The Wackness
A 90210 joke here, a Boyz II Men comment there, some RIP Kurt Cobain street art for good measure, and hey presto: it's 1994! Welcome to director Jonathan Levine's The Wackness.
This earnest, urban melodrama is hardly Spike Lee. When white guy Luke (Josh Peck) falls in love with white girl Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the warm fuzzies aren't exactly dumbed down, but there's no brain-breaking politics either.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
OK all you savages, you lovers of commas, you students of fear. The man who made it acceptable to write about whatever the hell you want as long as you mean what you say, the pioneer of GONZO journalism, the one and only late, great, Hunter S. Thompson is the subject of a new documentary screening at ACMI.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
When Patti Smith moved to NYC in 1967 she said she was going to "kick poetry's ass". Obviously it was not only poetry's butt that had the boot coming. But how Patti got from the pig swamps of Jersey to godmother of punk is a story we all need to hear.
Filmmaker Steven Sebring brings us a document, narrated by Smith, charting eleven years in her life - travels, concerts, spoken word performances, painting, photography, writing and thinking.
CHOKE
Chuck Palahniuk owned the late ‘90s. From the moment Fight Club splattered into popular consciousness, he stood in the cyclone-eye of our every swirling subcultural anxiety.
It seemed inevitable that we'd be bombarded with so many Palahniuk film adaptations that we'd finally have to learn how to spell his name - and yet it's taken this long to see CHOKE hit cinemas, translated into a dirty indie comedy with delusions of grandeur.
Sesame Street: Old School
A mood-disordered green hairy homeless person hanging out with a gay worm, a bird who lives in a vacant lot in Harlem, hallucinating that his best friend is a woolly mammoth, children going home with a strange man named Bob for "milk and cookies". A monster smoking a pipe while hosting a TV show - then eating the pipe.
MIFF - My Winnipeg
Breast milk! Betrayed! Wake up, Winnipegger! Even the titles that flash up during Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg are infectious. It's a kinda-sorta love-hate documentary about his home town, populated by dreamers, lorded over by his all-powerful mother, and made mythical by an avalanche of surreal new facts.
MIFF - Jack's Wife (1973)
From the moment they first shuffled across the grainy screen of Night of the Living Dead, zombies became synonymous with George Romero. Since he injected new monstrosity into a feared favourite, the excitement surrounding his zombie films is so frenzied that it's easy to forget he made anything else.
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