Have you met Moomintroll? Inspired by the stories of Tove Jansson, Moomintroll brings his adventures off the pages of popular children’s books and onto the big screen – it’s available on DVD and VOD right now.
With an all-star voice cast and music composed by Moomins’ biggest fan, Bjork, this little movie is hitting plenty of high points.With the help of his father, Moominpappa (Stellan Skarsgård), Moomintroll (Alexander Skarsgård) and his worried friends embark on a journey to the observatory to find out why everything in their valley is covered in thick grey dust and the sky continues to get redder by the day. They discover a comet is heading straight for them, but can they make it back to Moominhouse to get everyone to safety in time?
The Moomins are the world’s favourite troll family, and they’re brought to life with the help and voice work of Max von Sydow (The Exorcist, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens), Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Stellan Skarsgård (Good Will Hunting, The Avengers), Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal, Casino 
Royale), Peter Stormare (Fargo, 22 Jump Street), and Helena Mattsson (Iron Man 2, American Horror Story: Hotel). Do you think this gang can work together and overcome obstacles to beat the comet and save everyone from disaster? Skarsgårds to the rescue!
Royale), Peter Stormare (Fargo, 22 Jump Street), and Helena Mattsson (Iron Man 2, American Horror Story: Hotel). Do you think this gang can work together and overcome obstacles to beat the comet and save everyone from disaster? Skarsgårds to the rescue!Will the Moomins win over North America? Only time will tell.
If you’ve seen this movie or know the books, let us know what you think!!
Watch the trailer:
Reese’s Pieces were actually part of the plot. In the original script, it was M&Ms Elliott used to bribe E.T., but Mars wouldn’t allow their candy in the film if they couldn’t see the final script, so Reese’s Pieces stepped up and made history. Hershey didn’t pay a cent, but they did provide the movie with 1 million dollars worth of free tie-in advertising. Worth it? They saw a 65% increase in sales during the film’s run, so I’d say yes.
renowned for preferring a martini, to be caught drinking a beer. It’s a sad day when film makers are willing to forgo characterization, history, tradition, and story for the all-mighty dollar, but it’s not just one dollar, it is after all 45 million of them. How many cars can you smash up for 45 million? They destroyed about $34M worth in Spectre.
Cooper, which became the star of the movie. BMW provided 30 Minis to be used in the film and they saw a 22% rise in sales that year – not bad for a feature-length car commercial. I even rode an Italian Job roller coaster once where the cars were in fact little Minis. The movie made people reconsider the Mini Cooper – what was once thought to be a ‘girly’ car was no rebranded as sporty, speedy, and cool.
cancelling their Wayfarer line when it suddenly got a big bump thanks to Tom Cruise in Risky Business. He made the sunglasses cool again, and the brand attributes the sale of 360 000 pairs to the 
movie. So you can bet that 3 years later they were only too happy to enter into partnership with Top Gun, which this time high-lighted their Aviator line, which gave them a nice 40% increase.
it’s actually a plot point that the golfer becomes a spokesman for his favourite sandwich shop, Subway – he’s seen eating a sub while wearing a Subway t-shirt and SHOOTING AN ENTIRE SUBWAY COMMERCIAL. It’s unclear whether Subway paid a dime for this, but that movie was also responsible for increased ratings for The Price is Right, so anything is possible.
These two have so much hustle that there’s hardly a corner in all of dusty Los Angeles that they haven’t conquered, so when we called up Queen Bey herself to crown them with all the glory implicated in this event, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. To be fair, Rihanna and Katy Perry also accepted but those girls are so confused they couldn’t stop crowning themselves. So, Jay & Mark, in the name of Beyoncé, with the power invested by her entire Beyhive, I now pronounce you Most Industrious Assholes.
while Mark’s claim to fame was The League. Then they both appeared on the show they wrote and directed themselves, Togetherness. But that’s just what they do in their spare time. They’re also writing or producing or directing or micro-financing movies pretty much round the clock. Movies are either their passion, or their death wish.
workaholic, do what we love to do, and not die of a heart attack, destroy myself and my family, and keep my friends?’” – a commendable insight from Mark.
