On March 21, Lucy’s Mirror took to the small stage at L’escalier, a local bar and vegetarian restaurant known for hosting live music events. Composed of five McGill students, the band performed two hour-long sets for friends and curious strangers. For those in the audience, the show was a musical[Read More…]
Articles by Leo Stillinger
McGill Drama Festival continues to impress
Every year, Player’s Theatre’s Drama Festival highlights the abundance of student talent that McGill’s theatre scene has to offer. Showing until Feb. 23, the festival offers six original short plays written, directed, produced, and performed by students. Stories that depicted everything from a first date between high-schoolers to an existential[Read More…]
‘Cyclops’: McGill Classics Play entertains and educates
From Feb. 6 to 9, audiences at the Théâtre Sainte-Catherine Café-Bar were treated to an intrepid rendition of Cyclops, an ancient Greek play by Euripides. This run of Cyclops was the latest edition of a time-honoured theatrical spectacle: The McGill Classics Play. Every year since the 2011 staging of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,[Read More…]
RIDM offers stunning portraits of humanity
The 2018 Rencontres Internationale du Documentaire de Montreal (RIDM) took viewers on an unconventional cinematic journey. In ReMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening the director takes a job as a teacher and basketball coach in small-town Alabama, while Distant Constellation sees Mizrahi visiting residents in a Turkish retirement home. Such themes may not be typical subject matter for the big screen, perhaps; but anything goes at RIDM, the documentary film festival which brings stories from every nook and cranny of the globe to theatres around Montreal.
A different kind of music festival
A stock photo of a sleek white basin was projected on the wall behind the punk band. A song had just finished, and the guitar was still reverberating. “Let’s hear it for basins,” said Conor Antenucci, the bassist and singer of The Costanzas. “They hold so much goddamn water!” This[Read More…]
Community and remembrance at the ‘Atwater Poetry Project’
Since 2004, the Atwater Poetry Project has brought a poetry to the Atwater Library on a monthly basis. On Sept. 20, the library hosted three women writing about indigenous life in Canada, coinciding with indigenous Awareness Weeks. Each poet brought to light the persistent force and beauty of the indigenous identity.
Ethnographic filmmaking shines at FIFEQ
The Maison de la Culture de Cote-des-Neiges, and McCord Museum will host free screenings of the International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec (FIFEQ). This student-run festival of non-fiction filmmaking is celebrating its 15th year with its largest program ever, playing at UQAM, UdeM, Concordia, and McGill. Created in 2003 by[Read More…]
Album Review: Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s ‘Sex & Food’
When Unknown Mortal Orchestra first appeared with a standalone online single in 2010, the identity of its creator was unknown, and an air of mystery surrounded the song. It featured an uncanny, lo-fi voice singing strange words over a psychedelic guitar riff, and a weird title, “Ffunny Ffriends.” Since then,[Read More…]
McGill Drama Festival showcases all that McGill student theatre has to offer
For thirty years, Players’ Theatre has played host to the annual McGill Drama Festival. The 2018 edition featured six student-written, -directed, -produced, and -performed plays, with three running each night. Tackling themes ranging from religious fanaticism to quarter-life crises, these plays exhibited an energetic, bold diversity representative of Montreal student[Read More…]
From the viewpoint: Rostam brings new songs—and a string quartet—to La Sala Rossa
Former member of Vampire Weekend, Rostam Batmanglij—performing under his stage name, Rostam—headlined at La Sala Rossa on Feb. 5, touring behind his first solo album Half-Light, released last September. It was, as he proudly noted, the first-ever Rostam show in Canada. The night opened with a performance by Joy Again,[Read More…]
Cielo: Alison McAlpine’s conversation with the sky
Among the 142 films featured at the latest Montréal International Documentary Festival (Nov. 9 – 19), one of the most memorable was Cielo, the first feature film by Canadian director Alison McAlpine. Set in the Chilean Atacama Desert, Cielo is an exploration of the night sky’s hold over the people who[Read More…]
Chad Norman’s life of poetry
When Nova Scotian poet Chad Norman (Masstown, Learning to Settle Down) was a teenager, he and all his friends wanted to be rock stars. "I bought a Fender bass, and a MusicMaster, a beginning Fender, and a small little amp, and wanted to be a bassist,” Norman said. But the band[Read More…]
Dual documentary screening looks back on Standing Rock protests
Cinema Politica is a series of politically-conscious documentary screenings, taking place in movie theaters across Canada and the world. The latest edition took place at Concordia on Oct. 2, showing a documentary about the 2016 protests at Standing Rock directed by Michelle Latimer, herself a Concordia graduate. The two-part documentary, featuring[Read More…]
‘Resurrecting Hassan’ offers no easy answers
On Sept. 22, Cinema du Parc opened showings for Resurrecting Hassan, a documentary of local interest. Directed by Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Carlo Guillermo Proto, Resurrecting Hassan tells the story of a Montreal family coping with the loss of a child. Unflinching and quietly compassionate, Proto’s film is an examination of grief,[Read More…]
“Kuso”: A film about bodily substances that has no substance
The magic of cinema lies in projected images’ power to profoundly move us. Everybody knows what it feels like to laugh at Ghostbusters (1984), or to cry at Marley & Me (2008). Kuso, the new film directed by the electronic musician Flying Lotus, demonstrates the power of movies to move[Read More…]
First Impressions: Safdie Brothers’ ‘Good Time’ not the best of times
Leo Stillinger: At the beginning of the Safdie brothers’ (Daddy Longlegs (2009), Heaven Knows What (2014)) new feature-length film Good Time, two brothers have just robbed a bank. One asks the other: “Are you feelin’ this?” Good Time is not a good movie, but perhaps it can be justified in[Read More…]