Above the Fold 151 results

Michael Joplin remembers a happy Janis

Interview: Michael Joplin Though Janis Joplin's surviving siblings don't occupy huge amounts of screen time, Michael and Laura Joplin's presence brings a new dimension to Amy Berg's new documentary, Janis: Little Girl Blue, premiering tonight on PBS

Art Bergmann plays The Apostate

Music: Interview with Art Bergmann The former Vancouver punk icon says his joints are sore, his back aches and his neck breaks, but the release of his first new LP in a decade proves Art Bergmann is more than a survivor, he's close to folk hero By Katherine Monk For the first few minutes, we talk about sciatica, arthritis, spinal surgery and who’s dead. That's just what happens when you're over 50 and you haven't spoken to someone in 20 years. Even if that someone is Art Bergmann – the iconic face of Canadian punk rock turned apostate. Make that “The Apostate,” because after an extended recording hiatus that witnessed the release of just one EP and a lost recordings collection over the course of a decade, Bergmann has a new LP, The Apostate, what he calls his “response to living in the west." Bouncing from Vancouver to a small parcel of Albertan landscape situated near “the beige town of Airdrie,” Bergmann started a new life with his wife Sherri a decade ...
2Score

Mother’s Day: Greeting Cardboard

Movie review: Mother’s Day Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts and Kate Hudson bend over backward to accommodate cliche in this yoga class for yummy mummies
3.5Score

Green Room: a zombie movie sans zombies

Movie review: Green Room Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to Blue Ruin reimagines zombie movie cliche as a real-life face-off between a struggling punk band and a group of calculating white supremacists laying siege to their dressing room

Snack in a Snap: Cherry Almond Bars

Food: Recipe - Cherry Almond Bars When it's too early for rhubarb and too late for fruitcake, pick this cherry almond treat to feed your appetite for something fresh, fruity and dessert-y By Louise Crosby I wanted to do a blog on rhubarb this week to signal the arrival of spring, but alas, there was no rhubarb to be found. Spring is dragging its heels in these parts; warm weather is that elusive thing that could arrive next week, or the week after. We are waiting for so many things: crab apple blossoms, fiddleheads, green grass. We’re right on the verge but not quite there. Badly in need of something fresh and bright and new to eat, I found this recipe for cherry almond squares, ran up the street to our neighbourhood grocery to buy a bag of frozen cherries, and got to work. Now that’s coming to terms with reality. There’s nothing wrong with frozen cherries, in fact they work perfectly in these rich, crumbly squares. Combined in a pot with some sugar and lemon, they ...
3.5Score

Movie review: Sleeping Giant evokes the darkness of youth

Movie review: Sleeping Giant Three teenagers spending the summer at an isolated park recreate the malice and confusions of adolescence in this small Canadian film with big ambitions

Horns of a dilemma

Movies: A trumpet player's take on two new brassy biopics Searching for a proper trumpet movie proves problematic when Hollywood insists on blowing all the false notes in a bid to cook up drama and romantic heroes by Charles Gordon Trumpet players hardly every get to have movies made about them — unlike, say, ninjas. As luck would have it, there are two big ones out at the same time, Born to Be Blue, a fictionalized version of Chet Baker’s life, and Miles Ahead, a drama about Miles Davis. As a trumpet player, woefully amateur but serious about it, I have to say that the real star of Born to Be Blue is not Ethan Hawke, the Hollywood star, who plays Chet, but Kevin Turcotte, the Toronto trumpet player, who plays the music of Chet on the soundtrack. More on that later. In the jokes that are made about musicians (drummers who slow down, guitarists who play out of tune, unemployable trombonists) the stereotype of the trumpet players is the arrogant show-off. The trumpet ...
3.5Score

Movie review: Miles Ahead of its time

Don Cheadle's jumpy, jazzy biography of Miles Davis takes a lot of liberties with the facts, but it reminds you that jazz itself takes a lot of liberties with the notes

Nadia Litz and Jai West dig deep in The People Garden

People: Interview - Nadia Litz and Jai West on The People Garden The former actor and first-time feature director says she wanted to create a female character in her 20s who could ride a wave of emotional ambiguity to escape the warm, fuzzy, vulnerable and typically banal female box   By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER, BC – Ambiguity isn’t a topic that generally lends itself to passion, yet a recent sit-down with director-writer Nadia Litz and actor Jai West reveals a mental desire to resist closure that’s near obsessive. “Oh man. Ambiguity is the whole thing…” says Litz. “It’s everything. It’s the theme of the film: that there is no black and white conclusion to anything. It’s what relationships are. It’s what life is. It’s what death is.” When Litz talks about “the whole thing,” she’s talking about The People Garden, her debut feature starring West, Pamela Anderson and Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel Hemingway, niece of the late Margaux). ...
3Score

A Hologram for the King an empty projection

Movie review: A Hologram for the King Tom Hanks's latest feels like a collection of the beloved actor's greatest hits all rolled into one big lump of fish-out-of-water comedy that flops around on deck for the duration