The Duplass brothers have been at heart of the Mumblecore movement for a long time. Mumblecore movies are a subgenre of indies that are known by their incredibly small budgets, their “natural” (read: amateur) acting, with an emphasis on dialogue over plot, lots of which may be improvised.
Beginners
company isn’t just about churning out Duplass stuff. They’re also bringing up lots of their friends along with them. They’ve got enough pull to make pretty much whatever they please, but they’re sticking close to their humble beginnings. The brothers are famous for bottom lines of less than a million dollars, and they always come in under budget. With their success and auteur status they’ve recently been asked to helm a real popcorn movie (shh – a superhero one!) and of course they turned it down, unwilling to make the kind of compromises
that would entail. “We’re not making that level of money [of directing a blockbuster franchise],” Jay says. “But we don’t need that level of money because we lived like starving artists for 15 frickin’ years. It’s like, we don’t need things. We just like to make things.”
Jay and Mark aren’t just running their own little empire, they’re changing the industry as a whole. “There’s no excuse not to make movies on the weekend with your friends” says Mark, and you know he really, truly means it.
man, which is exactly what Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult) is. It’s the height of Britpop, and business is booming. If you find the next Oasis, or hell, the next Spice Girls, you’re made. But one misstep can also mean career suicide. It’s a super competitive industry, and both the screenwriter (John Niven) and the director (Owen Harris) have decided to bonk you over the head with this fact. And when, after the first 10 minutes or so, you’ve been completely bludgeoned with this theme, they yank open your jaw and force-feed it to you for 90 minutes more until you’re veritably choking on it.
entirety, so nothing sticks out. The bitterness is unending. Kill Your Friends aims to be the blackest of comedies, but when everyone is horrible all the time it really dulls your senses. It’s a grueling film to slog through without a single redeeming character so you can’t emotionally invest. Stelfox is pushed to further and further extremes but you won’t care an iota because nobody deserves to get out of this with their dignity intact.
To their credit, they spared zero expense on the soundtrack: Blur, Prodigy, Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers, Oasis. It reminds you what a good time it was to be alive in the late 90s. It also makes you angry that they’ve failed to live up to these bands. Almost certainly there’s an interesting tale here to tell. Kill Your Friends has no idea what it is though, and hopes you’ll be impressed with blood and cursing instead, which is almost the same as story, right?
In Cheer Up, we meet Finland’s second-worst cheer leading squad. On the heels of a humiliating loss, Garland explores what it takes to keep going in the face of defeat. Where will the girls find motivation? The documentary follows three of the women in particular – coach Miia, and team members Patu and Aino. We soon realize that their struggles and failures are not just confined to the gym. Miia’s personal life is on the rocks, Patu is grieving her mother while her father impregnates a new girlfriend, and Ainu follows the highs and lows of first love, and all the teenage angst that comes with it.
tears, tumbles, and bloodshed. Miia travels to the cheer leading mecca of the world, Texas, to seek inspiration but finds that their aggressive, winner-takes-all spirit just doesn’t translate back home.
pep and ponytails. It’s refreshing to remember that not everyone goes home with a trophy. For these women, and many others, success will have to be defined elsewhere.
emotions. Everything is pleasantly flat. Nothing bothers them. But some are subject to a disorder in which those feelings are somehow switched back on. This disease is fatal – if you aren’t driven to suicide, you’ll be euthanatized, because being the only sensitive person in a void of flat affect is simply too much to bear.
feels rather cold and lonely to us, the viewers, but the people living it don’t seem to notice until they come down with the disease, which sets them even further apart from their peers. But the one good thing is that Silas can see that his work mate Nia (Kristen Stewart) must also be infected. She hides her disease from others but cannot escape his awakened intuition. The two inevitably fall in love, though “coupling” is distinctly prohibited. The only way they can be together is to leave society and head for the outside world, where primitive humans still exist.
