When people call our nation’s capital a “government town”, they don’t mean it as a compliment. As much as I have loved living in Ottawa for the last ten years, the city has earned a bit of a reputation for being a little too conservative, even boring and uninspiring. Even though Pearl Jam will be playing here next month, I chose instead to travel four hours to see them in Toronto so as not to have my buzz killed by a bunch of Ottawans and their polite applause.
How inspiring it can be when talent blooms in your own city, especially one that is too often written off as unexciting. Not that the entertainment industry is any stranger to Ottawan talent. We have the dubious distinction of being the first to hate Tom Green, who used to try out his bits on unsuspecting citizens before moving to Hollywood. Alanis Morissette and Sandra Oh were born here. Even Tom Cruise went to elementary school in Ottawa for three years. Back in August, we had the pleasure of interviewing a young local filmmaker who has renewed our interest for local talent and strengthened (if that’s even possible) my passion for the medium. Even more than Tom Green.
When we last spoke with Morgana McKenzie, she had just turned 16. She had already written, edited, and directed three award-winning shorts and was in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for Ellie, her most ambitious project yet, which she was about to start shooting. After our interview, we’d been as impressed by her contagious enthusiasm as we had been by the knack for storytelling and attention to detail that she’d shown in her films.
Ms McKenzie premiered Ellie at a private screening yesterday for friends, family, and donors. As visibly excited as she was to share her latest project with us, she first took the stage to introduce us to eight short films by other local filmmakers to further highlight the exciting things that are happening right here in our own hometown. If you’re interested in reading up on any of the films or filmmakers that she selected to showcase on her big day, I’ve listed them below. For our purposes here, I’ll just sum them up by saying that they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. The weak points of each film, I’m assuming, are a result of the limited experience (in some cases) and resources that are par for the course as independent filmmakers start out. The strengths of each film (and there are many) can only come from a palpable passion and unquestionable creativity that no budgetary constraint could ever suppress.
As for Ellie, Ms. McKenzie is clearly a fast learner and is working for the first time with ACTRA actors and her biggest budget so far. It comes as no surprise then that Ellie is her most impressive film yet. Telling the story of two young people held captive in a mysterious cabin, it’s darker, more mature, and more confident than anything else I’ve seen from her. A stand-out performance from local actor Sebastian Labissiere is also worth noting. If Ms. McKenzie keeps doing what she’s doing with the same eagerness to learn and grow as a filmmaker, I am quite confident that I will be reviewing her movies for years to come.
I am proud to be living in a city where talent is blooming.
For anyone interested, here is a complete list of the short films we saw yesterday.
The Garage– (dir. Patrick White) A young woman discovers that the case of her stolen car in a parking garage may be more complex- and spooky- than she ever could have imagined.
Eyetooth– (dir. Cory Thibert) A creepy stalker is faced with a moral dilemma.
The Canvas– (dir. Adrie Sustar) When faced with some hurtful criticism of her work, a young painter becomes more emotionally invested in her work than ever before.
Ignite– (dir. Lora Bidner) A music video set to original music. Sparks will fly.
The Clean-Up– (dir. Kristian Larieviere) Two former best friends must work together to dispose of a body after a hit gone bad. But can they resolve their differences in time?
Connections– (dir. Nicole Thompson) An incident involving an old lady being pushed to the ground and having her purse stolen is examined from multiple perspectives.
Pieces of You– (dir. Derek Price) A young girl copes with loss through poetic voiceover and beautiful cinematography.
Primary Colours– (dir. Derek Price) A woman’s experience with domestic violence is told directly into the camera with disarming poetry.
We All Go the Same– (dir. Morgana McKenzie) A music video for Radical Face’s We All Go the Same set to images of brutal fairy tale murder.
Ellie– (dir. Morgana McKenzie) Two teens are held captive in a mysterious cabin. One makes a daring attempt to change his situation.
new drug dealers, and doctors the pushers. Pharmaceutical companies are more profitable than any other kind. They make HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars, people get hooked, people die, and nobody ever goes to prison for it.
“business” of selling drugs, and the people who come to see them are customers, not patients.
hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine. Pain relief, cough suppressant, anti-anxiety, sedative. His doctors were questioned but not charged. Mary Kate Olsen was found to be “not a viable target” in an investigation. We don’t know how he got the drugs, only that he took them, in excess, and he died too soon, leaving behind a very young daughter who will never know her father.
Watch it, and let us know what you think. Does Beymer make a good Tony, or would Elvis Presley (the director’s first choice) have done better? And how will Captain America fill the role?
nd terrifying me at age 14, and 
middle of the pack for the Coens, but it’s a great appetizer for their other stuff. It’s also a fun standalone movie that has a fantastic soundtrack and a bunch of crazy characters doing strange things. And if you have seen it, why not see it again, if only to notice for the first time (like I just did) that frequent Coen collaborator John Turturro is one of O Brother’s main characters. Either way, you can’t lose!
tips her $30K to quit whoring and change her life. He doesn’t expect her to wind up at auditions for his play the next day, but there she is, which makes things awkward because a) his wife (Kathryn Hahn) is the star and b) her co-star and secret admirer (Rhys Ifans) knows the director’s dirty secret and c) the oblivious playwright (Will Forte) is falling a bit in love with her, despite already being in a relationship with the former call-girl’s therapist (Jennifer Aniston). Got all that?
her performance; she’s the one to watch in this, and she’s the one who took me by surprise, and my laugh-spit sure took Sean by surprise (although Poots is also quite good, I can just never say her name with a straight face) (oh feck, more brackets). It’s not gonna be everyone’s cuppa, but while I started out this review calling this a Woody-wannabe, the truth is, I probably haven’t enjoyed an Allen film this much in years.
model?” Charlize said in the May issue of British GQ, whining that “when meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
Devil’s Advocate because director Taylor Hackford thought she was too good looking to play such a gritty role. “Devil’s Advocate was probably the hardest — they put me through the wringer,” Charlize told the publication recently, “Taylor just wasn’t convinced. He was like, ‘If you were his wife, why would he cheat on you?’ So there. She’s also too pretty to be cheated on. And definitely too pretty to realize how stupid she sounds. I mean, if you’re going to show up to accept Spike TV’s “Decade of Hotness” award, you just have to be prepared to accept all the terrible fallout that comes along with it.
