Now that school’s over and I’m all refreshed and relaxed and able to type long texts without feeling anxious, depressed and tired, I figured it was about time I wrote a second part to my wanderings on Nostalgia Crescent. Besides, I’m sure that it’ll help recover some of our souls from the institution known as the University of Toronto. In my last post, many of you mentioned a lot of old TV shows we used to enjoy as children. Now, again, this will not apply to you if you did not grow up in Canada in the 90s, so I welcome you to write your own post. In any case, I’ll try and think up as many shows as I can. I’ve already mentioned a few anime titles, such as Pokemon, Digimon, Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon in my last trip down memory lane, so I’ll refrain from mentioning them again. Anyways, let’s start the second part of our journey down Nostalgia Crescent with… (more…)

Micmacs, or orignally Micmas à tire-largiot, is a French film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the man who directed Amélie. Now, I’m sure some of you are asking, “How on earth will this ever escape the shadow cast by the ever so amazing Amélie?” Well, all I can say is that, even to all the die-hard Amélie lovers out there, Micmacs will not disappoint. (more…)

The Parking Lot Movie (D: Meghan Eckman; USA)

It would seem strange that anyone would want to see a documentary about a parking lot, but director Meghan Eckman has been able to craft in The Parking Lot Movie an interesting, funny, and revealing film. It is not so much about the physical space of the parking lot, but the people, culture, and life revelations and lessons that can be gained from minimum wage labour at a very peculiar parking lot in Charlottesville, named the Corner Parking Lot. (more…)

Hot Docs Audience Top Ten

1. THUNDER SOUL (D: Mark Landsman; USA)A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
2. A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
3. MY LIFE WITH CARLOS (D: German Berger; Chile, Spain, Germany)
4. AUTUMN GOLD (D: Jan Tenhaven; Austria, Germany)
5. LEAVE THEM LAUGHING (D: John Zaritsky; Canada, USA)
6. RUSH: BEYOND THE LIGHTED STAGE (D: Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn; Canada)
7. LISTEN TO THIS (D: Juan Baquero; Canada)
8. A SMALL ACT (D: Jennifer Arnold; USA)
9. WASTE LAND (D: Lucy Walker; UK, Brazil)
10. MARWENCOL (D: Jeff Malmberg; USA)

Hot Docs Recap 1

The 17th Annual Hot Docs Festival wrapped up on Sunday, May the 9th with the highest attendance ever with approximately 136,000 attendees, 170 plus of worthy and intriguing films, and the often revealing film festival advantage of Q & A sessions by the directors and producers of many of the films. We at blogUT tried valiantly to see a wide variety of films using previews, synopsis diving, and random serendipity to discover the best of the best, but have somehow missed the most well loved highlights of the festival (as judged by the Hot Docs 2010 audience award). This is, however, no slight against the consistently fantastic films we did manage to see. Out of the 10 most loved films by the audience, we managed to see just one, the fantastic Marwencol, an inspiring story of a hate crime victim who creates an eponymous 1/16th scale model Belgian town circa WWII and filled it with complex story lines in order to help resolve his anger and fear from a near death inducing beating. We also somehow managed to miss all of the films that won awards (again with the exception of Marwencol that won the HBO sponsored Emerging Artist Award). Most sadly, we missed the internationally critically acclaimed and massively sold out  A Film Unfinished, a daring deconstruction of an unfinished Nazi propaganda film that depicted the Jewish ghettos as happy and quaint residential communities, which won the festival’s top prize of Best International Feature. Other major award winners we did not see were The Oath, a character study of a once bodyguard and driver to Bin Laden, which won the Special Jury Prize for international feature, and In the Name of the Family, an exploration of honour killings of girls in North America that was named Best Canadian Feature.

So what did we managed to see? Over the eleven days of the festival we caught 9 films and it is a testament to the quality of the festival that despite all but one not being audience favourites or award winners they were all thought provoking, emotionally poignant, often funny and insightful, and powerful. As such, in the next few posts blogUT will review and dissect the slight portion of the 2010 edition of Hot Docs that we were lucky enough to experience. Today we start off after the jump with Marwencol and Talhotblond. (more…)

On Friday the 29th, Hot Docs, North America’s largest and most important documentary festival, revved up for its 17th year. In the past, documentaries have been stigmatized as boring, staid, and educational in the worst “this is a bad 50’s educational school video” sense. However, reality is indeed often weirder than the more popular and box office-grossing fiction.

As each permutation of reality unfolds on tabloid websites, increasingly for better or worse, documentaries have continued to give greater depth and context to both the sensational and the often-forgotten. Documentaries have become better, more potent, diverse, and engaging than ever. Hot Docs as a festival has also evolved, becoming an event for world and Canadian debuts of new and challenging films while increasingly trying to dispel the unglamorous past of documentaries by reaching out to younger viewers.

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The end of the year has arrived and it’s time to regain my soul by immersing myself in art. One of the first things I did after finishing all my assignments was… go to the opera! This time, I decided to see Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman because I was of course, enchanted by the legend behind it that appeared in Pirate of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, there were no pirates with squid faces who could play the organ with their tentacle beards, but Wagner’s opera was pretty epic in itself. (more…)

U of T’s own engineering orchestra is hosting its final concert of the year, The Symphonic Boom, on April 6th. This is the time of the year when the Orchestra plays its most challenging repertoire, after spending the entire winter term preparing. Last year, Dvorak’s Symphony no. 9 was performed in its entirety, along with the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, featuring Alice Chun. Enjoy a night of great music from the Skule Orchestra and Skule Choir with performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, the first movement from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and the Overture from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.

If you like classical music and would like to witness the tremendous musical talent within the engineering faculty, this is a concert that you absolutely cannot miss!

What: Symphonic Boom
Where: Church of the Redeemer (Bloor and Avenue)
When: April 6th, 2010 @ 7PM
Tickets: $8 General Admission / 4 students

For more info: www.skulemusic.ca/orchestra