Half-person, half-School-of-Rock-trivia-bot. Words and reviews in Toronto Star, Teen Vogue, and the Walrus.
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Fair Play 2023
One of the most memorable sequences about gender and the corporate workplace occurs in the underrated comedy “9 to 5” (1980): characters played by Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda fantasize about how they would get rid of their chauvinistic boss.
Tomlin’s character bestows upon the old jerk a fairy-tale demise, in which she dons a Snow White dress and poisons him, while Parton and Fonda’s characters imagine respective cowboy deaths, where he ends up either hog-tied and roasted…
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Crimes of the Future 2022
Saw this in theatres two nights in a row and I think I'm finally ready to *actually* write something about it. In short, Crimes of the Future is perfect from the first shot to the last. Literally. I'm still in awe about just how cohesive the first and final shots are: we begin with a casual acceptance of the world in spoil due to our actions (and our technologies) and we end on the fearful realization that our bodies, without…
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The Substance 2024
A little let down in what I had hoped would be a totally irreverent gore-fest (à la Revenge) but I ended up enjoying this bloody fairytale, even if its allegory is brittle and thin. A concept like this demands moral quandary, but Fargeat places her characters in diametric positions which ultimately leaves little for us to chew on or think about. We're along for a ride that demands nothing of us.
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The Shrouds 2024
In David Cronenberg’s newest film The Shrouds, Toronto is an inevitability, both for its lead character and the director himself. Karsh (Vincent Cassal) is a gray-haired Cronenberg stand-in, inventor of a grave technology named the Shroud, which allows people to look inside the caskets of their loved ones as they decompose. Most of Cronenberg’s films—from The Fly to Videodrome and Crash—are filmed and set in Toronto, yet the city’s most iconic building, the C.N. Tower, is often kept offscreen to…
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Saltburn 2023
I’ve decided to stop lobbing the “why does this exist” complaint at movies and, instead, get directly to the root of my issues, but Saltburn is just so narratively and thematically empty and visually extravagant that I can’t help but feel that this is an exercise of style and nothing more. Everything about and within it rings hollow and bland; the characters, the dialogue, the “twist” (is it one, though?). Even the things that are presumably supposed to elicit squeals…
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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin 2024
Sundance Film Festival 2024 Film #1
This is such a beautiful ode to our yearn for friendship and human connection, and how this may just be the most resilient trait we possess. The filmic flourishes within Ibelin are not entirely necessary (i.e. the videotape player) but they by no means undermine the ingenuity of the narrative structure — made up of a mix of family footage, talking heads, and different kinds of animation — or the heart of this story, Mats, who is allowed the opportunity to narrate his life in his own words.
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