Strong performances buoy drama’s heavy subject matter

Director Darren Aronofsky has demonstrated a penchant for grandiose metaphysical statements in past films, such as The Fountain, Black Swan and Mother!, but he is back down to earth in his new film, The Whale.

Quentin Tarantino geeks out on his favourite films in new essay collection

Before he wrote his own novelization of his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the loquacious Quentin Tarantino was a filmmaker who stuck with publishing his own screenplays, letting his onscreen characters do all the talking.

Seasonal Schulz double bill delivers plenty of Peanuts

Manitoba Theatre for Young People first presented this Charles Schulz-inspired musical mash-up in the before times, back in December 2017.

Season’s beatings galore in yuletide bust-up

Take Home Alone. Ratchet up the violence, so that booby traps can kill.

Peeling back the layers of this whodunit fun, indulgent

In the 2017 remake of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh attempted to revive the locked-room ensemble mystery by injecting lots of technical razzle-dazzle to the genre, the master thespian weirdly ignoring the genre’s drawing power has always been a careful assembly of stars striking sparks off each other in an enclosed setting.

Winnipeg-shot caper flick — opening today — was itself the victim of a heist of $250K worth of movie gear

It is a bitter irony that a movie titled Vandits — a comedy about four would-be thieves taking out a bingo hall on Christmas Eve — would itself be the victim of a heist of some $250,000 worth of movie equipment on the day production was supposed to start last November.

Homegrown films deliver chills and horror

Given that much of Manitoba’s film product ends up in the horror sections of your various streaming services, it’s a good time to consider supporting your local film industry when choosing a scary movie for Halloween weekend.

Locally shot film focuses on whistleblower’s origin story

When it comes to picking a first project to executive produce, local filmmaker Myron John Tataryn literally picked a Winner.

Director/writer of locally shot films a cheerleader for horror genre

Buffalo Gal Pictures producer Liz Jarvis recalls a preliminary meeting with crew members of the recently wrapped horror movie The Elevator Game when she announced the film would be helmed by an up-and-coming director named Rebekah McKendry and was met with this reaction: “Oh, do you mean Dr. Rebekah McKendry?”

The rom-com reborn

“Do you guys remember straight people?”

Laugh and learn

Observing the spirit of Orange Shirt Day — the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation — presents a challenge as we are compelled to look at the issues that arise in facing the often tragic and brutal nexus where Indigenous people and settlers meet.

Orphan star’s return to creepy role proved challenging

If you haven’t seen the 2009 film Orphan, you may not be aware of the plot twist that drives the story of an apparently psychotic child who threatens the lives of her adoptive family.

Theatre performers dish on restarting their fringe engines after a long hiatus

It only feels like it’s been forever.

In fact, we’ve just missed out on two live, in-person editions of the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. As we return to something that looks like a normal fringe, consider the artists who were deprived of their main source of work: performing at fringe festivals here and around the world.

We reached out to a number of veterans — and some relative newbies — to answer some questions about what it’s been like for artists to cool their creative jets for two years and then return to live performance.

The cast list includes:

Medical drama puts local actor in perilous position

Befitting the star of the new made-in-Manitoba drama series SkyMed, Winnipeg-born actress Morgan Holmstrom is taking flight.

Literally. Our phone interview precedes a trip to Glasgow where she is taking on her latest gig.

But we’re here to talk SkyMed, a medical drama set mostly in northern Manitoba, and which was shot mostly in southern Manitoba through much of 2021-22. The series premières Sunday evening on CBC at 9 p.m. and streams on CBC Gem.

“Our show’s creator, Julie (Puckrin), says it’s Top Gun meets Grey’s Anatomy,” Holmstrom says by way of describing the series, which follows a group of young nurses and pilots flying air ambulances in the remote North, where help is thousands of kilometres away.

Rainbow Stage scores with classic Canadian tale

It was some kind of ghastly benchmark in Canadian culture when, in 2010, someone made a movie titled Score: A Hockey Musical, a silly effort with a dead-end ambition: to make a film for that tiny Venn diagram demographic that loves both hockey and movie musicals.

As we can see this month at Rainbow Stage, someone discovered a better way to two-prong those communities utilizing a property hiding in plain sight.

Roch Carrier’s short story The Hockey Sweater was already a choice piece of Canadiana courtesy of Sheldon Cohen’s classic 1980 short animated film The Sweater, adapted from Carrier’s gently humorous short memoir. It recalls Carrier’s youth, playing on the local junior hockey team until his mother mistakenly orders him a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, when all his other teammates dress exclusively in the No. 9 Habs jersey worn by Maurice (Rocket) Richard.

This adaptation by Emil Sher (book and lyrics) and Jonathan Monro (music and lyrics), which premiered in 2017 in Montreal, hews close to the source material. But with a somewhat overlong running time of two hours and 20 minutes (including intermission), it embellishes Carrier’s gently sardonic story with a dollop of romance, deeper characterization, and a fleshed-out view of life in small-town Francophone Quebec after the Second World War.

Girl power crushes shame and alien-infected polar bears

The new Canadian horror film Slash/Back may recall a certain horror classic from 1982 in which a remote polar outpost finds itself under attack by a shape-shifting alien of evil intent.

But rest assured, Inuk director Nyla Innuksuk was not aiming for anything like John Carpenter’s gory/slimy classic, The Thing. If any movies from the ’80s inspired her, it was more like Steven Spielberg’s more benign alien invasion movie from that same year, ET: The Extraterrestrial, or perhaps Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985), both movies featuring kids riding around on bicycles and encountering outsize adventure.

“I grew up obsessed with movies as a kid and as a teenager,” says the Toronto-based Innuksuk, 35, in a Zoom interview with the Free Press from her parents’ home in rural Ontario. “Movies like ET and The Goonies, where these kids what kind of go off on adventures that was something that I always really loved,” she says, copping to the fact that, when she went on her own childhood adventures with her brothers and friends, she was “humming that ET theme song in your head.”

But what those movies failed to reflect was Innuksuk’s own childhood in Iqaluit, the capital city on Nunavut. Hence Slash/Back centres on a clique of young girls in another Arctic town, the Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung. Their adventure takes them into the path of a dangerous, strangely gnarly polar bear, which turns out to be even more deadly than usual, as its body has been taken over by serpentine alien parasites capable of invading other bodies.

