2011 CAST Awards Announcement

by James McNally on January 1, 2012 · 5 comments

in Awards,CAST

Update: Check out the CASTcast pod­cast organ­ized by the Mamo.ca guys! It’s hosted by our friends over at Row Three. Hear me and six other loud­mouths debate the res­ults for an hour! Special thanks to Matt Brown for organ­izing this.

I’m very pleased to announce the res­ults of the 2nd edi­tion of the CAST Awards. I “cast” an even wider net this year, and received 40 com­pleted bal­lots from film lovers in the Greater Toronto Area. Here are the CAST Top 25 voted on from a pre­de­ter­mined list of just over 100 films which had the most pre­lim­inary sup­port. Voters ranked up to 25 films on their ballot from top to bottom, with first choices receiving 25 points, second choices 24, etc. The Points column lists the total score for each film, the Mentions column indic­ates the number of bal­lots it appeared on, and the Seen column indic­ates the total number of voters who have seen the film, even if they didn’t include it on their ballot. I’m proud of the group of critics we’ve gathered, even though I’ve described us else­where as “a ragtag group of semi-professional film blog­gers, tweeters and Lightbox lobby loiterers.” Of the 112 films on the ballot, more than half our voting group saw at least 40, and five saw more than 70!

FILM TITLE
POINTS
MENTIONS
SEEN
1. Drive 548 31 36
2.The Artist 479 26 29
3. The Tree of Life 460 24 27
4. Attack the Block 386 25 36
5. Take Shelter 376 20 21
6. Midnight in Paris 330 24 31
7. Melancholia 306 19 26
8. Shame 284 19 28
9. Beginners 281 19 24
10. Martha Marcy May Marlene 279 20 24
11. Hanna 235 18 28
12. Café de Flore 207 9 13
13.The Raid 205 12 15
14. Blue Valentine 192 11 30
15. Bridesmaids 185 18 31
16.The Muppets 179 14 25
17. The Illusionist 174 11 22
18. The Descendants 172 11 16
19. Super 8 167 16 31
20. Contagion 167 14 22
21. The Interrupters 167 10 12
22. Tabloid 165 12 20
23. Hugo 162 10 23
24. The Trip 159 14 24
25. Meek’s Cutoff 159 10 18

Participants:

Here is a PDF with each person’s ballot and the col­lated res­ults, with a few more inter­esting stats included. Voters could opt out of having their ballot included, so you may notice some omis­sions, but rest assured that each sub­mitted ballot con­trib­uted to the overall results.

And for those still reading, here is my final CAST ballot, ranking 25 films from the list of eli­gible films. In a future blog post, I’ll come up with my own 2011 list(s), sim­ilar to what I did last year and in 2009 and 2008.

My CAST Ballot

  1. The Tree of Life (review)
  2. The Artist (review)
  3. Martha Marcy May Marlene (review)
  4. The Interrupters
  5. Take Shelter
  6. This is Not a Film (review)
  7. The Descendants
  8. Win Win
  9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
  10. Drive
  11. Attack the Block
  12. Beginners
  13. Hanna
  14. Rango
  15. ALPS (review)
  16. Super 8
  17. Goodbye First Love (review)
  18. The Guard
  19. Contagion
  20. Midnight in Paris
  21. Bridesmaids
  22. Shame (review)
  23. Miss Bala (review)
  24. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
  25. The Ides of March

Tagged as: #cast11

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Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism

by James McNally on December 20, 2011 · 0 comments

in Critics,Special Events

Kevin Courrier

Now before you think that I’m breaking out of my writer’s block with a ven­geance, based on that title, I’ll have to let you down ever so easily. It’s actu­ally the title of a really inter­esting film lec­ture series coming up at the Miles Nadal JCC. Each Monday night from January 16 through March 26, from 7:00 until about 9:00, critic and author Kevin Courrier (Critics at Large) is going to examine this meaty-sounding sub­ject with a selec­tion of film clips. The films under dis­cus­sion make this sound fascinating:

