The latest documentary from Oscar nominee and McDonald’s enemy Morgan Spurlock arrives at the Mayfair and makes it’s Ottawa premiere on May 4th (with follow-up screenings on the 5th, 6th, 9th and 10th).  The subject matter of the San Diego Comic Con is perfect research and prep to get you ready for the pop-culture invasion of the Ottawa Comiccon to our city on May 12th and 13th.

If the concept of a documentary produced by Joss Whedon and Stan Lee about the greatest geek gathering on the planet isn’t enough to lure you into the theatre, we will also have prizes every night from our friends at The Comic Book Shoppe and The Ottawa Comiccon.

Partake in Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, documentary fun featuring comic book fans the like of Seth Rogan, Seth Green, Kevin Smith, Paul Dini and more in the celebration of the joys of life that is geek.

The documentary CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP, is an exciting new film which chronicles Coco’s difficult time after leaving The Tonight Show and NBC and putting together his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television live tour before returning to the tube on TBS. It makes it’s Ottawa premiere this July (July 8-10, 13 & 14 to be exact). Roger Ebert has written his review of this revealing doc which shows Conan behind the scenes showing a side of him never seen on screen before. Check it out and then come to see Conan on the big screen, then you can go home and watch him on a smaller screen!

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop
Just because the rug was pulled from under him

Release Date: 2011

Ebert Rating: ***

By Roger Ebert Jun 22, 2011

“Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” has a title of piercing accuracy. After NBC and Jay Leno pulled the rug out from under him, the comic went overnight from hosting “The Tonight Show” to being banned from television for six months. To be sure, NBC paid him $40 million in a send-off package, but the Conan O’Brien we see in the film wasn’t in it for the money. He was in it because he can’t stop.

I appeared many times on his original program, most memorably being attacked by a man in a bear suit. I always liked him. I’ve also been on Carson, Oprah, Letterman, Leno, Regis, Arsenio, Joan Rivers and “A.M.” here and “A.M.” there. You arrive at least an hour early, finish with makeup, leave your dressing room door open and watch what happens in the corridor. Carson, Conan and Leno would drop by to say hello. I don’t remember seeing the others before airtime. Letterman in particular seems to build up steam in private. It has nothing to do with who’s nice and who isn’t. It’s show biz.

Watching this documentary, I realize that when Conan lost “The Tonight Show,” he was like Wile E. Coyote, chasing the Road Runner of his dreams off the edge of a cliff and afraid to look down. Enraged at Leno and NBC, he quickly undertook “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour,” which covered 32 venues, from Radio City Music Hall to the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee, where inside a tent in 100-degree heat, he was expected to introduce every act, and did. You get the notion he would have introduced them anyway.

Here is a man driven to assert himself. He waited five years for “The Tonight Show,” lost it in months and needed to say to the universe, “Sir! I exist!” The film, directed by Rodman Flender, watches him before and after shows and en route between cities, seeing a man incapable of giving himself a break. Overworked, exhausted, assaulted by demands, he cannot say no to an autograph, patiently hosts waves of visitors in his dressing room, drums up work on his days off and at times seems on the edge of madness.

Everyone around him pays a price. He relentlessly nibbles away at his support system, picks on his personal assistant, needles his sidekick Andy Richter and dominates his “writers” so compulsively that I can hardly recall one of them being allowed to say anything at meetings. He seems to consider them more of an audience.

Why these people stay with him is a mystery. My guess is that they know him better than we do and realize he’s undergoing a crisis. He’s driven. After shows, exhausted, he insists on going out to sign autographs and pose for photos with fans. The photos in particular are a version of the Water Torture Test for celebrities. The fan hands a camera to a friend or bystander, who inevitably doesn’t know how to operate it. The celebrity remains in position, his mouth frozen in a rictus, while the fan explains how the camera operates: “You push this button.”

