Canada
Kieron Tyler
“Are you going to be to Canada what Ingmar Bergman is to Sweden?” “Oh, I think so.” David Cronenberg’s response to a TV interviewer at the time of Shivers’ release must have seemed like unwarranted boastfulness in 1975, but he did indeed become one of cinema’s most significant filmmakers and remains such. After his first full-length feature had hit screens, Cronenberg’s chutzpah was enviable.Originally conceived as the schlokily-titled Orgy of the Blood Parasites to attract as much attention as possible, Shivers became a box-office (but not instant critical) success. It was followed by Rabid Read more ...
David Nice
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. But if the act of “hammering out a tune” is, as he puts it, "cosmic", as, very often, are the results, last night’s performance was aquatic, and not in a good way. Swimming around in front of an over-amplified orchestra – a much-expanded Britten Sinfonia conducted by Canadian Opera Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Atom Egoyan’s stock has dropped a bit in the 21st century. This box-set of his first seven films remains – along with his response to the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Ararat (2002) – the essence of his work to date.These early films have as much personal character as his compatriot and mentor Cronenberg’s. His feature debut Next of Kin (1984), in which a teenager escapes his loveless home by pretending to be a Toronto Armenian family’s long-lost son, introduces several themes: carefully faked identities, and the erasable memories enabled by video-tape. Family Viewing (1988), Speaking Parts Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Claustrophobia and a sense of huge space combine in Quebecois Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm. It’s an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s stage play, and the former element must have worked particularly well in the theatre’s enclosed space. Transferring it to the screen Dolan has brought out an almost hypnotic enormity in the empty rural landscapes that act as counterpoint for this chamber drama with a main cast of just three, figures acting out a somehow perverse but chillingly convincing scenario of loss and deceit.Dolan opens his French-language film (Tom à la ferme) with a short Read more ...
james.woodall
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. His stage imagination, so flexibly at work in The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Far Side of the Moon (which also became a film), wreaks endless visual and sonic surprises, and also allows itself to probe, three-dimensionally, philosophically. The screen can flatten Read more ...
William Drew
Canadian playwright Matthew Edison's award-winning 2003 play The Domino Heart receives its European premiere in rather reduced circumstances. As a Sunday to Tuesday production at the Finborough (directed by Jane Jeffery), it takes place on the set of another play (Chris Thompson's Carthage). Luckily the play itself is essentially a shared act of storytelling. Three characters deliver monologues to the audience while the others read, write, doodle and generally act as if they're not hearing one another. In the world of the play, they're in different geographical locations and different moments Read more ...
Heather Neill
Award-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an isolated house in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, are famous for having a shared life marked by tragedy: their triplet died in the birth canal, their mother succumbed to a fever on their twentieth birthday and their father was split in two by lightning on the same day. Grace, who works in a garbage dump, is outgoing and enjoys posing for the local catalogues and billboards, while Sugar is mousier, hasn't Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s something in the vocal delivery that calls for comparison to countrywoman Leslie Feist - a subtlety, an unreal-ness - but on her third, self-titled album Canadian songwriter Hannah Georgas has honed a sound of her own. What could easily have been your run-of-the-mill, heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter material spent a little time in the studio with Graham Walsh of Toronto-based electronica act Holy Fuck and came out with its soul intact, but with just enough bite to make these songs stand out.I confess to writing Georgas off a little last year, while she was opening for, and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better than anyone. The seemingly ethereal folkstress who partied with the most grizzled rockers and left them weeping for their mothers; the lover of the rock'n'roll life who can sing jazz standards and stand with the very greatest; the musical maestro who prefers to see herself as a painter - for all the reams of text written about her, the depths of armchair psychoanalysis attempted on her, Joni is always something other, and something more than anything you might expect. That is why, as much as any Read more ...
David Nice
French-Canadian pianist Hamelin has the technique and the stamina to play anything, which is why the note-crazy, obsessive “Night Wind” Sonata of Nikolay Medtner buzzed around at the heart of his recital. But between the proud resonance of its many climaxes and the distant voices he showcased so effectively in his own Barcarolle – three movements rather than one, unexplained in a note which simply ignored it – there’s little delicacy in the middle ground.That made much of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit less than phantasmagorical. “Ondine” should be the plaintive water-nymph, billowing to gusts of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s taken Avril Lavigne more than a decade to release a self-titled album, but in some ways it’s appropriate: after all, the Canadian singer’s best music still sounds exactly like what she was releasing as a teenager. The difference is that when she first burst onto the scene, all sweatbands and heavy eyeliner, Lavigne was a breath of fresh air - but now, on her new album, she seems to be taking her cues from the women she blazed the trail for.What she ends up with is the fun pop hits Katy Perry didn’t have room for in her spiritual new direction (“Sippin’ on Sunshine”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”); Read more ...