At this time of year, won’t you please think of New Zealand’s economy and return to Middle Earth for the first in a trilogy of The Hobbit films, starting with An Unexpected Journey. Flagrantly ripping off Star Wars, Peter Jackson forges a prequel to his previous sword and sorcery Lord of the Rings epics, this […]
Jacob Boon
Posted inArts + Music
Critics’ picks: top DVDs, comedy and films
TOP 12 FILMS OF 2012: Jacob Boon Coast writer since 2011 Jacob Boon will sometimes check his email in the theatre during a bad movie. He is not a very nice person. Ruby Sparks (Fox Searchlight) Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris An introverted novelist’s dream girl magically springs to life from the […]
Posted inLifestyle
Building a working life
It hasn’t always been easy for Cathy Finley. After years of battling mental illness, she wound up in the hospital in 2009. After that, it was a struggle trying to re-establish herself in the working world. “My occupational therapist thought LakeCity would be an excellent place,” Finley says. “I had never known of them.” That […]
Posted inArts + Music
Playing for Keeps
Women continue to enjoy the presence of Gerard Butler, which is just one of dozens of baffling, uninteresting aspects to the pathetically titled Playing for Keeps. Butler stars as that failed sports star in every town that was once bound for glory before reality crashed his life into an endless wasteland of banging housewives. Luckily […]
Posted inArts + Music
Killing Them Softly
Brad Pitt is all business in the luridly entertaining Killing Them Softly. Loosely adapted from the novel Cogan’s Trade, the film finds wise gang enforcer Pitt trying to clean up the ever-widening mess made when two no-name junkies stick up the wrong back room card game. Director Andrew Dominik, who previously collaborated with Pitt on […]
Posted inArts + Music
This Hour Has 20 Years
Twenty years is a long run for any television show. It’d be unheard of for Canadian political satire if it wasn’t for a handful of Newfoundlanders, a cramped Halifax studio and 22 minutes. Six years before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would hit the air, This Hour Has 22 Minutes was ambushing politicians and carving […]
Posted inArts + Music
Rise of the Guardians
It’s sort of a holiday-themed Avengers in the decently charming fantasy adventure film Rise of the Guardians. When evil boogieman Pitch Black threatens the magical beliefs of children, the moon assembles five legendary figures to stand against him. There’s the flibbertigibbet Tooth Fairy, the mute Sandman, an Australian Easter Bunny, a bombastic Russian Santa Claus […]
Posted inArts + Music
Red Dawn
The horrors of combat are all too real when brave North Korean heroes fend off savage insurgents in what is I assume a documentary entitled Red Dawn. Initially expecting to be greeted as liberators upon occupying American soil and freeing its people from their failed capitalist exploitation, the North Korean army (altered in post from […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Get over yourself. The franchise that defined vampires for a generation (deal with it) and gave insufferable blowhards something to complain about comes to a close; bowing out with this astonishingly shallow entry that manages to squeeze a satisfactory amount of bonkers from its wispy plot. To stop the dark lord Michael Sheen, who seeks […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Sessions
Sex is tricky enough when you spend your days in an iron lung, but love is a whole other battlefield. Based on the magazine article by poet and polio survivor Mark O’Brien, The Sessions is a simple and disarmingly funny tale of a paralyzed man attempting to lose his virginity through the services of a […]
Posted inArts + Music
Skyfall
James Bond is back doing what he does best—gloomy introspection with nihilistic indifference. This time, the British icon is vexed by loopy psychopath Javier Bardem who stages a staggeringly complicated revenge scheme against ex-boss M (Judi Dench). That all those machinations culminate in shoot-at-stuff-a-lot is one of the reasons Skyfall is so unwittingly entertaining. Not […]
Posted inArts + Music
Cloud Atlas
Everything is connected, or maybe not, but it all looks pretty and Tom Hanks is there in the massive Cloud Atlas. Adapted from the novel by David Mitchell, writers and directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer aren’t shy on ambition in realizing their $102 million movie. A rotating repertoire of players, including famous […]