What Made the Sedins Magic? Sixth Puck Sense
Sports: Daniel and Henrik Sedin Say Goodbye
Once called the “Sedin Sisters” by cynical media types who saw the Swedish twins as soft, Daniel and Henrik Sedin proved their taunters wrong with an iron forged commitment to the game, and pure finesse with the puck.
By Rod Mickleburgh
VANCOUVER - The outpouring of admiration and affection for the incomparable Daniel and Henrik Sedin, as they played their final three games for the lowly Canucks, was like nothing I’ve witnessed in my more than half a century of following sports. Fans, scribes, commentators, competitors, all the way down to the referees and well, just about everyone, joined in the celebration and heartfelt farewells in a way that went beyond the usual tributes to the end of a great player’s career. They seemed to be an acknowledgment that, in the 100-year history of the National Hockey League, the Sedins were something special.
They were not the equal of Howe, Gretzky, Lemieux, the Rocket, or some of the ...
Mina Shum Gets Her Freaky Friday On
Interview: Mina Shum
The Vancouver filmmaker always wanted to make a movie about how she and her mother are so different, and in her new movie Meditation Park, she reunites with Sandra Oh to make it happen.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER — Mina Shum says she's trying to be “a good Chinese daughter.” After a greeting at the door of the hotel suite, she ushers me to a seat, and checks to make sure the publicist is comfortable. The place is all too generic for a talk about the particular. With its creamy white walls and bleached white linens, the hotel room overlooking Vancouver’s downtown skyline is all postcard pretty, displaying snow-capped mountains and green-patina copper rooftops. Shum says she loves every corner of this coastal town, but her new movie Meditation Park is looking at a different view of the city she calls home.
Set in the Eastside neighbourhood of Sunrise-Hastings, and focused on one family’s love-laden unravelling, Meditation Park stars Asian heavywe...
Here Comes A Regular: A Photographic Archive of The Railway Club
Ex-Press Salon: The Railway Club Regulars
Natasha Moric tended bar at Vancouver's Railway Club for more than 20 years, in the days before selfies and Instagram, but she took her camera to work and captured the regulars -- in their comfort zone without filters
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC — Shakespeare said truth was best found at the bottom of a wine cup, which is why bar life has always attracted the artistic eye.
Jan Steen created a tradition with his paintings of rosy-cheeked drunkards in the 1600s, followed centuries later by Van Gogh and the Impressionists. Then photography came along and allowed what French writer Pierre Mac Orlan described as the ability “to capture the fantastic forms of life which require at least a second’s immobility to be perceptible.”
In the world of street photography, these glimmering moments of truth come to us a flashes in the darkness: a frozen moment of euphoria on the dancefloor, the desperation of a lurid glance near closing ...
Maze Runner Loses Route in Frantic Final Chapter
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
Dylan O'Brien returns as Thomas, a talented and genetically gifted teenager who leads a renegade group of kids looking to overthrow the wicked world of grown-ups in this final chapter of James Dashner's saga.
Bjarke Ingels talks BIG in new documentary
Movie review: Big Time
The man behind the architectural powerhouse, BIG, gets a medium close-up in Kaspar Astrup Schröder's globe-trotting portrait that takes us to the heights of Manhattan's skyline to the depths of a Danish maritime museum
Irene Howard, History Is Her Story
People: Plaque unveiled for Helena Guttridge
Mayor's tribute to Vancouver's first female councillor strikes a personal note for Rod Mickleburgh, who in turn honours a chronicler he calls 'Auntie Irene'
By Rod Mickleburgh
(May 19, 2017) - At the age of 70, my beloved Auntie Irene, under her scholastic name of Irene Howard, published her definitive biography of Helena Gutteridge, Vancouver’s first woman “alderman”. Ten years later, when she was 80, she completed her remarkable book Gold Dust On His Shirt, a moving saga of her family’s working class life in the gold mines of British Columbia, feathered with impeccable research of the times. At 90 she published a very fine poem, which is reproduced below.
