I’ve had a soft spot for Cancer Bats since high school, watching them open many Alexisonfire shows in Toronto. I’ve endured the dirty looks received for wearing a shirt with “cancer” written on it, and for many other people their first two albums are too much to handle.
Arts & Entertainment
Keep up to date on local art, new albums, and everything entertainment-related.
Dissecting art
Nicholas Ruddock’s debut novel, The Parabolist, is told through interlacing narratives that pivot around a group of University of Toronto medical students in 1975, taught by Roberto Moreno. Moreno is a recently immigrated Mexican poet and member of the (fictional) parabolist movement, a group which “arranges words and ideas in such a way that the energy input burns.
Film fest turns 35
The Festival du Nouveau Cinema is the oldest of its kind in Montreal, celebrating its 35th birthday this October. The festival opens tomorrow with Philippe Falardeau’s Congorama and closes Oct. 26 with a spotlight on the Spanish cinema screening of Pedro Almodovar’s Volver.
FILM: Cutting-edged comedy
Dear Journal, what can I say? He drove a cool car, remarks a certain 13-year-old boy by the name of Augusten Burroughs in the new movie adaptation of the memoir Running With Scissors. Having read Burroughs’ reminiscences of a homosexual boy with a 35-year-old boyfriend growing up in western Massachusetts in the late 70s, I was readily expecting golden phrases such as the former in the film’s adaptation.
FILM: A new Versailles
Audiences have been eagerly awaiting Sofia Coppola’s new film since her last offering, the critically acclaimed Lost in Translation debuted. Unexpectedly, Coppola brings us from the neon lights of the streets of Tokyo to the glittering hallways of Versailles.
FILM: Scorsese scores (finally)
All things considered, Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a decent feature film in over a decade. Gangs of New York seemed excessively brutal and utterly pointless, Bringing out the Dead sank like a stone and The Aviator, for all the accolades draped over it, hardly served its biographical purposes adequately and was a remarkably boring film.
Putting Canada back on the television map
Tuesday evening saw the debut of CBC’s latest prime time original broadcast, the brainchild of Chris Haddock, nationally revered creator of decade-spanning Canadian success Da Vinci’s Inquest. His new series, Intelligence, examines a new facet of West Coast criminality, this time turning the camera towards the perpetrators rather than the victims and investigators.
MUSIC: Byrnin’ down the stale record industry house
Studying and an urgent need to pick up dry-cleaning in time for Thanksgiving may have deterred many from attending this year’s Future of Music Policy Summit, held for the first time away from its birthplace of Washington D.C., in McGill’s own Schulich School of Music.
Previews
Theatre: Peccadilloes, Oct. 11-28, Wednesday-Saturday at 8 p.m.; Theatre Ste Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.). Wendy Clubb directs a Whip Theatre Company presentation consisting of a series of eight one-acts penned by Jon Rannells under the temptingly sinful banner Peccadilloes, or “sins” in Spanish.
RADIO: Strangeness appears on the night shift
A woman is calling in to talk about “some teeth that some men found.” “One of them was six inches and one of them was seven inches,” she reports. “They were some great big teeth.” The topic tonight is cryptozoology with guest Loren Coleman, who is a member of the International Society of Cryptozoology, the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club and the author of 17 books and more than 300 articles.
