Entertainment 505 results

Movies, music and popular culture reports from Ex-Press staff

David Bezmozgis dives into Russian diaspora

Interview: David Bezmozgis on Natasha The Toronto-based writer-director grew up in a community of Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, but decades later he says the "Russian immigrant experience" has become more difficult to define -- yet far more interesting to explore through drama By Katherine Monk The “immigrant experience” is a phrase that’s been getting a lot of media mileage in the wake of Syria’s collapse and continuing mass displacement due to climate change, but as a phrase, it’s generic. It assumes all immigrants share a similar reality: a sense of exile and limited expression until assimilation takes hold. Toronto author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis thinks the North American “immigrant community” deserves better than a broad label between quotation marks, so he wrote a short story called Natasha, originally published in Harper’s before appearing in a bound collection in 2004. A Lolita-like yarn about a sexy young Russian girl who moves ...

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
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
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). ...
4Score

Hello, My Name is Doris – the Exploress

Movie Review: Hello, My Name is Doris Sally Field finds fertile terrain as an eccentric hoarder in Hello, My Name is Doris, a feel-good romantic comedy aimed at menopausal women that's appealing to all
2.5Score

The Huntsman: Winter’s War cold as ice

Movie review: The Huntsman Female relationships falls prey to cleavage from The Huntsman's axe in Grimm revision of Snow White saga