In addition to telling jokes, O’Brien plays guitar and joins a backup band and various guest stars to perform country-rock. He’s surprisingly good, for a talk show host. He fantasizes receiving text messages from Jay Leno (“What’s it like to have a soul?”). I can only imagine how well he sleeps. We see his wife in only one brief early scene, and I suspect she was well-advised not to come along on tour.

This is not to say Conan O’Brien is a bad man. In fact, after the movie, I rather admired him. What we are seeing is a man determined to vindicate himself after a public humiliation. People attend his shows, cheer him, like him. That proves something, doesn’t it?

What we don’t see are the details of what must have been going on all this time in negotiations to find a new television home after the end of the six-month banishment. He and his agents must have been talking with a lot of possibilities, including TBS, where he ended up. Those talks would have added a maddening level of frustration to his exhausting existence.

O’Brien started out as a writer. He must have been driven to become a performer. It is a need in some people. One of the almost unbelievable stories in talk show history is how Johnny Carson was able to retire at the height of his popularity, and mean it, and stick to it. Maybe one of the reasons people liked him so much is that he never seemed to need to perform.

Other people do. I once ob served Henny Youngman taping a TV show in the old NBC studios at the Merchandise Mart. We got into an elevator together. It stopped at the second floor, a private club. A wedding was under way. Youngman got off the elevator, asked to meet the father of the bride and said, “I’m Henny Youngman. I’ll do 10 minutes for $100.”

Several luminaries from the world of rock–Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Grohl, Slash, Joan Jett, even Billy Bob Thorton, share their love for the hard living and long reigning king of metal. Come see a tribute to a man who made his own rules.

See the trailer here.

KILL THE IRISHMAN, a new mobster thriller based on the true story of Irish gangster Danny Greene, a man who the Italian mafia found very hard to kill, starts this Friday. It’s fantastic cast includes Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken, Vincent D’Onofrio,Val Kilmer and Paul Sorvino.

Check out Salon.com’s rave review of the film and don’t miss our engagement of it that runs this Friday and Saturday at 9:20pm and continues April 6 & 7.

Review by Andrew O’Hehir

You might feel like you’ve seen enough mobster movies to last you a lifetime, and you might be right about that. But the secret of writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh’s highly enjoyable “Kill the Irishman” is that it doesn’t try to out-dazzle or out-splatter the Coppola-Scorsese-David Chase tradition. This is a movie with grime from the streets of Cleveland under its nails, which tells the more or less true story of Danny Greene, an Irish-American longshoreman who rose to become a 1970s crime boss in that oft-derided Lake Erie metropolis. (Much as I love Baltimore, it’s gotten enough pop-culture love recently to last a generation. With Drew Carey’s sitcom long off the air, maybe Cleveland is ready for its close-up.)

I don’t know what strange kismet has brought us two ’70s-flavored crime flicks that feel like half-finished Quentin Tarantino projects right on top of each other — this one and “The Lincoln Lawyer” — but I’m certainly not complaining. Hensleigh and cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub even shoot the film in period style, with lots of screwed-up, semi-industrial locations, an awesome soundtrack of vintage soul and rock, and muddy, subtly desaturated colors. (Maybe those are meant to suggest the notorious pollution of Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga River’s surface infamously caught on fire in 1969.) But “Kill the Irishman’s” most surprising asset is the out-of-nowhere performance of Ray Stevenson, a big, shaggy, brawling hunk of man-flesh who plays Danny as an elemental force of nature, sometimes crude and violent, sometimes kittenish and mild.