  • Monday January 16: The Kennedy Era (The Godfather, Part II, The Manchurian Candidate, JFK assas­sin­a­tion news coverage)
  • Monday January 23: The Johnson Era (Bonnie and Clyde, Dr. Strangelove, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, Night of the Living Dead, The Wild Bunch, Bullitt)
Midnight Cowboy
  • Monday January 30: The Nixon Era (Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack)
  • Monday February 6: The Carter Era (The Conversation, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Winter Kills, Who’ll Stop the Rain, Nashville, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Star Wars)
  • Monday February 13: The Reagan Era (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blow Out, Pennies from Heaven, Diner, The Border, The Survivors, Moscow on the Hudson, Under Fire)
  • Monday February 20: No class
  • Monday February 27: The Bush Era (Field of Dreams, True Believer)
Primary Colors
  • Monday March 5: The Clinton Era (Primary Colors, Forrest Gump, JFK, In the Line of Fire, Love Field, Three Kings, The Contender, Wag the Dog, The West Wing (TV))
  • Monday March 12: No class
  • Monday March 19: The GW Bush Era (We Were Soldiers, Tears of the Sun, The 25th Hour, Team America: World Police, Fahrenheit/Fahrenhype 9/11)
  • Monday March 26: The Obama Era (Rachel Getting Married, Definitely, Maybe, No Country for Old Men, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Hurt Locker, The Visitor)

Tickets are $12 for each class ($6 for stu­dents) or $100 for the entire series, and are avail­able in person at the Miles Nadal JCC inform­a­tion desk (750 Spadina Ave. at Bloor St.). Hope to see you there!

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Announcing Shorts That Are Not Pants!

by James McNally on December 14, 2011 · 0 comments

in Personal,Special Events

Shorts That Are Not Pants

I know things have been pretty quiet around here since my big philo­soph­ical post last month. And while I’m still exper­i­en­cing writer’s block when it comes to reviewing indi­vidual films, I haven’t been sit­ting around feeling sorry for myself. In fact, I’m busier than ever. In addi­tion to coordin­ating the second edi­tion of the CAST Awards (look for an announce­ment early in the new year), I’ve decided to take my long-gestating idea for a shorts screening public.

I’ve always enjoyed short films, but seeing them out­side of fest­ivals has never been easy. In fact, even at fest­ivals, they’re usu­ally bundled together in unprom­ising sounding pack­ages like “Canadian Shorts 1″ or “Programme 6.” And the problem at the spec­tac­ular Worldwide Short Film Festival, where they group the films them­at­ic­ally, is just over­load. I’ve always wanted to curate a reg­ular pro­gram of films that would be some­thing like a mix­tape, and in 2009, I started doing it on a small scale.

I’d been a huge fan of Wholphin, a DVD “magazine” of short films from the people behind McSweeney’s, ever since the first one came out in 2005. By 2009, I was still amazed that hardly anyone I knew had heard of it, so I decided to screen a selec­tion of films for a small group of friends at my apart­ment. It was a hit, and not only because of the cup­cakes my wife thought­fully provided. After run­ning a few more of these nights, I wanted to share my enthu­siasm and some great films with the rest of the city. Starting last winter, I began researching venues and licensing fees and pos­sible part­ners, and I’m very happy to announce that we’re finally launching!

On January 13, 2012, at 7pm, Shorts That Are Not Pants will screen our inaug­ural pro­gram of inter­na­tional and Canadian shorts at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John St. at Richmond). I’ll refer you to the site for more details, but I sin­cerely hope you’ll join us at the start of this new adventure.

My plan is to make this a quarterly event, and we hope to be working with a variety of part­ners. For the first screening, we’re showing the entirety of the Future Shorts Pop Up Festival lineup, as well as a couple of won­derful anim­ated Canadian shorts from the National Film Board. But I’m excited by the fact that there is such a wealth of great material out there that has either never been screened before in Toronto, or was buried amongst hun­dreds of other films at fest­ivals. I’m looking for­ward to dis­cov­ering and sharing films with you, live and on the big screen. Hopefully we’ll even get a group together after the screen­ings to dis­cuss the films over a drink. Short films are worthy of your atten­tion, and I hope to demon­strate that to a larger audi­ence than just the dozen I’ve been cram­ming into my apart­ment. I hope you’ll join us!

