Some artists make their entire careers out of some combination of talents and opportunities, but Al Tuck spent more than a decade in Halifax’s music scene before adding another skill to his resume. “Well, I have a daughter now, so I’ve read a lot of stories with dialogue to her,” Tuck says of his prior […]
Hillary Titley
Posted inArts + Music
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Michael Pollan (Penguin)
Depending on from where you are approaching Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, the author has either finely distilled his exhaustive research on the industrial food chain and North America’s often counter-intuitive eating habits into approachable, easily digestible rules to govern food choices—or he has severely dumbed down his message. If you’ve read Pollan’s previous works, The […]
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Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus a visual treat
Dr. Parnassus has one of the most herky-jerky plots of recent memory. I’ll give you the skeleton—an anachronistic travelling stage-show (led by Christopher Plummer’s Parnassus) is joined by a mysterious outsider (Heath Ledger)—and then give you some of the elements that form the meat of the film: dreamworlds (a visual trip befitting director Terry Gilliam), […]
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It’s Complicated falls flat
It’s pretty complicated stuff for a long-divorced couple to throw themselves into a heated fling to discover whether the relationship was terminated too soon. Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin (as the divorcees) and Steve Martin (the third point in the triangle) bring an undeniable maturity to the sex-romp storyline. However, it’s remarkable how much director Nancy […]
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Did you hear about the Morgans?
Estranged couple Meryl and Paul Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) witness a murder and are forced to flee their chic New York lives into the protection of Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, the sheriffs of slow-pokey Ray, Wyoming. Diabolically inert and tonally clunky, but obviously going for a ra-ta-tat romantic comedy throwback, what […]
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Blunt and Friend play cute royal introverts in Young Victoria
If you are like me, you know most of your history of British monarchs from the films based on their lives. The Young Victoria is set just prior to Mrs. Brown, and just after The Madness of King George and copies both films’ playful marvel at their subjects exalted lives. The wide swath of Victoria’s […]
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Avatar falls flat without third dimension
James Cameron’s Avatar finally drops amid excitement about his epic visuals and budget and disappointment in the paper-thin plot for which they serve. Sam Worthington, via a 9-foot-tall blue Avatar, infiltrates the Na’vi tribe in order to coerce them off of the land above a rich energy mineral deposit and eventually goes native when human […]
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Invictus stirs the soul
The mere premise of Invictus stirs the soul: Confronted with a still hostile and divided population, South African president Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) encouraged and gently manipulated the underdog national rugby team (lead by Matt Damon as captain) from a predominantly white-South African passion to a unifying national cause. Director Clint Eastwood studiously avoids cues […]
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Me and Orson Welles is forced with rare moments of charm
Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) happens upon The Mercury Theatre’s ragtag beginnings and worms his way into its legendary production of Julius Caesar, directed by the egomaniacal Orson Welles (Christian McKay). Directed by Richard Linklater, Me and Orson Welles has a script (by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo Jr., from a novel by Robert Kaplow) […]
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Armoured doesn’t hold up
Columbus Short plays an armoured truck guard with a pant-load of topical, sympathy-baiting circumstances: He’s an Iraq war vet with a house in foreclosure, a mountain of medical bills stemming from his parents’ fatal illnesses and a commitment to take care of his wayward kid brother. So, obviously, you see how a guy like that […]
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Everybody’s Fine in this family flick
The tough-guy schtick doesn’t last forever, so actors like Robert De Niro stay credible by re-concocting their personas in unlikely settings. Not everything he has tried has been an outright success, but De Niro’s soft-edge experiments like this movie—where he plays a recent widower chasing down his grown children (including Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore) […]
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Going the extra mile: DVD picks of 2009
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Two-Disc Special Edition (Paramount) Button remains scattershot on second viewing, hampered by David Fincher’s inability to believe in sentiment as much as technical wizardry. But the disc’s three-hour making-of documentary sets a new quality standard for behind-the-scenes extras. DVD —MP Dollhouse: Season One (20th Century Fox) The never-aired, first-season […]