Jewish love story painted in bittersweet strokes

At one point in Daniel Jamieson’s play The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, artist Marc Chagall (Daniel Greenberg) is seen rebelling against the stodgy artists in his native Russian community of Vitebsk, saying that if he wants to paint green cows, he will paint green cows. (Chagall indeed took the green cow as his personal emblem.)

Directed by Ari Weinberg, Jamieson‘s play proceeds with the same kind of counter-intuitive insistence. The play does not project Chagall’s expressionist paintings onto the stage, as we might expect. (For that experience, head off to Beyond Van Gogh at the RBC Convention Centre in July.) Instead, this work, examining Chagall’s love affair with his wife Bella, emulates Chagall’s style through other means, his elegant curves and circles made manifest by a theatre-in-the-round presentation, or in the balletic dance moves between Marc and Bella (Isidora Kecman).

So, yes, the play assumes audience familiarity with the works of Chagall. At the same time, it follows its own rules when it comes to its obligations to convention. For example, this is a musical with only one substantial song over its 75-minute running time (without intermission). But a beautiful song it is, sung in English and Yiddish, written by English composer Ian Ross (not to be confused with the Winnipeg playwright of the same name).

Bittersweet music permeates throughout, courtesy of music director Michael Doherty on keyboards and cellist Tayah Plett. And bittersweet is the proper tone for a story of Jewish lovers living through the early 20th century, encompassing the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust, with Marc and Bella on the move constantly. It is no wonder suitcases are an important design motif here, pressed into service as a cradle or a phone table or a dance floor.

New play explores meaning of theatre

Since fringe festivals have been rife with one-man Hamlet productions over the past few years, it may be necessary to clarify that The Player King, a new play by Ron Pederson, is not that.

Mind you, the premise lends itself to it. A panicked actor (Rodrigo Beilfuss), searching for his absent castmates, comes upon an audience and tries to work through how he got there. His only stagemate is an ominously spectral musician (Cuinn Joseph) who limits himself to a running musical commentary to the nameless actor’s story.

A show must go on, if not the intended Hamlet show. So the actor tells his own story, interlaced with lines from the Bard to illustrate when appropriate, that is: frequently.

It emerges that the actor comes from a background that may not be rogue but certainly qualifies as peasant slave, a young 19th century farm worker electrified by witnessing a performance by a ragtag itinerant troupe. He quickly becomes obsessed, even after finding that the author of these works is long gone. (“The same week I learn about Shakespeare, I learn he’s dead,” he laments.) Nevertheless, he finds his own way to the stage courtesy of a failed actor named Roger, found in a pub doing recitations for drinks.

Dolce Vita-inspired production of Much Ado in the St. Norbert ruins keeps actors and audience hopping

Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita is the stylistic touchstone for director Ann Hodges’ robust interpretation of the Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing, produced live (at last!) in the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park in St. Norbert.

Fun fact: “paparazzi,” the term for predatory celebrity photographers, was inspired by a photographer named Paparazzo in the film.

That explains why the very opening scene in this production sees paparazzi chasing down the prestigious family of Leonata (Melanie Whyte) as news comes of a post-battle visit by the prince Don Pedro (Omar Alex Khan), and a few of his fellow soldiers, including Benedick (Cory Wojcik) and the lovelorn Claudio (Ritchie Diggs), who carries a torch for Leonata’s daughter Hero (Hera Nalem).

There is no such romance for Benedick, who conducts an ongoing “merry war” of words with Hero’s feisty cousin Beatrice (Sarah Constible). To outward appearances, the two loathe each other.

Crimes takes the Future to a weird new place

Bless his twisted heart, David Cronenberg is back… with his “Future.”

Apart from the title, his new film has little to do with the notorious Canadian director’s 1970 film of the same name, aside from being set in a world beset by a plague of mutation. (Alas, there is no character here named “Adrian Tripod.”)

Crimes 2022 also distinguishes itself with star power attached, most notably Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser, a man whose penchant for creating strange new internal organs has made him a performance artist star, in collaboration with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who shares Saul’s enthusiasm for sensual surgery.

Yes, you read that right. The movie shares a queasy fascination with medical erotica, recalling Cronenberg’s 1988 feature Dead Ringers, about mad gynecologist Beverly and his twin brother Elliot, both played by Jeremy Irons. “I’ve often thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies,” Elliot says in the film, a sentiment that pretty much comes to fruition in this movie.

Top Gun: Maverick: the Tom Cruise-starring followup to the Tom Cruise-starring 36-year-old blockbuster

Top Gun: Maverick absolutely lives up to its predecessor, Tony Scott’s streamlined blockbuster/machine from 1986. That film purveyed the very ’80s notion of war as a sleek spectator event, with keening jet engines, a glamorous hero and not a little homoerotic subtext, notwithstanding Kelly McGillis’s gratuitous love interest.

This 36-years-later followup sees Tom Cruise’s Captain Pete Mitchell, a.k.a. Maverick, is still a thorn in the side of the brass as he is dismissed from his gig as a test pilot by a rear admiral (Ed Harris, doing his rote gruff commander shtick) who sees unmanned drones as the way of future warfare.

“Your kind is headed for extinction,” Harris says in the script-o-mat allegedly written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie. (If you’ve seen the trailer for Cruise/McQuarrie’s new Mission: Impossible movie, Cruise gets an identical lecture from Henry Czerny — “Your days of fighting for the so-called ‘greater good’ are over” — proving The Usual Suspects’ screenwriter McQuarrie seems to be filling in the blanks of an iron-clad template these days.)

Anyway, Mitchell is sent back to the place where he proved his mettle, the Top Gun flight facility where he is assigned to train the latest crop of the very best fighter pilots in the country. Much to his consternation, these pilots include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of the late Goose Bradshaw, whose death made Maverick feel stirrings of manly guilt the first time out.

Kids in the Hall back to push the envelope

It has been nearly 27 years since the five-man Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall challenged comedy norms with their landmark sketch comedy series, which ran on CBC and HBO from 1989 to 1995.

The trailer for the new Prime Video series demonstrates the same biting-the-hand-that-feeds-them ethos — a bit between Mark McKinney and Dave Foley suggesting the Amazon corporation may be in league with Satan — that marked the quintet’s initial foray into comedy.

