The Ice Harvest The combined talent of director Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and performers John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton is a lot to recommend and it got this sour pill made. Firmly ensconced in the Coen brothers’ world of Midwestern noir, sans the quirky characters, The Ice Harvest takes place on Christmas Eve in […]
Arts & Culture
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Comic boom
Thursday, July 21 was a scorcher. Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley had been living in Halifax for four months. They didn’t know many people and didn’t think anyone would show up. They’d put out the flyers and the leaflets and the posters, they’d mentioned their idea to people they’d met through the local comic […]
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Hello Bombgurl
“I’m a poster girl for inappropriate art,” says Melissa Ryan. The petite 31-year-old Halifax artist is sitting in her north end apartment/studio, with her brown wavy hair in pigtails, surrounded by the odds and bobs of different projects she’s working on. Here are small canvases with splashy pop-art paintings piled up on a shelf above […]
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Lucky of the draw
Born in 2003 out of the depths of the imaginations of former NSCAD students, the critically acclaimed Lucky Comics keeps on truckin’. Fronted by Chris Lockerbie, Peter Diamond and Jesse Jacobs, with contributions from Owen Diamond, Eggnog, Dan Gallant and Rob Jabbaz, the collective has released a mighty triumvirate of issues over the past two […]
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Shades of gay
Seeing that lower-income earning gays were not being well-represented by the media, Michael Best decided to take matters into his own hands. Five years ago he began to compile a series of unusual experiences from his personal life, and eventually his confessional anecdotes became a full-length play. It’s been a long time in the making, […]
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That’s super
Originally built in the 1960s to satisfy a subur-ban occupation with capturing little Johnny’s birthday and the family trip to Disneyland, Super-8 cameras are now enjoying a second life as an alternative filmmaking tool. On Sunday night at One World Cafe, a screening of local and international short films will show off the potential of […]
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Reviews
Water Water is the third of Deepa Mehta’s elemental trilogy, following Fire from 1996 and Earth from ’98. Each film takes place further back in Indian history, exploring the places where tradition and culture crack under human desire. Water is set in the 1930s against the turmoil of India circa Gandhi, and the social changes […]
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire isn’t notably worse than its predecessors. It’s just harder to put up with at this point. Director Mike Newell keeps up the vendor’s manifesto adhered to by Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuaron: “Give JK Rowling’s readers what they want. Make sure […]
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Body break
Marie Chouinard doesn’t read her own press. She’s surprised to hear about a feature interview penned by celebrity interrogator Sarah Hampson in last Saturday’s The Globe and Mail. If Chouinard did peruse her own publicity, she would learn that she’s considered one of Canada’s most important and visionary choreographers. She would read that her new […]
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Mean machines
DaPoPo Theatre Company’s first year would not be complete without a performance of pure science-fiction social commentary. Thursday marks the opening night of Rossum’s Universal Robots. At first, the robots appear to bring an end to working-class blues. They can handle any chore, any task, no matter how toilsome. Programmed solely to work, no one […]
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The Pride of Mr. Darcy
There’s a rumour floating around that when the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice first appeared on the A&E network, a television executive asked whether Jane Austen would be available for promotional book signings. Crack all the jokes that you want about the reading habits of American TV executives, but the reality is that Austen, upon […]
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The write wing
Some professions work well on film. For every movie starring a dentist, armies of cops, lawyers and psychiatrists march across the big screen. Journalists spend plenty of time furrowing brows and grimacing for the camera. In 1997, Richard R. Ness published the hefty From Headline Hunter to Superman; 808 pages cataloguing over 2,100 feature films […]
