Kino-Eye

Toronto After Dark - TONIGHT!

2007-10-19T18:23:00.000-04:00

Remember - Toronto After Dark Film Festival starts tonight. Check out the schedule here.

It was inevitable that I would eventually reference the Wu-Tang Clan on this blog (and for that I do not apologize)

2007-10-12T18:30:00.000-04:00

'Reunited, double LP, world excited

Struck a match to the underground, industry ignited'

Or not. We're back after a brief hiatus. (Can I get a 'Suuuuuuuu'?)

Too $hort

2007-10-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

'Well I'm Too $hort baby, hear what I say

I never do work but I always play

Cause the game is life and I play the game

So you never talk down on a player's name'

Which is to say that the Student Shorts Film Festival is coming to Innis Town Hall, October 18 to October 20. Basically, while most of us were sitting at home in our underoos, downloading BitTorrent files of old Family Guy episodes, there were university students from Canada and across the globe who were putting in work to create delicious, bite-sized samplings of cinema. So give props where props are due and creep on over to Innis next week for the fest.

(And take a look at the festival's Lego-inspired trailer. Does this remind anyone else of being a kid and trying to film stop-motion animated features on a family member's camcorder, or was I the only one who was lame enough to do that?)

Toronto International Latin Film Festival

2007-10-12T17:44:00.000-04:00

From October 13 to October 20, The Royal Cinema will be hosting the Toronto International Latin Film Festival. TIIFF is dedicated screening the best in contemporary Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese cinema and this year the festival will feature films from Cuba, Venezuela, the United States, Brazil and Quebec. I'm interested in checking out 'Chavez, The People Have Awoken - The Venezuelan Revolution', in part because I recently read that El Commandante has come out against whisky, Hummers, and breast implants (say it ain't so, Hugo!).

imagineNative

2007-10-12T17:31:00.000-04:00

The imagineNative film festival is coming up. Showcasing films by Indigenous film makers across the globe, the festival 'fills a void in the artistic and cultural landscapes of Toronto in which Indigenous filmmakers and media artists are often underrepresented or misrepresented'. The festival runs from October 17 to October 21, with the opening screening of 'Four Sheets to the Wind' being held at 7:00 PM at the Bloor Cinema. Along with feature films, the festival program includes selections of shorts, music videos, experimental works, and documentaries.

Commfest

2007-09-28T12:06:00.000-04:00

Just found out about this:

The Commfest Community Film Festival is happening today until Sunday at Rainbow Cinema, 80 Front Street East. Here's the description from the website:

"COMMFFEST Community Film Festival is a registered charitable organization, combining public exhibits with forums for individuals and communities to engage in a dialogue of social issues and cultural exchange through the powerful language of film in all genres.

COMMFFEST showcases a wide variety of local, national, and international films. Its main objective is to bring communities together to increase awareness and understanding that we are more alike than not. Each film represents a voice to share experiences, educate others on their struggles, and discover common bonds of solidarity."

The films (which tend to be on the short side) are grouped into a number of series and tickets for each series are $9.

Ladyfest Toronto 2007 at the Brunswick

2007-09-28T03:41:00.000-04:00

As part of Ladyfest Toronto 2007, a collection of short films will be screened at the Brunswick Theatre tonight at 7PM. Artists include:

Micheline Durocher
Kim Kielhofner
Cara Spooner
Allie Caldwell
Sidrah Laldin
Freeshow Seymour: the films of Allyson Mitchell and Christina Zeidler

Tickets are $5-10 at the door. For more info on the artists involved, go to the Biographies page on the Ladyfest website.

Zapped!

2007-09-28T00:23:00.000-04:00

Scott Baio and I have been up late adding a links section to the blog. All the sites relate, in some way or another, to Toronto's film scene, so have a look.

Er, wrong CIA...

2007-09-27T22:32:00.000-04:00

The Rebel Film Series at OISE (252 Bloor Street West, @ St. George Subway Station) will be screening the film "CIA Covert Operations: The War Against The Third World" on Thursday, Oct. 4 at 7PM. The screening is free and will be followed by commentary and an open-floor discussion. Check out the list of up-coming films in this series over at rabble.ca.

Nuit Blanche

2007-09-27T21:57:00.000-04:00

Nuit Blanche is coming up this Staurday (Sept. 29). Here's a list of film/video-related pieces that will be on display, their respective artists and locations. For more info, go to the official Nuit Blanche website.

"Non-Specific Threat"

Willie Dohetry

The Burano Development Site, 832 Bay St. (at Grenville St.)

"Deeparture"

Mircea Cantor

Isabel Bader Theatre at Victoria College, U of T, 93 Charles St. W.

"Onscreen/Offscreen"

Curated by Barbara Fischer and Charlie Keil

Cineam Studies at Innis College, 2 Sussex Ave.

"Sleepless Night of Encounters: The Satoyama Story & Togitatsu's Revenge"

Vivian Reiss, Hideki Noda & Kanzaburo 18th

The Japan Foundation, 131 Bloor St. W., Suite 213

"Watcher"

Millie Chen

6, 35, 39 & 91 D'Arcy St.

"Traces"

Adad Hannah

The Rex Hotel Jazz and Blues Bar, 194 Queen St. W.

"Magical World"

Johanna Billing

First Baptist Church, 101 Huron St.

"Iconoclash: Night of Awe Dance Party"

Melissa Shiff

Grange Park (Grange Rd. and McCaul St.)

"Everybody Love You 2"

Daisuke Takeya

Rosalie Sharp Pavillion, 115 McCaul St.

"Midnight Mirage"

Vessna Perunovich

Anne Tanebaum Gallery School (parking lot), 60 McCaul St.

"Les Vampires"

Louis Feuillade

Cinematheque Ontario, AGO's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. W.

"Blender"

Theo Buchinaskas, Dan Thornhill, Kris Alexander

National Film Board of Canada Mediatheque, 150 John St.

"Short films by students from Ryerson"

Gladstone Hotel Art Bar, 1214 Queen St. W.

"City Glow"

Chiho Aoshima

Massey Harris Park, 945 King St. W.

"We Are Not Home Free"

Chris McCarroll

847 Adelaide St. W.

"LIFE"

beatzMASSIVE*

Trinity Bellwoods Park, Tennis Court, 790 Queen St. W.

"Indie Filmmaking with Broken Pencil"

Gallery 129, 129 Ossington Ave.

"One Minute Film & Video Festival"

Various filmmakers

Rhino Bar and Grill, 1249 Queen St. W.

"Dance Efficiency"

Derek Mainella and Matthew Bennett

The Social, 1100 Queen St. W.

"Private Moments in Public Spaces"

Laura Madera

Tatar Gallery, The Spoke Club, King St. W. & Portland St.

Suo Gan

2007-09-25T15:23:00.000-04:00

Seen '3:10 to Yuma'? Need a little more Christian Bale in your life? The East Asian Studies Student Union at the U of T is having it's first event of the year - a screening of Steven Spielberg's 'Empire of the Sun', the film adaptation of J. G. Ballard's classic novel, which stars a young Christian Bale alongside John Malkovich. The screening is in Robarts Library, Room 14353 on Sept. 27 (this Thursday) at 7:15PM (light refreshments will be served).

"She's a fox. In French she would be called 'la renarde' and she would be hunted with only her cunning to protect her."

2007-09-24T13:59:00.000-04:00

The Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East) is reopening October 1. But before then, be sure to check out 'Free Weekend At The Fox', Saturday, September 29 and Sunday, September 30, from 10AM to 4PM. You'll be able to inspect the newly renovated theatre and chat with the chaps in charge (the word for today is 'alliteration').

For more info, or to contact the Fox, try the theatre's website or Facebook group.

The Lantern Review

2007-09-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

I should have posted this earlier but a cold has kept me bedridden for the last few days. A friend from high school sent me info on a film-related event she's involved in at Cinecycle and asked that I spread the word:

"THE LANTERN REVIEW:

Saturday 21st at 8:30pm.

Location: Cinecycle (129 Spadina) + BAR + PWYC

film.video.dance.music. by:

NEIL CAVALIER + JACQUES MINDREAU

dual projection film/video and live sound

LUO LI + LESLEY CHAN

video + installation + live sound

GRAHAM BOYES

live audio/video mixing mangling

LISA KENNEDY + CARA SPOONER + ALIA O'BRIEN

film projection, live movement and score

LESLEY CHAN

mobile projection video storytelling

DAVID STEIN + ERIN MERRIFIELD

dance based video projection and live score"

Hope you have a chance to check it out!

Toronto After Dark Film Festival

2007-09-17T12:55:00.000-04:00

TIFF is over and done with. Still in need of a film festival fix? Well, coming this October is the Toronto After Dark Film Festival and founder and festival director Adam Lopez has been kind enough to send me some info about what's in store for this years festival:

"Toronto After Dark Film Festival is delighted to announce half its lineup of new horror and fantasy feature films which will premiere at its second annual edition, this October 19-25, at the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, Canada. The first seven feature films revealed are: THE TRIPPER, David Arquette’s star-studded debut horror film as writer-director; POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD, Lloyd Kaufman’s much anticipated new zombie musical; THE WOLFHOUND, the most expensive Russian fantasy film ever made; AACHI & SSIPAK, a groundbreaking new sci-fi animation from Korea; MULBERRY STREET and AUTOMATON TRANSFUSION, two critically acclaimed and gut-renching new zombie outbreak films; and AUDIENCE OF ONE, a hilarious, award-winning documentary about one priest’s disastrous attempt to shoot a Christian version of Star Wars.

Seven more feature film premieres, and a collection of 36 cutting-edge horror and fantasy short films will complete this year’s Toronto After Dark program, when they are announced online at the festival website on Sept. 26. Fans can watch trailers to the announced films, and pre-order Festival Passes at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival website here."

Check out a full sampling of trailers for these flicks over at Youtube.

Oh yeah, it's also Film Festival season...

2007-09-11T19:14:00.000-04:00

Forgot to mention that.

(Did anyone else besides me wait three and a half hours in line at the Manulife Centre to buy tickets? I mean, I know other people did, otherwise why would I have waited three and a half hours for tickets? What I'm asking is if any of you waited that long for tickets.)

Juarez

2007-09-11T18:41:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick heads-up about a film that will be playing at the Bloor Cinema on September 27 at 7PM - 'Juarez: The City Where Women Are Disposable'.

'Juarez is a feature length documentary that shows the theories found by family members of the victims, forensics, journalists, artists and activists in Mexico, questioning why the federal government hasn’t intensified its interest to thoroughly investigate the brutal murders of over 460 women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Juarez exposes the high levels of corruption and violence in Mexico, which have led to increasing violence and murders against women. Also, the documentary shows several interviews to the children of some of the murdered women of Juarez. They are the other victims of the femicide.' - from the website

Tickets, which are $10 each, are available in advance from the Toronto Women's Bookstore or by placing an order through juarezdoc@lasperlasdelmarfilms.com. For more info on the film, including a director's statement, check out the website.

Facebook film groups

2007-09-09T14:37:00.000-04:00

Just a heads up about two groups that are worth checking out on Facebook:

1) Cinema Studies Student Union - free films on campus - "The Cinema Studies Student Union is all about film culture. We operate a movie theatre on campus, where we show films on 35mm, which looks so so good. Our film selections are diverse, what they have in common is being great. Admission is free for all. Our theatre is Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave. No passes are required unless otherwise specified."

2) Brunswick Theatre--Toronto, ON - Keeps you up-to-date on upcoming events happening at "Toronto's Newest Cinema".

16MM Films - No Video!

2007-09-04T17:51:00.000-04:00

I was in Suspect Video today picking up a few videos ($3 used VHS cassettes = best/cheapest present ever) and happened upon the new flyer for Trash Palace. (If you're unfamiliar with 'Toronto's Classiest Cinema', check out the interview Kino-Eye did with the founder, Stacey Case, some months back.) Looks like another great line-up, and I say that not knowing a thing about any of the films he's chosen to screen.

Here's the list of up coming flicks (along with Stacey's brief explanatory notes for each film):

Sept 14 - Cotter (1973) (Alcoholic rodeo clowns)

Sept. 28 - Flat Foot (1973) (Italian crime/Bud Spencer's best film)

Oct. 12 - Rhino! (1964) (Safari Action)

Oct. 26 - Halloween Spook Show! (8MM and Super8 condensed versions of horror movie classics! Over 20 films!)

Nov. 9 - Macon County Line (1974) ("It shouldn't have happened. But it did...")

Nov. 23 - Gorilla at Large (1954) (Gorilla in the audience!)

Dec. 7 - Project: Kill (1976) (Leslie Nielsen as a kung fu assassin. This is not a comedy.) (KE: Found this bit of commentary on the film after Googling 'Project: Kill'. Not only does this movie have Mr. Naked Gun himself, it also boasts an appearance by Nancy Kwan, who played Linda Low in the musical 'Flower Drum Song'. Bonus!)

Dec. 21 - The Force on Thunder Mountain (1978) (Merry Christmas from Trash Palace. The best bad movie in the world.)

Jan. 4 - Plague (1978) (Happy New Year from Trash Palace. Shot in Toronto. A trash classic.)

Tickets are $5 in advance (there are no walk-ins allowed) and can be picked up at Suspect Video at Queen and Bathurst. And remember: the location of the screening is a secret (unless you've alrady been to the Palace before) and is printed on the ticket. Doors open at 8:30 and the film begins at 9:30, but I'd advise everyone to arrive early, as Stacey likes to screen some wild shorts before each movie.