That sense also comes through in a Zoom interview with the group’s other three members, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson, conducted after the show wrapped production last year.

This show follows in the original’s template, says the Montreal-born McDonald, 60, who now resides in Winnipeg.

The doctor is in… and in… and in

Director Richard Donner is credited with making the modern superhero movie a viable blockbuster with Superman back in 1978. But Sam Raimi was arguably the filmmaker most responsible for setting the current template, first with his wild, expressionist fantasy Darkman (1990) and then with his Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007), which artfully blended elaborate action with heartfelt emotion.

Raimi rejoins the Marvel Universe, taking up a character most in need of an infusion of human soul, the chilly, cerebral Dr. Stephen Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange (2016) and any number of subsequent Avengers movies/tie-ins.

The movie kicks off with a dream sequence wherein a weird, not entirely heroic Steven Strange variant attempts to save the life of a young woman (Xochitl Gomez) apparently being hunted by a hostile Lovecraftian entity.

Here in our world, it turns out Strange’s “dream” is a subconscious window into a different universe, which he discovers while attending the wedding of his former love interest Christine (Rachel McAdams). The nuptials are interrupted by the appearance of a tentacled kaiju, which Strange neutralizes with the help of his partner/mentor Wong (Benedict Wong). Along the way, he meets the girl from his dreams, and determines the spunky lass — named America — possesses the singular talent of being able to access any parallel universe, but only when she is in the grip of fear.

Winnipeg-shot comedy looking for Indigenous extras

The CTV comedy series Acting Good, starring Anishinaabe standup comedian Paul Rabliauskas, has put out the call for “hundreds” of Indigenous extras — male and female ages 16-90 years old — to play in various scenes throughout the shoot.

The 10-episode series has already begun filming in Winnipeg and surrounding areas and is expected to continue into June.

Rabliauskas plays Paul, a comic who returns home to the fictional remote fly-in community of Grouse Lake First Nation after a botched attempt to move to the big city. Grouse Lake was inspired by Rabliauskas’s own home community of Poplar River First Nation.

Also in the cast is actor, comedian, and series co-showrunner Pat Thornton (of the under-appreciated shot-in-Manitoba series Sunnyside), who stars as Brady, the “only white guy on the rez.”

Searing one-person drama antidote to playwright’s rage

Notwithstanding its at-home viewing availability, Tara Beagan’s Deer Woman is a play far removed from the usual night out at the theatre. The digital production, shot by Calgary’s Downstage Theatre (the first Canadian theatre to showcase it) has the impact of a depth charge.

The play begins out in the bush, where Lila (Cherish Violet Blood) is seen unpacking a beat-up pickup truck with a grim resolve.

Over the next hour or so, Lila will unpack much more, recording details of a troubled life on her cellphone, encompassing early abuse, an alcoholic mother, a hunter father and a younger sister brutally taken from her in an endless cycle of murdered and missing Indigenous women. The show’s final minutes includes material that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie.

In a phone interview from her home in Calgary, Beagan, 46, a Ntlakapamux and Irish Canadian theatre artist, acknowledges the play emerged from a place of rage.

PTE turns 50 with lineup of new works, timely topics

Prairie Theatre Exchange has a 50-year anniversary to celebrate.

So expect the Portage Place-based company to mine for gold with an bigger lineup of plays, available both online and in person. PTE’s season set list includes holdovers from past cancelled seasons, exciting new plays (including no fewer than five world premières), and a Christmas show that should throw the usual festive offerings for an improvisational loop.

“A 50th anniversary is a major milestone for an arts organization,” says PTE’s artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones. “It is an invitation for us to gratefully reflect on the past that has brought us to this moment, and to dream about what the company is and what it can be, moving into the future.”

In a kind of acknowledgement of the past two years of topsy-turvy pandemic programming, the first play will be available online and free of charge, hearkening back to PTE’s digital pivot after the beginning of the pandemic.

Doodle Pop a fanciful cork-popper for all generations

Lately, the realm of live theatre in Winnipeg has been feeling a certain weight, not just when it comes to socially responsible content (reflective of, lo, these troubled times) but in presentation, which is marked by social distancing in the audience and controlled, cautious activity onstage.

It is suitable that a children’s show should refreshingly and deliberately deflate all that lead balloon propriety, and take delight at the resulting fart noise in the bargain.

Doodle Pop, a production export from Seoul, South Korea, serves that jubilant function. While it is recommended for kids aged three to eight, consider it a cork-popper for all ages.

It focuses primarily on a couple of goofy characters, Woogie (Hyunki Jung and Donghyun Kim alternate) and Boogie (Youngeun Jeon and Seungeun Lee alternate), buddies who seem to exist on a sheet of white paper. (Think Daffy Duck in the Warner animated short classic Duck Amuck.)

Shooting King of Killers was murder

The action movie King of Killers wrapped its Winnipeg production last week, and it’s doubtful the city has seen a more intense shoot.

On March 16, the day after it wrapped, one producer on the film joked that it was a 25-day production obliged to finish in just 15 days.

Almost all of that shoot took place in the Millennium Centre on Main Street, which proved conducive to the film’s closed-world premise, in which the world’s greatest hit-persons gather for a challenge to take out the mysterious titular master assassin. The cast includes action movie heavyweights including Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Purge) and Stephen Dorff (Blade).

Despite the building’s contemporary moniker, it’s a very old piece of heritage architecture at Main and Lombard, and the director could be heard to complain post-wrap that the old stairwell took its toll on his legs. Every day is a leg day when you’re working at the Millenium.

Hilary Swank shooting inspirational drama in Winnipeg

Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank will be coming to Winnipeg to shoot the drama Ordinary Angels from late March to early May.

Set in Kentucky in 1994, the film is based on a true story. Swank will play Sharon Stevens, a struggling hairdresser who turns her life around when she meets a widower whose five-year-old daughter needs a liver transplant. Fully committing to this family, Sharon rallies the town and raises money to help save the girl’s life.

The widower will be played by Alan Ritchson, currently seen as the title character in Prime Video’s hit series Reacher, based on Lee Child’s international bestselling novels. (After its debut, that series became one of the streaming service’s top five most-watched series ever in the United States.)

