Launching a Rocket in the Living Room
DIY Column: The Apollo XIII Project
A New Year’s resolution to reuse, recycle or purge was already in progress, then the pandemic happened, and what started as a creative bid to turn garbage into art suddenly morphed into a personal Apollo XIII mission: Without access to Home Depot, can you find a way to repurpose what you already have?
Bruce McDonald gives Stephen McHattie a double-scoop of Dreamland
Movies: Interview with Canadian director Bruce McDonald
McDonald’s latest film features a drug-addicted trumpet player and a jaundiced hitman on a collision course in the middle of Europe. “It’s about the journeyman and the artist,” says the director. He might as well have been talking about McHattie himself -- the Canadian character actor who sits at the heart of this “one-man two-hander.”
Tell the Ones You Love, now more than ever
Column: The Balm of Poetry Part 6 - Dennis Lee’s Tell the Ones You Love
Tell the Ones You Love - A short, sweet poem about love. As we struggle to cope with the terrible sweep of this unforgiving virus, Rod Mickleburgh says he finds it particularly apt.
First Stripes revises bootcamp cliché with a Canadian accent
Movie Review: First Stripes
Jean-François Caissy’s fly-on-the-wall documentary isn't about glorifying the military with a starry-eyed salute to symbols. It's about celebrating the humans who sacrifice a part of themselves for the national ideal, but more importantly, for each other.
Greed mauls corpulent corpse of affluence
Movie review: Greed
Michael Winterbottom gives the billionaire class a kick in their overweighted assets in Greed, a black comedy that tries to address systemic inequality through an unsympathetic character modelled after the founder of Top Shop. It’s an interesting movie, but that doesn’t mean it’s an artistic, or even a rhetorical, success.
Giller winner conjures ghost of Fitz St. John
History: The Saga of Fitz St. John
Behind Esi Edugyan's Giller Prize-winning novel about the astounding exploits of Barbados-born Washington Black lies the very true story of William Fitzclarence “Fitz” St. John: A Vancouver longshoreman, unionist, and pioneer who -- alongside his Indigenous co-workers -- blazed a trail for equality and fair wages on the docks.
