CINEMANIA:

Corner Gas (David Storey, 2004, Canada) AKA There’s Not a Lot Going On

Way back in January of 2004, 1.2m Canadians tuned in for Corner Gas’s series premier, which is apparently pretty much unprecedented for the first episode of a Canadian-based TV show, and just goes to show that you can’t take too seriously the prevailing wisdom that what’s popular cannot possibly be any good. So listen up: Corner Gas is not only good, it’s bloody well great.

In Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare he said that William was "the poet of nature" because "his drama is the mirror of life." So too, I think, is the comedy of Brent Butt, the brain trust behind CTV’s emergent comedy hit Corner Gas. Not to over-praise Butt, but there is something quite extraordinary about his accomplishment with this series.

The nice people at Kino recently released a six-pack of one of my favourite filmmakers, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and so in this section of me blog I will be discussing four of the man's early and mid-career efforts: The Scar (1976), The Camera Buff (1979),No End (1985), and Blind Chance (1987).

100 Films That Made Me Sit Up and Take Notice

Recently, we at Cinemarati, given the mission to make a list of 100 film using as our guide the instruction to choose the films that are most important to each of us, with whatever that might mean to each member being left intentionally undefined, decided to update our film canons, which has given yours truly an opportunity to revisit my first canon submissions by checking out great films, some for the first time, others for the umpteenth, to see ho