I remember when Brad Pitt broke. It was probably around 1994. I was in Grade 9 and Thelma and Louise had taken its rightful place as my favourite movie. Holly Millea, who is the very best entertainment writer working today, used to appear on The Dini Petty Show to tell Dini what was going on […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Circumference
A tale of a woman’s struggle with body image, Circumference is a dynamite one-woman play written by and starring Amy Salloway. A series of monologues strung together, there’s more content in this play than any other this reviewer has seen combined. That explains the notebook that Salloway references throughout the hour-long performance to keep herself […]
Posted inArts + Music
Senseless sensibility
Halifax-like weather kept the city at a grumpy boil today. In the morning I crossed the street too early and ended up walking against the flow of the annual Walk for breast cancer, thousands and thousands of people, mostly women, ponchoed out and in high spirits despite the weather and earlyish hour. I took the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Pretty Pieces
Leigh Ann Bellamy and Mike Sheppard play desperate siblings who feel the world closing in on them in this dramatic piece from Kingston, Ontario-based writer Charles Robertson. Set in a bachelor apartment, an agoraphobic sister passes the time away acting as mother to a child she wishes would love her back. She waits for her […]
Posted inArts + Music
Divine Mechanics
Written and directed by Jamie Feldman, this satiric play tackles the issue of the reliance on technology as well as the role of a higher being in contemporary society. A great concept geared for laughs, Divine Mechanics only fails with a lack of comedic timing the plot needs to succeed.Andee Morgan effectively portrays the angel […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Butleress
Some wag once wrote: a farce is a type of play that critics laugh at and then pan. Not in this case. The Butleress is a jolly outing nicely living up to farce’s raison d’etre – to entertain an audience, eliciting laughs using broad humoured comedy, a ridiculous situation or scenario, played by shameless farceurs. […]
Posted inArts + Music
September rain
Essential festival tools forgotten in Halifax Business cardsLocal band t-shirts (hanging to dry in closet)MP3 playerHeadphones Solutions Sister’s Ipod with permission to replace music“Deluxe” headphones purchased from WestJet ($3 — slightly too big for head)Re-discovery of In-Flight Safety shirt in suitcaseContact info available upon handwritten request The first few days of FFing are such an […]
Posted inArts + Music
Pussy Star
Before video, and way before DVDs, dirty ol’ men and chronic sexual adolescents over voting age, bent on keeping their hand in with the “love connection”, frequented sleazy movie theatres known as Porno Palaces. Every movie had its “dramatic” moments before its inevitable bump and grunt, passion-free finale. Ohh, the mental anguish there had to […]
Posted inArts + Music
The great north end
The complex personality and tumultuous history of Halifax’s north end have made it an ideal muse for the many filmmakers, artists, poets and authors who live there. This Saturday, during the Go North! event—when north-enders invite the rest of the city to tour over 45 local artist studios, galleries, homes and businesses—two of the scheduled […]
Posted inArts + Music
Plays of the week
3 Dogs BarkingSeptember 9 at the Khyber Turret, 1588 Barrington, 9:45pm, $9 This charged drama is set in a dingy Newfoundland police interview room undergoing renovations (and thereby missing an evidence-recording video camera). The issue at hand is the true nature of a murder confession offered up by a minor league repeat offender of public […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Wicker Man
It takes a combination of audacity and stupidity to want to remake The Wicker Man. Robin Hardy’s 1973 thriller is note-perfect, largely because nothing quite approaches its unsettling tone. The Wicker Man almost looks like something PBS broadcast in the middle of the afternoon when you were a kid, but its happy Scottish fields are […]
Posted inArts + Music
Hollywood babylon
“There’s no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality,” growls Dixon Steele, the screenwriter suspected of murder in Nicholas Ray’s under-acknowledged classic In a Lonely Place. In this line, the character nails the ethos of the Los Angeles movie industry crime story, the Hollywood film noir, if you will. It’s a slippery, exclusive little […]