The story of Ordinary Angels centres around a pivotal plot point in which a community must find a way to dig out a path for a helicopter during a snowstorm. While the storm will likely be created with special effects, there is always a chance the city might provide the real thing, even in April.

Actress Edi Patterson foiled by famously frigid Winnipeg intersection

On last Wednesday’s broadcast of The Late Late Show with James Corden, actress Edi Patterson (a writer and star on the cable series The Righteous Gemstones) told a startling story of travelling to frigid Winnipeg to shoot a movie.

The film, which she didn’t mention by name, is Violent Night, the Christmas-themed action movie starring David Harbour, John Leguizamo and Beverly D’Angelo, directed by Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters). It was recently announced Patterson had joined the cast alongside Cam Gigandet (Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, Twilight, Easy A).

Talking to Corden, Patterson told of facing two Winnipeg perils during her work in February: freezing cold and the intersection of Portage and Main.

Needing to pick up lotion and shampoo, she learned of the existence of “a CVS equivalent called Shoppers Drug Mart” 500 feet from her hotel, presumably the Fairmont.

Local filmmaker turns past screwups into comedy gold for Roku Channel series

In old-timey parlance, Winnipeg filmmaker Damien Ferland is a bit of an odd duck.

With his quasi-Eraserhead moptop and a sometimes abrasive candour, the Winnipeg-born Ferland, 39, comes by it honestly. He has an admitted penchant for landing himself in awkward situations.

But where most people do their level best to tamp down memories of life’s embarrassments and failures, Ferland has taken to making forensic analyses of those moments on his webseries Hyper-Distracted.

Long available on YouTube, the show generally sees Ferland doing a standup report in front of various Winnipeg locations that were once the scenes of personal disasters.

Journalist delivers dramatic facts about world’s oceans

Alanna Mitchell is a breathtakingly atypical presence taking the stage of the Tom Hendry Warehouse this month.

She doesn’t project the easy confidence of the more seasoned performer we’re accustomed to seeing treading those boards. She is a journalist, you see.

In her Tuesday evening performance of her own work Sea Sick, she confessed to having a nightmare about showing up on stage without pants.

Yet Mitchell comes through as a comforting presence. If you’ve worked in a newsroom, she’s precisely the kind of affable, interesting sort with whom you may enjoy a chat in an ongoing quest to avoid your own work.

Putting the ‘goth’ in Gotham

If the 2019 Batman-adjacent movie The Joker took Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as its grungy esthetic template, this new Batman movie from director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In) goes equally dark, modelling itself after David Fincher’s Seven, of all things.

As in that take-no-prisoners psycho noir from 1995, an ingenious, morally twisted maniac is targeting citizens of Gotham City for deadly punishments, all the while taunting the police with messages that drive them towards a fateful unmasking.

In this film, the madman happens to be the Riddler (Paul Dano), and the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman duo are Batman (Robert Pattinson) and Gotham’s last honest detective, James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright). This iteration of Batman tends to play down the high-tech toys of past Caped Crusaders, emphasizing detective work. (One is reminded that at least one of the original bygone Batman publications, recently revived, was called Detective Comics.)

When it comes to solving puzzles, Batman has a more knowledgeable associate in faithful butler Alfred (Andy Serkis), who name-drops his own past in the British Secret Service.

Series deftly balances melodrama with meaty issues

Shot last year in and around Winnipeg, the CBC TV series The Porter is, first and foremost, breathtaking in its scope and ambition.

The largest Black-led production in the history of Canadian broadcasting, this is a panoramic portrait of Black Canadian life in the 1920s, centred on a pair of railway porters intent on improving the circumstances of themselves and their families.

Junior Massey (British actor Aml Ameen) and his friend Zeke Garrett (Ronnie Rowe Jr.) hold respectable jobs working as porters for the Cross Continental Railway, and specifically its filthy rich president William Edwards (Winnipeg actor Paul Essiembre in a role not too far removed from the nasty capitalist WASP he played in the musical Stand!). Their homes are in Little Burgundy — a black community in the St. Antoine district of Montreal.

In the first two episodes of the eight-part series made available to press, we see how things are stacked against Black workers, owing to racism in both the railway operation and in the labour union of railway workers, which is whites-only.

Manitoba: where action is, at least in the movie biz

In the wake of the success of the 2021 film Nobody, Manitoba is apparently becoming a centre for action movies.

The David Harbour holiday-themed thriller Violent Night, from Nobody producers David Leitch, Kelly McCormick and Guy Danella, is already shooting in Winnipeg under the baton of director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow; Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters), with several new cast members – including John Leguizamo (John Wick), Beverly D’Angelo (National Lampoon’s Vacation), Alex Hassell (The Tragedy of Macbeth) and Alexis Louder (The Tomorrow War) signing on.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Harbour (Stranger Things) plays a seedy Santa for hire who must rise to the occasion when mercenaries (led by Leguizamo) invade the house of D’Angelo’s corporate matriarch. The premise of the film sounds like a blend of Die Hard, Home Alone and Succession.

Meanwhile, another, more modestly budgeted shoot-‘em-up is being prepped.

Chinese director embraces Winnipeg’s winter weather

Even after they wrapped the Manitoba component of production on Feb. 4, the producers and the director of the Chinese-American co-production Unspoken were unaware that Winnipeg can lay claim to a little piece of Chinese cinema history.

This connection relates to Stanley Tong, the director of hit Jackie Chan films such as Supercop and Rumble in the Bronx. Decades ago, Tong was studying for a non-film career at the University of Manitoba when a penchant for doing doughnuts in his car on the icy U of M parking lot literally steered him toward work as a stuntman and eventually as a very successful director and producer of Hong Kong films.

One of Unspoken’s producers, Mark Ordesky from the L.A.-based production company Court Five, can himself lay some credit for introducing Chan to western audiences with the debut of Rumble in the Bronx, back when he worked for the upstart studio New Line, but he admits he didn’t know about Tong.

“But that wouldn’t surprise me at all,” he says on a Zoom call from Los Angeles alongside Court Five partner/producer Jane Fleming.

