"A Child's Garden of Verses" (2015)

After "The Rehearsal"(no nod to Bergman intended), I went back to something I'd shot years ago, but hadn't completed. I first filmed a version of "A Child's Garden of Verses" in the greenery of The Dunes Cafe & Gallery in Brackley Beach, PEI with Kelly Caseley, Cynthia King, Rob MacDonald and Ed Rashed, on 16mm and MOS ("motor only sync"). The plan was to bring the actors into the Island Media Arts Co-op offices at a later date to record their dialogue. That never happened, and in the years since filming, the film itself disappeared. This past summer, we went back to The Dunes, and I shot the new version that you can watch below with Kelly, Rob, Lennie MacPherson and Bonnie MacEachern, assistance from Dave Morrow, and musical accompaniment from Rob MacDonald.

"The Rehearsal" (2014)

After a big break from making very low budget short films, a horde of new generation local filmmakers, a significant improvement in the ease of filmmaking, technologically speaking, and a blood cancer diagnosis made me want to get back into it. Last year, a few friends helped me out in the filming of an idea I'd had for quite a while, and the result is "The Rehearsal", available for viewing below. I won't say what that idea was, because any impact this short has comes from just that - its concept. My typical answer to this question, though, is "It's about three women preparing for the most important performance of their lives."

I wrote and directed "The Rehearsal". It features Kelly Caseley, Rob MacDonald, Carly Martin and Laura Chapin. The DOP was Brian Sharp with camera assistance from Madhi Selseleh. Kelly also provided hair and make-up, Brian and I did the editing, and Dave Morrow was the Production Assistant.

The Bloody Terror Movie Checklist

Last week I asked a few people on my Facebook page, people from whom I've either read writing or comments on the subject, or people whom I've talked to about this, to give me some suggestions for... what do we can them... Midnight Movies? Cult Movies? Subversive Cinema? Underground? Psychotronic? You get the picture... Movies that have either been ignored or forgotten by the mainstream, rejected by it, or in some cases, never even hit its radar.

Friends of these people began commenting, and pretty soon I ended up with a terrific list of movies worth seeking out. Some of them you'd expect to see on a list of this types (Eraserhead), but many were unique to similar lists I've seen (You Never Can Tell). I had no intention of publishing the list, but it was so good that I had to.

Though I didn't contribute to this list, others who did, in order of comment, were: David Nicholson, Brian Bankston, Robert T. Daniel, Dennis Cozzalio, Maitland McDonagh, Ray Ray, Robert Humanick, Robert Monell, Curt Duckworth, David Zuzelo, Kevin McDonough, James Dempster, Michael Hinerman, Jeremy Richey, Sam Shalabi, Peter Nellhaus, Mark Allen, Christian Mux, Shelley Jackson, Anthony Lamanto, Thomas Ellison, Phillip Scot, Marilyn Ferdinand, Salem Kapsaski and Heather Drain.

Click on each of the images below to enlarge and to print. If you're interested in these sorts of movies, you'll no doubt find some suggestions here that you'll want to hunt down.

"The Cultural Impact of The Exorcist"

"The Exorcist" is an important film to me personally for a number of reasons - for its nostalgia, for the impact it had on me both in terms of hype and in living up to that hype, for the film's quality, for my varied interpretations of its theme, as a lesson in filmmaking, and on and on. And I wasn't the only one obsessing on William Friedkin's film version of William Peter Blatty's best seller; it was a worldwide phenomenon.

This entertaining Youtube clip entitled "The Cultural Impact of The Exorcist", made at the time of the film's release, illustrates the effect it had in North America back in 1973/74. Interviews start around the 1:50 mark.

Click here for "The Cultural Impact of The Exorcist".
Click here for a previous post about my experience with "The Exorcist"
Click here for my interpretation of "The Exorcist".

My Other Blog

I started a second blog after a recent Facebook conversation with filmmaker Harmony Wagnor. In this conversation, Harmony asked her FB friends to tell her what they didn't like about Canadian films. This made me think of a TV idea I'd pitched a few years ago that didn't go anywhere. The idea was that the public would vote on the best Canadian films, and we'd end up with list that would be a catalyst of sorts - a decent starting point from which Canadians and movie lovers around the world could further explore Canadian movies.

As access to and lack of knowledge about the existence of many Canadian movies were two of the main issues that came out of the conversation Harmony started, I decided go ahead and see what I could stir up as far as highlighting Canadian films online. That's why I started Maple Leaf Movies.

What I'm asking you and others to do is to: 1) go online HERE and submit as many Canadian films as you feel belong on a list of Great Canadian Films. In the fall, we'll have a vote and determine a list of 25 (give or take) films. The plan from there is to have writers write about each of the film on the list. 2) Pass it on. I'd like as many films and as many people as possible involved with this.

NEWSPAPER MOVIE ADS 1979-1981

In 2011 I posted some scans of ads for screenings I'd attended dating back to 1974 when I was 10 years old. Working within the scope of a 10-year period, I'm posting another batch here, this one covering approximately 1979-1981. Click on an image to enlarge.

The Most Dangerous Film Book Ever Written

In 1978, Randy Dreyfuss with Harry Medved and Michael Medved published The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way). In it, the authors selected 50 films they’d designated as the worst, mocking movies by Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, Alain Resnais, and others.

At the time of the book’s publication I was 13, and I enjoyed its tone and content. It was fun to laugh at movies that either failed or that I didn’t understand. Now, as an adult, I can see the smugness and lack of understanding that this book was selling. Unfortunately, I bought into it wholesale at the time, and I wasn’t alone.

It seems to me that the publication of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time coincided with a Zeitgeist that was ready to erode the way we appreciate movies. After all, home video and the whole “B-Movie” phenomena were just around the corner. Throughout the 1980’s, making fun of movies became a popular pastime – We rediscovered the films of Ed D. Wood Jr., Elvira was a pop culture icon, and the term “B-Movie” became synonymous with “bad movie”, typically referring to the product of an earlier era. Thankfully, my relationship with movies moved on and I developed a deeper and different kind of appreciation for cult films, in part encouraged by the publication of Michael J. Weldon's essential 1983 book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film - the prefect antidote to The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

One thing that this opening of my horizons showed me was that the kind of thinking responsible for books like The Fifty Worst Films of All Time simply misses the point. What it does, in the end, is limit understanding and appreciation, and encourages small mindedness. Where’s the joy in making yourself feel superior to a movie that is the product of its time? In my experience, a bad movie is one that doesn’t engage me; it’s a film that has been tested and committeed out of its skin; it’s a movie that’s designed for Oscar Season; and sometimes, more often than not, it exhibits the qualities that Dreyfuss and the Medveds would seem to endorse.

Having typed the preceeding words, I’d also encourage you to read The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, place it within the context of its time while doing so, and to draw your own conclusions. As I see it, it’s a bad book, mean-spirited and dumb, and I see it reflected in the people who talk too much in a theatre, text during the movie, and who laugh smugly at onscreen events that just aren’t funny.

Randy Dreyfuss, Harry Medved and Michael Medved. They were true trailblazers, not in writing about bad movies, but in bad writing about movies.