Linda, Linda, Linda

2007-09-03T15:34:00.000-04:00

I seem to be betraying my true colours by following up an interview with 'Hell in Eros' instructor Ryan Mitchell with yet another interview with someone committed to screening the best of Japanese cinema here in Toronto. This time, it's Chris MaGee, founder of the Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow and editor and chief of it's Facebook group. I can't remember who first alerted me to the existence of this group but whoever you are, thank you. The Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow is just the sort of thing Kino-Eye loves to cover - a small group dedicated to spreading the good word of world cinema to Toronto's student masses. I haven't been fortunate enough to attend one of the TJFAPW's screenings and am looking forward to catching it's screening of 'Linda, Linda, Linda' on September 21, as I've heard good things about this film.

(By the way: TJFAPW's Facebook photo is a work of art and big props must be given to Chris for squeezing a picture of perennial virgin Setsuko Hara in between photos of Takeshi Kitano blowing his brains out in 'Sonatine' and Tetsuo the Iron Man.)

What follows is an email interview I conducted with Chris this weekend. For more info on the Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow and it's upcoming screenings, check out it's Facebook group. It's loaded with almost 90 reviews of recent and not-so-recent Japanese flicks, so it's definitely worth a look.

Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow Interview, Part I - 'I wanted to be able to show people the depth of Japanese cinema'

2007-09-03T14:55:00.000-04:00

Kino-Eye: What originally drew you to Japanese cinema? Is your interest in Japanese cinema encompassed by a more general interest in Japan and Japanese culture?

Chris MaGee: I think Japanese culture and cinema has for me, like a lot of Westerners, always been there in a kind of semi-conscious way. I just remember as a kid watching the kaiju monster movies (Godzilla, Gamera, etc.) on channel 29 out of Buffalo after school, or the English dubbed episodes of “Battle of the Planets”. I think that a lot of Westerners have that shadowy sense of Japan from those things; our culture makes this kind of broad distinction of Japan as the other side of the coin to our North American culture, the same, but entirely different, filled with cherry blossoms and strange street fashions, anime and high tech. In the end this isn’t wholly correct, but its part of our cultural perception, especially growing up.

As I got older Japan was always there at the back of my mind. I used to have trouble sleeping and CBC News World would have a program called “Today’s Japan” that was put together by NHK. It would air at 1:00 am every night and I got kind of hooked.

The two things that ultimately got me into Japanese cinema, though, were that I took a class in screenwriting and ended going to Japan in 2006. For the screenwriting class the instructor kept drilling us with the three act structure and how all stories come in this neat little package, and it goes all the way back to Aristotle, so how’re you going to argue with Aristotle, right? She did pause for a second or two though and mentioned that there were some exceptions to the rule, namely experimental film and Asian cinema. This light bulb went off because I really don’t like being told there’s only one way to do something, so I went off and started with Takeshi Kitano’s “Dolls” and some of Miyasaki’s films. At first it was strange, but wonderful. The pacing, editing, the basic storytelling was utterly different to what I was used to.

Then there was the trip over to Japan. My wife and I had been niggling at each other about adventure, or lack thereof in our lives, so we agreed to go big or go home. If we were going to travel then let’s go to Japan. I’d done some retreats at a Zen monastery and she has her own meditation practice, so... As part of the preparations though I wanted to learn some Japanese and what better way to get your feet wet in the language and culture than through a country’s cinema.

So, that’s the story and through that process I fell in love with Japanese cinema. I really believe that it’s definitely a falling in love situation. Let’s hope we never get divorced!

KE: Does your interest in Japanese cinema cross over into an interest in other regional cinemas?

CM: Of course Asian cinema has a strong hold too. I’m a huge fan of Tsai Ming Liang’s films and I was really impressed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film “Mysterious Object at Noon”. I think in Japanese and Asian cinema as a whole there is a greater acceptance of the abstract, or well maybe abstract isn’t the best word to describe it... Donald Richie makes the distinction between the West’s “representational” approach to film making, very similar to how a painting is strictly interpreted as a window or mirror of our own reality. Asian cinema works on the level of the “presentational” as he defines it. I’ve always seen that as the equivalent of abstract, thus the choice of that term. To make another comparison to painting an abstract painting is just that, a painting, and it’s not trying to be a realistic mirror of reality. When you embrace that artificiality then it opens up all these other different realities, different possibilities. I think Asian cinema does that.

One thing I found really interesting is that when I was in Japan I’d see a lot of snippets of daytime TV. I mean here if they show films in the afternoon it’s usually something terrible like “Rocky 3” or some other 80’s movie, but in Japan I would see Godard’s “Breathless” or Cocteau’s “La Belle at la Bête”. What kind of impact would that have on young filmmakers? It’s a very interesting thought.

KE: What originally motivated you to found The Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow?

CM: Sheer isolation. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but... Watching films isn’t really a team sport. At best you might go with one other person to a show and then grab a coffee after and do the usual “What did you think?” for an hour. With Japanese cinema though you’re in a very specific niche, so I just found myself renting and borrowing all of these films and having marathon viewing sessions alone at home. It was fantastic, kind of loading my brain with all of this, but objectively it’s a guy alone in a room. I wanted to connect with other people who loved Japanese cinema as much as I did.

Also, I wanted to be able to show people the depth of Japanese cinema. I can’t begin to count the number of people who join the group and the first comment they make is, “I Love Japanese cinema! My favorite films are ‘Battle Royale’ and ‘Ichi the Killer’!” Now, there’s nothing wrong with either of those films, but I think the group’s job is to say, “Okay, then if you love ‘Battle Royale’ did you know about Fukasaku’s yakuza films from the 70’s, or for ‘Ichi the Killer’ maybe you’d like a film like Teruo Ishii’s ‘Screwed’.”

One thing that has bothered me in a way is that many (but not all) people are drawn to Japanese cinema now through the “extreme cinema” tag; very violent, provocative genre stuff. Any way to get into another country’s cinema is good, but I think that there are a lot of people who just get to that and stop exploring and assume that Japanese cinema means school kids killing each other on an island or Tadanobu Asano with his face held together with safety pins. It’s like basing your view on Hollywood cinema on Rosebud and a lightsaber. Those are just two arbitrary books ends. There’s so, so, so much more. So, that’s the main purpose of the J-Film Pow-Wow now. To let people know that.

KE: On your group's site, you have a note of appreciation from Midnight Eye's co-founder Jasper Sharp. How did you come into contact with him?

CM: I had a momentary spasm of courage and emailed Midnight Eye telling them about the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow and he was nice enough to get back to me. I think that’s what brought him on Facebook, so hopefully we’ll see a Midnight Eye presence there soon. Midnight Eye was one of the sites that really fed the fire for me, so I’ve been very flattered that he and I have struck up a nice acquaintance and got to bond over our love of the director Akira Ogata who did a couple films, “Boy’s Choir” and “The Milkwoman”. He was very open to writing that little blurb for the group too. Very nice guy.

KE: How frequently do you hold your screenings? How do you decide which films to screen? What has the attendance rate been like?

As of right now not very frequently at all, but that will hopefully change. I’ve tried setting things up in the past and I’d like to continue to do so in the future because the response was pretty good, but there are a lot of difficulties that you have to deal with, the two main things being what to screen and the legalities involved. You could pull together a really nice roster of films to show, but then how do you arrange the screenings with the distributors? It gets complex and potentially very expensive. The screenings we have hosted have been self financed, so...

One way that I’m managing to keep Japanese films on the big screen in Toronto is that I’m on the committee that is co-programming this year’s season of movie nights run by the Canada Japan Society. The season runs from September until June usually on the third Friday of each month. We’ll have quite a diverse bunch of films this year, starting off with Nobuhiro Yamashita’s “Linda, Linda, Linda” in September and then I believe we have some Kitano, Miike, Iwai, and other directors represented as well. The final details are getting hammered out.

I’d really like to have the Pow-Wow have its own screening series though, but the difficulty with that is that there’s a very small community of folks who show Japanese film in Toronto and there’s kind of an unwritten rule not to step on each other’s toes. I mean Cinematheque takes care of the classics (Ozu, Kurosawa, etc.), the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Don Mills has their family friendly contemporary films, and then at the Canada Japan Society the mandate is to showcase contemporary films that might be geared to the over 18 set. At the end of the day what’s left? A lot have people have told me that if we showed anime films we’d get a ton of people out, but that’s not the thrust of the group and Thomas Silver over at UTARPA, the U of T Japanese Animation Group is doing a fine job of that already. I’d say that my dream series would be a lot of the lesser known films and use the series as a way of showcasing those. You’d hope that you could get a few bodies out to see more obscure stuff like Nagisa Oshima’s “Sing a Song of Sex” or Keisuke Kinoshita’s “Carmen Comes Home”.

KE: Do you primarily spread word of your screenings through Facebook?

CM: Right now yes, although I’ve put up some posters in some key locations around the city. It seems that most people find out about us through Facebook though.

Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow Interview, Part II - 'Up until now it’s been kind of a one man show...'

2007-09-03T14:36:00.000-04:00

KE: What shops, video stores, libraries, theatres and neighbourhoods do you go to in the GTA to find Japanese films? Do you ever buy or rent bootlegged Japanese movies?

CM: There are great resources out there in Toronto for Japanese cinema you just need to be pointed in the right direction. I already mentioned that various groups, the JCCC, CJS, etc. that hold screenings. One of the best places to get your hands on not only Japanese films, but literature, news and culture in general is the Japan Foundation at Bloor and Avenue Road. They have a great library there and borrowing privileges are free. The Pow-Wow actually did some volunteer consultation work with Mariko Lilifeldt, the head librarian there a few months back so that they could expand their selection of films on DVD and some of those films have already hit their shelves, so that’s a great resource. I have to tell you though that their selection of films on VHS makes my mouth water!

Besides that anyone who’s interested in Japanese cinema or a good cross section of world cinema has to check out places like Queen Video, Suspect and Bay Street Video. All of those combined put most things that are released on region 1 DVD right in your hands. What isn’t can sometimes be found in Chinatown, but you take your chances not so much with the quality of the transfers, but in the quality of the subtitles. Some are really bad.

I also have some favorite little used places, but as a collector of films I have to keep those as my own happy little hunting grounds.

KE: What Japanese films do you hope to check out this year at the Toronto International Film Festival?

CM: Unfortunately my coffers are empty right now, so that coveted festival pass is out of financial reach this year, but never fear! One of our new contributing editors, Bob Turnbull is going to be our correspondent, so we’ll hopefully have the latest word on Kitano’s new film “Glory to the Filmmaker”, as well as a lot of others. I’m kind of upset that I’m not getting a chance to see Naomi Kawase’s latest “The Mourning Forest” myself. She’s one of those filmmakers I’ve read a lot about, but haven’t had the chance to catch in person. Maybe next year for me.

KE: How to you keep yourself informed about the latest developments in Japanese cinema?

CM: Through online sources mostly; the aforementioned Midnight Eye, Twitch Film is a great site and Mark Schilling’s reviews in the Japan Times are obviously a great source of what’s new in Japan. He has really eclectic tastes, so you don’t have to worry about only getting a narrow selection of films being reviewed.

KE: What films would you recommend to someone who needs an introduction to Japanese cinema?

CM: That’s kind of a hard question because it really depends on who is interested in exploring Japanese cinema and what they might have already seen. Like I said before, someone who loved “Battle Royale” should check out other films by Kinji Fukasaku, maybe also Seijun Suzuki’s and Yasuharu Hasebe’s films and go from there.

Then again it’s like visiting a country. If you visit Japan then there are some things you absolutely should see or you’re totally missing out. Same for Japanese cinema. I’d say the big ones would be Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”, Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” and “Seven Samurai”, Hirsohi Teshigahara’s “Woman in the Dunes”, Masaki Kobayashi’s “Harakiri”, Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu”, “Tampopo” by Juzo Itami, definitely some of Takeshi Kitano’s films, “Hana-Bi” being the big one, and I’d say films like “Audition” and some of the anime classics for sure. If you have those under your belt then you have a good foundation to build on, but it’s important to make your own discoveries, to see where your real tastes lie.

Still, I would love it if everyone could have a chance to see films like Sai’s “Doing Time”, Ogata’s “Boy’s Choir” and Itami’s “The Funeral”. Those are some of my more obscure favorites.

KE: Are there any books that have deepened your understanding of Japanese cinema that you would recommend?

CM: Definitely. I’d say that Donald Richie’s writings are key to someone who’s interested in Japanese cinema. His “One Hundred Year of Japanese Films” is a real seminal work, but also he wrote a really lovely book of character studies called “Geisha, Gangster, Neighbor, Nun” that includes these very perceptive portraits of every day people Richie encountered in his daily life in Japan along with your Kurosawa’s and Mifune’s and Katsu’s. It’s crazy the amount of people he got to know!

Then there’s Mark Schilling’s work and Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp’s work with Midnight Eye. They wrote a great book called “The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film” that I love. It’s a really great resource. It’s interesting with them that when you go through Richie’s work he kind of breezes over a lot of the contemporary films. He’s very dismissive of them and directors like Kitano and Miike and Tsukamoto. I guess he’s gotten old and curmudgeonly, but Jasper and Tom have kind of picked up where he’s left off. I absolutely believe that we wouldn’t have the interest we do in guys like Miike, or be aware of filmmakers like Ryuichi Hiroki or Rokuro Mochizuki at all if it weren’t for them writing about them and creating a demand for them in the West.

Outside of criticism though there was a really nice little book by Peter Carey that, I’m not sure if it expanded or greatly deepened my view of Japanese cinema, but it’s “flavoured” it maybe I could say. It was called “Wrong About Japan”. He travels with his son and they encounter a lot of the manga and anime greats as well as Hayao Miyasaki. That’s a great book.

