On Saturday May 9, 2015 rom 2:10 pm – 2:55 pm at Osgoode Ballroom East at The Sheraton Centre Hotel Richard will host a keynote interview with legendary director Spike Lee.
On Saturday May 9, 2015, Canadian Music Week is proud to present a special Keynote Interview with Spike Lee, as part of the event’s conference programming. As one of America’s most vital, vibrant, and challenging filmmakers, over his four-decade long career he has made an indelible mark on the independent film scene with his provocative, experimental, and socially active films. Known as “Spike Lee Joints”, he has directed, produced, written, and acted in over 50 films, along with creating his own production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.
Expounding upon Spike Lee’s expansive and storied career, the Keynote Interview will give attendees a rare inside look into the filmmaker’s accomplishments, creative process, and more. The interview will take place from 2:10 pm – 2:55 pm at the Sheraton Centre Hotel.
In conjunction with Spike Lee’s participation in this year’s conference, a special engagement of his masterpiece Do The Right Thing will screen at The Royal Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Lee on Sunday May 10th.
“Ex Machina” opens April 24 in Toronto and Vancouver!
Richard will host a Q&A with “Ex Machina” director Alex Garland at the Varsity Cinema on Monday April 20, 2015.
Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander star in Ex Machina, a sci-fi/psy-fi thriller that offers a chilling look into the not-too-distant future of artificial intelligence. Filled with plenty of twists, the film marks the directorial debut of Alex Garland, who wrote the script and has also penned acclaimed sci-fi fare like 28 Days Later and Sunshine.
Caleb (Gleeson), a 26-year-old coder at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan (Isaac), CEO of the company. Nathan is not only reclusive, but also rich, with property that goes on forever. On the way, the helicopter pilot tells Caleb, “We’ve been flying over his estate for the past two hours.”
Upon arrival, Caleb finds out that Nathan wants him to participate in an experiment – testing an artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful girl named Ava (Vikander). As Caleb finds himself falling for Ava, a dark psychological battle ensues, where loyalties are torn between man and machine. What does Ava really want? And what is Nathan up to?
With a silver-clad scalp and mesh-wrapped waist, Ava is a breathtaking vision who walks like a dancer (perhaps enhanced by Vikander’s training as a ballerina). Nathan’s retreat is built into rock, yet slick and shiny with glass walls that peer out onto a landscape of streams, peaks and greenery.
The film was partially shot on location in Norway.
A quick internet search turns up many adjectives used to describe Daredevil star Deborah Ann Woll; gorgeous, talented and cute to name just a few.
The redheaded actress uses other terms to describe herself.
“There’s nerd, geek, all those words,” she says. “I am settling closer and closer to dork. I am a very proud dork.”
The former True Blood star—she played fierce teenage vampire Jessica Hamby for seven seasons on the hit show—embraces her inner dork—“I’m Dungeons and Dragons player, a Mystery Science Theatre buff. I like board games.”—and says the role playing games have benefits beyond entertainment value.
“Sometimes I feel socially awkward. I feel like sometimes I have trouble connecting to people who are more extroverted. Something like Dungeons and Dragons or a board game is a way for me to be social but it takes some of the responsibility off of me myself. If I don’t feel impressive as myself, I can feel impressive as Mistress Pyrona, the Genosi Sword Maiden. Like my acting, it gives me a little bit of support.
“Playing Dungeons and Dragons isn’t at all like acting but it is that idea that you can be braver when you’re someone else.”
On the Netflix series Daredevil she plays Karen Page, secretary and soon-to-be love interest of Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer who moonlights as crime fighter Daredevil. The character has been around since the first Daredevil comic in 1964 but has changed substantially over the years. Page began as innocent and sweet but slowly morphed into a “heroin addicted porn star,” a complexity of character that gives Woll lots to work with.
“I like characters that change. For my Karen I said, ‘Alright, she’s going to have moments when she’s innocent, sweet and fun to be around and she’ll have moments where she’s dark and a little addicted to that adrenaline rush and danger. I want both of those things to live in her at the same time.’ We started her with a bit of a past, which hopefully, if we get to do any more of Daredevil we’ll find out about.”
Woll knows the fans care about the characters, and so far the reaction has been good to what she’s doing with Karen.
“They don’t care about it because they think you’re hot and they want to see you take your top off,” she says, “they care about it because they really want it to be the Karen they love and respect.”
