Somewhere deep in the low-rise sameness of the Burnside Industrial Park is a building no different from any anonymous business space. Except this one is filled with lights, cables, monitors, flimsy wooden-walled rooms and a group of children having the time of their lives. This is the interior set for Summerhood, a summer camp movie […]
Arts & Culture
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Get Rich or Die Tryin’
Get Rich or Die Tryin’ combines two movements of hip-hop movies: The gangsta rap manifest ghetto films of the early ’90s (Boyz N the Hood, Juice, Menace II Society) and this decade’s tales of careerism (8 Mile, Hustle & Flow). Its message — crime doesn’t pay — is, like much of the film, too familiar. […]
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The drawer girl
Shary Boyle gets her hands dirty when she works. The Toronto-based artist’s self-described “live, animated drawing performances,” often in concert with a musician, leave her hands smeared with ink. Boyle makes her mark from Berlin to Brooklyn, Paris to Halifax. She returns to town for a performance at the Khyber on Saturday November 12 with […]
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A cut below
A strange thing happened when i was watching the new DVD of Francis Coppola’s The Outsiders. I waited for the monologue that gets me every time. Johnny is stargazing with his friend Ponyboy and says, “It seems like there’s gotta be someplace without Greasers, Socs. There must be some place with just plain ordinary people.” […]
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The Weather Man
The Weather Man finds director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) in Alexander Payne (Sideways) mode. Verbinski’s lack of distinct style makes such excursions possible, and this one mostly works. He’s better at being Payne than Steven Spielberg. Pitched between empathy and fatalism, the title character is minor Chicago celebrity David Spritz (Nicolas Cage), who’s […]
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Campbell’s soup
If you are a B-movie fanatic, chances are you’ve run into Bruce Campbell at least once in your movie-renting career. The 47-year-old actor, who is best known as Ashley J. “Ash” Williams from the Evil Dead trilogy, has appeared in over 50 films, including such classics as Maniac Cop, Lunatics: A Love Story and the […]
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Disaster Drama
It began with a bump. A big bump. On Thursday, October 23, 1958 at 8:06pm, a series of shock waves thundered through the Number 2 Colliery of the Springhill Coal Mine, creating an intense, localized earthquake that was felt 23 kilometres away. One hundred seventy-four miners were trapped or crushed as floors smashed into ceilings […]
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Dreamer, Doom
Only occasionally does Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story stretch credibility. Its problems aren’t its claims to truth so much as its letdowns of genre. The sentiment in a story of friendship between a girl and a horse is so expected it needs ways to hook the audience. Writer-director John Gatins is left keeping his […]
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Niro and far
Shelley Niro sounds wiped. Calling from her home on the Mohawk reservation Six Nations, near Brantford, Ontario, it’s not surprising; she just attended the busy four-day imagineNATIVE media arts and film festival in Toronto. There she screened her new 57-minute film of connected shorts, Suite: Indian. Niro, a member of the Turtle Clan, only had […]
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The Big Hit
If there is such a thing as a higher being, she is probably smiling down at the North Street Church right now. Not because of an enlightened sermon or confession of juicy sins, but because of the loud movements and joyful sounds that are echoing off its peeling walls. For the past two months, the […]
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Elizabethtown
Cameron Crowe leaves no doubt that Elizabethtown is a personal film. The protagonist, like his leads in Say Anything… and Almost Famous, is a stand-in for the director — utterly without vice. His name is Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom). He’s a shoe designer who loses his job shortly before learning his father has died. On […]
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Funny boy
Shaun Majumder’s a funny guy. Which is lucky, because his singing career won’t be taking off anytime soon. After missing his first few interview calls, Majumder answers his cell phone singing “I’m a loser, I’m a big fat loser.” The sentiment is endearing, the tunefulness debatable. But with a full slate of acting, stand-up and […]
