Sitting in a quiet corner of the teen genre — away from crude comedies, gory slashers and believe-in-yourself tweeners—is the coming-of-age film. Sometimes it stars a single protagonist, but more often it’s a group at the apex of its adolescence. The end result is always earnest, heartfelt sentiment, and the best ones manage to sell […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts + Music
Rob in broad daylight
Everybody should have at least one hobby. Some people enjoy bird watching—filling their fanny packs with binoculars and guide books in hopes of spotting that rare triple-horned, green-bellied finch. For those who prefer People magazine to tiny pecking beaks and hay fever, there’s another, more urban, pastime sweeping our city: celebrity watching. The relatively low […]
Posted inArts + Music
Extra Credit
In a vast white room lit by hundreds of metres of bright white fluorescent lights, Alvena Poole waits. She sits at one of ten folding tables set in the middle sixth of the room, closest to the door. Empty white walls, a towering white ceiling and floors tiled in dirty white linoleum surround her. The […]
Posted inArts + Music
Funny girl
Nico the cat judders before springing atop a cafe-style table as comedian/teacher/writer Sherry Lee Hunter, set to swear off the lung rocket habit, fires one up. She inhales, then beats a beeline for an open side window above the sink counter in her compact kitchen. Trim, she moves around the room with the easy grace […]
Posted inArts + Music
Roll credit
Shauna Hatt’s best year working in film in Nova Scotia was 2003. It was the SARS and blackout year in Toronto, a city that for years has been the biggest film production centre in North America outside Los Angeles. American producers, believing the paranoid projections of weak-kneed insurance companies and a plague-ravaged city of mask-wearers, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Heti games
Tucked away in an alley behind Toronto’s earthy Annex neighbourhood is The Green Room, a bohemian watering hole styled with worn couches, cheap beer and unreliable washrooms. It was on The Green Room’s bookshelves that writer Sheila Heti found her muse—a neglected copy of The Life of William Hickling Prescott, written in 1863 by Harvard […]
Posted inArts + Music
Stage duty
Martha Irving has come a long way since her directoral debut for Shipwrecked on a Haunted Island. The play, a terrifying ghost story, opened (and closed) 40-odd years ago in Irving’s friend Karen’s backyard. “I was a real tyrant,” says Irving of her 11-year-old self. “I wanted to play all the parts so I kept […]
Posted inArts + Music
None for the ages
It’s not hard to believe what is said: the Academy Awards were created in the 1920s as a public relations exercise, to boost the California movie business and assuage the egos of the pretty, young stars. Award ceremonies are a coming of age for any industry—it means you’ve arrived, you’re making money and people really, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Best in the land
Look past the Botoxed parade of designer gowns and salivating paparazzi and you’ll find a distinctly Canadian story unfolding on this year’s Oscar red carpet. Canada’s public film producer, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), received two Academy Award nominations this year: one for Chris Landreth’s animated short film Ryan, and another for the […]
Posted inArts + Music
D’oh Christ!
Around 1990, when conservatives and other like-minded squares started shrieking about the crude, sassy new animated series The Simpsons,they of course jumped the proverbial gun. (“I don’t think anybody should be proud to be an underachiever” is how my own grade 6 teacher explained her ban of Simpsons shirts, which then mostly featured Bart spouting […]
