Kirsten Dunst is pissed. As Dunst, in line behind writer-director Cameron Crowe and in front of actor Orlando Bloom, enters a stuffy room in Toronto’s InterContinental Hotel to take her appointed seat, she is bombarded by the flashes and weapon-sized lenses of dozens of wire photographers. “Chris-ten! Chris-ten!” they scream, looking for a photo that […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Serenity
Serenity risks being slighted as a big-screen TV episode. It’s a continuation of 2002 space-western series Firefly, which was shelved early in its run by the Fox network. Firefly gained a cult following on DVD, and the film attempts to give those fans some closure. Serenity is consistent with the series tone, but it’s a […]
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Tiny Town adventures
Matthew Reichertz sits squeezed behind a table in a windowed nook, a sandwich and salad in front of him. A tiny lamp lights the surface of the rickety table. Gottingen Street foot and car traffic flows by in the angled panes of glass behind him. He looks a little hemmed in, a contrast to the […]
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Thumbsucker blues
Mike Mills is 39 years old. At 18 he moved cross-county, from Santa Barbara, California to New York City, New York, where he attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He was a bad student, but he could draw. Art school led to an internship with influential design company M & […]
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Eyes on the prize
“Our lives have become very long,” says a man named Karma. He’s Tibetan, a dweller on the high plains some 15,000 feet above sea level, and he, with two of his cousins, has gone blind. Four percent of the Tibetan population over age 40 has cataracts due to high levels of ultraviolet radiation that prematurely […]
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Weekend warriors
Seeing a genuinely Canadian film was one of the real pleasures of the Atlantic Film Festival. The CBC keeps telling us we want to see our own stories told, but there is precious little evidence of that at the multiplex. Aside from the booming homegrown film industry in Quebec, Canadians just don’t seem to be […]
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Crash of the titan
“My ego is too huge to not do something that has some impact on our culture,” said Jodie Foster in a 1997 interview, in which she also said, “I keep being in the same movie over and over again. Nobody realizes it but me.” Eight years later, one notion has fed the other to profoundly […]
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Post production
The festival is finished. For a little while, Halifax felt like a city unconditionally in love with the movies, whether a potential blockbuster starring Jennifer Lopez or an obscure international co-production no one on these shores is liable to ever see again. The Park Lane cinemas were clogged with line-ups as cinema-goers waited for the […]
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Roll Bounce
It’s easy to lose hope when theatres get overrun by heavily promoted flight plans and wedding crashers, exorcised epileptics, guys wasting their lives gardening and something advertised as being like heaven that’s closer to two hours in purgatory. But we should keep watch of the movies being thrown on screens without fanfare. Arriving without much […]
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Death and the king
The reign of Yazdgerd III, king of Persia from 632 to 637 AD, is not an enviable one by any standard. In his first year, Yazdgerd’s kingdom was invaded by Arab armies. Then, they occupied his capital city of Ctesiphon, forcing Yazdgerd to go into exile in 637 AD. Fourteen years later, he was tracked […]
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On a roll
“Um, this may sound strange, but have you seen a…” The painter cuts off the question in mid-sentence, as he leans over his scaffolding and opens a pack of Players. Using a fresh cigarette as a pointer, he nods, “The giant ball? It rolled that way, towards the Commons.” By the time the ball—which isn’t […]
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Playing’s the thing
Peter Gabriel hadn’t released a proper album of new material since Us in 1992. He’d staged the international Secret World tour, then for years, silence, broken only by a largely instrumental project in conjunction with the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. When he released Up in 2002 and launched the Growing Up tour, […]