Winnipeg-born actor isn’t your usual monster-battling TV teenager

In the very first scene in the new CTV Sci-Fi Channel series Astrid & Lilly Save the World, Winnipeg-born actor Jana Morrison can be seen slicing into the body of a demonic monster and plunging her hands into its gooey guts to retrieve a mysterious alien organ.

Jana’s mom is very proud.

And Rebecca Torres Morrison has every reason to be. As high school girl Astrid — who, with her best bud Lilly (Samantha Aucoin), takes on a monster-hunting mission to avert Armageddon — her daughter Jana not only scored a plum role in the series. She also offers up a rare representation of Filipinos on television.

That’s a point of pride for Jana Morrison, in addition to the way she gives representation to another oft-overlooked demographic, which she mentions in describing the series’ premise.

Loathsome lead character fuels action in Red Rocket

The poster for the movie Red Rocket features a nude Simon Rex inside a giant sprinkled doughnut, suggesting it might be some kind of naughty sex farce.

It is emphatically not that. This is director Sean Baker’s followup to his much-hailed 2017 offering The Florida Project and it follows in that film’s template, focusing its lens on the anonymous denizens of American flyover country.

In this case, the locale has shifted to Texas City, a depressed outpost in the Lone Star state, and former home to one Mikey Saber (Rex), who returns on a bus with $20, the clothes on his back and bruises from a beatdown he suffered back in Los Angeles.

Mikey has returned to plead for a second chance from Lexi (Bree Elrod), hoping to at least be allowed to stay with her until he gets back on his feet.

Teen actor shines as punk in nihilistic Hopper drama

By any metric, Dennis Hopper’s 1980 film Out of the Blue is a tough watch, given that it’s about a teen girl trying to find herself while living an often traumatic life with a junkie mom (Sharon Farrell) and a drunk convict dad (Dennis Hopper).

It might be doubly difficult for Winnipeg writer-producer Leonard Yakir, who had been directing it before the film was reportedly taken out of his hands and handed over to Hopper to direct. (Almost half the film’s $2 million budget was raised in Winnipeg.) When Out of the Blue was shot in Vancouver in 1980, Hopper had the 1969 landmark Easy Rider under his belt, but also the 1971 bomb The Last Movie, a self-indulgent piece about a movie shoot in Peru that sends Hopper’s wrangler character on an apocalyptic path. It’s not hard to see Hopper might have seen the film as a path back to the director’s chair.

Under Hopper’s vision, the movie did capture a cultural shift from the hippie ethos of Easy Rider to punk rock’s feverish nihilism, represented by Linda Manz’s character, Cebe.

In the film’s shocking opening sequence, Cebe and her drunken dad Don are riding in Don’s semi-trailer when the vehicle smashes into a stalled school bus.

Chinese superstar shooting drama in Manitoba

A movie has begun production in Winnipeg featuring a superstar that most western audiences may not even recognize.

But in the world’s largest film market, Zhang Hanyu is a lauded Chinese actor, the first to win his home country’s “grand slam” of acting awards, winning best actor trophies from the Golden Horse Awards, Golden Rooster Awards, Hundred Flowers Awards and Huabiao Awards.

North American audiences may remember Zhang from his work playing General Shao in director Zhang Yimou’s 2016 action-fantasy The Great Wall. But his work in Chinese cinema includes starring roles in films such as the hit war film Assembly, and in Tsui Hark’s wuxia film The Taking of Tiger Mountain.

Zhang stars as a bereaved father who comes to America to investigate his deaf daughter’s murder in writer-director Daming Chen’s Unspoken.

Devastating, divine take on the Scottish Play

When Roman Polanski filmed his 1971 version of The Scottish Play, he employed younger actors than usual to play the usurper and his wife — Jon Finch and Francesca Annis — and made things especially difficult for himself by filming in wet, inhospitable locations around the British Isles to bring to life the bleak Scottish environs of William Shakespeare’s play. The movie had other baggage as well: Since it was produced by Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, it was inevitable perhaps that Annis would play Lady Macbeth’s “Out, out damned spot” scene in the nude.

Director Joel Coen, operating for the first time without his co-creator brother, Ethan, goes in pretty much the opposite direction for his take, The Tragedy of Macbeth. All locations, from castle interiors to blasted heaths, are marked by a minimalist, even blank mise en scène reminiscent of Daffy Duck surrounded by white space in Duck Amuck. It’s also in black and white. The aspect ratio of the screen is almost square. This starkly existential interpretation has no pretense to Hollywood epic.

Also, the Macbeths are much older. We meet Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and Banquo (Bertie Carvel) on a strangely featureless foggy site where they encounter three witches, who predict Macbeth will inherit the crown from King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson). All three witches are played by the marvelous actress Kathryn Hunter, who steals scenes with the finesse of a master thief.

The witches crack open the door to Macbeth’s ambition, and it blows wide open when Macbeth shares the prediction with his wife, Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand), whose own thirst for power is nothing less than ferocious.

Comic artist Evan Quiring toils in the shadows to bring anti-hero to the page

By day, he works an unassuming — some might say humdrum — job as a logistics co-ordinator for a transport broker, tracking the paths of trucks making deliveries, and occasionally seeking out the reasons why those trucks may be late.

The gig may have a touch of heroism in it these days, given the urgency of keeping supply chains open in a stubbornly persistent pandemic.

But Evan Quiring doesn’t see it that way. So by night, he takes on a different identity, six floors up in the suburban environs of an apartment building in St. James overlooking Assiniboine Park. In the main living area, he gathers his tools and enters an alternate universe, an inky-dark place where evil holds sway and costumed vigilantes fight an unending battle to keep it at bay.

Quiring (pronounced Kwy-ring) is an indie comic-book artist. At 45, he’s been at this game for going on two decades. Possessed of no small persistence himself, Quiring has created a new hero, or rather anti-hero, to enter the pantheon of crime fighters dedicated to rooting out the evil that men do. The title says it all: Murder City Devil, a 21st-century version of the mythic Spring Heeled Jack. He’s a bounding, flame-blasting warrior of demonic countenance who literally fights fire with fire from within an urban hellscape.

Del Toro deft with the darkness of carny noir remake

The 1947 movie Nightmare Alley was film noir as pure and caustic as grain alcohol. So when director Guillermo Del Toro announced he would be doing his own version of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, some confusion could be expected. Del Toro is primarily known as a horror director with a penchant for lush Gothic production values, evident in his last film, The Shape of Water, which reconfigured The Creature from the Black Lagoon as a darkly beautiful inter-species romance.

