Still from C’est juste la fin du monde, via YouTube. One Sunday last November, my friend Megan and I met at a French-language movie theatre in Rosemont–La Petite Patrie in Montreal. I stood in line for matinee tickets, and then Megan and I bought popcorn. I ordered maïs soufflé, un regulier; the worker at the counter […] More »
Maid. Drug dealer. Vixen. Popular shows and movies are filled with harmful Latinx tropes. Nadya Sarah Domingo examines the damaging effects of our homogenous media culture
A couple of years ago, a stranger approached me while I was volunteering at a film festival in Toronto. She motioned to a group of friends standing nearby. They placed a bet on my ethnicity, she explained, and wanted to know where I was from. I smiled and patiently regurgitated my now-rehearsed response: I was […] More »
We meet Martin Stone on the eve of his 70th birthday: grey hair, goofy smile, his facial expressions vacillating between a childish joy and a more distant sadness. Originally from the U.S., he now shares a dirt-cheap Mile End apartment with a revolving cast of roommates in Montreal. In the mid-1960s, Stone left a lucrative ad […] More »
If you look at a map of southern Ontario, Leamington seems no more remarkable than the other small towns that dot Lake Erie’s coastline. Yet, in Min Sook Lee’s documentary Migrant Dreams, the 30,000-population town becomes the setting of a much bigger issue. Leamington has the largest concentration of greenhouses in North America. And, thanks to […] More »
Deconstructing the media's obsession with Hollywood celebrity pregnancies—starting with none other than Jennifer Aniston
Lisa Whittington-Hill
Sixteen. That’s the number of years tabloid magazines have spent declaring Jennifer Aniston pregnant. Rumours started gestating while the actress was still married to Brad Pitt, but really ramped up post-Pitt. Aniston has been “pregnant and alone,” “pregnant with twins,” “pregnant with John Mayer’s baby”—your body is not a wonderland when that happens—and a “pregnant […] More »
I didn’t exactly expect Jurassic World to be feminist savvy—it’s largely about capitalizing on nostalgia and making a bunch of dinosaurs run around. Dinosaurs, after all, are big bucks: as of July 26 the film has grossed $1,542,568,684 worldwide. They’re also very cool and I’ll admit I saw the movie twice. Even if the franchise […] More »
Why is sexy still so synonymous with white? Today’s independent porn industry challenges the sex-positive movement to break barriers and make more space for women of colour
Justine Ponomareff
It’s mid-April and Toronto’s Bloor Cinema is packed—so much so that it’s difficult to find two seats together. The lights dim around us and an announcer takes the stage. “There’s going to be naked people on screen, having sex,” she roars, punctuating her theatrical warning with a “who’da thunk” scoff. Ripples of laughter and cheers […] More »
Documentarian Nayani Thiyagarajah uses curiousity and compassion to confront shadeism in racialized communities ON A GREY NOVEMBER DAY IN TORONTO, with the sun nowhere in sight and an irritating mix of rain and snow outside, Tamil-Canadian filmmaker and artist Nayani Thiyagarajah is in good spirits—despite being bogged down by a head cold. In between sniffles […] More »
While most horror movies have problematic elements, the ones below are the worst. Unlike others, there’s simply no merit in them to overpower the awful parts of the film. 1. Hostel (2005): The Hostel franchise is problematic for a variety of reasons. First and foremost it’s part of the torture porn or “gorno” subgenre and […] More »
Grotesque deformities and burlap sack masks: these are the faces of physical disabilities in horror. Horror does not do disability well. Most “good” characters are able-bodied, whereas many villains in horror wear masks to cover birth defects, which the audience is supposed to find frightening. We’re supposed to learn that these faces are ones we […] More »
The Purge franchise has been a big success—not so much in terms of its critical success, but in audience reaction. On social media there was a constant buzz about it (so much so that use of the word “purge” automatically drew people to think of the film). Building on that success filmmakers debuted a sequel […] More »