Black Mass: A Whiter Shade of Noir
Johnny Depp's performance as real-life criminal James 'Whitey' Bulger is just another anemic reflection of film noir, the once-virile genre that gave birth to the gangster as American antihero and offered a cautionary tale for the collective subconscious
“One morning I woke up, and couldn’t move…”
Column: The Sick Days, Part 1
Journalist Shelley Page remembers the day her life changed at the hands of a serious autoimmune disease, and how she learned to survive the rigours of the old newsrooms on a daily dose of prednisone.
Mystery Illness: In search of an oil can
By Shelley Page
On Easter Sunday, when I was 19, I awoke from panicky dreams of missed j-school deadlines and failed foul shots to find that I was encased in a body bag of pain.
Before I consciously understood that I couldn’t move, my first thoughts were of a feature story due the next day, an air ball I doinked in the last basketball game of an inauspicious season for Carleton University, and a gnawing hunger for carbs.
I imagined crumpets, discounted and day-old, from the thrift bakery around the corner. My roommates and I survived on its discards.
Before I consciously understood that I couldn’t move, my first thoughts were of a feature story due the next day, an air ball I doinked in the last ...
Fending off the fall chill with lentil, tomato and Tuscan kale soup
When the leaves turn and the sun sinks early, it's time to talk lentils -- the edible pulse that will keep you warm, boost your calcium and create a hearty potage that's good for cardiac health
By Louise Crosby
September 18, 2015 -- Ok, we’ve had our fun with summer food. The weather is turning cool and it’s time to pay a bit more attention to what we eat. It’s time to talk lentils.
You’ve heard the drill: Whether brown, green or orange, lentils are full of vitamins and fibre, and contain high levels of iron and fat-free protein. They lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar, and contribute to heart health. We should be eating mountains of them, but let’s face it, unless they’re dressed up with lots of flavour, lentils can be a bit of a slog.
Marco Canora, owner of the New York City restaurant Hearth, shows us the way. His recipe for Lentil Soup with Tomato and Tuscan Kale, from his cookbook A Good Food Day, layers flavour upon flavour ...
Mob Rule – The Bloodbath Begins
Mob Rule: Part One
Gang wars are always brutal and bloody, but if you can't take the heat, you best get out of the place where they make the pasta. That's right, if you like your eggs hardboiled and your orange juice on the pulpy side, then John Armstrong's novel is right up your dark alley as he leads us on a continuing journey to the kingdom of Mob Rule. In this opening instalment, shots are fired, someone goes down and someone brushes off their Borsalino to live another day in the gritty city.
“If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity.”
-- Voltaire
By John Armstrong
CHAPTER ONE
I was already flat on the ground before I heard the bullets. We had just reached the bottom of the steps when Coriolano, my bodyguard, grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me to the sidewalk, then chips of concrete and stone were dancing in the air to the whine of ricochets and the silly sounding ...
Truth is stranger than TIFF
Real-life dramas make their appearance at the Toronto film festival, but sometimes in the movies, facts get in the way of a good story
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Truth occasionally makes an appearance at a Toronto International Film Festival, although usually not in the presence of a movie star (“You were great, Kevin!”) It pops up in a few movies, more or less; not just in documentaries, its natural home, but in the Hollywood versions of real-life stories, usually twisted ever so slightly to make it more interesting, or cinematic, or sellable. Sure, truth is stranger than fiction, but the challenge is to make it more lucrative.
The biggest “true” story at TIFF is Spotlight, the Tom McCarthy version of the real-life expose by the Boston Globe of the scandal of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests (the Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer prize for the story.)
Spotlight — the name of the four-person investigative team at the Globe that ...
Pop Culture Decoder: Cosmetic Dermatology
Misty Harris suffers the horrors of Thermage so you don't have to
By Misty Harris
I always intended to grow old gracefully, like Audrey Hepburn or a chunk of parmesan cheese. Things did not go as planned.