The problem, however, is with the story. The truth is, it just feels recycled. It feels like you’ve seen this before. It’s like every second Margaret Atwood novel and does little to distinguish itself from other movies in the genre. What it doesn’t borrow from Atwood it steals from Shakespeare and it never really does its own thing. Equals is a highly-polished piece from a second-hand store. It’s not trash but it could never compete with the real thing. If you’re the kind of person who’s comfortable buying a couch off Kijiji, then maybe this one’s for you.
Wider and Wider have used Bishop’s case to exemplify the broader problem of how mental illness is addressed both in medical and justice settings, but also take the time to ask intelligent questions regarding individual rights. Because Linda Bishop was in fact an individual: a mother, a sister, a gardener, a knitter, a reader. She died tragically, needlessly, but in life, when she was well, she was vibrant and engaging. Wider and Wider treat her with dignity, and are able to do so in large part because of detailed journal entries she left behind at the time of her death.
what her last days would have looked like with truly stunning, poetical cinematography rare in a documentary. Hopelessness and beauty intermingle, making for some stirring if haunting images. Did I sometimes find it a little pretentious? Sure I did. But even an Asshole like me can admit and admire when a documentary is trying to elevate itself. Combined with her journal entries read aloud, these images make her story all the more personal. God Knows Where I Am is both an intimate portrait and a rousing call to action.
son even though we detested both leads. Not the actors, per se, but the characters are just awful human beings and it’s hard to forgive the actors for that. So I’m carrying around this chip on my shoulder for Gillian Jacobs and was not super happy to bump into her in this movie. But clever Demetri Martin won me over by writing a love interest for Dean who did not exist solely for his pursuit. She had back story. She had depth. She was a person. This sounds weird, I’ll grant you that, but so often in movies the love interest exists solely to be adored and consumed and nothing else. She has no job or apartment or opinions. Gillian Jacobs had scenes without Demetri Martin. She was independent of his lust. It was refreshing even if it did make me confront my hostility toward the bitch from Love.
nd so of course this book was immediately on my nightstand and then devoured into my brain and then shelved politely to await its fate. Little did it, or I, know that just a few years later it would be turned into a movie, prompting Sean to finally give it a read as well (don’t judge him too harshly, he’s mostly literate).
struggled to picture Hanks as Alan Clay. Alan is a loser. He’s beaten down by life, but not in Hanks’s usual sad-sack way. He was too pathetic. But Tom Hanks is not only starring, he’s producing, which means he really likes this project, and he knew what he was getting into.
to be a fish out of water – not just the cliched culture clash crap of an American abroad, but of an aging salesman with an old bag of tricks in a newfangled world of young, tech-minded colleagues. The world is shrinking, and moving quickly, and Alan is getting left behind. Movie Alan has more verve than Book Alan, which sounds like a strange thing to complain about, but the truth is, the world already had enough of these Alans. For a movie that could have been refreshingly unHollywood, it sure made some safe choices and went for the audience-friendly ending that smacks of missed opportunity.
It’s National 
Shatner. Michael Cera. Ellen Page. Jay Baruchel. Catherine O’Hara. Eugene Levy. The Sutherlands. Will Arnett. Victor Garber. Michael J. Fox. All the funny people from SNL. There are talented Canadians in the director’s chair as well: Cronenberg. Cameron. Atom Egoyan. Norman Jewison. The Reitmans. Sarah Polley. Patricia Rozema.
Xavier Dolan’s Mommy: Before Dolan was directing 
nominated Les invasion barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), an older work in his catalogue, Jesus of Montreal, is quite a trip. A group of actors are hired to put on the passion of the Christ in Montreal. Jesus is interpreted a little differently than usual and the church is not happy. The movie works on its literal level and also as a biblical allegory, so you can watch and rewatch this one and always come away with something new.
Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies: He’s now known for Prisoners and 
or 
Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg: Described by Maddin as a “docu-fantasia” and by perplexed critics as a surrealist mockumentary, nobody knows exactly what the hell this is, but it IS both an experiment and an experience in cinema. Maddin casts someone else as Maddin and then paints a mythologized, metafictional tribute to his beloved town of Winnipeg. If you love movies, you have to check this out. You’ll feel it in your toes.
Vincent Valentino. We met him briefly at the 
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