There’s an irresistible, Cleveland-esque, underdog quality about this whole production, in fact. Stevenson is a 46-year-old British actor of Irish ancestry who’s been kicking around action-movie and TV roles for many years, without ever getting any closer to stardom. Playing Titus Pullo in the BBC/HBO series “Rome” appears to have raised his profile considerably, but this part — as a half-sympathetic, half-repellent crime entrepreneur who essentially brought down Cleveland’s Italian Mafia by himself — is something else again. (He has upcoming roles in “Thor” and the unfortunate 3-D “Three Musketeers” film.) As for director Hensleigh, his two previous films are “The Punisher” and a straight-to-video cannibal film called “Welcome to the Jungle,” and he’s spent most of his career as a mid-level screenwriter and script doctor. I mean, which is worse: That Hensleigh did uncredited rewrites of “The Rock” and “Con Air,” or that he actually took credit for writing “Jumanji”? Nothing about him suggests that he was likely to make something with this degree of sheer crazy cinematic bravado, and damn it all, that’s inspiring.

Hensleigh’s large and delightful cast is loaded with actors eager to prove they’re still kicking, from Val Kilmer as Danny’s cop nemesis to Vincent D’Onofrio as an Italian Mafia turncoat who becomes Danny’s right-hand man and Christopher Walken as a snaky, sinister Jewish restaurateur. All these people, and many more colorful ethnic stereotypes besides, collide in the notorious summer of 1976, when America’s long-running mob wars brought near-total chaos to Cleveland (where there were nearly 40 bombings that year). This is a gangster movie, not a history lesson, but I always approve of teaching the young ‘uns important truths, such as this: The ’70s were completely freakin’ nuts, and you’re basically lucky you weren’t there. Maybe the secret weapon of “Kill the Irishman” is that grizzled veterans like Hensleigh and Stevenson know this for real.

Say you’re planning to come see Planet of the Apes on March 12 (and if you’re not, you should be). Just scroll down to the bottom of the film listing, and you’ll see an additional social media menu that looks like this:

Now, you can add the movie to your calendar, share it on Twitter, invite friends to it by email or share it on Facebook — all with a single click.

And then, come March 12, all your friends show up and thank you profusely for inviting them to one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. And you’re a hero.

I think that sounds pretty good. How about you, Mark?

Cut.

Only one other city in North America is premiering the film that day — and that city is Ottawa.

We’re scooping Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Vancouver, Washington DC — even Austin, TX’s famous Alamo Drafthouse has to wait until Dec. 10.

Call it an early Christmas present.

Get in the spirit early! Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is based on two award-winning shorts by director Jalmari Helander. To watch the shorts on YouTube, just click the links below:

• Rare Exports Inc (2003)
• Rare Exports: Official Safety Instructions (2005)

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale comes to town Dec. 3, 4, 8&9 only at the Mayfair Theatre, Ottawa’s home of stuff you won’t see anywhere else.

CUT.

Why not see for yourself on Oct. 27 & 28 when this Ottawa-made biography of Emily Carr premieres at the Mayfair?

This Friday at 9:45pm, the Mayfair brings to those who dare, a new horror film that tests your limits of taste and terror. The Human Centipede trailer itself seems to be a litmus test for those who aren’t certain they can handle extreme or super-extreme horror. Roger Ebert couldn’t even apply a star rating in his review. Check it out below.

And if you have the stomach strength, come see the movie that could be the sickest horror picture of 2010.

The Human Centipede plays September 17, 18, 20 and 23.

The Human Centipede
Ew! I hate it when that happens!
Release Date: 2010

Ebert Rating: No star rating

By Roger Ebert May 5, 2010

It’s not death itself that’s so bad. It’s what you might have to go through to get there. No horror film I’ve seen inflicts more terrible things on its victims than “The Human Centipede.” You would have to be very brave to choose this ordeal over simply being murdered. Maybe you’d need to also be insane.

I’m about to describe what happens to the film’s victims. This will be a spoiler. I don’t care, because (1) the details are common knowledge in horror film circles, and (2) if you don’t know, you may be grateful to be warned. This is a movie I don’t think I should be coy about.

OK. Dr. Heiter is a mad scientist. He was once a respected surgeon, but has now retreated to his luxurious home in the German forest, which contains an operating room in the basement. His skin has a sickly pallor, his hair is dyed black, his speech reminds us of a standard Nazi, and he gnashes his teeth. He is filled with hatred and vile perversion.

