As Kelly Kapoor on The Office, Mindy Kaling is a perpetual teenager obsessed with shopping, boys and reality TV. The real Kaling is a supremely self-aware version of Kelly, one who knows what’s frivolous—she would never put up with Ryan’s bullshit— but is unabashed in her love for it. She’s cultivated a voice and it is […]
Tara Thorne
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Tara Thorne’s Top 11 Albums of 2011
Bon Iver, Bon Iver (Jagjagwuar) Its cryptic lyrics make its densely layered vocals and thundering drums even more beautiful somehow, as if Justin Vernon is daring you to come back over and over, try to figure him out. Bright Eyes, The People’s Key (Saddle Creek) Conor Oberst is thinking out these days: “You and me, […]
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Best music of 2011
Alison Lang Coast writer since 2007 Bad Vibrations, Black Train (Brotherhood) Bad Vibrations has what businesspeople would call a “consistency of vision.” With Black Train, these straight shooters will take you on a ride that is continually ghostly, tenebrous and spaced-out—brain food for headbangers. Bike Rodeo, Oh Bla Duh (Independent) Some bands out there raise […]
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Top 11 of 2011
Settle in and read our critics’ picks of the year. Learn about yourself and our writers in the process. Possibly a two coffee read and at least one of those coffees should have whiskey in it. MUSIC BOOKS DVDS VIDEO GAMES THE LOT OF IT
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The Horrible Crowes
Brian Fallon is one of our best lyricists, but his voice has only recently caught up. Years of straining and growling working-class rock anthems with The Gaslight Anthem has sanded the edges off the bottom end, and in The Horrible Crowes, you can nearly call it lovely. Though TGA comprises half of this band—co-fronted by […]
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Clooney works hard for The Descendants
Too many filmmakers stick George Clooney in underwritten parts and hope his charisma will fill the holes (Jason Reitman, Steven Soderbergh and the Coens: you should know better). But Alexander Payne returns seven years after Sideways with a piece that makes Clooney work for once. In The Descendants he’s Matt King, whose wife is in […]
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The Halifax Theatre for Young People’s dynamic duo
The Halifax Theatre for Young People—you know what kids are cool with? Rebranding!—presents a pair of two-handers best seen together. Glen J. Matthews and Doug MacAulay ably and sensitively anchor In the Fall as James and David, brothers barely in their teens in Cape Breton in the ’50s, while Kristen Slaney and Helena Pipe are […]
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Rich Aucoin’s spectacular spectacular
It’s 10 minutes to showtime and Rich Aucoin is in his street clothes in front of hundreds strong at St. Matthew’s Church. It’s already hot in here. The stage holds four drum kits, a grand piano, eight chairs for the string section, microphone stands, music stands, guitars and horns leaning everywhere—it’s not ready, and neither […]
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Moneyball hits for the cycle
Moneyball is an inside-baseball movie about the inside of baseball—there is precious little sports footage; it’s about team-building from statistical and budgetary perspectives, which is a hard sell. Luckily it’s got a terrific Brad Pitt at the centre. Pitt is Billy Beane, the spirited general manager of the worst team in baseball in 2001, the […]
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Film Fest Reviews
FEATURE FILMS Higher Ground – Friday, September 16, Park Lane 7, 7:05pm Naturalism and a radiant intelligence have been the distinguishing features of Vera Farmiga’s acting performances, and it’s a quality she brings to her directorial debut. Farmiga takes command in front of and behind the camera, playing a religious convert whose creeping doubt in […]
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And now for something more refined
Sometimes you get thrown off-schedule by long lines, late starts, transit problems, whatever, and you go for a wild card, or at least a name you recognize. I saw that Page Eight was directed by David Hare—who I temporarily forgot wrote The Reader, my most hated film since Signs, and The Vertical Hour, an overwrought, […]
