Warning: This post contains SPOILERS It didn’t take long for me to get to this month’s selection, which is Charles Laughton’s 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is a corrupt, self-described preacher in 1930s West Virginia, who has married and killed many widows for their money. While serving a month-long sentence…
I’m kicking off my 2018 edition of the Blindspot Series with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 surrealist fantasy The Holy Mountain. A Christ-like thief (Horacio Salinas) finds his way to the home of The Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky), a mysterious figure living in a tower. Along with seven other individuals, each representing a planet of the solar system, The Alchemist…
As an appropriate end to my yearlong venture through classic Canadian cinema, this month I watched Don McKellar’s 1998 apocalyptic dark comedy Last Night. In six hours time, the world will come to an end at the stroke of midnight. Patrick (Don McKellar) is content with facing the end alone in his apartment. However, he comes…
Back in 2013, I did a cult film themed Blindspot series, picking films from the book “101 Cult Movies You Must See Before You Die.” For my 2018 edition of the series, I have decided to return to the book and pick 12 more cult films to see. This time around, I decided to focus…
Before he moved to Hollywood with films like Sicario and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve made a film about one of the darkest moments of Canadian history with Polytechnique. On December 6, 1989, a lone gunman (Maxim Gaudette) walked into École Polytechnique in Montreal and shot 28 people, killing 14 women, before killing himself. This semi-fictionalized recreation of the…
This month I delve into the Canadian tax shelter era with the 1977 wilderness survival/horror film Rituals. Harry (Hal Holbrook), Mitzi (Lawrence Dane), Martin (Robin Gammell), Abel (Ken James), and D.J. (Gary Reineke) are five doctor friends, who go for a camping trip in an isolated stretch of wilderness. After the first night, the the men’s…
This month, I watched the 1994 dramedy Double Happiness, by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Mina Shum. Jade Li (Sandra Oh) is a young Hong Kong born woman living in Vancouver with her strict Chinese family. Jade’s parents (Stephen Chang and Alannah Ong) frown at her ambitions to be an actress and they would rather that she find a…
This month I watched 1989’s Roadkill, which is one of the earliest films from “Toronto New Wave” director Bruce McDonald. After rock band Children of Paradise disappear while on tour, promoter Roy Seth (Gerry Quigley) sends intern Ramona (Valerie Buhagiar) to track them down in Sudbury. However, Ramona soon loses track of the band and has to…
It’s a bit of a lighthearted pick for me this month, as I chose to watch Deepa Mehta’s 2002 Indo-Canadian romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood. Rahul Seth (Rahul Khanna) is a rich Indian man in Toronto, who is essentially blackmailed by his family to find an Indian girl to marry, or else his younger sister Twinky (Rishma Malik) can’t go through…
With it being Pride Month in Canada, culminating with this weekend’s Toronto Pride Parade, I figured that an appropriate selection for this month’s Blindspot would be Jean-Marc Vallée’s 2005 breakthrough film C.R.A.Z.Y. Born on Christmas Day to conservative Christian parents Gervais (Michel Côté) and Laurianne (Danielle Proulx), Zachary Beaulieu (Marc-André Grondin) is the second youngest of a family of…