KE: What can we expect from The Toronto Japanese Film Appreciation Pow-Wow in the future?

A lot hopefully. There’s my work with the Canada Japan Society movie nights and, like I said, hopefully our own screenings returning shortly. There’s a plan in the works to do a co-presentation of a new Japanese film at this year’s After Dark Film Festival in October, but I would have to kill you if I told you what that film is right now. It’s a great one though and it hasn’t been screened in Toronto before.

I’ve recently brought in three contributing editors to help out with reviewing films. It should be interesting because they’re all so diverse. Bob, who I mentioned before works for IBM, then Marc Saint-Cyr is in the cinema studies program at U of T, and Polly Esther is one of the stars of the Pillow Fight League. Of course then there’s me, so we’ll have this kind of wonderful stew of viewpoints coming together. I mean up until now it’s been kind of a one man show, but from here on in it will be more of a group effort between the four of us.

I think that the big goal right now that I have to put my muscle behind is that we’d like to start a website for the Pow-Wow, so we can have a little bit more in depth material on there, and also will hopefully give us a little more cred so that we can go out and solicit some interviews with some directors and actors. With that website to compliment the Facebook group (because that’s definitely going to keep going) I’d hope that we can build it up so that the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow becomes a cross between a Midnight Eye and a Now Magazine. Someplace where Torontonians who love Japanese cinema can check out what’s going on in the local scene, but a place where people internationally can get something as well. The only problem is that I’m an absolute HTML dummy, so this is my official cry for help if anyone wants to volunteer some time to do some web design for us!

Entschuldigen Sie bitte

2007-08-27T12:41:00.000-04:00

Well. It's been a while. Too long, really - months. Edward Yang, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have all passed away and are probably now in heaven, being assaulted by the vicious ghost of Klaus Kinski. We will miss them.

Meanwhile, Kino-Eye has been suspended in limbo for the last few months, and for that I apologize. Summer employment came to monolpolize most of my free time, thus preventing me from updating this site as often as I would have liked. But today is my final day as an espresso jockey and, from here on in, I should (school work aside) be able to devote myself to this site in a way that I haven't been able to recently.

And I am happy to report that as soon as I finish this little update-cum-apology, I will be able to post an interview that has been in the works for sometime now, one which I'm quite happy to have secured. In terms of postings to come, there are a few things in the works but, as usual, the content of this site will largely be determined on the spur-of-the-moment. And by all of you, who I am hoping will contribute articles and keep me posted on film-related happenings in Toronto.

So, again, big apologies for abandoning this site - it won't happen again.

The Great Happiness Space

2007-08-27T12:32:00.000-04:00

Way back in May, a friend of mine sent me an email asking me if I wanted to check out a class at the Anarchist Free University called 'Hell in Eros: Desire and Japanese Cinema'. Looking at the course website, I found I was familiar with some of the film makers featured in class (Takashi Miike, Nagisa Oshima, Kinji Fukasaku and Koji Wakamatsu) and unfamiliar with others (Kaneto Shinoda and Shuji Terayama). With my formal, communal experiences with Japanese cinema largely restricted to retrospectives at Cinematheque of critical favourites like Kurosawa, Ozu, Naurse and Immamura, I was interested to see how the work of these often maligned film makers would be investigated in class, given the course mandate to problematize the 'facile distinction' between the arthouse and the grindhouse.

So I and another friend headed on over, neither of us adequetly prepared for the screening that was to follow. The first film was Koji Wakamatsu's 'Go, Go, Second Time Virgin' and by the end of it the class was left, quite literally, speechless (for reasons I'm sure you're familiar with if you've seen the film). Subsequent screenings have been, if not as damaging (and I use that term reverentially, if that's at all possible), then certainly as interesting - Kinji Fukasaku's 'Black Lizard', Kaneto Shinoda's 'Onibaba', Takashi Miike's 'Audition', Nagisa Oshima's 'Diary of a Shinjuku Thief', Shuji Terayama's 'Throw Your Books Away, Rally in the Streets!', Masahiro Shindo's 'Double Suicide', and Jake Clennell's 'The Great Happiness Space: Diary of an Osaka Love Thief', among others.

After a healthy game of email tag, I managed to secure an interview with the instructor of the course, Ryan Mitchell, who reveals (among other things) what motivated him to launch the course, what 'Hell in Eros' actually means, and what Zizek and Lacan have to do with Japanese cinema. Class resumes in September and I appeal to all of you, as cinephiles and as students (who I am sure, come September, will realize what a drag formal education can be), to check out 'Hell in Eros' at the Anarchist Free University. The course website, with all the details related to class times and location, can be found here.

Hell in Eros Interview, Part I - 'It's more fun to respond to the ending of 'Audition' than it is to pore over Hegel.'

2007-08-27T11:39:00.000-04:00

Kino-Eye: What motivated you to found this course originally and how did you come to found it?

Ryan Mitchell: The course came about over a drunken conversation with another AFUer who had done numerous courses before. The idea was to do a split Peter Greenaway and Takashi Miike screening course where we would alternate weeks and screenings. Although the pairing seems a bit random — Greenaway is often considered ‘art’ whereas Miike comes from the ghetto of manga/yakuza adaptations — we did find affinities between the way each of them with certain themes: desire, frustration, decay, the uncanny. Not only that, we felt that Greenaway and Miike approached these themes with two seemingly different vehicles — Greenaway uses sex whereas Miike uses violence. Our idea for thecourse was to try and get at what each of these filmmakers were try to discuss through the use of sex or violence (or both). There seems to be some sort of unspeakable place that is only accessed through such acts.

Anyway, for whatever reason, this course didn’t happen. I had, however, done quite a bit of work on my Miike weeks so I basically had half a course planned and was looking for an outlet. At the sametime I was also planning on putting on a theory course on the political theory of desire. I basically decided to put the two courses together but expand Miike course to a broader Japanese cinema course.

KE: Beyond this, were there any more reasons why did you decide to approach Japanese cinema exclusively in your examination of desire as represented in film?

RM: Sure. This goes back to my intention to do a theory/philosophy course on desire. I had thought what it’d be like to gather people around to read something out of, say, Hegel’s “Phenomenology of the Spirit” and I figured this would be such a drag and it would simply replicate what’s going on in “real” universities where people sitting around and do a type of intellectual archaeology of playing with fossils. Pairing the two courses together and having a weekly screening would always make for a concrete object of discussion that we could project the abstract theory on to. I’d like to think that the format worked for everyone involved. Even if you necessarily didn’t understand the readings, or even do them, the film could be something you could respond to and that as a viewer you were as much as an expert as anyone else in the room since you could respond with your feelings and how the film affected you. Besides it’s more fun to respond to the ending of 'Audition' (1999) than it is to pore over Hegel.

Oh! That doesn’t directly answer your question, does it? Okay, even though I don’t want to say anything broad or essentialist about Japanese cinema — and especially about Japanese national culture — I kept coming across certain themes in Japanese cinema over and over again that I wasn’t seeing elsewhere. Specifically I was seeing the theme of “desire” in just about every other film I saw. What I was seeing was the violent, hellish reactions that desire produces in us. Again, I think this is an attempt to deal with this unspeakable/unknowable aspect that is at the heart of not only our desire but the human condition. I can’t say why the Japanese are so good at this but they sure seem to be!Beyond this, I also had a philanthropic urge where I felt a duty to get people out to see these films. Some of the greatest films in cinema history have been made by people like Wakamatsu, Masumura, Shindo, Oshima, and Miike, but outside of Jack Hunter’s wrong-headed “Eros in Hell” (1998) book these films are rarely discussed, let alone seen.

KE: So the title of your course is a play on Jack Hunter’s “Eros in Hell” (1998) book?

RM: Absolutely! Being the silly guy that I am, I wanted something pretentious and important sounding for the course, but at the sametime my reasons behind it are a bit more playful. The “Eros in Hell” book is pretty awful in that it plays up to the tiresome and offensive Japanese “blackface” stereotypes of young-girls-in-Sailor Moon-school-uniforms-getting-caned-across-the-ass that we in the West use to demonize Japan as a “degenerate” country. Although I’m largely dealing with the same group of filmmakers/films as “Eros in Hell” is, I wanted to give the actual films a bit more of a serious treatment rather than delegating them to the mondo/exploitation ghetto. The book, for example, plays up the “exploitation” elements of Masumura’s 'Blind Beast' (1969) and Shindo’s 'Onibaba' (1964) in that it simply gives a synopsis of the sex and violent content of these films. Needless to say, I think he seriously does a disservice to these important films.

Also, the book’s main thesis is that because of Japanese unique censorship laws — the ban on the onscreen depiction of genitals — has lead to an extreme cinema where all other boundaries are broken — again playing up the mondo/exploitation angle. I have to say I’m not convinced of this argument at all.

So, yeah, it’s simple. Beyond being a response to Jack Hunter’s book, my course is called “Hell in Eros” in that there’s something “hellish” about being in love, something hellish about desiring. I wanted to explore this idea in the course. Not only that but there’s been a few Japanese films that play to this idea. Chusei Sone did a pretty good “roman porno” with 'Hellish Love' (1972), Susumu Hani’s great New Wave film 'Nanami: The Inferno of First Love' (1968) and of course Yoshishige Yoshida’s 'Eros Plus Massacre' (1970).

Hell in Eros Interview, Part II - 'This is fucking awesome!'

2007-08-27T10:41:00.000-04:00

KE: You admit that your critical approach to these films is rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis and the writings of Zizek. These writers, along with writings by critical thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, make up the course's theoretical focus. What is it about these writers that appeals to you and why are their ideas relevant to discussion on Japanese cinema? Why have you decided to utilize their writings more often than texts that explicitly deal with Japanese cinema?

RM: Before starting the class I had an idea of what readings I’d like to do and some of the concepts that I’d be playing with. To be honest, I felt that none of the readings were going to go over well with the rest of the group since they were “difficult.” I made the pretentious mistake of handing out an essay by Felix Guattari, “A Cinema of Desire,” during thef irst class to show how cool and well-read I am. I hadn’t read it in some time and only got to read it after the first class, so I came back for the second class apologizing for handing out such a “difficult” piece, but the majority of the class enjoyed it and really wanted to discuss it. Although I had only intended the readings to be secondary to the screenings I found that as the course went on and we were reading things by Bataille and Zizek people were really wanting to discuss the readings and go further with theoretical side of the class. I have to admit I was caught off-guard about this since I never planned “lectures” or discussion entry points into the readings. Actually, the one time I tried to do a formal lecture — with chalkboard illustrations and everything — I got heckled! I totally deserved it too!

So, again this goes back to my intention for the class — that the screenings would serve as a vehicle for a discussion of desire. I guess the course fits in somewhere between a philosophy course and film course and for this reason I didn’t assign too many film history/theory texts. I really didn’t want too much to get in the way of a discussion of how the films address the question of desire. That said, as the course progressed I found it was necessary to contextualize the films within not only a historical context but also an artistic one.For example, I found when I screened Wakamatsu’s 'Ecstasy of the Angels' (1972) and Oshima’s 'Diary of a Shinjuku Thief' (1968) that it was necessary to talk not only about the student movement in Japan in the late 60s but also how the Japanese New Wave was aligned with the Art Theatre Guild and they were making films in response to the same thing the students were rallying against. So, yeah, maybe it was naïve for me to completely leave out the film history/theory side of the course. I have to admit to not being a huge expert on this side of things so I think I was maybe hesitant to provide such information.

KE: In Hannah Arendt's introduction to Walter Benjamin's 'Illuminations', she describes Benjamin's conception of the collector as a revolutionary, one who 'redeem[s] the object as a thing since it now is no longer a means to anend but has intrinsic worth' (that is, redeems the object 'from the drudgery of usefulness') and in so doing complements the redemption of people from their labour. You yourself are a collector of films and I believe have laid claim to ownership of hundreds of movies. Do you understand what you are doing in Benjamin's terms, or is there a more prosaic motive behind your collecting?

RM: I think collecting is what little boys do, and I fully admit that my collection is borne of the fact that I’ve yet to graduate into full adulthood and that in many ways the 2000+ films I have are the collection of a little boy! I know I’m never going to have the time to watch even half of them. I have no idea, for example, when I’m going to feel in the mood to watch Charles Bronson in Death Wish 1 through 5 or all of Fassbinder’s films.

My life has been a succession of different collections. I started collecting comic books as a youngster so I’d be chasing every appearance of “Tiger Shark” in the Sub-Mariner comic. I then moved on to collecting vinyl records so I’d be chasing stupid 7’ singles of this or that obscure band. Somewhere along the way I took up collecting dolls and action figures and I’d be chasing a mint condition carded Mego Captain America doll. It must be a sublimation for something! I’m going to have to ask my therapist…

In many ways I think collecting is a perfect metaphor for desire — we’re always chasing something and when we finally catch it we’re always disappointed because it was the case and not the catch. That’s why collections are absolutely predicated on lack — a collection is never complete and when it is, we often find reasons why it’s not or we move on to another collection to start again. I mean I would often look my various collections and be absolutely miserable because there was something missing from it: “If I only had the 8-inch Fist-Fighting Batman with Karate Action I could be happy!” Manufacturers aren’t stupid, that’s why they create obscenely small print runs of that Charizard hologram card so that they can make every 10 year-old Pokemon collector miserable. Actually, they probably make their parents miserable who have to put up with their kids.

