Handing out Canadian Candy
News: The Canadian Screen Awards 2016
Room cleans up with nine wins in the film category, including best picture, while Schitt's Creek, Book of Negroes and Orphan Black dominate the TV side of Canada's annual awards show... now called The Candys?
By Katherine Monk
It was pretty good, eh? They had a big stage. A band. Gold statuettes. A host that wasn't William Shatner. And people in the audience -- some of whom were even recognizable. More importantly, this year's Canadian Screen Awards also included a few titles with proven international appeal, such as the TV show Orphan Black and the film Room, the Oscar-nominated drama that cleaned up with nine wins at Sunday night's gala, including best picture, best director, best actress, best actor, best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay for Emma Donoghue. For an awards broadcast that's struggled with audience ambivalence and stumping films with no box-office visibility, this year's show, hosted by Norm Macdonald and ...
Trump Stumbles Right On
Politics: Feeling Blue in a Red State
As Republican rallies descend into racist violence and rhetorical chaos, right-wing talk-radio's angry baby of anti-government sentiment comes of age carrying a verbal assault weapon and a whole lot of attitude
By Carla McClain
OK, boys and girls, time to cut to the chase. Time to figure out why a once-functional nation like the United States of America is about to nominate for its President -- arguably the most powerful political office in the world -- a bloviating birther braggadocio blowhard, aka Donald J. Trump. How did we get here? What in the name of God has happened to us? That’s not hard to figure out.... Welcome to the fruits of twenty-five years of the highly effective brainwashing of a good chunk of the American people -- OK, let’s say it, the weak-minded sheeple among us, and there are lots of those throughout the human species -- by right-wing talk-radio. I happen to know how this got done because I -- unlike ...
Preparing for Parenthood
The Daddy Diary Part 1 – The NeverEnding Story
A veteran journalist tackles his hardest assignment yet: parenthood. A long-time fatherhood fence sitter, he takes his inspiration from a family of storytellers - not to mention the adventures of a boy and his dragon.
The Little Prince gets a little lost
Movie review: The Little Prince
An uneven effort with plenty of good intentions, Mark Osborne's adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's kid-lit classic gains a new dimension but loses some depth
Feeling all pains and needles
The Sick Days: Part 22
After toughing out the chronic pain of inflamed joints and fever flashes, a young reporter hits the wall and lands in the hospital where hiding the truth about her illness is no longer an option
By Shelley Page
An ‘X’ was drawn on my back to mark the spot where the biopsy needle was to be plunged. That’s when the nephrologist executed the bait and switch. “Ok, how about you do it?” “The biopsy? Me?” Hovering over me — face down, backside up— the attending nephrologist discussed the procedure with the resident, who’d been at his side since I met them the previous afternoon. (It was a teaching hospital). “Yes, you’ve watched enough of these. You’re ready.” “It’s a straight shot?” “More or less.” One of them touched my shoulder. “How are you feeling?” Uh. I lifted my head, twisted my neck to look them both in the eyes. I’d read somewhere that you’re supposed to make eye contact with ...
After a life in news, one last plea
People: Tribute to Ron Rose (1919-2015)
A veteran newspaper man files a final message to readers: "Do what you can to stem the unedited and often unsourced outpourings in the flood of social media."
By Rod Mickleburgh
We said farewell late last month to a good man. Part of the great generation that survived the Depression, World War Two, the tinderbox of the Cold War and Liberace, Ron Rose was part of this crazy world for nearly a century, falling just four years short of the big One Zero Zero. But that’s not why so many of us gathered to pay our respects. We were there because Ron Rose, besides being the most gracious and generous of individuals, was a newspaper man. It was a gathering of the clans, a celebration of someone whose working life as a knight of the keyboard stretched back to the Depression. Ron Rose was history. When he started at the Vancouver Sun as a copy boy in 1938, he reported for work in the celebrated Sun Tower, then topped by the paper’s majestic neon ...
Pick a Pepper, Stuff a Pepper
Food: Recipe - Cheesy Stuffed Poblanos
While stuffing peppers is a cross-cultural tradition, Mexico's passion for stuffing the warmly flavoured poblano is close to perfection
By Louise Crosby
For eons, people have been stuffing vegetables – with rice and other grains, beans, meats, cheeses. Think of eggplant stuffed with spiced lamb and pine nuts, pale green zucchini stuffed with ground beef and rice and cooked in a yogurt or tomato sauce, mushrooms stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese, squash stuffed with quinoa and feta. It’s a traditional and creative way to liven up a vegetable, make it the star attraction, in fact, and to pack more nutrition into your meal. Peppers are a natural for stuffing because they’re hollow, and in Mexico, chiles rellenos – poblano peppers filled with cheese, dipped in an egg batter, and fried – are a favourite food. America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook played with that idea by first microwaving the peppers for a ...
Robert Carlyle boards new train as director
People: Robert Carlyle
Robert Carlyle gets back to his Glaswegian roots and takes a bit off the top as a barber with Barbicide on his mind, and a mother who loves a good game of bingo as much as a grisly murder in The Legend of Barney Thomson.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – Everyone’s been asking him about Trainspotting 2, but Robert Carlyle has more on his plate than a plan to reprise the role of Begbie in an as-yet-to-be scripted sequel to Danny Boyle’s breakout film about heroin addicts. For the past few years, he’s been living in Vancouver playing Mr. Gold in the successful Disney TV series Once Upon a Time, and before that, he was Dr. Nicholas Rush in the B.C.-shot SGU: Stargate Universe. He says he loves Canada’s west coast. But after making his directorial debut with the Glasgow-shot black comedy Barney Thomson, released in theatres this week, Carlyle says he’s looking at a tough decision somewhere down the road. He may want to hang around town. Even ...
Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment
Entertainment: @home releases for March 8
Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car
By Katherine Monk
We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5) The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur. They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is. Charlie ...
London Has Fallen and it can't get up
Movie review: London Has Fallen
Gerard Butler returns as the bulletproof bodyguard who slays terrorists, butchers an American accent and saves the free world before breakfast
