Appears in: Back Patio Press
Release Date: May 15/2020
Summary: A cinemagoer is startled by the strangely patriotic alternate ending of a sci-fi blockbuster.
Read it for free at Back Patio Press (or continue reading below).
Appears in: Back Patio Press
Release Date: May 15/2020
Summary: A cinemagoer is startled by the strangely patriotic alternate ending of a sci-fi blockbuster.
Read it for free at Back Patio Press (or continue reading below).
Appears in: Sci-Fi & Scary
Release Date: May 10/2020
Summary: A tongueless punk rocker and an AWOL nurse revolt against a tyrannical government.
Read it for free at Sci-Fi & Scary (or continue reading below).
With Ordinary Man, Ozzy Osbourne presents his most personal album yet, without losing any of his theatricality.
He’s also in very good hands musically, with accompaniment from members of Guns N’ Roses, Rage Against the Machine, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and guest vocals by everyone from Elton John to Post Malone.
Reading Brendan Vidito’s Nightmares in Ecstasy is like entering a basement laboratory to find hundreds of unspeakable things sealed in jars, peering through the murk to glimpse eyeballs and tentacles and other mutated appendages that appear unnervingly human, but somehow not.
It’s been a weird few weeks, to be honest.
UPDATE: This post was written back in March, when the 2020 JUNOs were facing an uncertain future. I’m happy to report that the Awards will be broadcast on CBC Music at 7 PM EST on June 29th/2020.
Richard Stanley’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Colour Out Of Space is a wonderfully weird cosmic horror freak-out featuring Nicolas Cage at his most bizarre.
Beloved children’s songwriter Fred Penner entertained a crowd of kids (and a handful of nostalgic adults) at Algonquin Commons Theatre Friday night.
Marking the anniversary of his 1980 The Cat Came Back record, the show featured familiar tunes from throughout his career, including a pair of songs from 2017’s Hear The Music as well as music from his TV show Fred Penner’s Place, which ran for 900 episodes on the CBC in the 1980s and 1990s.
Forty years after the release of his debut, Penner’s whimsy and wordplay still charms. Onstage for over an hour, he held the audience’s attention with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a collection of shanties about sandwiches, lonely bumps, rude goblins, and a menagerie of delightful animals. The understated animations that accompanied the music had an earthy, storybook quality, enhancing but not overwhelming the simple songs.
There’s a timeless aspect to Penner’s music, which draws from classic folk and country. Chatting with the crowd between songs, he noted that some of his most well-known covers (such as Wild West ghost story “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and “Ain’t Gonna Rain No More,” a traditional ditty first recorded in the early 1920s) weren’t originally written for children.
Fittingly, his iconic version of “The Cat Came Back” incorporated a medley of Ray Charles’s R&B standard “Hit the Road, Jack” and The Turtles’s catchy pop hit “Happy Together” – an offering to any audience members who had, like Penner, came of age in the sixties.
(If only The Turtles had written a song about a turtle.)
Part of Penner’s enduring appeal is that he doesn’t talk down to the kids, nor does he ignore the adults. (I laughed when he asked if anyone remembered the original vinyl record of The Cat Came Back – that one definitely went over the heads of the three-year-olds in the room).
It’s a delicate balance being child-friendly without coming off patronizing or overly juvenile; Fred Penner walks that line as well as ever, which is why, after all these years, he’s still capable of delighting kids and parents alike – not to mention the millennials who grew up with Fred Penner’s Place.
I’m fascinated by transformations.
Not just the dramatic spectacle of a man turning into a werewolf under the full moon, or a human hand mutating into a weapon in a Cronenberg flick (although I love those, too). What I’m talking about today, though, are the subtler changes that are no less profound.
Armed with a record’s worth of new material, JUNO-winners The Beaches played a sold-out show at the Bronson Centre Wednesday night.
In the opening scenes of Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy, former Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood is once again on a quest.
When we first see him, he’s travelling on foot along a desolate shore, his baggy garments resembling a cloak, on the way to meet his estranged father who’s reached out inexplicably after a decades-long absence. The scene has a certain dreamlike quality, which seems comparatively normal as the film descends wholeheartedly into insanity.
The Jerry Cans played a packed house at Ottawa’s 27 Club on Monday.
The Nunavut roots rockers started out with a jig led by violinist Gina Burgess, kicking off a night of fun folk-rock that combined East Coast fiddling with Inuktitut-language lyrics and Inuit throat singing.