Warning: This piece contains spoilers from the film Ex Machina. Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina is, in fairly obvious ways, a creation story for the modern age. Nathan (Oscar Isaac)—who strikes the balance between charm and egomania with uncanny precision—is the film’s self-styled deity. Nathan is Narcissus equipped with[Read More…]
Books
Flashback: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1974)
The Vietnam War and the correlated counterculture movement disenchanted many young people with the way society functioned, and for some, the outlet to this frustration was murder. The ‘60s also saw a rise in serial killers, including Charles Schmid—also known as the Pied Piper of Tucson—who murdered three young women[Read More…]
From the Viewpoint: Authors in Their Undies
Performers are often told to imagine the audience in their underwear to help themselves calm their nerves. Christopher DiRaddo—a queer Montreal author—joked that he “must have gotten it wrong” when organizing Authors In Their Undies. The event featured three other queer Canadian authors who walked onto Stock Bar’s stripper stage,[Read More…]
Past vs. present: Jane Eyre vs. Crimson Peak
Warning: Spoilers The mansion in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a character in itself. It breathes, bleeds, and moans. It’s rotting and sickly, yet simultaneously vibrant and beautiful; it’s also an accomplice to the brutal murders that have plagued its inhabitants for decades. With an ancient manor, a mysterious[Read More…]
Book Review – Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun
A.J. Somerset blends a barrell full of personal anecdotes with historical analysis in Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun to explore the rise of gun culture in North America. Somerset, a former Canadian soldier and avid sport shooter, offers a unique perspective into how and why guns have morphed[Read More…]
Ladies’ Book Night provides brutal honesty among hilarity
Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, a snug little bookstore in the Plateau, welcomed four American writers—Mira Gonzalez, Elizabeth Ellen, Chloe Caldwell, and Chelsea Marti—to present their monotone yet dynamically comic collections in spoken word. The synergetic flow between the four writers is astounding, yet makes perfect sense. All four women write[Read More…]
Lena Dunham’s new book offers insights, few surprises
Fans of Girls will rejoice that Lena Dunham’s recently published book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” offers readers the same self-deprecating humour, laugh-out-loud one liners, and stories almost too erratic to be true that made its author’s popular HBO show a megahit.[Read More…]
Edge of Eternity provides engrossing ending to historical trilogy
History has a bad rap for being a seemingly perfunctory field of study. As a history major, I certainly have gotten my fair share of skepticism when I profess my interest in our past. But history, more than almost any other subject, carries a certain humanity with it. It is[Read More…]
Revisiting a burdened and haunted past
It’s not always clear why horror is such a popular genre. After all, it intends to horrify—to inspire fear in shadows that seem to disappear the second we turn around. Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians reminded me of the reasons Stephen King novels and the endless slew of gory sequels do[Read More…]
Wilt the Stilt walks again
A collective of writers and artists known as “FreeDarko” rose to cult Internet fame with their essays promoting the concept of “liberated fandom” that is the idea that the modern basketball fan didn’t need to restrict him or herself to a single franchise but could, instead, enjoy the wide array[Read More…]
