The Tribune

moviemarketingmadness.com The romcom has morphed into a formulaic genre so rife with well-worn clichés that there’s often little room for creativity, honesty, or genuine laughs. Crazy Stupid Love isn’t an entirely new story, but its clever script and a believable cast set it apart from the pack. Ryan Gosling plays[Read More…]

musicvice.com Back for its 17th year, the annual North by Northeast (NXNE) festival and conference brought over 600 bands to Toronto over the course of five sweltering days in June. One of the most anticipated shows was Toronto’s own Fucked Up playing a free show at Yonge and Dundas Square,[Read More…]

David Irwin Unless you’re deep into experimental and avant-garde saxophone, chances are you’ve never heard anyone play quite like Michigan-born, Montreal-based Colin Stetson. Between using circular breathing (simultaneously breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth in order play continuously), the keys as percussion, and singing into his[Read More…]

style.ritzgirl.com West-coast duo The Pack a.d. revisited Montreal this past summer with a powerful June 10 performance at Le Divan Orange. Guitarist and main vocalist Becky Black is disarmingly slight in person, given that the androgynous power of her voice captured on disc creates the impression of a giant. But[Read More…]

When I saw Hey Rosetta! play in a crowded band shell in the pouring rain at Osheaga in 2009, the last thing on my mind was “Man, these guys sound like Coldplay” (coincidentally that night’s headliner). But when I started listening to Seeds, their third full-length album, I realized that[Read More…]

All Eternals Deck, the newest  album from the Mountain Goats, represents an evolution from their last record, The Life of the World to Come. Their latest release is a melting pot of brilliantly worded social and political commentary, combined with an expanded instrumental repertoire. This latest release captures the listener[Read More…]

deconrecords.ca Nowadays, the words “Canadian hip-hop” usually lead to a discussion of Toronto hitmaker Drake, whose surge in popularity has earned him fans all over the world. But Sunday’s Juno Awards saw Drake lose Rap Recording of the Year to Vancouver-based rapper Shad, whose 2010 album TSOL has also been[Read More…]

Alice Walker A few swindlers promise gullible investors a huge rate of return for modest investments. Sound familiar? Actually, these kinds of schemes were going on long before the 21st century, and Ben Jonson’s 1610 comedy, The Alchemist, is a testament to that.  Currently being performed by the McGill Department[Read More…]

The 2011 McGill Drama Festival (MDF), an annual event put on by Players’ Theatre, features seven student plays that highlight the impeccable acting, writing, and directing exhibited by McGill students.   “MDF is the only theatre festival at McGill which is entirely student-run, and it also acts as a unique[Read More…]

warmuseum.ca Andre Pratte, the author of a new mini-biography of Wilfrid Laurier for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, complains that the  man on the five-dollar bill has been mothballed by myth. “Laurier’s fame today is confined to old books on the shelves of public libraries,” he writes. It is the dual[Read More…]