Noir doesn’t easily lend itself to Del Toro’s world: The genre is bleak and brutal, yes, but also to the point. Del Toro’s gift is for heavy, intricate atmosphere, gorgeously utilized in the haunted romance Crimson Peak, but also evident in his playful/poetic approach to superhero movies (Hellboy, Blade II) and even in the realm of the kaiju blockbuster (Pacific Rim).

Damned if Del Toro doesn’t make it work though. His vision of Nightmare Alley, conceived with his wife and co-screenwriter Kim Morgan (Guy Maddin’s ex, by the way) is a therapeutic wallow in a mud bath of danger and depravity. It’s heavy and dirty, yes, but decidedly invigorating.

Bradley Cooper takes on the role of downfall-destined anti-hero Stanton Carlisle, whom we see in the movie’s first shot dragging a swaddled corpse into a hole in the middle of a ramshackle old house, which he will soon set ablaze.

The only psycho in silly Winnipeg-filmed thriller is the screenwriter

While it was being cobbled together in Winnipeg in the chilly winter of 2017, the movie now known as Night Hunter was shot under the working title Nomis.

Night Hunter feels a little more like a generic serial killer thriller. And now that the movie is widely viewable on Netflix this week, we can see that is apt.

Writer-director David Raymond, who made his feature debut here, aspires to something a little more twisted than usual in this story of hard-bitten homicide cop Marshall (Henry Cavill) out to solve the murder of a young woman who, we see in the prologue, had unsuccessfully tried to evade the psychotic individual who had kept her prisoner.

It becomes clear that the perp is a serial killer. The madman’s path soon crosses with that of the impudent teen Lara (Eliana Jones), who happens to be partnered with mad vigilante Cooper (Ben Kingsley).

Red X exposes the dark side of Toronto the Good

David Demchuk’s new novel Red X is on one level a startling portrait of the city of Toronto. Beneath the veneer of a city celebrated for its diversity and culture exists a meticulously detailed hunting ground where the most vulnerable are prey to monsters both human and otherworldly.

Demchuk makes us see Toronto the Good through the uglifying lens of a horror novel, centred on a malevolent spirit stalking the city’s vulnerable gay population over centuries, although much of the action is set from 1984 to present day.

It is no coincidence that 1984 is the year Demchuk moved to Toronto from Winnipeg to pursue a career as a writer. He started as a playwright and segued to journalism before finally determining to be a novelist while well into his 50s. The Bone Mother, published in 2017, adapted from his own play The Thimble Factory, was his first novel, but reads like the work of a seasoned pro, taking the reader on a fearsome tour through a menagerie of monsters tied into the Slavic mythology of Ukraine and Romania. It was nominated for the Giller Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award, among other laurels.

Red X , which appeared Tuesday on CBC’s list of best Canadian fiction in 2021, is even more ambitious in its scope. The deathless entity at its centre, laying claim to some of the city’s most at-risk gay men, was inspired by a real life monster, and the novel provocatively dances between the fiction of Demchuk’s imagination and the grim reality that inspired it.

Love at second sight

Acrophobic moviegoers will remember the vertigo-inducing opening shots of Robert Wise’s 1961 version of West Side Story, with its god’s-eye shots of Manhattan moving ever closer to the titular setting, a canyon of tenements where a star-crossed love story is about to unfold.

In this loving but different “reimagining” of the 1957 Broadway classic, Steven Spielberg pays brief homage with an opening overhead shot that zeroes right in on its urban setting, smashed apartment buildings making way for the Lincoln Center, a slyly subversive jest that indicts consumers of high culture in the process of gentrification.

Credit screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America), strategically altering the original book by Arthur Laurents, for hitting its audience where the play’s characters can no longer afford to live. Expect more of the same sauce in this version.

The year is 1957, the same year the musical debuted on Broadway. We are introduced to the Jets, a street gang intent on keeping their neighbourhood white, a futile gesture in the face of a wave of immigration from Puerto Rico. The opening skirmishes depicted in Wise’s movie transform from scrappy mischief to racist malevolence in Spielberg’s.

Trio of artists presents three-pronged play about two-faced god

The name of a new Winnipeg theatre group — the End of the West Collective — sounds a little apocalyptic.

But be assured, it is a positive and hopeful trio. The name came about because all three members happen to be neighbours in Winnipeg’s West End.

Still, as they prepare to première their new work under the auspices of Theatre Projects Manitoba, the group members acknowledge they did come together owing to the semi-apocalyptic nature of the COVID-19 crisis.

In the fall of 2020, they formed around the nucleus of seasoned theatre artist Jacquie Loewen, once a performer in the popular sketch-comedy troupe Hot Thespian Action, a fight choreographer, and more recently a director for Manitoba Opera productions (The Telephone and La voix humaine).

Festival explores the role of folklore in horror flicks

When she returned to the city of her birth to take the job of assistant programmer at Winnipeg’s Cinematheque in 2007, Kier-La Janisse brought a bold voice to the cinema’s already vaunted reputation.

Before her departure in 2008 to launch her microcinema, Blue Sunshine, in Montreal, she started, among other things, the Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal Party (the TV cartoon/breakfast food binge was a holdover from her time as a programmer at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse), Plastic Paper, a festival of animated, illustrated puppet film, and the cutting edge documentary festival Gimme Some Truth, which she envisioned showcasing “the kind of films that left you feeling as though you’d been punched in the face.”

During her time here she worked closely with the late Cinematheque artistic dirctor Dave Barber.

“It’s hard to imagine the Cinematheque without Dave,” she says. “It really is his theatre. He had such a unique perspective on things, he championed so many Canadian filmmakers, but it was never to fill a quota or satisfy some funding requirement — he genuinely loved Canadian cinema and saw all the things that made it idiosyncratic and weird.”

A Christmas thriller? Stranger things have happened

Hallmark it ain’t.

Universal Pictures will be producing a Christmas-themed movie titled Violent Night to be filmed in Manitoba commencing in January through March. According to a report in SlashFilm, the film will star David Harbour of the Netflix series Stranger Things, the 2019 Hellboy reboot and the recent Marvel movie Black Widow, in which he played Red Guardian, Scarlett Johansson’s “father” within a Russian deep-cover family unit.

