From the first moment of Bad Santa, the film is fully defining its viewpoint. Billy Bob Thorton, looking alcoholic skinny with a cigarette in his hand and a Santa suit hanging angrily off his lanky frame, provides voice over narration to a scene that is set at a bar and which ends with Billy Bob […]
The last weekend in October was one of the coolest weekends I’ve ever spent in my beloved Toronto. Downtown, in the heart of the ever-gorgeous Distillery District, sits the city’s most valuable performance space: The Young Centre for the Performing Arts. The beautifully designed venue sports a spacious lobby with a bar that serves everything […]
In my University writing classes I always wanted to write inside baseball stories about how Shakespeare people talk about Shakespeare. Every professor I ever had (playwriting, screenwriting, tv writing- all of them) told me I wasn’t allowed. They said the audience would tune the characters out because they didn’t understand, that everything had to be […]
When I say to people that I love all Christmas movies, the good, the bad, and the really bad, I think that I mean it. That doesn’t mean they’re all equally entertaining or anything, but I can sit through pretty much anything if you put a Santa hat on it. I decided to test that […]
Ross Petty’s annual Christmas Pantomime has been a beloved event in Toronto for 16 years. I can remember going as a kid and getting to see Canadian legends like Mr. Dressup (Ernie Coombs), Fred Penner, Kurt Browning, Rex Harrington and Karen Kain onstage as absurd twisted fairy tale creatures. It was the thrill of the […]
Half the battle with watching The Santa Clause is just ignoring the late 90s parade of former stars (Judge Reinhold!) and future stars (David Krumholtz) and stars that inexplicably have stuck around long after their usefulness (Tim Allen, although he actually gets a lifetime pass for Toy Story) that litter the pathways. Add to that […]
It is amazing to me that the release and theatrical run of 50/50 came and went with very minimal hoopla. The film is everything Hollywood commentators love- clever and unexpected but somehow in adherence with current tonal trends, well cast, smartly written, genre subversive, thematically daring, backed by big names and based on a true […]
Shakespeare in Action’s second tragedy isn’t as strong as its repertory companion Romeo and Juliet. While the casually modern staging works wonderfully in R and J, in a modern Mackers a low budget can make things look haphazard because of the precision necessary to pull off a military look. The company would have been better […]