The best horror films are never only about the Double Gs—guts and gore. Sure, part of the appeal of scary movies is that they make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and that frequently requires a spray of blood or a nightmarish vision of terror in the form of Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, but great horror films are always about something other than the thrills and chills.
To be truly effective scary pictures must tap into a collective anxiety; societal hot buttons that elevate the frights to a new level. For instance, Frankenstein plays on people’s fear of science while Godzilla is an obvious cultural metaphor for nuclear weapons in reaction to the devastation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see Dracula as the metaphorical embodiment of everything from drug addiction and old age to alternative lifestyles and capitalism.
Perhaps the most socially self-aware horror film of all is Night of the Living Dead. It’s got zombies galore but director George A. Romero had the braaaiiins to include a subtext that echoed the contemporary state America’s of race relations, the horrors of Vietnam and cynicism with government. It’s the best of both worlds—a thought-provoking movie that gushes with gore.
Film historian Linda Badley suggests Night of the Living Dead horrifies because the zombies weren’t bizarre creatures from outer space or from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but because, “They’re us.”
This weekend a new film, Unfriended, turns the camera, or in this case the Skype screen, on us in an eerie story about bullying. On the surface Unfriended may look like a cheapo teen horror flick with a cast of unknowns—which it is, but so was Night of the Living Dead—but by basing the plot in the world of social media and the bad behaviour that comes along with anonymous avatars, it becomes a ripped-from-the-headlines comment on a very touchy societal subject.
The movie begins a year after Laura, a popular high school student, was cyber shamed into killing herself. A teenage girl is on a group Skype session when she begins to receive cryptic and threatening messages from Laura’s old account. As the movie unfolds secrets are revealed and the danger is amped up.
The mysterious killer is a hoary old horror convention, but here it’s told in the contemporary language of Millennials. Unsurprisingly, the movie has already sparked the interest of the Y Generation—the trailer garnered almost 300,000 Twitter comments on its first day—who relate to the setting—by-and-large it takes place on a computer screen—and who are all too familiar with the everyday brutality of Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Instagram and Spotify. They understand what a minefield the web can be and the filmmakers realized the narrative possibilities of creating cinema’s first deadly internet troll. Freddy Kruger is your father’s baddie; the new horror comes in bits and bytes.
Similar to Psycho’s Norman Bates or the undead of 28 Days Later, the kids of Unfriended tell a very specific story—the sad tale of a teen suicide—that becomes a universal horror tale by making the characters and setting ordinary and relatable. Like the best of classic fright films, it breathes new life into a form we’ve seen before by recontextualizing it for a new generation.
Years from now when people look up the meaning of the word “unnecessary” in the dictionary the definition will be the synopsis of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.”
In the original 2009 movie Blart (Kevin James) was living the life of a security guard—excuse me, Security Officer—at New Jersey’s West Orange Pavilion Mall after failing the physical portion of his State Trooper’s exam. He was a lovesick loser, unlucky at love and life.
Things have changed a bit since then. He’s still working security, but is flying high off his last major caper, single-handedly taking on a group of thugs who took over the mall and held his lady love hostage on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.
In the new film he’s in Las Vegas attending the Security Officer’s Convention. Tagging along is daughter (Raini Rodriguez) a teen working up the courage to spill the news that she’s leaving home for university in Los Angeles. On what should be one of the greatest nights of his life—delivering the keynote speech at the convention—duty calls when a disgruntled high roller (Neal McDonough), who lost a bundle on his last visit to the casino, kidnaps Blart’s daughter and attempts to recoup his money by stealing priceless art from the Wynn Hotel.
You have to wonder why Kevin James waited six years to make a Paul Blart sequel. After seeing number two I’m tempted to think it was to give people enough time to forget how brutally unfunny the first movie was. You have to hand it to him, however. With “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” he’s managed to top the first movie, making a comedy even more relentlessly unfunny than the first one.
There are, to be generous, about three laughs in “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2,” all of which can be viewed in the trailer. The other 89 minutes are filler. The audience I saw it with seemed to be laughing out of pity rather than because anything in the movie is actually amusing.
On Saturday May 9, 2015 rom 2:10 pm – 2:55 pm at Osgoode Ballroom East at The Sheraton Centre Hotel Richard will host a keynote interview with legendary director Spike Lee.