Violent Night, which has been described as “an elevated thriller set against the Christmas holiday backdrop,” comes from the people who gave us Universal’s hit action movie Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk. That Winnipeg-lensed film, budgeted at US$15 million when it shot in late 2019, turned a tidy profit against the odds in its pandemic release in March, scoring more than US$55 million at the box office worldwide.

Like Nobody, Violent Night will be produced by John Wick co-director David Leitch with Kelly McCormick, whose shared credits also include the kickass Charlize Theron action film Atomic Blonde, as well as Deadpool 2 and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. The script is by Sonic the Hedgehog scribes Pat Casey and Josh Miller.

Bard’s wife crafts sandbox world that demands leaning in

“I long for the sea,” announces Anne Hathaway at the start of this 92-minute, one-hander drama by Winnipeg-born, Alberta-based playwright Vern Thiessen. Considering some of the circumstances of her life to be revealed, it will prove to be a shocking statement.

Hathaway, played by Winnipeg actor Debbie Patterson, is better known as the wife of William Shakespeare, to the extent that she is known at all. The Bard had three children with her, but he largely kept his distance throughout his career as it blossomed so fruitfully in the Stratford hothouse. Hence, the woman has largely existed in a cruel obscurity, even in the public imagination. (She barely figures in the whimsical Marc Norman/Tom Stoppard script of Shakespeare in Love.)

With this play, Thiessen seeks to rectify that state of affairs with a backstory that, among other things, suggests the living arrangement was due to Shakespeare’s homosexuality, an affirmation that the “Fair Lord” in many of his sonnets were indeed a reference to his lover.

Hathaway, for her part, is surprisingly worldly about such concerns; the arrangement allows her to indulge her own desires with a succession of willing men. At the same time, she proves to be a doting mother to the three children she had with “Bill,” including her daughters Judith and Susanna, and her auspiciously named son Hamnet. “Hamnet is a stupid name, don’t you think?,” says Anne wryly.

Winnipeg writer’s narrative leads him to Netflix

It’s not that Burke Scurfield was necessarily destined for a life in the entertainment industry.

But he allows being put in a headlock at the age of four by professional wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart may have had something to do with starting him on a path that would ultimately lead him to a writing gig on Netflix’s first in-house adult animated series, Inside Job. The first season’s 10 episodes follow Reagan Ridley (voiced by Lizzy Caplan), a tech genius at the corporation Cognito Inc., which functions as an all-powerful enabler to the world’s most unbelievable conspiracies, encompassing a robot U.S. president, the Illuminati, a secret moon colony and, yes, lizard people.

Created by Shion Takeuchi with executive producer Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls), the show is a workplace comedy in which the workplace happens to include a sentient mushroom and a man-dolphin.

“It’s like Dunder-Mifflin in the deep state,” says Scurfield in a phone interview from Toronto.

Charming Toronto writer/actor delves deep in autobiographical drama

At this point in our culture, the words “I see dead people” may lead you to assume you’re in for a scary ride.

What’s fascinating about Samson Bonkeabantu Brown’s autobiographical solo play 11:11 is how un-scary it is. For the average theatregoer, certainly it is a work that may take you out of your comfort zone. But it does this in a delightful way, like a strange dream that feels like its own adventure.

That’s not a coincidence. Brown has plumbed his own dreamlife in telling his story, about a child visited by ancestors and pushed toward an understanding of a vague future purpose: “You are a child who will bridge the gap.”

The journey continues into an unsettled adolescence, in which Brown comes to terms with a sexual preference towards women, and yet refuses the label of lesbian: Born with the body of a girl, he knows he is a man.

Daniel Craig's overlong final outing as suave secret agent doesn't reach an all-time high

The world of James Bond is stirred, shaken and positively blown up in this fifth and final chapter of what you might call 007: The Daniel Craig Years.

Craig, as most people know, will not be returning to the role of the suave superspy. That alone makes this a pivotal movie in the long-running franchise, for no other reason than Craig's Bond cycle has been the most consistent running narrative, with each movie dovetailing into the next.

This is in high contrast to the Sean Connery/George Lazenby/Roger Moore/Timothy Dalton/Pierce Brosnan years, in which each movie more or less stood alone. One assumes this Bond phase was influenced by the successfully interlaced realms of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

After a snowy prelude in which an assassin stalks a young girl, we catch up with Bond holidaying with the lovely Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) in Italy, where, in the interest of making their love official, she suggests he say a symbolic goodbye at the tomb of Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), the doomed heroine of Casino Royale.

Trans playwright's new work rooted in his belief destiny is at work in the world

In early 2019, Samson Bonkeabantu Brown was actually preparing to launch his play 11:11, detailing among other things his personal journey through gender transition, as part of the Riser Project at Toronto’s Theatre Centre. In the middle of that prep, he took on a different assignment that would give him unexpected fame beyond the stage.

Brown, a trans man, signed on to do a short film for Gillette which sees the actor/playwright shaving for the first time under his own father’s watchful eye.

In a phone interview from Kitchener, Ont., where he is currently stage managing a project, Brown says he didn’t expect the film to get a lot of attention.

But millions of views later, Brown was amazed to find himself as the star in a significant cultural moment.

Winnipeg-born producer ‘a fierce warrior’

From modest beginnings in St. James, Tara Woodbury may have become one of the most important producers working in the Canadian entertainment business.

Before this week, Woodbury, 38, might have won that title on the strength of the CTV series Transplant, which in 2020 became the most-watched Canadian series among total viewers, with an average audience of 1.4 million. (The series about a Syrian refugee doctor given an opportunity to work in a Toronto hospital was deemed the biggest new Canadian drama since 2015.) Now in post-production on the second season, the series was also a hit stateside (where it airs on NBC), becoming the No. 1 drama after its debut in September of last year.

Woodbury, an executive producer for Sphere Media, had a hand in the show’s creation alongside creator showrunner Joseph Kay, another Winnipeg-to-Toronto transplant.

