“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 […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
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, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Cowboy Show
Dustin Harvey used to be such a trusting young man. One year ago, he happily promoted his new stage production Winding Up Godot, a parody of the classic Waiting for Godot starring wind-up toys. Unfortunately, the estate of Samuel Beckett found out about Harvey’s little spoof (possibly from a Coast article) and threatened to sue […]
Posted inArts + Music
Writing the streets
It’s a well-documented fact: Canada is an enormous land mass. You can make this country your home and still never, in your lifetime, experience isolation in the flat prairies, vertigo peering up at the Rockies, or rapture from the alien glow of the Northern Lights. This sense of mystery, which in its darker moments can […]
Posted inArts + Music
Corpse Bride
Necrophilia is the unspoken threat in Just Like Heaven and Corpse Bride. Both are highly accessible. But where Just Like Heaven is soap opera treacle, only the Tim Burton film has the courage to address the lure of dead things as a rejection of established civility. Yeah, Burton went there already with Winona Ryder’s Lydia […]
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D’oh! Where’s my deer?
You might not notice anything out of place among the Mutations in the Garden of Delight. In fact, unless you look at the map for the Port Authority and NSCAD University’s new outdoor sculpture park at the entrance to Halifax Harbourwalk, you wouldn’t know that something is terribly amiss. At some point during the night […]
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Screen test
Whole New Thing Co-written by and co-starring Cape Breton’s prodigal son Daniel MacIvor, Whole New Thing is about a sexual awakening of a teenage boy (Aaron Webber, making his screen debut). After he experiences his first wet dream, he writes a 1,000-page book about it (complete with illustrations), so his worried hippie mom (Rebecca Jenkins, […]
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Festival express
In 1981, the world of film festivals was very different. Sundance wasn’t even known by the title of Robert Redford’s most famous role. It was The Utah/US Film Festival, just moved from Salt Lake to Park City. The Toronto International Film Festival was five years old, also under its former name, The Festival of Festivals, […]
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Girl Talk
A young girl—still a virgin—is called a slut simply because she lives in a group home. At the age of 10, another girl overhears her principal whisper “slut” as she walks by in a pair of short shorts. Yet another makes the mistake of kissing a boy and ends up being shunned by her classmates […]
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Recording soundtracks
Film is a naturally collaborative medium, and much of the best in music is as well. To bring filmmaking bigwigs and music honchos together is such a natural marriage, it’s sort of surprising no one thought of it before. This year’s Atlantic Film Festival dates, September 15 to 24, overlap with the Nova Scotia Music […]
Posted inArts + Music
Poetry in Motion
November 11, 2004. A couple thousand people come together for a Remembrance Day ceremony at Sullivan’s Pond in Dartmouth. Paul McNeill and Catherine Cooper are among the families and neighbours who have devoted the day to appreciating the men and women who sacrificed everything for their country’s future; or, more precisely, us. After all the […]
Posted inArts + Music
On the line
When Halifax filmmaker Steven James May set out to document the lives of three women working in the phone sex industry, he knew that he would dealing with some touchy subject matter. Sure enough, in the weeks leading up to his film’s premier at the Atlantic Film Festival on September 22, he was busy working […]
