FANTASIA 2014—DIRTY MOVIES: A History of the "Stag" Film

Suffering the dog days of Summer in Boise, Idaho, I regret all the more not being able to attend this year's Fantasia International Film Festival (Fantasia), where I usually escape in late July-early August. Admittedly, Montreal has its own potential to steam me out, but at least at Fantasia I can spend most of my time in air-conditioned movie theaters watching my first and favorite passion: genre films.Still, not being able to attend in person this year has afforded an opportunity to explore an experience of Fantasia contingent upon the generosity of publicists willing to share streaming li

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FANTASIA 2014—Cybernatural (2014)

Earlier this year, I reviewed Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg's Noah (2013), a 17-minute short that screened at the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival in that festival's hybrid documentary sidebar. Essentially depicting the potential for miscommunication rife on such a disembodied medium as the internet, Noah ingeniously crafted itself out of the now-commonplace practice of multitask browsing between online platforms, assembling screenshots of Google search functions, Facebook messaging, SKYPE sessions, Gmail, YouTube, Wikipedia, Chat Roulette, gaming, iTunes, and iPhone texting, narr

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YBCA: BAN7—INVASION OF THE CINEMANIACS!

Bay Area Now (BAN), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' (YBCA) signature triennial, has for six years running brought to life current perspectives for both YBCA and the regional art scene through the work of artists who capture the spirit of "now." In its seventh edition, BAN7 is experimenting with a new curatorial approach that highlights collaborations with the region's artists and arts organizations and pushes beyond presentation—what Dina Iordanova terms "descending programming"—toward a multidisciplinary celebration of the diversity of artistic practices in the Bay Area.BAN7's core idea is

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FANTASIA 2014—OPENING & CLOSING NIGHT FILMS

In its 18th edition, the Fantasia International Film Festival returns to Montreal's freshly renovated Concordia Hall Cinema July 17 through August 5, 2014, offering a whopping three weeks of World, International, North American and Canadian premieres spanning a panoply of genres.French cartoonist Riad Sattouf's Jacky au royaume des filles (Jacky in the Kingdom of Women, 2014) [official site] opens the festivities. Drawing from his Syrian background, Sattouf's Jacky satirically upends the Cinderella story by visiting the Kingdom of Bubunne, where women are in power while men wear veils and do

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