Snap to it When Snapchat first arrived on the social media scene, it was hard to see its purpose beyond sending nudes. The app started as a project created by a group of Stanford students. On Snapchat, the user snaps a picture and sends it to a friend who can[Read More…]
Articles by Anna St. Clair
Stranger Things and The Americans: The Cold War on TV
With its 1980s pop culture nostalgia, Netflix’s Stranger Things feels comforting and familiar, yet unlike anything else on television. Stranger Things is based on a simple premise: One night after riding his bike home a kid named Will Byers goes missing from Hawkins, Indiana, a small midwestern town. Strongly influenced[Read More…]
Spotted: McGill in the movies
When you’re trying to make it to your 8:30 a.m. lectures on a freezing cold February morning, it’s hard to imagine that McGill resembles the bowels of the Pentagon or a military base during the zombie apocalypse. Yet in the past, Hollywood has managed to transform locations around campus into[Read More…]
2016 Oscar Nominated Short Films: An in-depth review of the competition
Once again the world gathers to see what the pinnacle of human cinematography has to offer: The time of the Oscars are upon us. Whether or not the motion pictures presented at this year’s awards are representative of every race or ethnicity, a highly important matter in and of itself,[Read More…]
Players’ Theatre’s production of “Dinner!” offers a feast of life and death
The ideal audience member of Players’ Theatre production of Dinner! is someone who played with their food as a child, and sat in on philosophy lectures as a first year wondering how the hell this applies to real life. Dinner!, written by Moira Buffini and first premiering in 2002, follows[Read More…]
Star Wars: The fans awaken
The force is strong with this one Ten minutes into The Force Awakens, viewers witness a stormtrooper’s moral struggle between right and wrong, and it’s here where the question on everyone’s mind is answered: The Force Awakens works. Showing how stormtroopers deal with morality just as much as Luke Skywalker[Read More…]
Pop Dialectic: Aziz Ansari’s Master of None
There’s no denying that Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix original series, Master of None, has taken the millennial world by storm. Featuring an extremely diverse cast and tackling anything from the quest to find the best taco to institutional racism, the show is being touted as the best comedy of the year. But[Read More…]
Play Review: Butcher question ideas of justice, revenge, and love
Playwright Nicolas Billon premiered Butcher last year in Calgary, having previously won the 2013 Governor-General’s Award for Fault Lines, a work of three plays including Greenland, Iceland, and Faroe Islands. While Billon’s previous plays have had darker themes, they look like comedy sketches in comparison to his latest work. Butcher[Read More…]
Past vs. present: Jane Eyre vs. Crimson Peak
Warning: Spoilers The mansion in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a character in itself. It breathes, bleeds, and moans. It’s rotting and sickly, yet simultaneously vibrant and beautiful; it’s also an accomplice to the brutal murders that have plagued its inhabitants for decades. With an ancient manor, a mysterious[Read More…]
Pop Dialectic: Modern Family
Modern Family just finished its long run of consecutive victories at the Emmy Awards earlier this year. Two writers take a look at the show and its legacy. Click each perspective to read more Modern Family was always stuck in the past Arielle Garmaise When Modern Family premiered in 2009,[Read More…]
Album Review – Bob Moses / Days Gone By
Deep house is always a somewhat difficult genre to analyze. With its steady beats and minimalist instrumentation, it’s meant to set an atmosphere rather than move and inspire. Armed with a laptop and sound equipment, making mediocre deep house isn’t terribly difficult, and these days[Read More…]
Osheaga: 10 for 10
With Osheaga firmly entrenched near the top of the list of Montreal’s summer highlights, it’s hard to believe that the festival has only been around for a decade. To commemorate the occasion, the Tribune decided to break down the 2015 lineup and highlight five prominent returning acts that blew up[Read More…]
Iran gets spaghetti westernized in latest film
Director Ana Lily Amirpour is billing A Girl Walks Home at Night Alone as Iran’s first vampire spaghetti western, as though vampire spaghetti western is a popular genre in Hollywood. While entirely in Farsi and featuring an Iranian cast, the film was shot in southern California, which barely passes for Iran. The[Read More…]
Album Review: The Dodos – Individ
San Francisco indie band, The Dodos leaves behind its acoustic-folk sounds of 2008’s The Visitor and 2013’s Carrier for the neurotic industrial rock of its sixth release, Individ. The band’s usual intricate drum patterns and haunting lyrics make the album worth a listen, but the musical creativity of past works[Read More…]
Waiting for August a tender portrait, but not much else
Waiting for August, directed by Teodora Ana Mihai, tells the story of 15-year-old Georgiana and her six siblings, who live together in a Romanian housing project. The pack of children must adjust to life when their mother goes to Italy to find work and Georgiana takes on the role of[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: Time Warp
My Same Artist: Adele Album: 19 Released: January 28, 2008 Adele has made a name for herself with her soulful and powerful voice, bringing new beauty to pop ballads. In “My Same” Adele’s vocal muscles were not flexed as far as on other tracks, but the cool vintage piece highlights[Read More…]
Theatre Review: Oh, What a Lovely War!
It’s commonly said that “comedy is tragedy plus time,” and few shows can capture that saying in as much of a literal sense as Oh, What a Lovely War! does. Originally created in 1963—well after the dust had settled on the horrors of both world wars—the production was intended to[Read More…]
Gotham: When Batman’s growl had a pre-pubescent pitch
Why do people love prequels? Is it the allure of watching the characters you know so well develop psychologically? Perhaps it’s because everyone is younger and—usually—better looking? In the case of Gotham, maybe it’s both. Gotham, which premiered on Sept. 22, was created by Bruno Heller and begins with the[Read More…]