Around the time I turned 30, a collection of creases made camp on my face – the human equivalent of rings on a tree – and proceeded to mock my age every time I looked in a mirror. Now, I’ve never thought of myself as vain, but I also never thought I’d look between my eyebrows and see skin pleats that resembled a vagina. So there’s that.
This is how, about four years ago, I wound up forking over nearly two weeks’ salary for Thermage – a cosmetic dermatology procedure that proved so traumatic, I’m only just now able to discuss it. My consultation went something like this:
A physician identifying himself as Dr. Bob* (in the grand tradition of quackery, he omitted his last name) escorted me into his office and asked me to describe my “most urgent” ...
#TIFF15 – LEGEND measures Hardy’s range
Tom Hardy sinks his incisors into the dual role of duelling siblings Reggie and Ronnie Kray in Brian Helgeland's stylish gangster drama that takes on classical and classist themes, then pummels them to pulp
LEGEND
Directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Christopher Eccleston, Chazz Palminteri, Tara Fitzgerald, Taron Egerton.
Thirty years ago, Tom Cruise made a fantasy movie with Tim Curry, a herd of unicorns and director Ridley Scott called Legend. This is not that movie. If there’s any connection to be made, Brian Helgeland’s LEGEND shares DNA with The Krays, Peter Medak’s 1990 movie about Reggie and Ronnie Kray, twin brothers who ruled the London underworld in the 1960s.
Violent, cocky, but entirely self-created criminal kingpins, Reggie and Ronnie Kray became guttersnipe folk heroes: Kids from the wrong side of London who cracked the upper crust with fists and a shiv.
Their story really is ...
Is Tom Hardy the best actor in the world?
The star of the new gangster drama Legend is a versatile actor whose roles range from the indomitable Mad Max the villainous Bane. Is there nothing he can't do?
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Tom Hardy might be the best actor of his generation.
He can do anything. He was the scary buff gangster in Bronson and then he was the scary but doomed hit man Ricki Tarr in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. Next thing you know, he’s Bane, the gigantic muscled villain in The Dark Knight Rises, growling through a leather mask. Hard to believe it was the same guy in Locke, a solo film about a man who’s responsible for the concrete in a British construction project, called away because a woman he once slept with is about to give birth to their child. Now he’s Bob, the compliant bartender in the gangster drama The Drop who turns out to be a guy you don’t want to screw around with. Then he’s the indomitable (but vulnerable!) hero in the post-apocalyptic desert in Mad Max: Fury ...
#TIFF15: Demolition deconstructs grief with heart
The Toronto International Film Festival opened with Jean-Marc Vallée's off-beat drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts
Demolition
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis.
Jean-Marc Vallée’s opening night movie befuddled some critics here in Toronto, but I fell in love with this movie about an investment banker who unravels in the wake of a personal tragedy — if only because I had no idea how it would end. Anyone who reads the synopsis of Brian Sipe’s screenplay knows how it begins: Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in the car with his wife arguing over a leaky refrigerator when the random force of fate T-bones their vehicle. His wife is killed, but Davis escapes without so much as a scratch. On the surface he is whole, but beneath the shiny exterior, he is shattered — and it’s this dissonance that powers the whole off-beat drama.
How could an external reality and an internal truth be ...
TIFF report: So far, so exciting
It’s easy to find things to love at the Toronto film festival, especially if you let Alfred Hitchcock be your guide through the movie magic, writes Jay Stone
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — On the sidewalk of John Street, just around the corner from the theatre where most of the Toronto International Film Festival movies are screened, someone has stenciled the instruction, “Find out what you love and let it kill you.”
It’s a line from Charles Bukowski — who found out that he loved alcohol, then died of it, thus proving the authenticity of his advice, if not the wisdom — and it’s an ideal motto for TIFF, where, if you’re not done in by the pace of the films or the parties, you’re also tempted by the unlimited free doughnuts in the hospitality suite of EOne, the distributor that runs a must-visit salon on a high floor of the nearby Intercontinental Hotel.
Mmmm. Doughnuts. I mean, Movies.
It’s also ...
