Author: Admin

Horror flop The Wolfman begs for a silver bullet

In cinema, there’s always a fine line between the supernatural and the ridiculous, and the best horror films flirt with this boundary without crossing it. Unfortunately, director Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman was less than tactful in his approach to the werewolf genre, and the film ends up resembling more of a farce than a truly scary movie.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: What a Winer

Re: “Why Gaza Remembrance Week misses the point” by Adam Winer (09.02.10) Mr. Winer seems to have entirely missed the point in believing that SPHR should be neutral in its display and presentation of speakers for the Gaza Remembrance event. When an entire population becomes the target of Israeli amunition and unjustified sanctions, then logically people have to stand up in defence of human rights and to lobby governments and intellectuals to stop the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Revamping spoken word

It’s hard to imagine how rewriting the lyrics to a Fat Boys song into his own beat-box symphony at the age of nine could lead C.R. Avery to where he is today. Currently on his Dead of Winter cross-Canada tour, backed by The Legal Tender String Quartet, you could say that Avery is in his element – his storytelling/harmonica-playing/beat-boxing element.

COMMENTARY: Eye-fucking hate Avatar

I am worried about the future. There are many things that make me think that the future will not be as exciting as Back to the Future 2 and The Jetsons, such as global warming, international strife, the possible collapse of capitalism, and other similarly serious problems.

COMMENTARY: Why Gaza remembrance week misses the point

From February 1-7, the McGill chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights staged Gaza Remembrance Week to mark the one-year anniversary of the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Earlier in January, SPHR organized a “Public Commemoration of the Gaza Massacre” in downtown Montreal.

Everybody’s a terrorist in From Paris With Love

Pierre Morel’s new film From Paris With Love is exceptionally tasteless. Admittedly, action movies are meant to be vile concoctions of guns, cars, drugs, and racial/sexual stereotypes, but From Paris With Love is so strikingly problematic that it cannot be considered a harmless testosterone-fuelled fantasy.

Internet protocol, proxy servers, and possible prison time

When the Internet was invented in the mid-nineties, it presented numerous new challenges to the engineering and computer science world. Never before had so many people been connected through so many links simultaneously. Today, approximately 100 terabytes of information are transferred on the Internet every second, and transmission can be complicated to understand.

OFF THE BOARD: Class you can watch in bed?

PSYCH 213: Cognition is like most 200-level psychology courses: it’s straightforward, chock-full of interesting studies that explain human behaviour, and it’s in Leacock 132. But unlike most large science classes, it’s not recorded. Among the many redundant questions posted on WebCT, there have been well over 100 requests to record Cognition lectures – in addition to dozens of emails and in-class appeals about the same subject.

CD REVIEWS: Yeasayer: Odd Blood

If the African- and Middle Eastern-tinged flavour of Yeasayer’s 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals impressed you, get ready to be transported by their sophomore effort, Odd Blood. Yeasayer leaves the tribal aesthetic behind for an electronic vibe, with distorted vocals, synth, and pounding bass lines.

Om: a taste of Tibet

The prospect of a big, steaming bowl of noodle soup was what originally drew me to Om Tibetan restaurant on St. Laurent – a friend of mine boasted that he had found the best bowl of soup in the city. Initially sceptical, I finally tried it for myself and have many times since gone back for more.

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