And one morning last month, at the age of 94 and a half, Auntie Irene sat in the front row of chairs arrayed in a room off the main lobby at city hall, looking as elegant and vivacious as anyone who pre-dated Vancouver’s Art Deco municipal masterpiece by 14 years ...
Margie Gillis moves through it
Dance: Pearl - The Show, Queen Elizabeth Theatre Oct. 27, 28
The Canadian dance icon digs deep in a new show that pays tribute to the Pulitzer-winning author of The Good Earth, but that's just the beginning of Margie Gillis's bid to help us 'reincorporate' and find our inner Pearl
By Katherine Monk
(October 24, 2016) VANCOUVER – Dance icon Margie Gillis has many honours to pin on her lapels: Officer of the Order of Canada, Knight of the National Order of Quebec, Lifetime Achievement honoree at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards and the first-ever winner of the Stella Adler Studio’s MAD Spirit Award.
Yet, there’s one credit she’s particularly proud of, though it features no hardware, prize money or resume-worthy mention. “I was listed as one of the reasons why the Sun News Network failed,” says Gillis over a requisite latte in Vancouver Monday.
In town for a two-night performance of Pearl, a “Broadway-style” production that celebrates the life ...
Sharlto Copley: Never a cop out
People - Interview with Sharlto Copley
The recently transplanted South African talent focused on staying alive as he donned a variety of hardhats in the new, boundary-pushing action movie Hardcore Henry
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – “Let’s not die today.” According to Sharlto Copley, those four words were a daily mantra on the set of Hardcore Henry.
“It was a big discussion: No one must die making this film. We talked about it because we were pushing the boundaries and the rules and we had very little money. On the days where there was a very high risk, we’d fly the Jolly Roger – skull and crossbones – in a prominent place to make sure everyone was on guard and alert,” says Copley, sitting down for a chat at a high end Vancouver hotel.
“Everything you see in the movie happens. When you see a guy getting blown up and the van beneath him, that’s actually happening… It was by far the most risk I’ve taken as an actor, which sounds so lame ...
Robert Carlyle boards new train as director
People: Robert Carlyle
Robert Carlyle gets back to his Glaswegian roots and takes a bit off the top as a barber with Barbicide on his mind, and a mother who loves a good game of bingo as much as a grisly murder in The Legend of Barney Thomson.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – Everyone’s been asking him about Trainspotting 2, but Robert Carlyle has more on his plate than a plan to reprise the role of Begbie in an as-yet-to-be scripted sequel to Danny Boyle’s breakout film about heroin addicts.
For the past few years, he’s been living in Vancouver playing Mr. Gold in the successful Disney TV series Once Upon a Time, and before that, he was Dr. Nicholas Rush in the B.C.-shot SGU: Stargate Universe. He says he loves Canada’s west coast. But after making his directorial debut with the Glasgow-shot black comedy Barney Thomson, released in theatres this week, Carlyle says he’s looking at a tough decision somewhere down the road. He may want to hang around town. Even ...
Ryan Reynolds: swimming in Deadpool success
People: Ryan Reynolds Interview
Ryan Reynolds wears his love of Vancouver on his fleshy sleeve with a tattoo of the Nine O'Clock Gun, but thanks to the skyrocketing success of Deadpool, the sexiest dad alive is making a big noise of his own.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – He’s officially the hottest star in Hollywood now that Deadpool has racked up a quarter-billion $US in its first week of release and launched an on-line fan frenzy demanding he host SNL, get his own statue in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, and get on with spawning a series of Deadpool sequels.
Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds has come a long way since his so-called “breakout year” back in ’02-’03, when he made the leap from recurring roles on TV shows such as Fifteen, The Odyssey and The Outer Limits to being the star of features films. He played a party hound Van Wilder, and a master thief in Foolproof, Canada’s first full-size experiment with the action genre. The whole movie was geared ...