Jesus! I really didn’t answer your question! Benjamin? Arendt? Films? Japanese? Want to repeat it again? I tend to rile myself up like this… I think I should go lie down…

KE: What objectives did you set for the class upon establishing it this summer?

RM: I’m not sure if I have any concrete objective for the course other than facilitating a space where we can watch film and discuss it. The reason for not having a specific objective is that I know people are coming to the class for different reasons and I’m completely fine with that. Some people are there to learn more about Japanese cinema, others are there for the desire component and some just show up to goof around. It’s all good.

Just the other week we were watching Yasuzo Masmura’s 'Manji' (1964) and in the middle of the screening someone from the group bursted out laughing: “this is fucking awesome!” I guess you can say that is the type of audience member I had hoped to attract! Objective met!

KE: How is your class in particular and the AFU in general advertised? Have these methods been successful?

RM: This is an interesting question and it’s something we’ve often grappled with at the AFU. My quick and immediate answer would be to say “no” and that we could benefit from more exposure for what we do — I think more people would be involved if they knew we existed! We were just recently written up in the Globe and Mail and have received some other “mainstream” exposure, but we’ve tended to stay low on the radar. I dunno, maybe it’s for the best?

This Fall we’re doing outreach with some alternative high schools in the area and we’re going to have some of our classes count as school credits. We’re also trying to create better connections with various universities. We’ll have to see how this all works out.

For my own class I did absolutely no advertising—just what was put on the website. Although weekly attendance wildly varied from 5 to 25, I was happy with the enrolment for my individual course where I had about 30 students. I figured anything more than 30 would have been unmanageable. I’m still debating actually promoting any of my future courses since I prefer things to be more intimate rather than have more people show up to my class just to allow me to feel popular.

KE: What films are you planning to screen in the coming weeks?

RM: Well, we’re on hiatus for the summer - I’m just too busy with other projects during August. Also, with the weather being so nice it gets hard for me to commit every week. I am, however, restarting/rebooting the class in September for the Fall semester.

There were about four films that I intentionally didn’t get around to showing the first time around — Miike’s 'Imprint' (2005), Masamura’s 'Blind Beast' (1969), Oshima’s 'In The Realm of the Senses' (1976) and Miike’s 'Ichi The Killer' (2001) — and I’m using them as “bait” to encourage the folks who showed up to the first instalment of this class to come back for the second. The reason I held off on showing these films also had a practical purpose because I think they all exemplify what I’m doing with this course — it would just be a good way to wrap up all the themes of the course.

KE: What do you hope attendees of your class will take away from the experience?

RM: To come away from the class saying “this is fucking awesome!”

On Reginald Harkema’s Monkey Warfare - an essay by Kohei Usuda

2007-07-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody,

Sorry for the lack of new material as of late. Chalk it up to days spent moving and unpacking, as well as hours of grueling labour in the salt mines (I swear to God I'm going to quit).

That being said, I have exciting news: Kino-Eye finally has it's first contributor. A friend and local film maker, Kohei Usuda has generously contributed a short essay he has written on Reginald Harkema’s film 'Monkey Warfare', a 2006 feature shot largely in Parkdale. I won't say too much about the article (too many cooks in the kitchen and all that) other than to say that I'm always pleased to read Kohei's writing on film, given that he brings to his essays a critical and yet sensitive appreciation of cinema as a medium and as an art.

Read and enjoy (and then contribute something yourself).

* * *

'On Reginald Harkema’s Monkey Warfare'

By Kohei Usuda

Writing on the current state of Canadian films in the new issue of Cahiers du cinéma, Mark Peranson lists Reginald Harkema’s 'Monkey Warfare' – which was shot largely in Toronto’s Parkdale district – as two of 2006’s most unique Canadian films alongside 'Radiant City' by Burns and Brown. Yet, upon reading the reviews of 'Monkey Warfare', one cannot but be alarmed by all the discussions regarding the political implication of the film, such as the theme of “burned-out post-radicalism” that Harkema’s film is supposedly commenting on. At any rate, that is how Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere begins his review, going on to say that Monkey Warfare “is about things that have gone stale. Things like marriage, idealism, old records and yesterday’s hopes.” Indeed, for NOW’s Cameron Bailey, “Monkey Warfare is that rare Canadian film that takes politics seriously”; likewise, for Eye’s Jason Anderson, “Monkey Warfare returns repeatedly to questions about how one is supposed to go about changing the world and whether violent acts are ever justified.”

Of course, the critics are not wholly mistaken in speaking of Harkema’s film in terms of contextual aspect of the film; however, in doing so, the same critics must not fail to notice the other equally important subject of 'Monkey Warfare': i.e. the subject of recycling, exchanging, and trading. That is how, as we see throughout the film, the Parkdale couple Dan and Linda (Don McKellar and Tracy Wright) make their living: gleaning up offbeat vintage items off the street, and selling them on to the buyers through their website. Harkema obviously underlines this theme by showing the gestures of his characters passing objects from one character to another. As a matter of fact, it is this gesture that the relationship between each character is established. For instance, we recall that it is through the gesture of the young pot-dealer Susan (Nadia Litz) passing a joint to Dan that they strike up their friendship (see OutNow.ch). But obviously we must wait until once that Dan passes his radical ideology to her – as presented in the forms of books and records – that they move beyond their simple association as a dealer and a client. Finally, their relationship based on exchange is fully complete when Susan uses his theory into practice, that is, when she actually transforms Dan’s idea into action. (But unfortunately the story doesn’t end happily for her since Dan refuses to pass on his know-how of making a Molotov cocktail!) Of course, the danger in passing on an object is that, sooner or later, it might come back to its original owner, hence making a full circle: thus, in no time, the young Susan emerges as a radicalized revolutionary, transforming herself into Dan’s older self to haunt his hidden past. This is a classic image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Perhaps that is why there are numerous circular objects in the film, such as bicycle wheels, vinyl records, and so on.

In this sense, despite many critics’ allusion to Godard – Cameron Bailey name-drops 'La Chinoise' as well as 'Two or Three Things I Know about Her' – Harkema’s film is closer to Bresson in essence than to the filmmaker of 'Week End'. Indeed, it was Bresson – and not Godard – who used to film the movements and circulations of objects passing from one hand to another. (The images of hands snatching wallets in 'Pickpocket' are probably one of the most graceful moments in the history of cinema.) Yet, save for one fleeting shot, in this film about objects passing from one hand to another, Harkema refuses to present banknotes in the image. That is to say, unlike Bresson’s 'L’Argent', he refuses to show the transaction of money and goods, the act of which the French director saw as an evil deed. If there is no place for banknote in 'Monkey Warfare', perhaps it is because money is something people use to dispense with; a banknote as an object is nothing more than a piece of paper, without a value in itself other than its symbol as the currency.

In final analysis, we can say that Reg Harkema is a materialistic filmmaker. In the sense that, firstly, he presents interaction between people by filming the movements of objects that pass between them; secondly, he shows things such as knowledge, revolution, politics, history – all elements without substance, therefore un-representable in the image – in filmable objects such as vinyl LPs of left-field music, books on history, on revolutions, etc.

Brunswick Theatre Interview, Part I - 'We won't shy away from screening a controversial documentary'

2007-06-28T01:33:00.000-04:00

The first time I saw the poster adevertising a film on 'Vatican Sex Crimes', I thought I was in for a sleezy sexploitation flick centred on the busy fingers of a parish priest. Examining the fine print, I found the poster actually advertised the screening at the Brunswick Theatre of a film on the recent sex scandals that have plagued the Catholic church. I don't know whether the owners of the Brunswick intented to foster in the public this sort of initial misreading of their ad, but I had to admit, it was effective - I now wanted to find out more about this local cinema that so brazenly advertised the moral short comings of the Catholic clergy.

A bit of digging on the internet (read: Googling 'Brunswick Theatre Toronto') soon turned up the contact info for the programmer of the Brunswick, a Mr. Scott Gilbert, and I requested a brief interview. Arriving early for our meeting, I had the chance to peruse the shelves of videos and books the theatre stocks for sale. The videos ranged from documentaries on 9/11 and the Iraq war to global warming and the connection between mardi gras beads and Chinese factory labour, while the books stocked featured the usual suspects: Chomsky, Nader, Hersh. Next to the popcorn machine was a table littered with pamphlets and books on Cuba and the Cuban revolution, most of them in Spanish. This seemed to be a favourite theme of the theatre, as when I later wandered into the screening room I saw displayed prominently on one of the walls a banner calling for the freeing of the 'Cuban Five'. The theatre was a hodgepodge of political views and sympathies and, in a way, I admired the earnestness of it all. While I didn't completely share the theatre owner's obvious enthusiasm for progressive politics, it was certainly preferable to the affected apathy that passes for trenchant social insight among Toronto's hipster crowds.

Meeting Scott outside the theatre (which is on Brunswick Ave., just off Bloor and next to Futures Bakery), I was able to put to him some questions regarding the motivation behind launching the Brunswick, the theatre's politics, and it's connection to Toronto's activist community. (Once again, the interview has been divided into smaller parts to make for easier reading.)

Kino-Eye: Why and how did you come to found the Brunswick?

Scott Gilbert: We decided to start this more as a vehicle for social change than as a commercial venture. It's kind of an extension of our earlier work - we've now been open here for four months, but for a year before that we were renting the Bloor Cinema and doing documentaries there, anywhere from two to five (documentaries) a month, and before that for three years in Guelph, as students on the student union, we were involved in various activities that included bringing in speakers and holding talks. So we've got a lot of experience over the last several years and we're now trying to give it a shot and make it a business.

KE: Now, I'm going to jump ahead in my list of questions, as you've already touched on something I had planned on bringing up later. You seem to be screening quite a lot of politically-themed documentaries and have seemed to have carved out a niche market for yourself screening films that other theatres are uninterested in. What motivated you to screen these films and why do you believe these films are of importance?

SG: Well that's just it. In light of the fact that so many other theatres in the city closing down, we knew we had to have an edge on the market, and we're definitely not going to make it anywhere if we're going to be showing just the big mainstream films. Most of the other theatres around the city do the mainstream fictional films, the comedies and stuff like that, and when they do bring on documentaries, it's usually only the big ones like 'The Corporation' or something by Michael Moore. But there are literally thousands upon thousands of other documentaries out there that none of the big cinemas screen. Most of the time you can't get these films from Blockbuster or other local video stores, and a lot of the time they're not available for download off the internet, and if they are, they are difficult to find.

That's kind of our edge on the market - we've turned this space not only into a screening room but a video rental store for a lot of these films. We're starting to archive them and make them available for people, either for rental or to see on the big screen. The additional edge we have on the market is that we hold a discussion after each film. We won't show documentaries of some guy in his ski trip - we'll show documentaries that have a political, social, or environmental mandate to it.

KE: So your response to someone who would be disinclined to go to one of your screenings because they believe they can simply rent the film at their local video store would be that these films just aren't widely available for rent.

SG: Exactly. I would say that probably about 16-20% of our titles you can get at Queen or Suspect Video, but the vast majority are just not available at either of those locations. I really don't understand why - there is a market for them and people certainly want to see them. But I think most video stores simply aren't aware of these films because most documentary film makers and distributors don;t have the budgets to allow for mass marketing campaigns in multiple cities. Most of these films are made for the university and high school market, so what we do is contact different school boards and different university libraries and go through their collections and that's how we learn about a lot of these titles.

KE: You just mentioned that a lot of these films are being produced for the university market. Do you find that your principle audience is students, or are you reaching a much wider audience?

SG: We are trying to reach a lot of university students but are just not getting the kind of numbers we were expecting from that crowd. We find that most of our audience is actually in the range of 35 and older, which is actually surprising. It could be that most students don't have a lot of time or money, so we're trying to make some changes to encourage them to come out more, but by and large most of the people who do come are middle aged.

KE: You have started a pretty aggressive marketing campaign, postering many major streets with ads for these films. Is this campaign recent and, if so, have you noticed an increase in turnout due to the postering campaign?

SG: We use postering primarily because it is what we can afford. We go around on a moped and do major intersections. On key strips, like along Bloor from Bathurst to Yonge, we'll do every pole, but most of the time we'll just bounce from intersection to intersection, trying to cover the widest range possible. We've found it to be very effective in getting random people that we otherwise may not reach. But it is also limited because there are simply so many posters out there that many people do not see them. City workers tear them down, as do people that disagree with the films. So there are pros and cons to postering - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

KE: You say that there are people who tear down your posters because, politically, they find something objectionable in the films you are screening. How can you distinguish between those individuals and the city workers who are paid to tear down every poster they come across?

SG: Oh, they tell us. We'll see them do it and they'll yell at us from across the street as we are putting up other posters. Our web designer got a phone call asking him not to make a website for us. The biggest opposition has been surrounding around the screening of 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. Our position is that we won't shy away from screening a controversial documentary and encourage people to come out to express their views. We respect all view points in our audience and we encourage people to come out and criticize the films. We'll never turn away anyone based on their view point and in fact we often offer critics free tickets to our screenings so that we can get them in there and diversify the view points in the room and facilitate a free and open discussion on the topic.

KE: Are these post-film discussions meant to make the film-going experience more active and less passive?

SG: Exactly. We always try to block off at least 45 minutes after each screening after each film. The idea is that we really want to get a dialogue going on these films. A lot of these films are really powerful and they take a lot of you and it is important to get a discussion going on them because a lot of the time people feel that they do need time to bounce ideas off other people in the audience and think about constructive ways of dealing with the issues raised in the film. If you see any of these films at another theatre, you just see the movie and go home - you're not provided with this opportunity for social discourse.

