Arts
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Electric Avenue
When I first arrived in Winnipeg in February of 1986, I was instantly fascinated by the idea that a city could exist in a climate that was so profoundly cold. It struck me that the water wasn’t frozen when coming out of the tap and that although the buildings looked as though they were evaporating from the deep freezing temperatures, they were well heated and electricity wasn’t regularly interrupted at all.
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Interstellar
A lot of the early word-of mouth on Interstellar was that the film was good, but didn’t deliver on the promise of a great director like Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises) working in the beloved space opera genre. Well, those early whispers are wrong. Interstellar delivers, and then some.
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The Overnighters
Hydraulic fracking has turned the sleepy town of Williston, North Dakota, into a hub of the state’s oil boom. The new oil money has drawn hopeful workers from all over the economically depressed United States to the town (its population nearly doubled from 2010 to 2013). However, a lack of affordable housing in the area has created an epidemic of homelessness in the town.
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This month in hip hop
There’s been an unfortunate lull in quality rap releases as of late: two of the stronger albums of the year – Common’s Nobody’s Smiling and Cormega’s Mega Philosophy – were both dropped back on July 22. Since then, we’ve really only seen the welcome comeback of Dilated People, the return of the gangsta (with albums from Jeezy and Gucci Mane) and a steady influx of shitty white rappers.
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Growing pains
Any artistic pursuit involves constant focus, effort and sleepless nights spent sweating over whether or not an individual voice will rise up from the heap of work on the floor. Halifax-based artist Mo Kenney reports that the many years using that exact recipe has paid off in the form of her slightly different second album, In My Dreams.
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Christmas with Kozelek
For a casual Mark Kozelek fan, the last two months of his lengthy career have been a bit inexplicable: first, there was the Hopscotch Music Festival incident (he called a noisy crowd “fucking hillbillies” and told them “to shut the fuck up,” later making t-shirts with the quote to commemorate the standoff). Then came the invented beef with Philadelphia band War on Drugs, which culminated in the highly controversial songs “War on Drugs: Suck My Cock” and “Adam Granofsky Blues.”
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So fresh and so clean
An established downtown Winnipeg recording studio is soldiering on, but under a different name and management.
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Playing with politics
A fictionalized version of Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes centre stage in Proud, the latest production by Theatre Projects Manitoba. The piece is written by Canadian playwright Michael Healey whose first full-length play, The Drawer Boy, premiered back in 1999.
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Everything You Can Imagine Is Real
Imagine a city without art. There would be no colourful murals in the neighbourhood, no books to read before bed and no shows to go to when you just want drink a beer and listen to noise.
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Tinker, Tailor, Szoldier, Buy
“The Z is silent but you still kind of say it."
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Coffee, garbage & female empowerment
Documentaries offering fresh insights into today’s most current and urgent issues will be screening at the 12th Annual Global Justice Film Festival. The event, run and organized entirely by volunteers, spans one evening and a full day at the University of Winnipeg.
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Ida
Ida, the newest film from director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love), is a rare accomplishment. In the tradition of European masterworks like Andrei Rublev or Grand Illusion, it manages to be about a nation and the cataclysms that shaped it, simply by telling a human story. Ida isn’t a throwback to those classics, but it accomplishes the same feat they do: it uses the medium’s most basic elements to create a pure cinematic experience. Free of genre, spectacle or pretension, it’s cinema at its best.
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Nightcrawler
I had a bad feeling during the first few scenes of Nightcrawler. Between the stilted dialogue, heavy-handed media satire and Jake Gyllenhaal’s “look how creepy I am” performance, the film almost totally lost me. “Oh no,” I thought. “Here’s a movie that’s trying way too hard to be something, instead of just being what it wants to be.”
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An extended interview with John Ralston Saul
I realize that you were recently in Winnipeg for the receiving of an honorary doctorate from the U of W, and that is was the university that it was your father attended. How did the convocation go?
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Autumn years
While Autumn Still only formed last November, members of the pop-rock trio have been kicking around the Winnipeg music scene for quite some time.
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F-ckin’ chillin’ out with Chopin
Tom Thacker, frontman for legendary Canadian punk quartet Gob, has creatively grown since the group rose to fame in the mid ‘90s. The band, which plays Winnipeg’s favourite Osborne Village institution Ozzy’s on Oct. 31, did not always view its music as artistically important.
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Nightbreed
Despite the vast number of Canadian-made horror films out there, what exactly defines the genre can be difficult to pinpoint.
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Altman
It’s hard to overstate the influence of director Robert Altman. In his nearly 60 years as a filmmaker, he pioneered a naturalistic style utilizing ensemble casts, improvisational dialogue and a subversive attitude that helped define the New Hollywood of the 1970s. He helmed such classics as MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville, as well as cult favourites Popeye and Secret Honor. He made stars of Donald Sutherland, Shelley Duvall and Elliott Gould.
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Night Moves
The term “neo-neo realism” has been used by some to describe director Kelly Reichardt’s style. Her use of long takes, naturalistic performances and minimalist editing in Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff have made that style the defining characteristic of her work over story or genre trappings. Even Meek’s Cutoff, which could have been a standard western, defies genre classification. In her newest, Night Moves, she’s managed to make a tense and suspenseful thriller that never betrays her style.
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Fostering care
A play about Manitoban kids in the care of Child and Family Services (CFS) has been created by Sarasvàti Productions and VOICES: Manitoba’s Youth in Care Network. The idea began two years ago after Sarasvàti produced previous plays about serious topics such as food banks and gangs.