A ghost is, in most tellings, the spirit of a person with unfinished business on earth. Sometimes that business is vengeance; sometimes it’s simply an inability to let go. In Double Walker, it’s both.
Continue reading “Review: ‘Double Walker’ balances on a tight rope between genres, and (mostly) succeeds”
Hey team. One of my favourite things to come out of last months Montreal Fantasia Festival was the interview I conducted with filmmaker Quinn Armstrong about this film, Survival Skills. The interview is written, but it was conducted over Zoom.
As a bonus for the patrons, the video of my interview with Quinn Armstrong is now available as a patron-exclusive on Patreon.
Part of the plan moving forward is for more exclusives like this and a few other ideas that I have.
I really enjoy film blogging, but it also isn’t free. There are costs –both money and time– associated with doing it. That’s just the world we live in, so I am trying to make a bit more of a go of this.
The one question I get asked the most is, “when are you going to relaunch the podcast?” and that’s a fair question. The current answer is “when I have 25 patrons, ” so if you liked the podcast, please consider supporting it.
Thanks,
Matthew
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Survival Skills is a film I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first watched it. A biting satire of police training, it frames a cold hard look at the way police are trained to interact with the people they’re sworn to protect.
I watched and reviewed the film yesterday and today had the opportunity to sit down with writer and director Quinn Armstrong via Zoom to talk about police training videos, the timeliness of this satire, and what he hopes to expose with his film.
Continue reading “Fantasia Interview: Quinn Armstrong on his film ‘Survival Skills’”
There are many ways a film might examine some aspects of our society. Whether drama, comedy, horror, or science fiction, each genre provides a different lens to examine what and who we are. Satire is the most powerful of these lenses if used correctly. By taking some subject and twisting it to an extreme position, we can expose some of the absurdity of our world.
Survival Skills is one of those movies. Taking the form of a lost 1980s police training tape, it follows Jim (Vayu O’Donnell), a childlike rookie police officer going through his first day. Things take a turn, though, when the narrator (Stacy Keach) walks him through a domestic violence call, and he begins to disagree with the proper procedure.
Continue reading “Fantasia Review: ‘Survival Skills’ is way more than just a weird VHS nostalgia trip”
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