“Hold on, let me give a quick hurray — we just found out we’re not lost,” says Ryan Wylie, turning away from his cell phone to cheer on his fellow passengers. Navigation woes are inevitable as the co-founder of the Free Form Film Festival travels across North America in a convoy of three vehicles—two vans […]
Arts & Culture
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Great escape
Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada books prove our country’s fascination with our own iconography. From stubby beer bottles to Nanaimo bars, Coupland’s photographic dissection of Canadian culture is one of the most amusing visual interpretations of our home and native land. Artist Leah Modigliani grabs hold of Coup-land’s magnifying glass and looks much deeper. Although […]
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Inside the Fringes
Challenging the very definition of the term fringe, this year’s Atlantic Fringe Festival includes three established companies: Angels and Heroes, Foghorn and Exodus Theatres. Alongside Angels and Heroes’s raunchy Hard-On House (a take-off on George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House) and Foghorn’s emotionally raw I Stand Before You Naked by Joyce Carol Oates, Exodus’s production of […]
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The anniversary party
If ever she once was, Lia Rinaldo is no longer bothered by a new film festival in Montreal. “It became quite clear that we were pursuing different things,” says Rinaldo, the Atlantic Film Festival’s director, of the new event that overlaps with AFF’s 25th anniversary. “So, we haven’t kept in regular contact, as one would […]
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The Brothers Grimm
Two thousand five has been a big year for big-name filmmakers. For me, the auteurist successes have come from Wong Kar Wai, Steven Spielberg, and to a more modest degree, Hayao Miyazaki, Jim Jarmusch and Tim Burton. On the other end of the spectrum is the newest work by Fernando Meirelles, John Dahl, Ridley Scott […]
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Trail Blazing
With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature film with such skill and vision it’s hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived. In the annual guide outlining the programs […]
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Making monsters
A block or two from the Via Rail station in Halifax’s lower south end, a nondescript shoebox-style apartment building houses one of the plucky Argyle Gallery’s stable of young creative talents—artist Mary Kim. Her shared flat, really an enlarged bedsit, is hived off into four small rooms, intended, it appears, for tightly budgeted living and […]
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Flowers, Plain And Dukes
Broken Flowers Don Johnston is the type of character Bill Murray has played a lot recently—generally indifferent to his surroundings. As Broken Flowers begins, his fed-up girlfriend leaves him. He then receives an unsigned note from an ex, claiming to have mothered his son. Don doesn’t want to get involved. With his mystery-obsessed family-man neighbour […]
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The art of public art
Last February when artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude cloaked New York’s Central Park with 7,503 saffron panels, created from 99,155 square metres of woven fabric, they accomplished much more than an awe-inspiring installation of public art in one of the world’s most famous landmarks. Their work, formally titled “The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005,” […]
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The stills
It’s easy to pick out photographer David Cieplinski as he turns the corner from the parking lot behind St. Antonio’s Hall on Hunter Street. A camera bag, adorned with a colour wash of rock pins, straddles one shoulder. A palm-sized silver digital camera is hitched onto his belt, clipped alongside a mini-flashlight and a vintage […]
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Going, going, Tong
Redemption is massive. It’s part and parcel of screenwriting 101. You put a guy in a tree, you throw sticks and rocks at him and then you get him down. You want to see him survive and get out of it.” Michael Dowse is talking up his movie, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a new […]
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Plum deal
Success is in the eye of the beholder, but most of those who are in search of fame and fortune usually end up in bigger cities. The opposite is at least semi-true with graphic and recording artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. The 26-year-old grew up in London, Ontario and eventually relocated to Toronto. However, with a […]