Brunswick Theatre Interview, Part II - 'We're really about getting a social movement going'

2007-06-27T23:48:00.000-04:00

KE: You've mentioned repeatedly that there is a political motive to what you are doing. And looking upstairs in the theatre, I see the theatre also stocks fair trade clothing and books by such writers as Chomsky, Nader, Hersh, and Caldicott. It seems that you have set your sights on something much larger than merely screening films. Do you consider the Brusnwick Theatre as having a, and I use this term very loosely, political agenda? In other words, are you trying to galvanize public interest or support around certain key issues or concerns?

SG: Absolutely. We don't identify ourselves with any particular political party - we keep our personal political views to ourselves. But we certainly do advocate for certain cause. We promote fair trade, we promote social justice, we promote general community involvement - these are all things that do have a political edge to them. Many of the books that we offer are in the realm of the programming that we deal with. All the documentaries that we deal with are of the a political or socially progressive nature, whether it be global warming or resource depletion. We're really about getting a social movement going and less so about just being a bookstore where we sell books on any type of issue just to make money or screening any kind of film just to fill seats. It really does have a specific focus and we've coined our mandate as loosely covering the issues of social justice, politics, and the environment. Something like 'The God Delusion' doesn't really fall neatly into any one of them but does fall loosely into the political theme and to a certain extent social justice as well. We do try to keep all our programming within that range and of course support it with he products as well.

One of the things we are thinking of doing is to retail energy efficient light bulbs. We deal with global warming through our screenings and we want to supply people with a quick and easy way of dealing with the problem. We sell fair trade clothing because we screen many films that deal with sweat shop labour and labour conditions in China and other countries where labour standards are very poor, and we want to provide people with the opportunity to support alternatives to sweat shop labour-produced clothing.

KE: So do you select you documentaries on their political or their artistic merits?

SG: For the message. The films are usually low budget, weren't very well made, or even they have points where the DVD skips, but we screen them anyways because we believe in the message. Some of the films we have we just taped off of TV, they're not very high quality, but people who come to see them, by and large, don't really care about the picture or sound quality. We go much more for the message.

KE: So how do you see your relationship to Toronto's various social movements, such as the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War?

SG: Well, we want to build coalitions and work in solidarity with them as much as possible. An example is that in the first month of June, there was a film festival that was arranged by a fellow who works quite closely with us in booking the space. It was called 'Occupation is a Crime' and it was a collaborative film festival and it was a collaborative film festival where several different groups from across the city each took one night of the week. So we had the Toronto Coalition to the Stop the War, there was the Toronto Haiti Action Committee, No One is Illegal, Not in Our Name, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid - a whole bunch of groups from across the city that all advocate for their own individual causes and what we want to provide is a hub for all these groups to come together. Even if their individual view points differ, we want to provide a communal space for them to raise their voices. We don't want to focus on one group over another.

KE: Have these groups solicited you for support or have you tended to approach them?

SG: It's been a mix. Certainly when we got going, we tried to do a lot of out reach through phone and email, letting these groups know that we existed, and over time there have been a few key people that have picked up the ball and run with it and done most of the organizing. On our end, we have a limited amount of time, but we have almost all the major players in the city that advocate for various causes aware of us and what we do and have either a night here and there or plan to in the near future.

KE: Your mandate seems quite similar to Uprising! Books in Kensington Market. Do you have any connection with them?

SG: We don't any direct relation with them. Funny that you mention it, though. I was born and raised in Toronto and then studied in Guelph for four years. And before i left for Guelph, I became acquainted with several groups in Toronto and really came to like what Uprising! was doing in Toronto and wanted to emulate it without stepping on their toes. I really liked to idea of books that were not always mainstream. The other group that we took inspiration from was Boiling Frog Productions. They used to rent the basement of a bar up on Keele and Dudas and do screenings of documentaries on a weekly basis, which was a pay-what-you-can or $5 type of deal, and they combined that with DVD and book sales. So when we developed our business plan, we looked at these various examples and tried to take the best characteristics from each of them and try to determine what they were doing wrong and try our venture into something on a larger scale.

KE: Do you have any relation to the grindhouse films that are shown at the Brunswick?

SG: There are actually two different groups screening grindhouse films. One group was renting the space on Saturday nights sometime ago and has left and is thinking of setting up their own cinema, and we are now renting to another group on Friday nights. We don't have any official connection to them - it's an example of the kinds of private booking deals that we do.

KE: What do you see as the relationship between the Brunswick and the other theatres in Toronto?

SG: We're definitely very different. One of the major differences is that we don't do any actual film projection - we don't do 35 or 16mm. All we do is DVD, VHS, or laptop projection. So that's definitely one of the major differences. Most cinemas have fixed seating - we don't. Most cinemas screen films to make money, whereas we have a very clear mandate. We're definitely smaller than most cinemas. One hundred seats is our maximum capacity and we usually only have 65-70 out on the floor. And we're one of the only cinemas that does regular free screenings. We usually have 6-7 free screenings a month.

KE: What has turn out been like?

SG: When we charge at the door, we're averaging 15-20 a day right now. When we do free screenings, it's anywhere from 50-100 people. Overall, we've found that to be effective, because they buy popcorn and refreshments and we pass a hat around and we usually make more off of that than you do charging $10 at the door. The problem with that is that you deplete your resources pretty quickly as everyone will have seen the film. For it's a balance and we like to take a bit of each.

KE: Thank you very much for you time.

SG: No problem.

For more info on the Brunswick, check out it's website.

For all you scribblers out there...

2007-06-26T18:45:00.000-04:00

If you're hungry for indie animation (but like it served up in Youtube-sized portions), then you're advised to check out the Toronto Animated Image Society Animation Showcase 2007. Describing itself as 'a not-for-profit, artist-run organization whose mandate is to explore and promote the art of animation', the Showcase 2007 will feature films of all genres, styles, mediums, and themes, all under 15 minutes in length. The screening is to be held tomorrow (Wednesday, June 27) at 6:30 at the National Film Board Cinema on 150 John St, with a reception to follow. Admission is free for TAIS members and 'selected animators', or $5 for the rest of us schlubs.

For more info on TAIS, mozy on over to their website. And when you're finished there, saunter over to their blog.

Sorry for the late notice on this event - I only just found out about it today as I was on my way home from work.

I was a teenage 'Fibber McGee and Molly' fan

2007-06-25T01:20:00.000-04:00

If you find yourself with a half hour to spare around, oh, let's say, 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, be sure to tune in to CKLN, Ryerson campus' radio station, to catch 'Cinephobia', a weekly program dedicated to all things film run by a chap from Liverpool, Stuart Andrews. Stacey Case will be on the program this week plugging Trash Palace, so be sure to check it out.

Head on over to CKLN's homepage. And after you've done that, check out Cinephobia's Myspace page.

Kino-Eye and Senator Ted Stevens Proudly Present 'The Internet: A Series of Tubes'

2007-06-24T03:17:00.000-04:00

Need to check the movie listings but all the copies of NOW Magazine have been pilfered from the box by the bus stop? Try TorontoPlex.com. It covers everything from Cinematheque to Cinecycle. So now you have no excuse for missing C.H.U.D. at the Brunswick.

You'll never guess where Pai Mei's weak spot is...

2007-06-24T02:34:00.000-04:00

A quick plug for two blogs run by Colin Geddes, the man behind the Kung Fu Fridays screenings at the Royal and the Revue, and the programmer for the Midnight Madness portion of the Toronto International Film Festival. Colin has been of great assistance in alerting Kino-Eye to film-related happenings around the city and we can only hope that, like the Shaolin Temple after its decimation in 1732 at the hands of the hated Qing, the Temple of Fu will rise again.

To check out Colin's 'Kung Fu Fridays' blog, which discusses all things k-fu related, click here. (Much respect, Colin, for choosing Lo Lieh as your profile pic. Not the most handsome of the Shaw Brothers' stable of actors, but one hell of a Pai Mei.)

For 'Popcorn & Sticky Floors', a more general blog dealing with the films and theatres of yester-year, click here.

Got a blog, a magazine, a zine, or a radio program that you want us to plug? Send us the info and it will be done!

Mono-no-aware

2007-06-24T01:46:00.000-04:00

The pendulum swings in the opposite direction...

From Stacey Case's Trash Palace, we now move to Cinematheque Ontario, which for the duration of the summer will be running a retrospective of films from the Janus Films collection (Janus Films being an independent North American distributor which can be credited with introducing to North American audiences over the last five decades some of the greatest films and directors of world cinema). Call it a Best-of-the-Best, or All-Killer-No-Filler - Renoir, Kurosawa, De Sica, Bergman, Bresson: all the directors your cinema studies profs have been drilling into your heads for the last few years (and if you can still stomach them after all that, then you are to be commended).

If you have the time (often we don't) and the money (as students. we rarely do), I'd encourage you to see as many films as possible. But if I was going to recommend to you one film to see at Cinematheque this summer (and I say this with great hesitation, as many of my favourite films will be playing there), it would have to be Yasujiro Ozu's 'Tokyo Story'. Now, I'm sure there are many a cinephile out there that is groaning at this choice, given that the film just topped a critics list of 'greatest films of all time'. But if we can get past our cultural elitism (a disease that is positively rampant in this city), I think we can all admit what a beautiful, utterly human movie 'Tokyo Story' is, and how necessary it is to see such a film on the big screen (I've seen it at Cinematheque at least twice).

For a more qualified opinion, I quote Donald Richie, a Japanese film scholar whose writings on Ozu I don't fully endorse (I find his views on the essential nature of the 'Japanese tradition' problematic) but who nonetheless has the most sensitive appreciation for Ozu out of all the critics I've read on the subject:

'The end effect of an Ozu film - and one of the reasons that he is thought of as a spokesman for the Japanese tradition - is a kind of resigned sadness, a calm and knowing serenity which persists despite the uncertainty of life and the things of this world. It implies that the world will go on and that mutability, change, the evanescence of things, also yield their elegiac satisfactions.' - from 'Japanese Cinema' by Donald Richie

Not that Cinematheque needs our money (they have corporate sponsorship) and not that we can't go to Queen Video and rent most of these films ourselves. Nonetheless, I encourage all of you to choose one or two films from this summer's program to see. And being a Kurosawa fan (Kino-Eye's official mascot is, of course, Toshiro Mifune), I would be remiss not to encourage you to see 'Rashomon' or 'The Seven Samurai'. Classics, all.

Check out the full list of films offered this season at Cinematheque, as well as info on how to become a member, by clicking on this little link.

'Before I speak, I have something important to say.'

2007-06-24T00:51:00.000-04:00

I assume a few of you are curious as to the origins of this blog's title, 'Kino-Eye'. Perhaps a few of the more clever students out there have already deciphered this cryptic phrase. If so, well done - your prize is the satisfaction of knowing that you truly are a film geek (and possibly a communist as well). For the rest of you, the answer is maybe more mundane than you might have hoped. 'Kino-Eye' is simply the name of a movie I happen to enjoy, by a director whose name I feel more sophisticated just by pronouncing, Dziga Vertov.

A friend of mine - himself a director - originally alerted me to the Soviet Dziga Vertov, specifically Vertov's film 'Man With A Movie Camera'. An amazing work, but a little too cumbersome to be the title of a blog. I opted instead for the title of one of Vertov's earlier works, 'Kino Glaz' ('Kino Eye'). It has a nice ring to it. More to the point, it allows us to imagine that we are that eye, redirecting the gaze of cinema (narcissistically, perhaps) back upon itself - in this case, the Toronto film scene.

But I think Vertov himself said it best:

"I am the eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see... My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you."

(Many thanks to my friend Kohei for supplying me with the quote.)

I don't pretend to possess the qualifications to write at length about early avant-garde Soviet cinema, but I will say that I find it immensely fascinating that some of the most innovative films ever committed to celluloid were produced under the watch of the 'Man of Steel', Joseph Stalin. But then again, it might not be so bizarre. 'Casablanca' is nothing if not a paean to America's Free-French allies during the Second World War. And of course, there is Akira Kurosawa's first feature, 'Sanshiro Sugata', itself intended by his producers to instill in a war-time Japanese audience the correct sense of 'Yamato damashii'. Perhaps the relationship between the (totalitarian) state and art is more symbiotic than we would like to believe.

If you're curious about this Vertov fellow, or maybe are in need of some time to kill while you should be working on an essay (and if so, shame on you), then head on over to Google Video where you can watch the entirety of 'Kino Glaz' for free (along with, as I've just discovered, a slew of classic Chinese films from the Nationalist period). Too lazy to search the site yourself? All right. Here's the link. Happy?

(With many thanks to Groucho M. for supplying the title to this post.)

Trash Palace: 'Toronto's Classiest Cinema'

2007-06-20T02:58:00.000-04:00

If you're like me, then you love Suspect Video. Not so much for the movies that they rent but for the bins of discounted VHS cassettes they're getting rid of for three bucks a piece. If you get past the copies of straight-to-video Van Damme features and mediocre romantic comedies from the mid-'90s, you can find quite a few finds. I've managed to find copies of Ozu's 'Floating Weeds' and the Marx Brothers' 'Animal Crackers' and a lot more. It's actually getting to be a bit of a problem. I now have a stack of VHS cassettes in my living room that easily dwarf me and yet I don't have the time to watch them all.