He drugs his victims and dumps them into his Mercedes. When they regain consciousness, they find themselves tied to hospital beds. He provides them with a little slide show to brief them on his plans. He will demonstrate his skills as a surgeon by — hey, listen, now you’d really better stop reading. What’s coming next isn’t so much a review as a public service announcement.

Heiter plans to surgically join his victims by sewing together their mouths and anuses, all in a row, so the food goes in at the front and comes out at the rear. They will move on their hands and knees like an insect. You don’t want to be part of the Human Centipede at all, but you most certainly don’t want to be in the middle. Why does he want to commit this atrocity? He is insane, as I’ve already explained.

He also wants to do it because he is in a movie by Tom Six, a Dutch director whose previous two films average 4 out of 10 on the IMDb.com scale, which is a score so low very few directors attain it. Six has now made a film deliberately intended to inspire incredulity, nausea and hopefully outrage. It’s being booked as a midnight movie, and is it ever. Boozy fanboys will treat it like a thrill ride.

And yet within Six, there stirs the soul of a dark artist. He treats his material with utter seriousness; there’s none of the jokey undertone of a classic Hammer horror film like “Scream … and Scream Again” (1970), in which every time the victim awoke, another limb had been amputated. That one starred the all-star trio of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and you could see they were having fun. Dieter Laser, who plays Dr. Heiter, takes the role with relentless sincerity. This is his 63rd acting role, but, poor guy, is seemingly the one he was born to play.

Tom Six is apparently the director’s real name. I learn his favorite actor is Klaus Kinski, he is an AK-47 enthusiast, and wears RAF sunglasses and Panama hats. Not the kind of guy you want to share your seat on a Ferris wheel. He has said, “I get a rash from too much political correctness.” I promise you that after this movie, his skin was smooth as a Gerber baby’s.

I have long attempted to take a generic approach. In other words, is a film true to its genre and does it deliver what its audiences presumably expect? “The Human Centipede” scores high on this scale. It is depraved and disgusting enough to satisfy the most demanding midnight movie fan. And it’s not simply an exploitation film.

The director makes, for example, effective use of the antiseptic interior of Heiter’s labyrinthine home. Doors and corridors lead nowhere and anywhere. In a scene where the police come calling, Six wisely has Heiter almost encourage their suspicions. And there is a scene toward the end, as the Human Centipede attempts escape, that’s so piteous, it transcends horror and approaches tragedy.

The members of the Centipede are Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie and Akihiro Kitamura. The Japanese actor screams in subtitled Japanese, perhaps because he will broaden the film’s appeal among Asian horror fans. In the film’s last half, the two actresses don’t scream at all, if you follow me.

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.

Stonewall Uprising is a new documentary about the growing gay rights movement in the late 60s that included a major riot outside the Stonewall, a New York City gay bar that was raided by police until one night in the summer of 1969, when its patrons refused to be thrown out and arrested because of their lifestyle.

This revealing film premieres Friday August 27 at 9:30pm, and also plays August 28 and 30.

Here’s Jay Stone’s fabulous review from the Ottawa Citizen:

This is somewhat unbelievable to me, but Killer63′s fifth year is on the horizon.  So again, I’m starting to get the word out to filmmakers who are interested in submitting a short horror film to be screened as part of our mini one-night film festival at the Mayfair.

The screening will go down on October 16th. The date was initially set a bit later in the month, but we’ve got some great things ahead in October that out packing up our calendar tight with exciting Halloween themed treats.

Past years films have ranged from live action to animation, from serious to comedic, documentary, music video,  puppets, slasher, zombies, ghosts, vampires and even stuff more bizarre.

For further information on the event, feel free to contact me here through the Mayfair blog, or check out the Killer63 Facebook page or batturtle.blogspot.com.