About

Row Three is a collaborative film website that aims to foster discussion and community for those who like their cinema a bit Hollywood, a bit indie and a bit foreign. Formed and run by a collective of writers who try to stray from summer blockbusters and the so-called “popcorn” flicks in favor of a bit more upscale fare. We are not always successful in this endeavor; nonetheless we all love to talk movies and we hope to build a place for everyone to join in on the conversation. Everything you ever wanted to know about the contributors from the third row is listed below.

Our Contributors

John Allison

• Location: Saskatoon, Canada
• Age: 36
• Quick Info: I still remember my first movie going experience. I was only 6 years old and I went with my family to the drive-in. Playing that night was Star Wars. Ever since then I’ve been a fan of movies. My tastes have certainly expanded since then but I’m sure that night is the reason I am a movie fan. I currently work for the Canadian Federal Government but if I could find a way to make movie watching and writing a full time job I would do it in an instant.
• Top 20 movies: These are in no particular order. Infernal Affairs, Old Boy, Miller’s Crossing, Little Children, Unforgiven, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Once Upon a Time in the West, Usual Suspects, Alien, L.A. Confidential, The Great Escape, Reservoir Dogs, The Seven Samurai, The Sting, Life of Brian, Die Hard, The Princess Bride, Drunken Master 2, Léon, Indiana Jones Trilogy, Original Star Wars Trilogy and pretty much every James Bond movie. Yup, I know that is more that 20.
• Favorite Scene: I have a couple and they are both from Miller’s Crossing. First is the Danny Boy scene where Albert Finny uses the Tommy Gun and the second is the scene at Miller’s crossing between Turturro and Byrne.
• Favorite Directors: Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Joel & Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg, Johnnie To, Chan-wook Park
• Favorite Actors: Min-sik Choi, Gabriel Byrne, Daniel Craig, Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Jeff Bridges, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman and Johnny Depp
• Favorite Actresses: Kate Winslet, Frances McDormand, Judi Dench, Juliette Binoche
• Most hated movie: Battlefield Earth (I loved the book)
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: Borat
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Flash Gordon
• Favorite TV Shows: Deadwood, Dexter, Carnivale, Sopranos, M.A.S.H., Babylon 5, Fawlty Towers, League of Gentlemen
• Favorite Books: Anything by David Gemmel, The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide, Lord of the Rings, and most Fantasy. I don’t have time for books though any more.
• Favorite Musical acts/bands: Sting, The Police, The Chieftains, Young Dubliners, Zucchero, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Band, Big Rude Jake, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis
• Drink of Choice: I’d say Rye and Seven but I’d much rather just drink Coke.
• The one thing not mentioned above: Here is my favourite Babylon 5 quote -

  “You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

  Marcus Cole, Ranger to Franklin, A Late Delivery from Avalon

Marina Antunes

• Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Age: Old enough to know not to tell you
• Quick Info: I love movies. The passion started in my early teens but didn’t take on gargantuan proportions until a few years ago. When I’m not watching movies I’m either working, organizing an event for one of my groups (Meetup rocks!) or heading to class. When I have a spare moment, I like to curl up with a good book.
• Top 20 movies: Too many to list but here are a few I like to revisit - Interview with a Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Blue Velvet, The Matrix, Cube, Taxi Driver, Casino, The Sound of Music, The Little Mermaid, Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, Clueless, A Clockwork Orange, Léon, The Professional, Gattaca, Seven, Kalifornia
• Favorite Scene: The closing scene of Interview with a Vampire with Tom Cruise saying, “I’m going to give you the choice, I never had” with the Stones playing in the background. Brilliant.
• Favorite Directors: Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Neil Jordan, Amy Heckerling, Manoel de Oliveira, Luc Besson, Guillermo del Toro, Vincenzo Natali, Bruce McDonald, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, Joe Wright, Kenneth Branagh
• Favorite Actors: Edward Norton, Ethan Hawke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ryan Gosling, Viggo Mortensen, Christian Bale, Giovanni Ribisi, James McAvoy, Heath Ledger, Peter Sarsgaard
• Favorite Actresses: Cate Blanchett, Sarah Polley, Toni Collette, Abbie Cornish, Julie Delpy, Ellen Page, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kate Winslet
• Most hated movie: Twentynine Palms
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: Citizen Kane - it’s not that I hate it but I don’t love it as much as everyone else appears to.
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Anything with Keanu Reeves (particularly Devil’s Advocate, Constantine and Johnny Mnemonic), The Fountain
• Favorite TV Shows: Big Love, Six Feet Under, Firefly, The Sopranos, Oz, My So-Called Life, Arrested Development, Dead Like Me, Family Guy, Robot Chicken
• Favorite Books: Again, too many to list but a few I love – “Belinda” (Anne Rampling), “Queen of the Damned” (Anne Rice), “Fall On Your Knees” (Ann-Marie Macdonald), “She’s Come Undone” (Wally Lamb), “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Margaret Atwood), “The Fire-Dwellers” (Margaret Laurence), The Sevenwaters Trilogy (Juliet Marillier)
• Favorite Musical acts/bands: Pink Floyd, NIN, Guns N’ Roses, Josh Groban, Chevelle, Linkin Park, Enya, Annie Lennox, Garbage, Sarah McLachlan, Sting, Plastilina Mosh, Mariza, David Bowie
• Drink of Choice: Vodka tonics, brown cows and anything with rum.
• The one thing not mentioned above: Sleep is over-rated.

