Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder star in Mel Brooks’ Oscar winning comedy The Producers. Scoring the Academy award for Best Original Screenplay, this one is a hoot from beginning to end. It also saw Wilder get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Mostel stars as Max Bialystock, a producer, who will do anything to make…
Tag: musical
Toronto Fan Expo 2025 – Day 2
I have to say, today’s venture into Fan Expo was a good one. After too long apart, I was reunited with my creative partner, Sue Lawley-Maynard. Can you believe we hadn’t seen each other in person since before covid? There was a point that if one of us was around then the other was probably…
Top Secret! (1984) – Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams
It’s been a couple of decades since I last watched Top Secret! I remember from my time working in a video store that it was a perennial favourite of my friend Ted. And with the passing of Val Kilmer, I felt it was definitely time to take it in again. And wow, did I laugh….
Mean Girls (2024) – 4K
In 2004, Tina Fey delivered an iconic teen comedy with Mean Girls, then it leapt to the Broadway stage as a musical, and now, coming full circle, the musical has come to the screen, and Paramount Canada delivers it to your home theatre on 4K and Blu-ray today. Updating the musical songs to be more…
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2023) – Subspace Rhapsody, and Hegemony
Subspace Rhapsody does something that Star Trek has never done before, gives us a musical. With songs by Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley and Tom Polce and a script by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff this episode first debuted on 3 August, 2023. Sure, musicals aren’t everyone’s fare, but in a season that took some…
Footloose (1984) – 4k
There is no way this film is forty years old. I remember very well the summer of ’84, and the first time that I saw Footloose. I was completely swept up in the music, I just recently discovered pop music, having grown up in a predominantly country household, and the rhythms and beats really spoke…
Anna and the Apocalypse (2017) – John McPhail
A Christmas Zombie Horror Musical Comedy sounds like a definite win. I missed Anna and the Apocalypse when it played at Toronto After Dark a few years ago, and I was a little bummed about it. But now that the holidays have rolled around, I figured I could take a look at it and figure…
West Side Story (2021) – Steven Spielberg
When I first heard that Spielberg was taking on the classic musical, West Side Story, previously immortalized on celluloid by iconic director Robert Wise, I was a little dubious. Not that I didn’t trust Spielberg. Even with some of his weaker films (BFG) he arguably does something unique and noteworthy, even if it just demonstrates…
Fringe (2010) – Brown Betty, and Northwest Passage
Peter (Joshua Jackson) is in the wind somewhere, and Walter (John Noble) is attempting to deal with things in his own way, he smokes up on some Brown Betty and gets insanely high. All of this wouldn’t be too bad if Olivia (Anna Torv) didn’t show up with her niece, Ella (Lily Pilblad) in the…
TIFF 2021: Dear Evan Hansen dir. Stephen Chbosky
Mental health. Suicide. Depression. Loss. Grief. Loneliness. These issues are usually trapped in the individual, and though a number of us share in these things, it’s never a shared experience. We are held in the prison of our issues, in a society where social media presentation, the illusion of life being better than it is…
The Mind Reels 