I was born and raised a city kid; you have to go back to Scotland and Queen Victoria to find someone in my family who lived and worked in the country. Pavement and asphalt are my natural habitat, so it was with some unease that I bought my first pair of hiking shoes this year, in preparation for a trip to Ireland [...]
Clouds as a gateway to God Red Lodge Montana I spent 20 years of my life running from God. I won’t go into the reasons here – for a long time I blamed poor religious education, but that was just an excuse – but I began my adult life in full flight from questions about God, faith and spirituality. Obviously [...]
University of Western Ontario Early this summer I attended a graduation party for a small, private Catholic high school where the children of several friends were saying farewell to classmates and teachers they had known for years – some of them since kindergarten. Many of these young men and women were babies when I first met them, so this pleasant [...]
Whit Stillman, New York City August 1990. My youngest daughter is fond of asking unanswerable questions like “what’s your favorite food?” or “who’s your favorite band?” I usually answer that I’m too old to have favorite anythings anymore, but she hasn’t asked me “who’s your favorite living movie director?” yet, and that would be easy to answer: Whit Stillman. Stillman [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis Facebook was launched a dozen years ago as a place for Ivy League college students to connect online and answer burning collegiate questions like “Who’s hot and who’s not?” But even before they made a movie about it, Facebook had gone from being an online distraction only potentially more interesting than World of Warcraft into something between [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis As the father of daughters, I always feel a bit guilty when I find myself railing against the excesses and absurdities of contemporary feminism. I mentally prepare myself for the counterarguments my position will invite: Don’t you believe women should have the same opportunities as men? Don’t you think equal work should mean equal pay? Do you [...]
"The children are our future” is probably among the most sententious phrases you can utter in politics, a sure tell that the person using it has no plan that will immediately have an impact on the children – yours or anyone else’s – or the future. So it’s reasonable to raise an eyebrow at a book that makes some dire claims about [...]
Former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi leaving a Toronto courtroom with lawyer Marie Henein. As I write this, the trial of former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi is in recess until the judge hands down a verdict later this March. What was supposed to be an open and shut indictment of the onetime media darling turned out to be a hugely [...]
Since I began writing this column almost seven years ago, I have had a few mantras – dictums that I’ve thought you can rely on when judging popular culture and its baleful evolution. One is that cheaper usually beats better (as in mp3s or video on cellphones versus high end audio gear and movie theatres). Another is that there’s no such thing [...]
They still make Christmas movies, as far as I can tell, but we’re a long way from Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney singing Irving Berlin tunes for a war-weary generation. This Christmas, for instance, we have the very wry Bill Murray spoofing the holiday TV special in A Very Murray Christmas, and The Night Before, a seasonal buddy film where Seth Rogen, [...]
Perhaps it’s a quirk of our family, but sitting down together for a movie regularly has always been as important as sitting down for a meal. I have spent 30 years, on and off, writing about movies and other entertainment, so I’ve always wanted to be there for those moments I remember so well from my own childhood, when something I saw [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis As I write this, the media frenzy surrounding the leak of a reported 32 million user accounts from the adultery website Ashley Madison has subsided into the background hum behind Donald Trump and the U.S. elections, the Pope’s visit to Cuba and the United States, and the apparently shocking news that Volkswagen diesel motors produce exhaust [...]
It’s generally accepted that the romantic comedy went into decline at some point in the ‘90s and hasn’t quite been itself since its final heyday, with films like When Harry Met Sally and Working Girl. If the genre has any life left in it, its saviour has come in the shape of writer/director Judd Apatow, whose innovation was to scour away most [...]
The recent scandal involving Josh Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting has prompted calls for the cancellation of the show and speculation that the whole genre of reality TV might have played itself out. While I don’t think that the end is in sight for the most cost-effective production model TV has invented since the game show, it might be time for [...]
Six years after I was laid off from my job at a national daily newspaper and sent back out to the uncertainties of freelancing as a writer and photographer, I’ve found myself with a steady gig again. Of those six years I can’t say much except that it’s no way to earn a living. The new job is more interesting – editing [...]