Dave Becker

• Location: Perkiomenville, Pennsylvania, USA
• Age: 38
• Quick Info:My love of movies began one June day in 1982, when, for my brother’s birthday, a group of us decided to go to the movies. We wanted to see Dragonslayer, but my father ended up driving us to the wrong theater, and we saw Raiders of the Lost Ark instead. Life has never been the same for me since.
• Top 20 movies: The Godfather, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Schindler’s List, Aguirre Wrath of God, Pulp Fiction, Fargo, The Royal Tenenbaums, Chungking Express, Spirited Away, Once Upon a Time in the West, Nashville, Advise and Consent, Do The Right Thing, Lawrence of Arabia, Citizen Kane, The Manchurian Candidate (the original one), JFK, The Godfather Part 2, Goodfellas, Fanny and Alexander
• Favorite Scene: My favorite scene is from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, when a mortally wounded Slim Pickens locks eyes with his wife, Katy Jurado. Neither of them utters a word, but both realize that their life together is over. Very poignant stuff.
• Favorite Directors:Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Samuel Fuller, Francois Truffaut, Otto Preminger and Anthony Mann
• Favorite Actors:Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, Peter O’Toole, Vincent Price, Denzel Washington and Frank Sinatra
• Favorite Actresses:Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Deborah Kerr, Samantha Morton and Julianne Moore
• Most hated movie: Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: The Caine Mutiny
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Domino
• Favorite TV Shows: The Simpsons, Family Guy, Blackadder, Taxi, Seinfeld, All in the Family, Star Trek (in all varieties), Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses…and I concur with Kurt on I Claudius. I make it a point to watch that mini-series at least once a year.
• Favorite Books: Most of what I read is movie-related. Favorites include “If They Move…Kill ‘em: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah” by David Weddle; “Revolution: The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties” by Peter Cowie; “Truffaut: A Biography” by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana; “Garbo” by Barry Paris
• Favorite Musical acts/bands:Pink Floyd, The Who, Enya, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, The Rolling Stones, Alanis Morrisette, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan
• Drink of Choice: Rum and Coke
• The one thing not mentioned above: Last year at a yard sale, I purchased an old LP soundtrack for the Hope/Crosby comedy, The Road to Hong Kong, for one dollar. When I got it home, I discovered it had Bing Crosby’s autograph on the back of it!

Jonathan Burdick

• Location: Pennsylvania, USA
• Age: 22
• Quick Info: I spent the majority of my childhood watching the Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies daily, to the point of wearing the VHS tapes out. As the years went on, I discovered that there were actually more films out there than those, so I watched more and more and more movies. Before long, I realized that they were something I was really passionate about and enjoyed dissecting, discussing, and debating. Other than that, I’m just a college student planning to teach high school history someday - that is if Hollywood doesn’t discover me first.
• Top 20 movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Godfather, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Chinatown, Unforgiven, On the Waterfront, The Hustler, The Big Lebowski, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ed Wood, Once Upon a Time in America, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Goodfellas, Casablanca
• Favorite Scene: Indy’s gun and the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Favorite Directors: Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Joel & Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, John Huston
• Favorite Actors: Harrison Ford, Paul Newman, James Stewart, Edward Norton, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Guy Pearce, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Toshiro Mifune, Bob Hoskins, Val Kilmer, Eric Bana, John Hurt, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Campbell, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Couldn’t leave any of them out. Seriously.
• Favorite Actresses: Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Connelly
• Most hated movie: Batman & Robin
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: Kill Bill
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Kung Pow: Enter the Fist!
• Favorite TV Shows: M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, The Office, Deadwood, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Favorite Books: Everything Cormac McCarthy, East of Eden, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Great Gatsby, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The Dark Tower, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor
• Favorite Musical acts/bands: Tom Petty, Foo Fighters, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Chris Cornell, Eric Clapton, Band of Horses, Spoon, Bruce Springsteen, CCR, Sublime, Queen, Pink Floyd, Cake, Muse, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Wilco, Jonny Lang
• Drink of Choice: Chocolate Milkshake
• The one thing not mentioned above:I own over one-hundred unique bottles of hot sauce.