You can buy tickets for just $8 in advance. At the door, tickets will be $10, or $5 if you’re crazy enough to show up in shorts. Even if you can’t make it and want to sup­port the series, buy a ticket and just let me know that’s your inten­tion. Of course, men­tioning us on Twitter (follow us here), Facebook (we have a page) or any­where else online or off would be helpful, too. I’m cer­tainly not hoping to make money on this, but it would be great if I didn’t lose too much. :)

Tagged as: shorts

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Blind Spots Series 2012

by James McNally on December 4, 2011 · 12 comments

in Blind Spots,Lists

Blind Spots

Every time I get together with other film blog­gers here in Toronto, some­body inev­it­ably gasps in horror as someone else admits that they haven’t seen a par­tic­ular movie. This has always been amusing to me, because, you know, everyone has their cine­matic blind spots. Though there is no Official Canon of Films You’re Supposed to Have Seen™, some­times we act as if there is. And there are def­in­itely films that, as a cinephile, I know I should have seen by now, but just have never gotten around to. Hence the idea for the Blind Spot series.

I shared this idea with Ryan McNeil a few weeks back and he’s already gotten the jump on me in posting his list, but the gist of the idea is that I’m going to list a dozen films below. Films I feel somehow guilty or silly for not having seen yet. I’ve some­times nodded along to dis­cus­sions of these films, hoping nobody would ask me my opinion. By the end of 2012, I will be armed with my own opin­ions on them, along with a small sense of accomplishment.

My hope is to watch and post some­thing about each film on this list during 2012. Though I have many many more than 12 on my blind spot list, for this first attempt, I’m going to try to bal­ance Hollywood films with for­eign and doc­u­mentary films. Ideally, I’ll post once a month, but I’m not holding myself to that and neither should you. Here goes (and no gasping!):

  • Raging Bull (1980, Director: Martin Scorsese)*
  • Knife in the Water (1962, Director: Roman Polanski)*
  • Nashville (1975, Director: Robert Altman)
  • L’Atalante (1934, Director: Jean Vigo)*
  • Gone with the Wind (1939, Director: Victor Fleming)
  • Psycho (1960, Director: Alfred Hitchcock)
  • Blue Velvet (1986, Director: David Lynch)*
  • The Conformist (1970, Director: Bernardo Bertolucci)*
  • Jules and Jim (1962, Director: Francois Truffaut)
  • Grey Gardens (1975, Directors: Albert and David Maysles with Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer)
  • Cabaret (1972, Director: Bob Fosse)
  • Tokyo Story (1953, Director: Yasujirô Ozu)

Films marked with an asterisk (*) are ones I have actu­ally owned on DVD for quite a while now.

You are more than wel­come to join me in this enter­prise. Come up with your own list, post in the com­ments and/or on your blog, and let’s keep each other account­able for expanding our know­ledge of cinema next year!

Thanks to Flickr user atomische (Tom Geibel) for making his image avail­able under a Creative Commons license.

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Animation Express 2

by James McNally on December 2, 2011 · 0 comments

in DVD

Animation Express 2 Blu-ray

Animation Express 2 (Directors: Various): It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since the National Film Board of Canada released the ori­ginal Animation Express col­lec­tion. I raved about that col­lec­tion, and although sequels are usu­ally not as good as the ori­ginal, this second col­lec­tion is just as stuffed with treas­ures as the first.

Particular favour­ites include the exper­i­mental CMYK, where printer’s marks dance around the screen to the music of the Quatuor Bozzini quartet, and Wild Life in which an Englishman trades his bowler hat for a cowboy hat, coming to Alberta in 1909 to try his hand at ranching. It doesn’t quite work out in this whim­sical and yet haunting film.

The DVD con­tains 20 more (and the Blu-ray 26 more!) and while I don’t like all of them quite as much as the two above (I par­tic­u­larly didn’t like the Meryl Streep and Forest Whitaker-voiced Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life), this col­lec­tion con­tinues to gather the very best in Canadian anim­a­tion, some of the most-awarded work in the world.

P.S. Though I’ll be posting more about this later, you can see both CMYK and Wild Life on the big screen as part of a new shorts screening series I’m launching in January. Behold Shorts That Are Not Pants. Hope you can join us!

Tagged as: animation, blu-ray, nfb

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