month : 11/2016 15 results

Tatiana Maslany, Tom Cullen fire up first-timer

Interview: Joey Klein on The Other Half In a world full of malaise, misanthropy and unmitigated sorrow, first-time filmmaker Joey Klein says he wants to hold up a funhouse mirror to ambient pain By Katherine Monk (November 30, 2016) Joey Klein is what you’d call a ‘late bloomer.’ When he was a kid growing up in Montreal, he assumed he’d become a doctor like his father. He ended up in McGill management school instead, and hated it. So he headed to New York City at the age of 25 to study acting, a career he pursued with success, landing roles in American Gangster and 12 Monkeys -- to name a few. Yet, he craved a bigger challenge still. He had a hankering to address the ambient angst of modern experience – without exploiting Hollywood trope – so he started writing. And now, just a year shy of his 40th birthday, he's making his directorial debut with the theatrical release of The Other Half. “Originally, it was a story about grief… and about grief over time. ...

Between the lines: Delicate tragedy of Manchester by the Sea

Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan makes a triumphant return to movies with a story about a solitary man who must go back home to face his family and the events that changed his life By Jay Stone TORONTO — There’s a scene in the penetrating and devastating drama Manchester by the Sea where Casey Affleck, playing a loner with a crippling secret in his past, stands in front of a burning building. It’s defining tragedy in the film: the Affleck character, named Lee, has just been to the grocery store to buy some 2 a.m. snacks and beer, and he has returned to find his life going up in flames. It’s the kind of moment that would call — in a lesser film — for a lot of outsized emotions. But Manchester by the Sea is too quiet and controlled for that: it’s written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, a master of understated sadness, and has in Affleck a leading man whose own work (he’s the younger, less famous brother of Ben) reflects a though...

Remembrance of Moosewood

Recipe: Cauliflower Cheese Soup The vegetarian collective based in Ithaca gave birth to a popular cookbook and launched the career of Molly Katzen back in the 1970s, yet despite changing times, the soup remains the same By Louise Crosby There was a time in my life when I lived with friends in an old farmhouse in the country, with chickens in the yard, a big vegetable garden, and lots of cats. During the week, we drove into the city for jobs or school, but come the weekend, we were back-to-the-landers in plaid shirts and work boots, often congregating in the big homey kitchen at some point in the day to cook a communal meal. A rosy picture, I know, but those are my memories. Our little hippie commune worked out pretty well for awhile. We were all interested in healthy food, and made a lot of beans and brown rice. Unlike now, when new and wonderful cookbooks come out every day, there weren’t as many recipe books to choose from. I mostly remember the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, The ...

Mom is the Flash, Dad is the Slow

Daddy Diary: Part Seven Faster than an unfired bullet: A first-time father discovers his superpower has nothing to do with speed, and everything to do with slowing down to a snail's pace By Chris Lackner “This is a job for… The Slow.” That’s my superhero name at home these days — prompted by my less-than lightning flash responses to my newborn daughter’s needs. Mom may be The Flash, but dad is decidedly less so. “Faster than an unfired bullet. More powerful than your average eight-year-old. Able to leap tall stuffed animals in a single bound (on his good days). He is… The Slow.” Is Dad on diaper duty? Triple or quadruple the time required to complete the task. Is Dad sent to find some kind of baby item — cloth, blanket, toy, cream, soother etc.? Don’t wait up for him; he’ll be back before dawn. It’s not that I decided to become The Slow. No superhero chooses their destiny – their destiny is thrust upon them. With great power comes great responsibility ...

Elle and the politics of rape

Movie Review: Elle Paul Verhoeven's provocation gives Isabelle Huppert a difficult and complex role, but the movie itself is a confused series of disturbing incidents about the meaning of sexual assault

Hello Tokyo, How You’ve Changed

Globe Trot: Tokyo Returning to Japan's teeming metropolis after a 60-year absence offers a distilled glimpse of technological progress and the immutable Japanese character By Charley Gordon (November 22, 2016) In the busy Asakusa neighbourhood of Tokyo is the Senso-ji Temple, a major attraction. Thousands of people jam the narrow street leading from the gate to the temple, which is lined with dozens of shops selling just about anything. Not everything sold relates to religion. In fact, there is a store that sells cookies that are made right in front of you by a machine. Japanese, unlike North Americans, don’t eat on the streets but those cookies are a temptation. Hence a sign, in the kind of Japanese English that has always held a peculiar charm: "This street is not able to eat while walking." After being away from Japan for 60 years, it was encouraging to see that some things haven’t changed. The Japanese do things their own way, no matter how much Western influence they ...

Fantastic Beasts found but the magic is missing

Movie review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Eddie Redmayne unpacks some familiar plays for sympathy as a magical brand of Dr. Doolittle in an undeniably disappointing Harry Potter prequel

Leonard Cohen and me: A reminiscence

By Jay Stone   Even if we stated our case very clearly and all those who held as we do came to our side, all of them, we would still be very few. -- Leonard Cohen, Parasites of Heaven When he died last week his constituency emerged, thousands, millions perhaps, smitten, devoted, some with stories of how they had gone to his house in Montreal and he had made them egg salad sandwiches. He was gracious, modest, haunting, and with the key to something we thought was ours alone. “Have you ever noticed how private a wet tree is, a curtain of razor blades?,” he wrote (in A Cross Didn’t Fall On Me), and suddenly you did notice. A poem is something that everyone knows but no one ever said before. I found him by accident. When I was a teenager, there was a copy of his first novel, The Favourite Game, on the bookshelf in my father’s den when we lived in north Toronto. I don’t know how it got there, but my father got a lot of books from publishers because he was on the radio ...

Soothe your soul with Sweet Potato

Recipe: Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Honey, Espelette & Lime Yogurt The world may be falling to pieces and suffering from the DTs, but there's hope and healing in a dose of sweet potatoes: they're a comfort food, super, too By Louise Crosby (November 15, 2016) It seemed strange, in the past week, to be testing a recipe for sweet potatoes as 'DT' became leader of the free world and Leonard Cohen bid us farewell. The world is a much more worrisome place this week, but we have to hold on to the life we believe in, no matter how mundane, and move forward. So there you go: sweet potatoes. As you probably already know, these humble spuds are a super food, rich in vitamin A in the form of beta carotene. They are also a good source of vitamin C, manganese, copper, pantothenic acid, potassium, some of the B vitamins, and dietary fiber. Despite their sweetness, they are considered to be low on the glycemic index. So any which way we want to eat these tubers is a good idea. This simple ...

Arrival proves mind-altering

Movie review: Arrival Denis Villeneuve's latest may look like a simple first-contact story, but it goes much deeper as it questions the linear nature of time and the role of language