So it was on one of my frequent trips to Suspect Video that I stumbled upon a beautiful flyer for something called Trash Palace. Advertising itself as 'Toronto's Classiest Cinema', it promised screenings of such lost gems as 'TNT Jackson', 'Force on Thunder Mountain', and 'Schizo' (which has the best tag line ever: 'Schizophrenia: When the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing!'), all said to be presented on 16mm film. But even more intriguing than the movies themselves was the warning printed on the bottom of the flyer: 'No walk-ins. Secret location. Address on ticket. Advance tix at Suspect Video. $5.' Clever marketing? Or indie elitism? I had to find out.

That night, I visited Trash Palace's website - trashpalace.ca - to see if I could dig up anything else about these screenings. But the website was as enigmatic as the flyer. Precious little information was provided about the screenings and the movies themselves. My curiosity piqued, I contacted by email the projectionist Stacey Case, requesting an interview, either by phone or in person. Less than an hour later I got a reply and we arranged to meet Tuesday morning at Wagamama cafe on King and Techumseh. Putting on a newly purchased copy of the Hong Kong soft-core flick 'Erotic Ghost Story 2', I set about writing a list of questions for Mr. Case.

I arrived late for our meeting, having forgotten my digital voice recorder in my apartment, and was worried that the interview would have to be cut short. Well, it wasn't. For an hour and a half, Stacey talked about the motivation behind Trash Palace, his love for grindhouse and drive-in cinema, the place of the collector in today's film community, Mexican wrestling, and hammocks. It was a joy talking to someone who has such obvious passion for what he does and hopefully this transcription of the interview communicates some of that same passion. (I apologize in advance for the length of the piece. Maybe it's just symptomatic of me being knew to this whole blogging thing, but I would feel quite bad if I cut out too much of the interview. I am, however, chopping the interview into manageable chunks so it looks less daunting and so people can tackle it in piecemeal fashion.)

So here it is, my interview with Stacey Case, founder of and projectionist for Trash Palace. Enjoy!

Trash Palace Interview: Part I - 'Everything drives my passion'

2007-06-20T01:10:00.000-04:00

Kino-Eye: So how did you come to found Trash Palace and why?

Stacey Case: Well, I'm 39 years old, and this goes back to when I was three, watching Sunday afternoon monster movies while growing up on a farm on Niagra-on-the-lake - (watching) Abbott and Costello, 'The Hilarious House of Frankenstein' - just watching all this crazy stuff on TV. When I was ten I picked up my first issue of 'Fangoria' - that was in 1979, issue number four, 'Salem's Lot' on the cover - and I just knew that someday I was going to make movies. It took a while. I finished high school in '87. The Jackson Vocational Interact Survey decides...you answer all these questions and it guides you in your career path - maybe you want to go this way or take this in university or whatever. My parents though smart people become doctors or lawyers. When I got the results from the Jackson survey I was kind of heart broken because it said to go into something else and I wanted to go into movie and television production. But my parents wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, to go to university. But instead I fucked off and went to Vancouver, so I could just do my own thing, which ended up being booking bands - punk rock bands and stuff.

I moved back to Toronto in about '92 and started up a punk rock fanzine called 'Rivet', published sixteen issues or something. And through the course of 'Rivet', I began writing, illustrating, telling stories, and I realized the illustrating I was doing was actually storyboarding for films, and I didn't even realize it. But when I did realize, it took me back to when I was ten years old when I wanted to make movies. So I bought a Super 8 camera, some film, a two-track recorder, a Super 8 projector, wrote a short script, shot a short film (which) played at a few film festivals, shot another short film (which) got chosen for the Images Film Festival Best in Toronto showcase in '96/'97.

I've always been a fan of superheroes and monsters - I'm a comic book nerd. While I'm collecting vintage film equipment and learning how to use it, I discovered at ABC Books on Yonge St. and buy obscure film-making books. If you were to see my library at home, all of it would be film (related). By going to ABC Books and buying old film books, I found all these little boxes of Super 8 films for $7.99 a piece, all these condensed feature films from the '50s and '60s, like Peter Lorre's 'The Beast With Five Fingers', 'The Hideous Sun Demon' or it's British version 'Blood on His Lips'. And the packaging was really lurid and by this time I was already designing (my own posters) and I just started researching and collecting these old films. I started with 8mm and then picked up a 16mm projector.

At the time I was teaching art classes to little kids through the public library system and I got the Markham public library's 16mm projector, because I was working there and they had an AV room with nothing in it because everyone had sold off all the films because everyone was moving to video. But their old projectors were still there, so I bought them off of them. The 16mm projector triggered memories of being a kid and being in class and how the teacher would wheel in the projector and draw the blinds and we would watch a movie in the middle of the day, an educational film, and that was always one of my favourite parts of the day. Either that or running the mimeograph machine. I used to love hand-cranking the mimeograph machine. So I had a fascination with the machinery and the way you have a reel of film that you run through light and how it looks on the screen like motion but actually isn't, it's just (still) pictures. This stuff is just cool.

Before 'Nacho Libre' came out, I started shooting Mexican wrestling films, in '96. I shot eight films and I'm currently editing the final three. Shooting these films was basically my film school. They taught me pacing, timing, how to script a fight, how to draw emotion from an actor - all for 80 bucks a film. I went to work on A&E documentaries after shooting my second film because somebody asked me: 'Oh, you're a film maker. Do you know how to use video cameras?' And I just lied and said, 'yeah'. And they were like, 'OK, do you have a passport?' And I lied and said, 'yeah'. And they asked, 'Do you want to go work on an A&E documentary by yourself in France for a month?' And I said, 'yeah'. So I got everything together, got a passport, learned how to use the video camera, and fumbled my way into a career. And because I'm an old punk rocker, the footage I got there, no one else could have got. I lied my way into buildings - I was following the path of a murderer around for one of A&E's investigative reports, they had captured him and they were retracing his steps all over France and Ireland. And they were so happy with the footage that they hired me full-time. And all this time I was shooting Super 8 films, collecting films, doing my own stuff.

Everything drives my passion - collecting film, collecting lobby cards, collecting old exploitation film ads, all the promotional campaign material. Everything about it, I love, all the luridness of it, everything. I hate today's movie posters. Everything is too computerized. Back in the day, you'd have beautiful hand-painted posters. The illustrators for old movie posters were amazing. Nobody does that anymore. I just love a good ad campaign. I love the guy yelling at you - 'The Chinese professionals! Tiger Man! Rated R!' I fucking love that stuff. I love it so much that I collect it. I collect 16mm trailers for old films. And by collecting it all, it inspires me.I shot the first 500 episodes of NakedNews.com. You look at my CV and you see this path that I've taken and I've taught myself the whole fucking thing. I never went to university or anything, I taught myself everything. After working at Naked News, I got hired to direct a feature by a guy that wanted to make a Mexican wrestling film. And since I'm the Toronto expert on Mexican wrestling, I directed this film. Great experience directing it, but the aftermath was horrible. It was so bad that I left the business. Luckily over the years I have taught myself a trade, screen printing, which has allowed me to turn my hobby - screen printing - into my job while I figure out whether I want to get back into film.

Like, I like narrative. I like a beginning, a middle, and an end. I don't fit in with the film making community in Toronto because it's all experimental art films. I'm all about narrative. I want to see a guy and a girl, I want to see a mummy, I want to see topless girls - that's what I'm about, that's what I grew up on, that's what I like. I want to see monsters destroying a city, I want to see broken arms and blood flying around - that's what I like. And I like being subversive with that stuff, too, and thinking up all this crap that you'd never expect to see in a film like that.So I got out of the business. I directed a feature film and never got my directors cut, I never got to go into the editing suite, I got cut off from the film I directed. It's called 'Enter...Zombie King!'. It's Mexican wrestlers versus zombies, it's got gratuitous gore and nudity. The band I was in, The Tijuana Bibles, had 13 songs on the soundtrack. So all these things completely pissed me off because I feel like I got taken advantage of. I was like, 'if this is what it's like to direct a feature film, then fuck this. I'm going to turn my hobby into my job.'

Trash Palace Interview: Part II - 'It's trash, but it's my fucking palace, man.'

2007-06-19T23:59:00.001-04:00

SC: Trash Palace and collecting films has been my lifeline, the one thing that has kept me passionate about low-budget film making. So I don't spend a lot of money on the films that I buy. I've been buying these films for the last eight years - the Super 8s I've been collecting even longer, but I'm much more intrigued by the 16mm because they can be projected further and it can be hooked up properly to a sound system. I can get 16mm bulbs and belts for relatively little, so it's not that expensive of a hobby. I have something like 15 or 16 feature films and then a bunch of shorts. I'm very picky about what I purchase. And I have enough films now that it's time to share it.

I have a studio space. When I first moved in, I built a wall (in the middle of the room), so there wasn't enough room for me to screen a 16mm film and warrant charging someone money to watch it. But on a whim, three months ago, I was looking at that wall and I wondered, 'why did I build that wall? I got this space in order to show movies. Fuck this, I'm knocking it down. I'd rather knock down that wall and put a hammock, so I'd have somewhere to lay down when I'm tired.' So that's exactly what I did. An hour later that wall was down, dismantled, and out the freight elevator and into the fucking garbage. And someone owed me some dough at a place where I wholesale shirts out of, and I told them, 'don't pay me this time, give me one of your Mexican hammocks.'

So I put up a fucking hammock. And I pulled out my projectors and did some fucking tests and realized I had an eight-foot wide screen on my bare wall. So painted the wall and did some test screenings for friends and they were like, 'what are you going to call it?', and I said, 'I don't know, I gotta think about it'. Because my house is very clean, my wife likes a clean house and I like going home to a nice clean house. But my studio - I think it's nice and neat, but to outsiders it's full of trash. I go to Mexico City and purchase old Mexican wrestling masks and wrestling lobby cards, so I have all kinds of stuff in my studio. I take it out and I have a museum of the stuff I've collected over the years. The term Trash Palace has been used before, but I think it's an amusing term. It's trash, but it's my fucking palace, man. It's dedicated to all my film stuff. And I owe it to all the directors and actors that have ever been in these films that no one cares about.

And I mean it's the same with my film. If you IMDB my film, 'Enter...Zombie King!', eight people will have reviewed it - three think it's shit and the other five think it's genius. And that's just the nature of these films. It's like, what did you expect for $200 000? I mean, shut the fuck up and make your own movie - fucking critic. Make your own fucking movie. You have no idea. So to reinforce that concept to myself, I show these films and I get to defend them. And by defending them, I get myself back into the mindset of making my own films on my own terms. So Trash Palace is about defending the films that I love and getting myself ready to get back into the ring and make some more films.

KE: Well, you've managed to cover off quite a few of my questions already. This is good - it's much easier when someone else does all the work.

SC: Well, I didn't just wake up yesterday and think to myself, 'I'm going to start up Trash Palace'. This has taken ten years. Ever since I bought my first film at ABC Books, I was like, 'one of these days, I'm going to show this to somebody, I'm not going to sit by myself and watch them by myself, I'm going to share them with people because they'd be tossed out otherwise. I love it. The first screening we did was 'Sugar Hill'. We had eleven people. For 'TNT Jackson' we had six people. For 'Schizo' we had 22. For 'Force on Thunder Mountain' we had seven. I don't care if there's nobody because I have the films, I have the studio, I have the equipment, and this needs to be done.

I don't want people know where the studio is. And there's a couple reasons why I'm doing that, why I'm having it as a secret. One, I find it amusing, that I'm forcing people to go to Suspect Video to buy a ticket for a screening that they don't even know where it is. I just find that funny. It's my studio - if I want to have some fun at someone else's expense, that's fine. What I like are the people who go and get the ticket and show up and are like, 'this is fucking cool, man'. And I'm like, 'thanks'.

As a poster designer who is all about promotion, I get to make these posters and hand bills. I hand print them all. If and when you come by the studio, you'll see all the work that I've done. They're always on this stock of paper, they are always just one or two colours. I just enjoy making stuff.

The studio is only so big. I say that there is seating for 50, but that's with standing room only. Really, there's seating for 30. I don't want a line up. I don't want people waiting outside my building.

KE: Is that because you want everyone to be able to enjoy the film?

SC: Yeah, I just don't want it cramped in the studio. I want it so that everyone has a good time. It's a small experience, not a big experience. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I have a few ideas of where it's going to go in the future, but I don't want to talk about that just yet.

All I know is that I marketed this 'Force on Thunder Mountain' screening all wrong. I called it the wrost film ever. I tried to screen it on two different occassions in my past but people just told me to shut it off because it was too boring. But in the Trash Palace, it's one of the greatest films ever. It blew my mind, and the seven people that were there were like, 'you are so wrong, this film is great'. And I was like, 'you know what, you're totally right, this is totally awesome'. I can't believe all the things you can enjoy about these bad films. Like, you just start wondering, 'what was the director thinking?'

And it's funny, because there are all sorts of film fans out there - some screen movies like this, others like this. I screen films like this. So when I'm changing reels, I throw on some garage rock and say to the audience, 'let's talk a little'. You know, serve a beer and, out of respect for the film, let's just sit back and enjoy the movie.

Going to the theatre now isn't the same. There's no movie experience I've had with which I've been a thousand percent satisfied. The Trash Palace is kind of like the way I want to watch movies. I want the projectionist to say before the show, 'I've got three short films - one's about this, one's about this, and one's about this. Which one do you want to watch?' You know, include the audience. I have two friends that help me - an MC and a snack bar guy. I don't do much talking - I'm rocking the projector. But between the three of us, it's like a fucking comedy act. It's just fun, funny and weird.

Trash Palace Interview: Part III - 'It's all about being classy about bad movies'

2007-06-19T23:49:00.000-04:00

KE: Now, I'm going to have to back track a bit, because you brought up a lot of things that I want to talk about. You just mentioned that the experience you often get at the movies is somewhat lacking. And from the looks of it, from the ways that you publicize these events and keep the location of the screenings secret, you seem as interested in creating a cinematic experience as you are in simply presenting the films themselves.

