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Toronto Film Critics Association names “The Master” best film of 2012

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Paul Thomas Anderson's religious cult drama, "The Master," won four top awards at the Toronto Film Critics Association, including best picture, best director, best screenplay, and best supporting actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of cult leader Lancaster Dodd.

As the Global News notes, the Toronto critics are "the latest film group to break from an early consensus" of critics who largely favour "Zero Dark Thirty." (This past weekend, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle also honored "The Master" as the best picture of 2012.)

Weird news: Monkey wearing a coat found in Canadian IKEA store

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:23:00 +0000

TORONTO (AP) -- Shoppers at an Ikea store in Toronto weren't monkeying around when they reported a primate on the loose.

Customers spotted a monkey - clad in a pint-sized shearling coat - wandering around the store's parking lot Sunday afternoon. The baby monkey, named Darwin, made its way through rows of parked cars and ended up outside a set of store doors.

Ikea staff lured the primate into a corner before calling police, who contacted the city's Animal Services department, said Staff Sgt. Ed Dzingala.

"It was just outside the store, just in a corner area where the monkey had nowhere to go, but it was pretty scared," Dzingala said. He said the monkey had escaped its crate in a parked car.

The monkey, which reportedly wore a diaper as well, never made it inside the store and was picked up by Animal Services officers within half an hour. The animal's owner later contacted police and was reunited with the pet, Dzingala said.

Word of the incident sparked a flurry of comments and photos on Twitter, as well as two parody Twitter accounts which took on the persona of the wandering monkey.

Neil Young’s kitchen-sink memoir

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:21:00 +0000

THE TRUEST OBSERVATION one can make about Neil Young's new memoir, "Waging Heavy Peace," is that it is a book by Neil Young. It is ornery and messy and irrepressibly enthusiastic, the book one might write if he were also the kind of person prone to, say, spending three million dollars to rent a Hollywood soundstage in order to make a bizarre comedy about nuclear destruction co-starring Dennis Hopper and Devo. Or develop a mid-life obsession with model trains and end up buying a major share of Lionel.

They are the same whims that have also borne the 66-year-old Young through a five-decade career, careening between mournful folk and silvery feedback sessions, and which define the central mystery of his music. Using his 37 proper albums and endless bootlegs to try to reverse-engineer the person behind them, one might end with a somewhat reasonable idea of just who Neil Young is. But even that probably can’t adequately prepare a reader for the experience of spending nearly 500 pages inside Young’s head. For reasons having little to do with sex or drugs, "Waging Heavy Peace" might be the most authentically demystifying rock memoir yet ever penned.