As the lights go down on Big Love‘s modern polygamist compound, Tara Thorne remembers why the series was such a big deal. When we meet Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), he’s a hardware-store owner in Sandy, Utah. His wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), is a substitute teacher. They have two teenagers, a boy and a girl, doing […]
Tara Thorne
Posted inArts + Music
Women Making Waves
Last weekend’s Women Making Waves conference, a coming-out of sorts for the Atlantic branch of the 37-chapter Women in Film and Television organization, began early Saturday at Mount Saint Vincent University with about 75 writers, directors, actors, crew and interested parties attending a series of panels and workshops. The day began with the headliner Patricia […]
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The view from here
“Last year we had a German film about black magic. This boy told his father he wanted to see the German Harry Potter movie,” says Jason Beaudry. “He’s a kid from Cole Harbour who likes BMX biking, but now he also wants to learn German and be a director.” It’s been a decade since the […]
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The Rural Alberta Advantage
Nothing has changed for this Toronto-via-Alberta trio: Nils Edenloff still strums and sings his heart out. Amy Cole deploys ethereal keyboard textures. And Paul Banwatt drives the show with his dynamic, spirited drumming. It was a winning formula on the debut Hometowns and continues merrily along with Departing, about the transient relationships and notable moments […]
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Waiting for “Superman”
Guggenheim’s heartbreaking film, a Best Documentary contender that did not even get nominated—he won for An Inconvenient Truth—opens with an admission of white liberal guilt. The Los Angeles resident, married to actor Elisabeth Shue, drives past three public schools before depositing his children in a private one. But whatever his social standing, Guggenheim comes by […]
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Lambs still screams
The Silence of the Lambs was released on Valentine’s Day, 1991. Directed by Jonathan Demme and adapted by Ted Tally from the novel by Thomas Harris, it stars Jodie Foster as FBI cadet Clarice Starling, assigned to profile notorious criminal Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as a rote exercise, but really to enlist his […]
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Bright Eyes
After two outings under his own name and an indie-supergroup side project (Monsters of Folk), Conor Oberst ducks back under the umbrella he’s best known for—Bright Eyes. Though most of the ramshackle alt-country has been obliterated, Oberst’s piercing lyrics and strained vocals remain, entrenched in big-picture songs about spirituality and philosophy, themes explored last on […]
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The Chicago Code
The central cast in this new show from Shawn Ryan (The Shield) comes with great TV credentials: Chicago’s first female police superintendent is Jennifer Beals of The L Word; one of its best cops is Jason Clarke from the woefully underrated Brotherhood and his young partner is Matt Lauria, late of Friday Night Lights. There’s […]
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Somewhere tests our patience
More tone poem than film, Somewhere finds Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) at her most untethered and experimental. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is untethered himself, a movie star drifting through days at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel. Occasional visits from his daughter (an excellent Elle Fanning) punctuate the press conferences, random sex, trips to Italy and […]
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Provs to reinstate arts council
Killed by the RodMac government in 2002, a new independent arts funding body, Arts Nova Scotia, will be established this fall, announced premier Darrell Dexter in a Valentine to artists province-wide yesterday. Bringing back arm’s-length funding was one of Dexter’s election promises.
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Hey Rosetta!
The sprawling pop outfit from Newfoundland returns with a third album shined to a high gloss by Scottish producer Tony Doogan (Wintersleep, Mogwai), who packs Tim Baker’s compositions with more sonic noise, blurring the defined stop-start quiet-louds of Hey Rosetta past. That means it takes a couple listens for the hooks to sink in–there’s nothing […]
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127 Hours’s real time
Your average film festival press conference is a confluence of paparazzi yelling, sheet lightning storms of camera flashes and banal questions about a movie maybe not every journalist in the room has seen (hence the oft-pompous moderator). But in September of last year, a hotel conference room in downtown Toronto was shushed into a bizarrely […]
