roberge? Well, tough. It's been pulled from theatres after a disastrous $40,000 over two weeks in cinemas. The problem, apparently, is that it sucks and the few people watching it fall asleep halfway through. They're keeping their chins up, saying it's "not a disaster," but it's hard to quantify it as much else.

Maybe you can catch it in a few weeks at Dollar Cinema, where screening in front of three people isn't considered strange.

This is how to bring the two solitudes together

Something you don't see that often: A Quebec film screening at Dollar Cinema.

Sci-fi parody flick Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 (not to be confused with Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2) is playing there twice a day until Thursday. Here's a review from when it first came out in April from The Gazette's Brendan Kelly.

Let’s make fun of Indian people

This is a joke, right? I mean, they're not actually making a movie about the Maple Leafs, with Justin Timberlake playing a Québécois hockey player?

And one whose jokes are so racist that they end up making us look bad?

On the improtance of copy editing

From the website for an awesome-sounding new movie:

Fimratings!

Dear Newline Cinema,

I'm available to proofread your websites in the future.

Just give us the disk and we’ll give you your life back

Builders of the CHUM mega-hospital (that's the French one) were showing off a prototype of their state-of-the-art patient rooms last week. They include the latest in accessibility and technology:

It will also feature an electronic gadget to read the bar code on a patient's identification bracelet and automatically dispense appropriate medication.

"The bar code is to distinguish among three people (for example) all named Claude Gagnon on the same floor," Leclerc said.

"The medicine dose will be prepared by a robot. The patient's charts will be filed electronically in the computer."

The electronic gadget will be connected to the hospital's mainframe, which will be connected to the Net, but both will be protected from unwanted intrusions by Gatekeeper security software by Gregg Microsystems. So your medicine dispensing will be perfectly secure and 100% accurate, unless you're friends with Angela Bennett.

(In case you don't get the obscure movie reference, the previous paragraph is fiction.)

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 3

Name the metro stations featured in this short film (YouTube version, QuickTime version).

No more no more late fees

Hey, remember No Late Fees? Yeah, not so much anymore. Turns out economic reality still requires a financial incentive for a high turnover of new releases, otherwise video rental outlets would have to have huge stocks of these films and then get rid of them after a couple of weeks.

It makes sense. How many people really need to rent a movie for seven days? It's better to pay a set price per day (or even per hour) and leave it at that.

Personally, I don't remember the last time I rented a movie.

Guzzo patron caught camera-handed

Jean-Michel Vanasse reports someone has actually been caught allegedly filming a movie at a Guzzo theatre, and arrested for copyright infringement.

I wonder why he wasn't searched for the camera before entering the theatre.

YASTGB: FNC

I'm not a cinema buff, but since I've announced all the other blogs The Gazette has launched recently, I shouldn't ignore this one.

The Festival du nouveau cinéma blog (2007) is getting contributions from Gazette researcher Liz Ferguson, film critic John Griffin, freelancer Al Kratina, columnists Brendan Kelly and Bill Brownstein, and editor Basem Boshra.

YASTGB: World Film Festival

No posts yet, but the Gazoo is starting a new short-term blog about this year's World Film Festival, with contributions from six different staffers.

The worst of Québécois film and television for your viewing pleasure

A friend pointed out to me today that he was planning to pop his Fantasia cherry by going to an interesting showing this evening. One mention of the words "Total Crap" and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

For those who don't know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there's much better.

Now, you might think "wow, that's a really weird hobby", and you would be wrong. You see, there's someone else in town who's doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call "zapping" and showing awful clips to eager audiences.

Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn't decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.

So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia's DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here's the teaser.

Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5's Kaleidoscopic Zappin' Party (Teaser).

Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)

What’s the opposite of d’oh?

Yeah, I know this is stupid PR-driven non-news advertising crap, but go Vermont! And nice video. Maybe I'll come visit someday.

Guzzo is doing searches

The federal government's new law against recording video inside movie theatres has come to its inevitable conclusion: Cinema Guzzo is now searching people who enter its theatres and seizing any type of camera, whether it takes video or not.

As you might expect, some people are not happy about this.

Guzzo can't really be blamed for this. The law makes the cinema owner just as responsible if the law is broken, so they're just looking after their own asses. But the idea that so much is contraband -- food, drink, bags, cameras -- inside a room where all they're doing is projecting an image onto a screen kind of boggles the mind. Even aircraft luggage doesn't get this kind of treatment.

Of course, it goes without saying that, other than proving the U.S. movie industry has our government by the ballsack, this bill doesn't do anything. Michael Geist (whose blog should be on everyone's reading list) has a roundup of its problems (and a cool video about it too), to which I will only add this: Movies recorded in a crowded movie theatre are of such bad quality that I'm surprised anyone actually does it.

Take this badly-camcorded Family Guy / Star Wars bit. It includes a laugh track, viewer commentary, a partially obscured, darkened, oblong screen (that the camera pans away from every now and then) and a barely-discernable original audio track. Is this kind of stuff the world's greatest threat to the movie industry?

Who needs rights when press junkets are at stake?

Remember that decision by Warner Brothers to cancel advance screenings of its films this summer? Yeah, Ottawa caved. So now it'll be illegal to record films, even if you have no intention of doing anything illegal with it.

Guilty until proven innocent, just because it's so difficult to prove guilt.

Today in “who cares?” news

Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won't be able to see Harry Potter and Emma's enhanced breasts before it's actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won't be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they'll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.

I suppose I should mention that the claims -- that people camcording films in Montreal's movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies -- have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn't be able to write big feature stories about Canada's rampant piracy problem.

In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in "trouble" because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.

The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a "diner des cons" with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.

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