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Film Review: Bond is Back
2006-11-16 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Film - Four decades and twenty-one films in, the Bond series really only had two options: continue along the path of ever-more-desperate celebrity cameos, CGI effects and over the top villainy, or, you know, make something interesting. Wisely, the franchise opted for the latter.

With Casino Royale, screenwriter Paul Haggis kept what was working (Judi Dench's wonderfully world-weary M) and ditched what wasn't (pretty much everything else) to create something between a re-launch and a prequel, a tale of James Bond before that name meant anything. Daniel Craig's 007 is a charming thug, a hitman who is only gradually learning that steamrolling his way through foreign embassies may not be the best way to earn a reputation.
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Film-Fest Review: Requiem
2006-09-28 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Movie - German filmmaker Hans- Christian Schmid's Requiem plays like The Exorcist without the demons and projectile vomit. Though inspired by the same events that prompted last year's Exorcism of Emily Rose, Schmid shuns the Hollywood horror approach, aiming for realism instead, leaving the audience to determine just how much of the devil is in the details.

Schmid's direction is aloof, allowing events to unfold in an almost documentary fashion. The detachment gives Sandra Hüller space for a fantastic performance as Michaela Klinger, a recovering epileptic who worries that her seizures are caused by something more malevolent than chemical imbalances. There is definitely something sinister going on, but it could just as easily be Michaela's reluctance to consider that it's all in her head.
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Film-Fest Review: Wasabi Tuna
2006-09-28 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Movie -

Billed as a campy comedy for all audiences (the press material is oddly eager to point out you don't have to be gay to like it), Wasabi Tuna is more like a train wreck. One where the train has careened off a cliff and onto an active minefield. And is leaking poison gas. And is somehow breeding nihilist werewolves. It's that bad.
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2005: Read these words
2005-12-08 - Garth Paulson and , Peter Hemminger

Book - We3

With the help of Hollywood, comic books have been poised to cross over into the mainstream and be recognized as legitimate art for a while now. Unfortunately the process has been a slow one, for every in-depth article by respectable magazines there are still hundreds of people who see comics as little more than anatomically incorrect people punching each other into outer space. While this stereotype is still partially accurate, there are also comics like writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely's We3, which deserve to be approached in the same way you would a novel.
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2005: The bottom of the heap
2005-12-08 - Garth Paulson and , Peter Hemminger

Broken Social Scene--Broken Social Scene

Everyone knows when a band releases an album as critically praised as Broken Social Scene's 2003 masterpiece, You Forgot it in People, the expectations for the follow up are going to be massive and there will be a backlash. Both of these happened to the Toronto collective when they rose to indie stardom after YFIIP was universally slobbered over. It isn't fair to criticize a band for failing to live up to someone else's expectations but hype and the past aside, Broken Social Scene's eponymous just isn't very good.
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Spun: The Blue Raincoats
S/T
2005-11-24 - Peter Hemminger

Spun - Blue Raincoats mastermind Keri Steele seems to be using the project as her audition for the Canadian spotlight. The self-titled debut is an album straining to overcome its singer-songwriter origins, adding punch to its arrangements with electric guitar stabs and floating horn counter-points but in the end it falls shy of greatness.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's holding the album back. The melodies are consistently strong, the arrangements are varied, and Steele's voice has a hushed strength able to compliment this type of music perfectly. Only one song, the Norah Jones-lite "Apple of my Eye," could reasonably be considered a dud. One listen to "Childhood" makes it clear what's lacking elsewhere--Steele sings prettily but not intimately. It's not that she's deliberately detached but she somehow avoids the nuances of a truly great performance.
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Music Interview: A uniquely fucked up man
2005-10-27 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Music - Some artists feel the need to hide behind layers of artifice, carefully crafted personas and vague lyrical metaphors. When Luke Doucet croons "it takes a uniquely fucked up man to break his own heart" on the song "One Too Many," off his second solo offering Broken (and Other Rogue States) he clearly isn't hiding. Where in the past Doucet has traded in the sundry narratives of a revolving cast of outlaws, deviants and scoundrels, Broken is an album which smacks of personal heartbreak. The result is Doucet's most cohesive release to date, a fine mix of bitter sentiment, casual virtuosity and a directness surprising even the artist himself.

