Canada

Alan Zweig investigates the wacky world of record collecting. An odd film made by a Toronto filmmaker who interviewed record collectors in their homes and in their favourite haunt – the record store. For those who enjoyed High Fidelity and thought that Nick Hornsby’s novel was a rip off of their life story, wait until you see this one! The director’s thesis is that record collectors are obsessive compulsive and are using this pursuit to make up for something that is inherently missing from their lives.Read More »

A short documentary that follows director Charlie Tyrell as he tries to uncover a better understanding of his deceased father through the random objects he inherited, including a pile of VHS dirty movies.Read More »

Variety.com wrote:
Set in ’69, “A No-Hit, No-Run Summer” gets to first base, at least, with its modest tale of B-team squirts who play in old hockey jerseys but eventually hold their own against the well-named Aristocrats. Third feature by Quebecois helmer Francis Leclerc (“Girl at the Window”) is formulaic and insubstantial, but pleasant and occasionally more as it asserts the sandlot’s rejuvenating power for pint-sizers like 12-year-old Martin (Pier-Luc Funk), whose dad (Patrice Robitaille) takes up coaching duties for the summer. Movie is far milder than either version of “The Bad News Bears,” for better and worse; grosses will follow suit.Read More »

GO FURTHER is a documentary that charts the progress of an environmental activism bus tour from Seattle to Santa Barbara, led by actor Woody Harrelson. In a biofuel bus burning hempseed oil as gas, painted with scenic and symbolic murals depicting the tour’s goals, Harrelson and his crew of eclectic environmentalists–a yoga instructor, a raw foods chef, an organic living neophyte–set out to educate people about Simple Organic Living (SOL), calling their trek the SOL Tour. While some of the SOL Tour’s participants ride in the bus, others bike alongside it.Read More »

Freud and Camus and the great Canuck fuck, a David Cronenberg bash. It begins with an abstruse dash of Dreyer (They Caught the Ferry) and briskly gets down to business, a biker chick (Marilyn Chambers) mangled in a road crash and pieced back together via “very experimental” skin-graft surgery. She awakens from her coma bewildered and bloodthirsty, under her armpit now lurks a quivering little Venus flytrap equipped with a peekaboo stinger; helplessly lunging at victims, she embraces, penetrates, and contaminates. The road to Montreal is littered with oozing cannibals snapping at each other, martial law is declared and machine-guns are brought out. On TV, the voice of Science weighs in: “So, uh… don’t let anybody bite you.” The venereal upheaval that bubbled up within the high-rise community in Shivers logically spills out into a foamy Quebec apocalypse, a wintry landscape smacked with tremor upon omnisexual tremor. Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
A man’s wife is under the care of an eccentric and unconventional psychologist who uses innovative and theatrical techniques to breach the psychological blocks in his patients. When their daughter comes back from a visit with her mother and is covered with bruises and welts, the father attempts to bar his wife from seeing the daughter but faces resistance from the secretive psychologist. Meanwhile, the wife’s mother and father are attacked by strangely deformed children, and the man begins to suspect a connection with the psychologist’s methods.

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“Television is reality and reality is less than television.” Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) in Videodrome.

Max Renn (James Woods) runs a sleazy Toronto cable station that airs softcore porn and bizarre, violent entertainment. When a station techie begins receiving pirated signals of a disturbing sadomasochistic program called “Videodrome,” Renn decides that it would make the perfect addition to his line up. While appearing as a guest on a cable talk show, Renn meets relationship expert Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry). The two of them are immediately drawn to each other, both sharing a penchant for rough sex and, naturally, Betamax dupes of “Videodrome.” When it’s discovered that the pirated signal originates from somewhere in Pittsburgh, television producer Masha (Lynn Gorman) attempts to help Renn secure the rights for his station. She discovers that local television guru Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) is behind the violent show and that the behind-the-scenes machinations are of a deeply sinister and complex nature. Against Masha’s advice, Renn seeks out the elusive O’Blivion just as his obsession with the show begins to affect his own reality. Bizarre hallucinations melding his body and the video image begin to plague him. As a vast (yet increasingly personal) conspiracy behind “Videodrome” is slowly revealed, Renn begins a profoundly disturbing transformation into “the new flesh.”

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IMDB:
Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager’s day devolves into an odyssey with a cast of characters that start to tear his world apart.Read More »

Quote:
Montreal-based actor-turned-filmmaker prodigy Xavier Dolan’s third feature is a terrific character study for its first two hours — and then there’s the third one. That’s starting to be a routine for the young director: Dolan’s gently affecting debut, “I Killed My Mother,” was a remarkably insightful portrait of a young gay man’s relationship to his mother, but his two follow-ups have suffered from an overindulgence in style in spite of their many strengths. In the case of “Laurence, Anyways,” Melvil Poupaud delivers a stirring performance in the title role as a high school teacher who confesses to his hip girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) that he has a penchant for cross-dressing. The story tracks Fred’s transition from anger to acceptance as the couple attempts to keep their relationship intact. Dolan’s screenplay is sharply attuned the nuances of human behavior, and strikes an intelligent note between intimacy and a grandly expressionistic vision that dramatizes the emotion of the scenario with boisterous music cues, fantasy sequences and a lavish color scheme.Read More »