[image-4]Published May 15, 2008.The Dead GirlDirected by: Directed by Karen Moncrieff (First Look)This hyper-intimate film—less drama than horror—follows the ripple of effect of women affected by a murder. There’s the victim (Brittany Murphy), her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), the medical examiner (Rose Byrne), the killer’s wife (Mary Beth Hurt) and the stranger who finds the […]
Tara Thorne
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Laugh tracking
Picnicface has this thing about “the right laugh.” The eight-member Halifax comedy troupe knows from laughs—-Picnicface has been turning away patrons from its Sunday Night Comedy Spectacular for the past year. That line stretching past the vacant Sam’s building every other Sunday? It’s theirs. Those people scurrying around a packed Ginger’s Tavern as the clock […]
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Sky high
“It’s funny, just recently in the last few shows we’ve done in Toronto, there are people that are seeing us for the first time and that’s the song they’re familiar with,” says Paul Murphy. “They are surprised by the rest of the songs-—they don’t really expect our band to sound like our band. It’s neat […]
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Chris Walla
Chris WallaField Manual (Barsuk)Death Cab for Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla takes a swing at the solo life via 12 songs produced with unlikely cohort Warne Livesey, whose work with Matthew Good sounded huge and a bit bombastic, the opposite of Death Cab’s refined indie-pop. With Tegan & Sara’s The Con, Walla established himself as a […]
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Operation Filmmaker
Operation FilmmakerDirected by: Nina DavenportMongrel MediaAfter seeing an MTV special about youth in Iraq, actor Liev Schreiber invites Muthana, a film student whose school was bombed, to intern on the set of his mediocre 2005 film Everything is Illuminated. But once he gets Muthana on location in Prague, Schreiber who, to be fair, is directing […]
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Kathleen Edwards
Kathleen EdwardsAsking for Flowers(Maple)On her 2002 debut, Failer, Kathleen Edwards introduced herself as a mouthy boozehound with an alt-country bent. On Back to Me, she reflected on a life changed by success. Asking for Flowers, co-produced by the artist and Jim Scott (Tom Petty), sounds bigger and smaller than both. Bookended by epics “Buffalo” and […]
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Rock, Paper, action!
Lisa and Bart are having an argument. They decide to settle it via Rock, Paper, Scissors.Lisa’s thought: “Poor, predictable Bart. Always picks rock.” Bart’s thought: Good ol’ rock. Nothin’ beats that!” Bart: “Rock!” Lisa: “Paper.” Bart: “D’oh!” “It’s a universal game. If you’re three or 103 you know about it,” says Tim Doiron, the writer, […]
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Diablo Cody vs. Judd Apatow at the Oscars
“I think because I have this weird mythology surrounding my career, I feel very pressured to dispel any myths that there might be about me. I have done so much press that I think it could be construed as obnoxious, really. I mean, obviously I have free will—but it wasn’t something I went out and […]
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Touching down
Like so many great bands before it, The Tom Fun Orchestra is an accident. The behemoth of sound from Cape Breton, with nine members at its core, began at the 2005 East Coast Music Awards in Sydney. Ian MacDougall, Tom FunÂ’s songwriter, vocalist and one of its guitarists, had returned home from a stint in […]
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Oscar touch
“I gained some weight.” 
 “I didnÂ’t say anything.”
 Those two lines are in the trailer for a reason: Exchanged in a blazing Arizona parking lot by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, they play as an easy joke in an admittedly hard-sell film. By now you already know theyÂ’re siblings. But this bit, like […]
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How She Move
Step dancing. Say those words in this town and they conjure up images of tartan, fiddles, Rankin sisters, milk-skinned Cape Breton kids jigging away, upper bodies impressively immobile, tapping out their traditions to the hand-clap beat. Say those words in Toronto, Baltimore or, say, south central Los Angeles: The images are as different as highlands […]
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Mob mentality
“Just before the last episode aired,” says Robert Cushman, “I went back and watched the first one, and it’s amazing. Just how many relationships were there, in embryo.” The National Post‘s television and theatre critic is talking about The Sopranos, the lumbering, Emmy-scarfing beast that took almost a decade to deliver 86 episodes of intricate, […]