TIFF11 INTERVIEW: Willem Dafoe (actor) and Daniel Nettheim (director), of The Hunter

On press duty for their new film The Hunter at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Daniel Nettheim and Willem Dafoe have been discussing Tasmania, Julia Leigh’s source material, and their cinematic sensibilities. It’s a character-driven piece that showcases its star’s craft while also the exotic environment his job of capturing the last Tasmanian tiger brings. My review can be read here. Sitting down as part of a roundtable interview with two fellow Americans, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Chilean, and a German, the two were quite forthcoming and conversational…

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REVIEW: Repo Men [2010]

“Ask me about my lips” I had been waiting for over a year to finally see Repo! The Genetic Opera and while I enjoyed it thoroughly, it wasn’t the masterpiece I had hoped it’d be. Very easily a cult classic in its eccentricity, I thought maybe Hollywood decided to piggyback the concept and make a more mainstream actioner out of the subject when the announcement of Repo Men came down the pike. In reality, however, the new film is based on a novel titled The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia,…

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TIFF09 RECAP: Connecting to Your World … and mine

Every year at the Toronto International Film Festival seems to get better and better. Is that due to the increase in films from six to eleven to fifteen? It very well might be. And I’ll just say now, watching fifteen films in less than four days may not be the healthiest thing in the world. Between the vendor sausage/chicken dogs/nitrates on a bun being easily accessible and a standard meal when going from one film to the next with barely enough time to catch your breath and the sheer fact…

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TIFF09 REVIEW: Daybreakers [2009]

“Humans were offered a chance to assimilate; they refused” There really is nothing more invigorating than a TIFF Midnight Madness screening. The atmosphere is alive with genre fans anxiously waiting to see some blood, gore, and dismemberment. I fortunately was able to get tickets for the world premiere of the new vampire flick Daybreakers in just that setting. Introduced by twin brother directors, Michael and Peter Spierig, the audience was treated to a great time, starting from one brother speaking aloud that he was drunk, “It’s the best way to…

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TIFF09 PREVIEW: For the Love of Film indeed …

September 10th is the day that friend/co-worker Chris Schobert and I head back up north for our third year at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). We’ve done the middle three days (2007) and the last three days (2008), so we thought, “What the hell?”, let’s try our luck with the opening four. Rolling out of bed, speeding down the QEW, and landing at the box office hours before our first film wouldn’t quite be effective for this year’s journey, however. Being in TO for FaneXpo last weekend meant we…

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