Southside With You takes rom-com in new direction
Film: Sundance Film Festival
Movie about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date takes the frame off the official portrait to paint a tender picture of two people falling in love
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UT — There’s a good chance this year’s Sundance Film Festival will be defined by a larger, and perhaps more honest, discussion about race in America. And if it is, we can look at Richard Tanne’s debut feature Southside With You as a beautiful example of a paradigm shift.
It’s not just an accessible romance starring two rising African-American stars in Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers, it’s a fictionalized take on the first date between would-be First Lady Michelle Robinson and a young Harvard law student named Barack Obama.
We knew the two met at a corporate law firm. We knew she was his advisor. And we knew she wasn’t eager to get involved with a junior, fearing it would erode her professional edge and play into white expectation.
The rest became the ...
Redford defends Sundance’s record on diversity
Film: Sundance Film Festival 2016
Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford says the whole reason he started programming films in Utah's Wasatch Mountains was to broaden the world of mainstream filmmaking to include other voices.
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UTAH - It used to be called an “Oscar race.” Now it’s all about race and the Oscars.
It’s an issue that’s settled into the tissue of the film industry like a bad infection, threatening to throw the whole system into sepsis, and prompting a wholesale change to the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences functions as an organization.
Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced new initiatives Friday, hoping to stop the growing momentum behind a celebrity boycott, assuring the public the Academy membership would look a lot different by the year 2020, with more representation from non-white males, and more women.
Even here at the Sundance Film Festival, where the mountain air and a host of ...
Dirty Grandpa leaves a stain
Movie review: Dirty Grandpa
Robert De Niro and Zac Efron hit the road, and rock bottom, in this grotesquely sexist and vulgar attempt at comedy that uses crack and pedophilia as fodder.
Star Wars: A Feminist Force Awakens
Podcast: Pop This!
Star Wars: The Force Awakens provides a Ton Ton's carcass of content to discuss and, in a pinch, butcher and turn into a sleeping bag in this week's Pop This!
Featuring Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Warner. Produced by Andrea Gin.
A sampling of what you might hear in Episode 11: Star Wars
What would I do with a BB8?
I have never cared about space at all. I can see Star Wars is part of pop culture canon, but it's a conversational understanding of Star Wars.
What you did for me for Real Housewives, I need for you to do me for Star Wars.
I don't think I thought of it as a space movie... It just happens to be set in space.
I was watching the hero's journey: Joseph Campbell figured out we have an innate story we need to experience. I recommend the hero with a thousand faces.
Maybe it's good to watch this movie not stoned out of your gourd.
I feel like this is my literal everyday, I'm invited to save the world and I don't.
It ...
Ten Sundance titles that tweak our critical antenna
Film: The 2016 Sundance Film Festival
This year's festival includes a testament to Kristen Stewart's continuing career in art house cinema, Don Cheadle tooting his own horn as Miles Davis and one movie about a wiener dog, and another about a dog named Weiner.
By Katherine Monk
The festival kicks off in earnest later today with Robert Redford's annual press conference, but before the press corps gets pressed together and becomes a blurb-spouting Borg, I made a list of ten standout titles that may, or may not, get mileage when it's all over:
Captain Fantastic: Viggo Mortensen plays a father who’s raised six kids off the grid, and — for reasons as yet unknown — is forced to plug back in the world he left behind.
Certain Women: Kelly Reichardt is a true independent who embodies the Sundance ethos, and she returns with Certain Women, an adaptation of Maile Meloy’s short stories that stars Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone.
Complete ...
Don’t die: It’s Year of the Pulses
Food: Recipe - Curried Chickpea Soup with Tomatoes, Ginger and Cilantro
The humble pulse could hold the key to a better future with a low carbon footprint and sky-high nutritional value
By Louise Crosby
Unless you were sleeping over the New Year, you will know that 2016 is International Year of Pulses. This piece of news might have struck you as slightly hilarious. With such serious issues facing humankind – climate change, the refugee crisis, Donald Trump – the United Nations dedicates an entire year to the celebration of lentils, chick peas, dried beans and peas?
It’s actually not so crazy. First off, these humble members of the legume family are nutritious – full of protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals – and low in fat. They can help manage diet-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. They’re also inexpensive and contribute to environmental sustainability. According to Pulse Canada, the national industry association and a big player in this ...
Burning out the worry circuit
Fiction: Mob Rule - Part 44
After hightailing it out of the South in a moonshine-mobile, Jack and Vanessa head back to Yankee town pondering a pile of worst-case scenarios
By John Armstrong
It was beautiful day in early fall, and since no one had told the Sun or bees or the birds or the flowers and trees, they carried on as if it were still late August and the air came through the open windows like perfume. It was warm enough for shirtsleeves but I kept my cotton work jacket on over a sleeveless undershirt, what we call in New York a ‘guinea tee.” I would have shucked the jacket but it covered up my shoulder holsters. Just before we left, Cooter advised me that if we were planning on sleeping in the car, it was best to be ready: “There’s people out on the road that will kill you just for practice, and you’re travelling with a good-looking young woman.” He gave me knowing look. “If I was you, I’d shoot first and apologize later.”
It was hard to imagine on a day ...
Talking ’bout my, my vag-g-g-ina
Home Entertainment: Amy Schumer - Live at the Apollo
The world's hottest comic brings a whole new world of oppression to the stage of the legendary Apollo Theatre for her first standup special on HBO
Hitting the road in a Hupmobile
Mob Rule: Part 43
After turning pruny in a bucket of dishwater, Jack realizes he needs to get back to New York City and touch base with his estranged bosses before he's either killed by his own clan, or declared President
By John Armstrong
That said, I wasn’t planning on staying forever. While we dawdled, our bus passes had expired and at night I tried to figure out how long it would take us to save enough to get North. In my less optimistic moments I had visions of ending up like the dirt farmers Vanessa served meals to in every day – too poor to do anything else but keep going the way they were. (I couldn’t count how many times I heard the joke about the farmer who inherited a million dollars and was asked what he planned to do with it – “Reckon I’ll just keep farming till it’s all gone.”) Even working a 14-hour day, after Cooter took off his (more than reasonable) charge for room and board, we had about enough for cigarettes and the occasional trolley ...
What makes a political campaign ugly?
Politics: The art of the campaign
You know the gloves are off when someone makes a comparison to Hitler. It's already happened in the race for the Republican nominee, but Rod Mickleburgh reports it can happen anywhere when tempers flare and common sense is thrown under a campaign bus driven by fear.
By Rod Mickleburgh
Forty years ago this month, all these things really happened.
The premier of British Columbia waited for the provincial election results with his wife and kids in a nondescript Coquitlam motel room behind closed drapes, the windows covered over by aluminum foil to discourage possible snipers. Plainclothes members of the RCMP prowled the corridors, making sure no one approached the premier’s room to try and make good on several anonymous death threats Dave Barrett had received.
It was a fitting end to the nastiest, most laced-with-hysteria election campaign in B.C.’s long polarized history.
The man under police guard was Dave Barrett. For the past ...