"My personal life hijacked my artistic life in some ways," says the singer and guitarist of the breakup sparking the album's genesis. "I got so all consumed by it, it's pretty hard not to write about something like that. It's such a classic theme, you find yourself thinking and writing things that have been thought and written before, and you realize where the impetus for all those break-up records comes from--it's a real life experience. So I found myself doing this thing that's been done so many times before, and wondering, can I put a new spin on it? That was the challenge."
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Film Review: Urban clown dancing gets a Rize
2005-10-20 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Film - Rize, the new documentary by Vanity Fair photographer David LaChapelle, has all the elements you would expect from a depiction of life in South Central Los Angeles. The opening features footage from race riots in both the '60s and the '90s. The film's vivid colours begin to show hyper-kinetic dancing backed by an overbearing hip-hop soundtrack. Then, just a few min- utes into the proceedings, things take a turn for the surreal.

Enter Tommy the Clown, complete with a rainbow wig, white face paint and baggy clothes. Costuming aside, what Tommy is doing is pretty far removed from traditional clowning. The true focus of the film and the main subject of LaChapelle's lens is dancing. Specifically, he focuses on the rivalry between two schools of dancing. There's the "clowning" style combining booty-quivering and hip-popping with pratfalls and general silliness, and "krumping," an offshoot resembling a mix between tribal dancing, street-fighting and the video for Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty," also directed by LaChapelle. Krumpers find clowning too restrictive and self-censored, while clowns think the krumpers look ridiculous, which is saying something when your group is identified by face- paint and colorful garb. It all comes to a head in a dance-off, where audience applause decides the school with the better moves.
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And... Counterpoint!
A rebuttle to the October 6th opinion,"Pimp my Decade."
2005-10-13 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Opinions

As Joel Klettke stated in his article last week, we are living in the "era of the mundane, of the mediocre." Never before have things been quite this bad, and woe is us to have been born into this sad state of affairs. All we can do is hope and pray the next generation has things better than us because the way things are, it really couldn't get much worse. Everything from pop-culture to politics to intellectualism has reached a level of stagnation that makes it unlikely this decade will be remembered as anything other than an absolute waste.

Truly it's a shame our generation hasn't found a "defining movement," as the article laments, "just a bunch of sub-groups, misfits and elitists." After all, the '60s had the hippies, a group of teenagers who thought that psychedelic drugs, sex and plenty of music would lead to massive political change. The '70s was doubly lucky, as it got both the coked up disco hounds and the heroin-addled punks. The '80s already did the whole greed thing, and the '90s took the last of the heroin and mixed it with apathy and flannel. Where does that leave those of us who aren't content to be part of a sub-group? Being an emo kid is ok, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could dress, act and think exactly like an even larger group of people? Curse you, passage of time, for depriving us of that opportunity.
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Film Review: Serenity now! Serenity now!
2005-10-06 - Peter Hemminger, Gauntlet Entertainment

Film - Fox TV's treatment of Firefly never made much sense to the few fans it found during its run. The series, created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel mastermind Joss Whedon, was the type of show a network would have to go out of their way to screw up. Sadly, Fox did. Episodes were regularly pre-empted for sports, shown at odd hours, were under promoted, and when they did make it to the airwaves, they were shown out of order. No wonder it took a DVD release for the show to catch on.

Now, like Police Squad and Star Trek before it, the show has been resurrected from its premature death and given a second chance on the big screen. Thankfully, it doesn't waste any opportunities. Serenity is everything multiplex sci-fi should be--fast-paced, action-packed and funny without neglecting its plot or its characters. Writer-director Whedon doesn't bog the film down with pseudo-technical jargon or biblical self-importance like Star Trek and Star Wars respectively. Instead he infuses it with enough thrills and charm to satisfy audiences who wouldn't be caught dead watching those other two series.
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