I had high hopes for WET, HOT AMERICAN SUMMER. It is a spoof of the 1980s Teensploitation “camp films.” You know the ones – Up The Creek, Meatballs, Oddballs, Screwballs (actually, that last one is set in a high school, but you see where I’m going). Those juvenile, over-sexed 1980s comedies that were a formative part of most of our youths. I know that I certainly stayed up late to catch these on late-night cable TV or looking for sympathetic…

HOKUM or Hokey? That’s actually unfair, but I couldn’t resist the wordplay. HOKUM is a great movie. It does use a lot of the tropes that one would expect to see from a horror-thriller movie - the jump scares, the gloomy darkness, the quick scene changes, the redemption arc - but it uses them in an intelligent manner, like it is poking fun at itself and its genre. Yet, HOKUM is not a spoof or a satire. It is a…

I'm a Canadian historian, so I already know much more about the residential school system than most other Canadians, but still, this movie was a heart-breaking, eye-opening experience for me. Indian Horse is one of those movies that every Canadian should see. I could nit-pick it down a star or so by pointing out minor flaws, but I'm not going to do that because this is a movie for the ages. This is a movie with a message that transcends…

Film School Dropouts 2019 - Week 13 - Editor - Daniel Mandell

I was surprised by this film. Frankly, I was expecting it to be a screw-ball comedy, something more akin to Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Boy was I wrong. Sure, it starts off with a pretense that is ideal to launch as a screwball comedy - office romances and extra-marital affairs are ripe for framing as a comedy of double entendres, quick get-aways and quick changes -and it…