SC: Oh, absolutely

KE: So what would you say that your screenings provide that Scotiabank Theatre doesn't? How would you describe the experience you're giving the audience versus just going to your local theatre?

SC: Well, there were five kids in my family and my parents would take us to the drive-in in our station wagon. They'd bring pillows and blankets. We didn't have a lot of dough so we'd buy popcorn but we'd bring our own cans of pop. My favourite place to watch the movie was on the hood or on the roof, you know, under the stars. The whole concept of unstructured cinematic viewing experience doesn't exist anymore. I mean, you could get up and walk around, you could stand up at the front and watch the movie. The cinematic viewing experience now is very regimented. You walk in, you buy your ticket, you get your snacks, and you go sit down, and all the chairs are the same. The only real choice you get is how far away you sit from the screen or how close you sit. And I understand that, because that's the nature of the mass-marketed film experience. You need to control it and appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

When I first moved to Toronto, I used to go to the Rio on Yonge St. and they'd show five movies for four bucks. And they always showed a horror, an action, a crime, a nudie film with all the sex cut out, and then probably another horror or else a kung fu film. There was barely anyone there during the day so you could lay down on the seats, put your feet up over the front seats. You could sleep - I'd watch the first few films, sleep through the next couple, then get up and watch the last film. With the Trash Palace, all those things come into play - not the sleeping, but I have 6X9 gym mats in the front that you can lay down on. Behind that are movie seats I just purchased, the ones with wooden arms. So if you want that experience, you can have that experience. If you want to seat in the folding chairs, you can have that experience. One person is allowed to lay in the hammock, so you can have that experience. You can stand in the back with me. There are all these experiences that you can have - there's not just one. And you have choices. I'll say, 'this is the feature, but what shorts do you want to watch before?' And I tell people after the movie, 'you're welcome to stick around to watch some more films'. And usually half of the audience says sure and we keep watching shorts until they've had enough of the experience or until I've had enough and I want to go out for a drink. It's about an experience, that's for damn sure, and I think people like that.

And there's room to talk during these movies, as long as you're quiet - there are conversations. People talk at the screen. That's what people used to do at the movies. People used to yell at the screen. If there was something going on in an exploitation film, people would yell, 'kill 'em! Kill 'em!' I remember that. People don't do that anymore. Now it's all about being silent and not bothering anyone else. I'm not saying that all theatres should be loud. But there's a sense of entitlement now - you pay your 13 bucks to see your movie and you expect peace and quiet.

There used to be a choice in cheaper films. Back in the day, there were different types of films being made for different types of audiences. So you had these kinds of films made for drive-ins, and these kinds of films made for the inner city, and you had these kinds of films made for the middle class, and these kinds of films made for the upper class. Now everything is the same - everyone can see everything. And everyone has to be quiet. Well, I kind of like how it used to be, how the upper class wouldn't go see a car crash film - the inner city would. And the inner city would react to a car crash film the way you should react - you'd yell at the screen. Now it's all the same, it's all been homogenized.

Now, I won't show a film if only one person comes. But if three people come, that's enough for a screening. And I think people appreciate the fact that this guy is forcing them to buy a ticket and on the ticket is the address where the movie is being shown - there are people that appreciate that.

KE: You mentioned going to the drive-ins with your parents as a kid, and going to the Rio as an adult, and those experiences refining your sense of what a movie-going experience should be. And looking over your flyers at Suspect Video and your website, it seems that most of the films are coming out of those eras - the era of the drive-in and the era of the grindhouse. So why do you focus on films from this era? Is it an attempt to recreate a sense of that era....

SC: No, it's not.

KE: ...or do you feel that films that are being produced today, such as the one you made, can't really compete with the ones that were made decades ago?

SC: No. My answer is going to be brutally honest. I'm married. I have a house, a mortgage to pay, car payments, a studio that I rent, a lot of things to pay for. I cannot justify spending hundreds of dollars on a print. The Trash Palace will never make me money. I'm not doing it for money - I'm doing it because I need to do it. I'm a collector and I'm fascinated by this stuff. The reason I have the particular films that I have is because people that sell them think that they're shit so they sell them cheap. That's my first rule: don't spend a lot of money.

Take a film like 'House of Wax' with Vincent Price. That would be in the $400 range. 'Frankenstein's Daughter' I got for $60. Now, they're both from the same era - 'House of Wax' is '53, 'Frankenstein's Daughter' is '58. I think because Vincent Price was in it, it would have been seen as upper class or middle class. So, as a collector, you pay middle class prices. 'Frankenstein's Daughter' was a drive-in film. I'm not seeking out drive-in films - I'm looking for what is within my budget. The types of movies that I'm willing to spend my money in fall into the genre of the drive-in film. Because people think that they're crap, I get them for cheap. I can afford these films. The films that I can actually afford happen to fall into this genre. Others films, like the educational shorts, they're kind of different, they're more reasonably priced. I'm far more intrigued by a film I buy for $40, a film no one knows about, then I am by spend ing $400 on something everyone knows about. I'm far more intrigued by something like 'Force on Thunder Mountain', which has only two reviews on the internet. And I have the movie and the colours are gorgeous, man. And I wonder, 'why was this made? Who were they trying to sell this to?'

Like, 'Doll Squad'. It's basically 'Charlie's Angels' and the director Ted V. Mikels, his whole oeuvre is corpse grinders, zombie films with lots of lurid ad campaigns. There's not a whole lot of substance to the films. But his love for these films shines through and drives these shitty films. The upper class would find it incredibly boring. Other classes would find all sorts of things to love about it. It's not exactly about collecting drive-in films. It's because people think that they're crap that I get them for cheap.

The most recent film I got was 'Plague 1978' also known as 'The Gemini Stream'. Shot right here in Toronto. I'm fucking stoked. The director is living in California. I just got in touch with the writer's wife and told her i just purchased a copy of the move and she said, 'why?' And I just said, 'because I find it interesting that what other people consider to be trash, I consider to be awesome. I'm sure it's one of the first films your husband wrote. He may not be proud of it, but I'm proud of it. I can't wait to show it. And I hope he'll be my guest.'
Ted V. Mikels found out about the screening of 'Doll Squad'. Wasn't happy.

KE: Really?

SC: Yeah. Which is interesting, because I purchased the print off of him six years ago for $128.

KE: Why wasn't he happy?

SC: Because he's not getting a cut. So I wrote him and said, 'I understand licensing fees are negotiable. May I begin negotiations? I have done four screenings. The first screening we had eleven people. The second screening we had six people. The third screening we twenty two people and the fourth screening we had seven people. That's an average of nine people a screening. Your film was a 'free to get in, pay to get out' feature. The cost to get out was $2. Using the average attendance rate, that's 2X9, that's $18. That's my offer.' I gave you the blunt version - the one I sent him was much nicer. I ended it by saying, 'sir, some things are done for love, not money. Kind regards, Stacey Case, projectionist, Trash Palace.' I sent that this past Sunday. I checked my email that night and he had written back. And I just mailed him a bank draft for $18.

KE: He wanted the $18?

SC: Yeah, and I completely respect him for wanting the $18. I've got a receipt for the bank draft and it says, 'Ted V. Mikels, $18'. And I keep all this stuff because I'm working on a fanzine called 'Trash Palace' and it's going to be all this stuff thats going on. Compiling reviews - my snack bar guy is writing a column, my MC is writing a column, Im writing stuff. And I'll just have a really cool fanzine. And if I really put my mind to it, it would be a dope book about this theatre. However, there are more shows to come. I want to have 26 shows, one every other Friday.
But I was very proud, and when he wrote to me, I wrote him back and said, 'look, I'm one of you guys, I'm a film maker too, I'm not just a collector. Here's my IMDB page, read the reviews. They're just like your reviews, bro.' He hasn't written back yet. But he will. I think I blew his mind.

You know, it's all about being classy about bad movies. They deserve good posters.

KE: Yeah, the posters are beautiful. Such obvious care went into designing them. Now, you say you're not just a collector...

SC: But I am a collector. But the type of collecting that I do is different. Everyone is a collector, really. My wife collects Wonder Woman stuff. I don't know, maybe there's something empowering about it. I guess I find what I collect to be empowering. Plus, I like having stuff.

Look, when I just moved here from Vancouver, I just had these shorts and my fucking leather jacket. I had nothing. I stayed in hostels and shit. That's how I know about the Rio - I used to pay four bucks to sleep in the Rio. I'm not a pack rat. I can give shit up.

Trash Palace Interview: Part IV - 'There are so many things you can do with a film and still have it be about a werewolf'

2007-06-19T17:09:00.001-04:00

KE: I guess why I bring up your role as a collector is that you say that you're interested in buying up movies that no one else wants. Yet you have a profound respect for these films, as a collector, but also as a director. I mean, you've made your own films, you know what it takes to make one of these movies. So do you see yourself as an archivist? Do you see yourself as preserving these films for posterity? I mean, we have institutional mechanisms to preserve a Jean-Luc Goddard film, but no one is really interested in preserving 'Force on Thunder Mountain', right?

SC: No, not at all, you're totally right. There's other people in the city who collect films. And there's an element of altruism to all of us. If I didn't purchase 'Force on Thunder Mountain'. Like, public libraries threw out old educational shorts. I mean, I have this old short. 'The Boo-boo Monster'. And the people in the audience just loved it, their laughter was so joyous. And if I hadn't bought it, it would have just got thrown out. That's horrible. It deserves to live, it deserves to have people see it. It's such a disposable culture and we've made it so easy with DVDs and downloads that so much gets lost in the shuffle. I have to be very picky about what I collect. For me, it's not just about collecting films. I collect films because it drives my passion for making my own films. And there's tons of people in the city who collect films. There's Scary Ed who collects old educational shorts, there's Dion Conflict, Greg Woods, Colin Geddes from the Midnight Madness portion of the Toronto International Film Festival - each one has their own reason for collecting. I collect because it inspires my own efforts to make films. I love seeing how somebody else with a low budget pulled off something. Collecting is what gives me the juice for getting back in the ring to make my next film.

I love that no matter how good or bad a film is, it got made. That's all that matters. The rest is all talk. What matters is the reel of film.

Watching these movies is like going to school. When I talk to Ted Mikels, he's my teacher. I watch these films and they take me to school. I don't know how you watch a movie, but I can watch a movie and visualize the camera man and the boom mike operator. And that interests me. And you watch some of these films and you realize that there is a lot going on behind the surface. It's subversive.

KE: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned how you like to add that sort of subversive element to your own films, that you want there to be this layer to the film beyond the tits, guns and gore.

SC: Yeah, these films are never that simple. You can fuck around with gender roles. There are so many things you can do with a film and still have it be about a werewolf. Like, there's so many things yo can say in a film and still have it be this crazy fucking thing.

These films are generally just tits and ass and gore. I mean, I collect Super 8 condensed versions of these films. You ain't seen nothing until you've seen a ten minute version of 'Destroy All Monsters' - just action, no exposition. And I'm inspired by that. When I shoot a short film, I shoot it like it's a condensed film. I drive the narrative forward like a jack-hammer. It's not that I have ADD - I just love these condensed versions of these films.

It used to be that Hollywood films would be like 'Absence of Malice' starring Meryl Streep and Paul Newman. Now the Hollywood film is an exploitation film. 'Spider Man 3'? Exploitation film. 'Fantastic Four'? Exploitation film. The things that used to only be done in exploitation films are now being done with $300 million budgets and CGI. What makes Japanese films today so great is that there's no CGI, it's all masks and crazy fucking ideas. That's low budget film making. If and when you come by the studio, you'll see all these masks and props that I have. And those props write the movies I make. And I have a feeling that the next film is going to use all these props and it's going to be the greatest fucking thing ever. And when I'm done that film, I have another I want to do. I'm getting back into TV and there's a couple ideas that I've pitched to MTV in the States and I hope that project will fund my next movie. But you don't need to have a whole lot of money to make an enjoyable movie. You don't need CGI. These low budget films are quite endearing - I think of my own films as endearing.

KE: You say on your website that if you want to see a 'good' film, you shouldn't come to the Trash Palace.

SC: You know who I'm speaking to, though.

KE: Yeah.

SC: I'm speaking to those people. Like, my whole family would hate what I'm showing. But the people who show up to my screenings say, 'these are great films'. I have to use words like 'good' and 'bad' to show people that it's not high art. However, I have a respect for low art and what can be read into low art. What's a good film? If you went on line and did a poll of what is a good film, all the fan boys would say 'Fantastic Four' or whatever just came out. My criteria for what a good film is quite different from what most people would think was a good film. I mean, three quarters of those people (gestures to pedestrians outside the cafe) wouldn't like the films I show. I actually don't like using words like good or bad, but for people who don't know what I'm talking about, I have to use those words. I have to make it hard for people to come to these screenings because most people wouldn't want to come to these screenings.

KE: OK, so a few more questions. Could you briefly give your thoughts on Tarantino and Rodriquez' new film 'Grindhouse'. I mean, they were pretty blunt about their intentions - they wanted to recreate the sort of experiences they had in grindhouses back when they were young. Do you think this movie succeeds in recreating this experience or does it succumb to that homogenized film going experience you mentioned earlier?

