Category: film
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TIFF’08 – Where a party is more than just a party
In festival speak a “party” means a select number of people and their significant others, agents, producers, assistants, best friend from high school and the dude they just met taking a piss in the alley outside the Gala screening are the only ones who get into a room. Sometimes the room is beautifully decorated, at…
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TIFF’08 – Exclusive Interview with Trent Hagaa – Writer of Deadgirl
This year’s Midnight Madness features its perennial lineup of unpredictable edgy screenings, and Deadgirl is no exception. Already earmarked as a critics’ must-see, TheCulturepin.com had an opportunity to pry into the mind of the screenwriter whence this sordid tale was birthed. The Culturepin: So…one bright Sunday morning you woke up and thought “I should write…
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TIFF’08 – How To Get Tickets You Want – in layman’s terms
Even a TIFF veteran tends to find the process of getting tickets to the screenings they want daunting, and the cryptic instructions provided by the festival itself are of little help, that is, when you can find them. This year I wanted to make sure I spared myself wiling away some of my fading years…
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TIFF’08 – JCVD – Muscles From Brussels Goes Po-Mo
Director Mabrouk El Mechri, a native of Versailles (a Parisian suburb whose name is believed to come from the Latin “versare” or, “to keep turning over”) brings an interesting turning of the soil for Belgian action legend Jean Claude Van Damme in what I deem one of the most interesting films to come to the…
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TIFF’08 – Treeless Mountain
After winning a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at Sundance for her first film, “In Between Days,” director So Yong Kim was invited to workshop her project “Treeless Mountain” at the exhaustive and consistently effective Sundance Writers and Directors labs. A US/Korean co-production, South Korean native Kim who cites Belgian directors the Dardenne Brothers…
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Animation Makes Strong Statement at Toronto Film Fest
In the first day alone of the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, there are no less than three non-cutesy-ironic-computer-generated-fairy-tale-spoof feature-length films showing. Like 2007’s massive fest-buzz film Persepolis, based on a graphic novel concerning an outspoken young Iranian girl during the Islamic Revolution that went on to garner an Oscar nom ( but lost to Ratatouille),…