Kurt Halfyard

• Location:Toronto, Canada
• Age: Approaching mid ’30s
• Quick Info: Fortunately blessed with parents who had no issue with their impressionable six-year old sitting through a VHS copy of Jaws, or equally baffling, one year later it was off to the late show of The Wrath of Kahn. Perhaps the capper of inappropriate viewing was a family outing to Out of Africa. I mean, the third one was more scarring than Quint’s chewed off lower body or mind altering ear-slugs (or for that matter, a bare chested Ricardo Montalban). Emotional damage aside, the video age corresponded with coming-of-age - for better or worse, everything I learned about life was rented on VHS or Beta for $1.99.
• Top 5 (or 20) movies: L’Avventura, Aguirre Wrath of God, Blue Velvet, The Maltese Falcon, The Sweet Hereafter, Videodrome, Dr. Strangelove, Alien, Once Upon A Time in the West, The Conversation, Seconds, The Double Life of Veronique, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Do The Right Thing, Big Trouble in Little China.
• Favorite Scene: The “Me And My Shadow” musical number for Napoleon in Time Bandits.
• Favorite Directors: David Cronenberg, Shinya Tsukamoto, Guy Maddin, Wong Kar Wai, Sergio Leone, Peter Weir and of course, The Coen Brothers — but this doesn’t really scratch the surface, I could go on for hours.
• Favorite Actors: I tend to dig on Character actors: Timothy Spall, John Turtorro, J.T. Walsh, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peter Lorre and Michael Gambon
• Favorite Actresses: Katrin Cartlidge, Patricia Clarkson, Jennifer Connelly, Marion Cotillard, Cate Blanchette, Chloë Sevigny, Julianne Moore and Frances McDormand.
• Most hated movie: A toss up between Armageddon and Top Gun (Go figure, I do like The Island and Domino).
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: Batman Begins
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Ultraviolet, Hulk
• Favorite TV Shows: The Wire, Deadwood, I Claudius, Spaced, The Singing Detective, SCTV
• Favorite Books: The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds.
• Favorite Musical act/band(s): As my wife says, wailing chicks - Portishead, Neko Case, Julee Cruise
• Drink of Choice: If it’s free, it’s damn fine!
• The one thing not mentioned above: “I kick arse for the Lord!”

Andrew James

• Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
• Age: 32
• Quick Info: Sacrificing a social life for spending all his free time reading, writing and researching about film allows for an ever expanding knowledge of film; though the quest is far from over. With cable (HBO and Showtime) and a VCR by age 7, movies just became a staple and a way of life. In 2001 was the birth of MoviePatron.com which Andrew founded and continues to write movie reviews for. No college degree in journalism or film criticism, Andrew just tells it like it is; in an “around the water cooler” sort of way. Oh yeah… and he LOVES pasta - all kinds.
• Top 5 (or 20) movies: Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Saving Private Ryan, Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Sideways, Raiders, Contact, Leaving Las Vegas, Little Children, Fargo, Big Trouble in Little China
• Favorite Scene: The bus ride in Almost Famous singing Tiny Dancer
• Favorite Directors: Kubrick, Soderbergh, Coens, PT Anderson, Jean Pierre-Jeunet
• Favorite Actors: Paul Giamatti, Tim Roth, Ryan Gosling, Robert Downey Jr., Edward Norton, Gael Garcia Bernal
• Favorite Actresses: Jodi Foster, Naomi Watts, Gong Li, Hilary Swank, Cate Blanchett, Ellen Page, Amy Adams
• Most hated movie: House of the Dead
• The 1 movie everybody loves, but I don’t really care for: The Godfather, Taxi Driver
• The 1 movie everyone hates, but I love (i.e. guilty pleasure): Starship Troopers, The Core
• Facorite TV Shows: Lost, Lost and Lost. I also like Lost
• Favorite Book: The Zombie Survival Guide
• Favorite Musical act/bands: The Autumns, Band of Horses, Pink Floyd
• Drink of Choice: Grey Goose gimlet
• The one thing not mentioned above: I know the correct answer to the question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does it make any noise?”.