Nicole Kidman – this ugmo got the lead role in Moulin Rouge instead of Charlize, who can’t sing, incidentally, but the main reason was of course, her distracting beauty, which is why they replaced her with Kidman, who after all, only models for Chanel, Jimmy Choo, and Omega, though that’s not an exhaustive list.
beautiful, so she has to be replaced by someone far plainer – Gwyneth Paltrow (who admittedly models for Hugo Boss and Estee Lauder), who actually was still too damned beautiful, so they got rid of her and went with the plainest woman they could think of, Marion 
Cotillard (yes, she technically models for the same brand as Charlize – Dior – but it’s in the uglier handbag section, so it barely counts), and then they thought, jeez, I don’t know, maybe even crummy old Marion is still just a little too pretty for this, so let’s call up that frumpy dancer, Alicia Vikander (who barely manages a Louis Vuitto
n campaign)
Theron was in consideration for the role of Helen Gandy in J. Edgar, but the director realized, no, this woman is just too beautiful, and so he hired the repulsive Naomi Watts instead, once voted #2 in the French edition of FHM magazine’s “100 Sexiest Women in the World 2006”, presumably right behind Miss Theron, and a model for Pantene and Ann Taylor.
And then there was the time Charlize auditioned for the role of Rose in Titanic. James Cameron must have also been ultimately discouraged by her exquisiteness, poked around for someone a little less stunning and thankfully landed upon the face of Lancome herself, Kate Winslet. Gross.
definitively a few rungs lower, a solid 6 on a good hair day, she was able to land the role of a video game character, who are known for their realistic-looking women.
him. But as quickly as his star rose, so began his descent. The very next year he was arrested on a DUI at the scene of an accident where luckily the only injury was his own (he required extensive hand surgery which forced a pause in production of Transformers 2). And then: bar fights, drunkenness, badmouthing movies and costars, boasting about conquests that put other people’s relationships in jeopardy, headbutting strangers, chasing the homeless, making fans cry, live-tweeting LSD trips. He dropped out of a Broadway play starring Alec Baldwin and then trolled him from the front row during a performance. I mean, who else would even try to out-Baldwin a Baldwin? He got caught plagiarizing, then attempted to apologize for it by hiring a skywriter far away from where the victim lived. These were bad years, and there wasn’t a single person who didn’t distance themselves from him. Heck, even the 
Transformers franchise was handed over to Marky Mark, and Indiana Jones given back to a septuagenarian. But then came even worse years,the paper bag years. In an effort to insist he “wasn’t famous anymore”, he wore paper bags over his head to red carpet events and on talk shows. In an effort to reframe his erratic behaviour as “performance art”, he staged increasingly bizarre events – during one “show” he lived in an art gallery for 5 days during which people lined up to spend 1 hour alone in a room with him while he sat in perfect silence, often soaking the paper bag on his head with tears. He would later claim that a woman raped him during her hour and he did nothing to stop it in order to preserve the integrity of the piece. Then he live-streamed himself watching 
all 29 of his movies back to back in a Manhattan theatre (he cried then too). And just this February he spent 24 hours in an elevator. Because, duh, it’s art. Meanwhile, I’m wondering where the hell his mother is. This man is clearly suffering and Hollywood is not known for coming to anyone’s rescue. In fact, this tabloid culture in which we are living feeds off of young people’s breakdowns.
grieving guy who flies to Bucharest to shakes his blues but instead finds himself drawn to a woman with an intoxicating accent. She’s bad news, as evidenced by the many iterations of the film’s title – you may find it called Kill Charlie Countryman, or The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Either way, you know she’s going to get him killed, but she’s beautiful, aloof, and dangerous, so how can he resist?
Countryman is watchable, but it would be hard to mistake it as good.
serious bank helping to make those foreclosures happen, then buying up those empty homes for real cheap and repackaging them for new buyers. The money is staggering. Dennis is dazzled by it. He’s never made this kind of cash before, and mid-recession, he’s not likely to find even a fraction of it anywhere else. But it means working for the bad guys and evicting people, nice people, just like him.
doesn’t bail out the losers. America was built by bailing out winners. By rigging a nation of the winners, for the winners, by the winners.” Fucking ouch, eh?
homes. In fact, when Andrew Garfield is pounding on people’s doors, those are, more often than not, real evictees answering them, often standing in their own foreclosed homes. Jason Reitman went for a similar effect in Up In the Air, interviewing real victims of downsizing on camera. Both these movies are symptoms of the same dirty disease, and it’s heartbreaking. And I can’t help but wonder if any of these homeless people are comforted by being portrayed, however compassionately, by Hollywood millionaires.
take forever to make. Both The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011) were based on scripts that he started back in the 70s. They also take forever to edit. He reportedly shot over a million feet of film for The New World, which of course had to be edited down to a concise 135 minutes. Knight of Cups, shot during the summer of 2012, spent nearly four years in post-production. Both Christian Bale and Natalie Portman have said that they spent more time recording their voiceovers than they did in front of the camera.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 