SC: The only way 'Grindhouse' could have worked properly if theatres like the Rio still existed. You can't recreate this kind of experience for people who have only ever been to these homogenised theatres. If you've never been to a second-run theatre, you were actually confused by 'Grindhouse'. The scratches, the parts cut out of the movie - people thought it was terrible. In that sterile environment, people were pissed off but couldn't do anything. If you were in an actual grindhouse, the missing reels and scratched print were just part of the deal. And you could yell at the screen if you hated it. You can't do that in theatres today.
I mean, Tarantino's film, 'Death Proof', was just a Tarantino film. It wasn't a grindhouse film. It was just a classic Tarantino film - strong women getting revenge. In the revenge drama, I've seen 40 movies better than that film. 'Planet Terror', I actually enjoyed. Who cares why she can fire the machine gun that's attached to her leg? I believe it, I'm in. I like the leaps in logic in his film. His film, to me, was much more in keeping with what those grindhouse films were.
And as a genre, I think there should have been more nudity in both films. I've been studying grindhouse films for years. There should have been nudity. Fanboys were complaining about the lack of tits. The fact that the film made so little dough makes a lot of sense. You confused one half of the audience and let down the other half. I mean, what did you expect was going to happen, you dopes? They should have spent less money and gone straight to DVD, because that's where the grindhouse is now. Unfortunately, no one is doing anything intelligent in these films anymore.

KE: Now I'll just ask you one more question, as I know you have to go. What do you see as Trash Palace's relationship with other screenings, like Rue Morgue or the now suspended Kung Fu Fridays screenings? Do you think there is something that could loosely be defined as a Toronto film scene? Or do all these things tend to operate pretty much independent of each other?

SC: I think that there's a film scene, but I'm not part of it. I know the players. For me, it's different. You've heard all the reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm doing things for my own reasons. For me, it's not just about showing the movies. It's not just about uncovering some dope ass treasure and then bragging about it. That smacks of elitism. The people who collect and show films in town have their own reasons. We're not unified in any larger picture. We all have our own reasons. I'm not doing it to show off. The posters are an expression of my love for this stuff - but maybe the posters are showing off.

I do enjoy talking to these people, though, as there's a lot of stuff that we can talk about. I don't get to talk film with a whole lot of people, so I do enjoy talking to these people. I don't go to other screenings. Because I'm married, I have my own screenings, I have a life apart from this. I don't go to the movies often. If I do, it's with my wife. I'm all about narrative, I'm not an experimental film maker, so there's not a lot of film festivals for me to take part in. I mean, there's the After Dark Film Festival, but I don't have anything I want to screen now. I'm 39 years old, I've learned how to do all this on my own - that's how I roll.
But I'm looking forward to sending stuff out to festivals some time soon. And people like my stuff - it's funny. I remember going to Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal back in 2003 and screening 'Enter...Zombie King'. But before the movie, I screened some shorts, and one of them was called 'Squeegee Rampage' and it was about this wrestler versus these squeegee kids. And all the squeegee kids come from Montreal so to screen it there was awesome. And right from the first scene, which shows the squeegee kid pissing in his squeegee bucket, I had the audience, it didn't matter what happened, five minutes in, I fucking had them. And that's the best, knowing that you got them. That's a good feeling, man, that's a good feeling. So watching these types of films that I screen - they're not very good - but I know they got me. I believe - I'm a believer.

KE: Well, thank you very much for talking with us today.

SC: My pleasure.

* * *

Well, it's almost five in the AM. I've been up for the last five hours transcribing this interview and I'm pretty beat. I hope someone out there takes the time to read this interview in its entirety. Tall order, I know. But I wouldn't be putting it out there if I didn't think it was worth your attention. Remember to check out this week's Trash Palace screening of 'Frankenstein's Daughter' - doors open at 8:30 but tickets have to be bought in advance at Suspect Video (remember, you only know where to go once you've bought the ticket). Apparently, Stacey's come up with a drinking game to accompany the film. You know I'll be there.
Again, the Trash Palace website is trashpalace.ca.

If you want to take Stacey up on his offer and check out his CV on the Internet Movie Database, here's the link.

And here's the link to the IMDB page for Stacey's film 'Enter...Zombie King'.

Welcome to the Panopticon

2007-06-19T04:12:00.000-04:00

Kino-Eye has officially joined Facebook as a group! Just search for 'Kino-Eye' under groups and you should be able to find it. Hopefully this Facebook group will help assemble an informal staff of writers for the blog as well as serve as a message board for discussion related to the Toronto film scene. A few people have already expressed interest in writing for Kino-Eye. That's great - but even if you don't feel comfortable writing articles for the blog, you can always send me an email to alert me to people, events or anything else you think worthy of attention.

Many thanks again to my friend Peter for designing yet another logo for the blog.

Kino-Eye (Hearts) Twins

2007-06-19T00:30:00.000-04:00

(These young women may look innocuous, but don't be fooled - they have a David Koresh-ian hold on their millions of devoted followers.)

Many of you have probably visited one of Chinatown's many DVD stores. You've probably picked up a few flicks. And, as you were paying, you might have wondered where all the DVDs came from - a residential basement somewhere in Markham? A factory in Kowloon? And how come they're so damn cheap? But really, you were just glad they were selling '2046' for the price of a Starbucks coffee.

The Chinatown DVD store has become a fixture of Toronto's video store community. Specializing in East Asian (primarily Hong Kong) cinema but increasingly branching out to include Thai and Filipino films, the Chinatown DVD store serves as a conduit through which we in Toronto may access the cinematic pop culture of Asia. If you're hungry for the latest mahjong comedy, Korean horror flick, or Japanese drama, you don't head to Queen Video - you head to Chinatown. Long before audiences were able to catch Jet Li's 'Huo Yuan Jia' (known here as 'Fearless') in theatres, the local Hong Kong DVD store was carrying an uncut, subtitled copy for the fraction of the cost of a movie ticket. I still remember taking the Greyhound bus up from London for day trips to Toronto back when I was in high school and planning my entire budget around my requisite trip to the Chinatown DVD store. There, I'd stuff my knapsack full of '80s heroic bloodshed and '90s New Wave wu xia flicks. Probably my best find was a rare VCD copy of Fruit Chan's first film, 'Made in Hong Kong', starring a young Sam Lee. (I lost it a few years back and haven't been able to find another copy since.)

Given how much we in Toronto owe these stores for introducing us to commercial East Asian cinema, I thought it appropriate to hit the streets and see if I could secure an interview with the owner of one of these stores. After being turned down no fewer than three times, I finally managed to find a proprietor who was willing to speak to me. His/her only conditions: that I preserve his/her anonymity and that of his/her store. Fair enough. With cops routinely shutting down DVD stores in Chinatown, he/she had a right to be wary of a white dude with a digital voice recorder.

Here's what he/she had to say:

Kino-Eye: So how long has this shop been in business?

Shop Owner: Five or six years.

KE: And how long have you worked here?

SO: Same.

KE: Is your clientele primarily Cantonese and Mandarin speakers?

SO: Mostly nowadays they are Mandarin. But a few are Cantonese.

KE: Is there a strong sense of community in Chinatown and, if so, do you feel you and this store to be part of that community?

SO: I'd say yes.

KE: Chinatown DVD stores sell movies at the price of 10 for $20, even 11 for $20. Is there strong competition among the various DVD stores in Chinatown?

SO: These days, there is a lot of competition, it's very strong.

KE: How do you decide which movies to stock and sell?

SO: Well, we stock the latest ones, and in terms of the older ones, we stock the blockbusters.

KE: What kind of films would you recommend to a person who is unfamiliar with Hong Kong cinema?

SO: Hong Kong movies are mostly comedy and kung fu or action, so I would recommend one of those (films).

KE: Toronto used to have a Chinese-language movie theatre that was owned by Golden Harvest but it closed down years ago. Do you think a similar theatre, if opened, could be successful today?

SO: I don't think so. Asian people don't go to the movies that much. They prefer to watch DVDs.

KE: Did you ever check out the Kung Fu Fridays screenings that used to be held at the Royal and the Revue theatres, the ones that would show classic martial arts films from the '70s, '80s and '90s?

SO: I heard about it but I never went.

KE: I was in Hong Kong in 2005 and Twins, Gillian Chung and Charlene Choi (see above photo and link), were everywhere - on the TV, on the radio, in the movies. They were like an industry unto themselves. Are they still ridiculously popular?

SO: Um, I'm not a fan of them but, yeah, they're very popular in Hong Kong and parts of China. They have a new movie out - 'Twins Mission'.

KE: Recently Celestial Pictures bought the rights to the old Shaw Brothers films and has set about re-releasing them on DVD. I notice you have an entire section devoted to these films. Are they quite popular and, if so, who tends to buy them?

SO: Yeah, they're popular. Mostly middle-aged people (buy them) because they like (movies from) the '60s and the '70s.

KE: Why do you think the Hong Kong film industry is doing so poorly these days?

SO: Because DVDs come out so quickly and people don't often go to movie theatres to watch (the movies).

So there you have it. Now grab some loose change and head over to Dragon City and pick up the latest Ronald Cheng comedy.

(If you want to learn more about Hong Kong cinema but don't know where to start, check out 'City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema' by Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover or 'Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment' by David Bordwell. (Bordwell is actually in a bit of a feud with noted philosopher/social critic Slavoj Zizek. It's kind of like the Notorious BIG and 2Pac beef of the mid '90s, except it's between old white dudes without gats.) You might also want to head over to LoveHkFilm.com. The guy who runs it reviews nearly every movie that comes out in Hong Kong. And I mean every movie - not just the latest Johnnie To flick, but even the Hong Kong version of 'Sweet November'. That guy has nerves of steel.)

It took a former paratrooper to save the Revue

2007-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Remember last summer when it seemed like every rep cinema in the city was closing shop? Well, here's a bit of good news for all of you who feared the Revue was going to be turned into a parking lot...

Many of you will have been aware of the campaign to save the Revue from demolition - a campaign headed by the Revue Film Society that managed to raise $30 000 (!) in the course of a few short months. (Check out their website at http://revuecinema.ca/.) It was a valiant effort, but sadly not enough.

Well, one Liverpool-born Danny Mullin has rescued the Revue for the hefty sum of $954 000 (a steal when you consider the going price was $1.275 million) and lease it to the non-profit Revue Film Society. While $60 000-worth of upgrades are expected to be needed if the theatre is to open by the end of the summer (bake sale, anyone?), we can all be grateful that Mr. Mullin has taken it upon himself to preserve this piece of Toronto's heritage when no one else seemed willing or able. Leave it to the English to show us Canadians how it's done. Hopefully we can secure an interview with Mr. Mullin to get his thoughts on the Revue and the status of Toronto's rep cinemas. In the meantime, prepare for late August, when the Revue is slated to open again. And expect a retrospective on Kirk Douglas - I hear that's Mr. M's favourite actor.

Thanks to Second Cup for letting me steal last week's National Post from which I gleaned most of this information.

(On a side note: I was in Little Italy today, having a drink with a friend, when what did I stumble upon in the bargain-bin of Balfour Books but a copy of Andrew Fenady's cult novel about a man who undergoes plastic surgery to literally become Sam Spade, 'The Man With Bogart's Face'. I think this minor find bodes well for the site...)

"All you need for a blog is a gun and a girl."

2007-06-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

You have to be asking yourself: Does the world need yet another blog? And one on film at that?

Well, for starters, this blog won't be a place for me to wax idiotic about the latest flick I caught at the bijou. There are enough sites out there lending a critical eye to world cinema, written by people far more qualified to do so than myself, to justify adding one more to their ranks.

Then on what will Kino-Eye focus? Toronto's film scene. What do I mean by that? Well, it will include postings regarding...

revue theatres (a dying breed)

upcoming film festivals of all sizes (including calls for submissions)

listings for film screenings

meetings of local film clubs or associations

interviews with local film makers, video artists, programmers, film critics, or anyone else even remotely connected to the local film scene

talks by (local) film makers and scholars

student-run film projects

the launch of new film-related publications

film-related contests and events

anything else related to film happening in the greater Toronto area. (And I mean anything - from the latest offering at the Royal to whatever Reg Hart happens to be showing in his living room on a Thursday night.)

But the question remains: for whom is this blog intended? Generally speaking, anyone. More precisely, students. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own interests onto my peers, but I believe the majority of students at the University of Toronto, York, Ryerson, and OCAD genuinely enjoy watching films (films from the grindhouse, the arthouse, and anything in-between). Unfortunately, many are simply unaware that there is a world beyond the multiplex and Blockbuster. It's amazing how many students aren't even aware of Cinematheque - and that's pretty mainstream. This blog is for those students, the ones who have grown tired of the impersonal film-going experience dished out by places like the Scotiabank Theatre and who crave something more.

So how is this site going to work? Obviously, I can't do this on my own - I'm only one man, I need your help. So I encourage all of you to contribute to this blog. Send me interviews, articles, event listings, reviews of local cinemas or festivals, or anything else concerning Toronto's film scene. Ideally, I'll simply act as the editor of this site, posting the pieces you send me. So whether it's a heads-up concerning a screening you and your friends are having in your basement apartment, notification of the release of a new student-made film, or an in-depth interview with Bruce LaBruce (oh, do we dare to dream?), send it to me and I'll post it. It's that easy. This site will be what we make it.

So now you know what it's all about. Now it's your turn. Get your Jimmy Olsen on and hit up the cinemas, the video stores, the galleries, and the location shoots for the latest scoop. Then return here with your updates. To quote Ekin Cheng in the under-rated 1999 Hong Kong racing flick 'The Legend of Speed': "Sometimes you must step on the gas...and sometimes you must step on the brake. Now is the time to step on the gas."

Gun it!

(Many thanks to my friend Peter for designing the logo for Kino-Eye.)