On Friday, she should cement her reputation in the realm of feature film. Woodbury is one of the producers of Night Raiders, Danis Goulet’s debut feature film set in a future dystopia where a desperate mother (played by filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) goes to extraordinary lengths to be reunited with her daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart), stolen by the government to be indoctrinated in a state-run academy.

Timely, dystopian take on state indoctrination earns accolades

In a morning phone interview from her home in Toronto, filmmaker Danis Goulet admitted she was still feeling the high from the previous evening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where her first feature film Night Raiders drew a rapturous standing ovation on Friday, Sept. 10. That response came on top of TIFF making her the 2021 recipient of TIFF’s Emerging Talent Award.

“It was really an incredible and emotional night,” Goulet said. “It felt like a combination of so many things coming together.

“My parents were here from Saskatchewan, my family, the cast. It was just so incredible to have that moment and have everybody there.”

It undoubtedly helped that the timing of the film’s opening could not be more apt. Night Raiders presents a future dystopia where children have been stolen from their parents to be indoctrinated by state-run academies. The film specifically focuses on the plight of one mother, Niska (played by filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), who goes to extraordinary lengths to be reunited with her daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart), joining a band of Indigenous rebels fighting to reclaim their stolen children.

Film festival broadens scope in fourth edition with movies from 15 countries

Last September, the third edition of the annual African Movie Festival in Manitoba should have been a pretty dismal affair, given that audiences in the Gas Station Arts Centre were limited due to COVID-19 protocols.

But instead, it was the best year of the fest, according to Ben Akoh, the founder and president of AM-FM, with 18 films screening over two days.

This year’s fourth edition promises to be bigger and better, with a total of 24 films to be screened from 15 different African countries, including Rwanda, Tunisia, South Africa, Benin, Morocco, Senegal, Togo, DR Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire (as well as from African diaspora in Switzerland, Guadeloupe, U.S. and Canada).

“Last year for me was a huge success for a number of reasons,” says Akoh. “We had more numbers participating last year, despite the pandemic. I think we got a lot more support after last year’s festival than we had in the previous couple of years.

Extreme French cinema plumbs darkest depths

French films have always had a tendency to startle the most jaded horror movie fans, going back to the 1950s, with landmark thrillers such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece Les Diaboliques (1955) or Georges Franju’s 1959 gory face-transplant classic Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face).

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, France’s film industry seemed intent on reclaiming their stature with a whole new subgenre of films, dubbed by one critic as “The New French Extremity” with shockers such as Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (2003).

The subgenre’s intellectual undercurrent was one of the appeals for Olivia Norquay, who became a programming co-ordinator at Cinematheque in April. Norquay, 34, is an unabashed horror fan, which she demonstrates with her weekly Sunday afternoon radio show Bikini Drive-In, a freewheeling discussion of genre movies on CKUW, 95.9FM.

Norquay says her appreciation grew in earnest in her time working for the late lamented DVD/record store Music Trader in Osborne Village.

Literary road movie could use a rewrite

A movie team-up featuring screen veteran Michael Caine and upstart actress Aubrey Plaza could not have been on anyone’s movie bingo card.

The 89-year-old Caine has history, from sublime English classics (Alfie, Get Carter, Sleuth) to ridiculous studio sequels (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Jaws: The Revenge). But even his bad movies never quite tarnish his presence in front of the camera.

Aubrey Plaza, who sprung from the network TV realm of Parks and Recreation, is by contrast an indie queen (Safety Not Guaranteed, Black Bear) with an unconventional, darkling appeal.

Plaza plays Lucy Standbridge, a woman struggling to maintain the publishing empire of her elderly father. Facing a buyout by her one-time lover Jack (Scott Speedman), Lucy discovers a contract in which an advance was paid to one Harris Shaw (Caine), once a hotshot novelist who put her dad’s publishing company on the map.

City bursts back into the film business

Trailers for movie productions are once again parked all over the city. The Exchange District has undergone a time warp of buildings dressed to look like businesses from a half century ago, for the David Slade-directed period thriller Dark Harvest. Such temporal overhauls also marked the CBC/BET TV series The Porter which winds down its splashy production this week.

It’s safe to say that after a fallow period exacerbated by the pandemic, film production has returned to Winnipeg with a vengeance.

That production roll will continue with films including the cheerleader/horror hybrid Bring It On: Halloween commencing production next month. (The title may be changed to incorporate the phrase: “Cheer or Die.”)

The Cartel, the American production company with offices in Winnipeg, is said to be prepping two different Christmas TV movies, and that’s not counting the Hallmark movie A Kiss Before Christmas, which will commence shooting this week into October.

Malignant: Tasteless, dark, sadistic and a whole lot of fun

You’re reading a review of the movie Malignant a few days after its Friday release because, like so many horror movies before it, Malignant apparently did not screen in advance for critics.

For decades now, studios have often treated horror fare as material best left unseen until opening day, because most movie critics tend to be prejudiced against it. (There is some justification for this.)

But this time, the joke was on the studio — Warner Bros. to be specific.

Critics ended up liking the film quite a bit. On Monday morning, the film’s score on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes score was 75 per cent favourable. Audiences, curiously, were less impressed, with an audience score of just 50 per cent, so advance screenings would have only enhanced the movie’s box office prospects.

Play's riverside setting heightens mood and mystery

Winnipeg has now gone two years without a fringe festival. The ironic thing about that is that, for fans of live theatre, going to a play is a decidedly fringe-y prospect these days.

In the last few weeks, we attended a Winnipeg Jewish Theatre performance of Jack Ludwig’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise in a big open tent on the Asper campus, with an audience of masked, socially distanced attendees. (The play’s producers weren’t too happy about some set pieces being pilfered from the tent facility, but the audience did not seem to miss the hard-top comfort of WJT’s usual Berney Theatre venue.)

This week sees Theatre By the River get even more outdoorsy with performances of Zinnie Harris’s haunting drama Meet Me at Dawn. The cast take us to a “liminal place” by a body of water where an energized Helen (Mel Marginet) expresses joy at having survived a boating accident alongside her more subdued girlfriend Robyn (Alissa Watson).

The play is performed off the banks of the Red River by Whittier Park. The Thursday evening performance was done in front of a subtly glorious sunset, with a view of the Exchange District and the rear of the Mere Hotel on Waterfront Drive. The location, the two-person cast and the rather ephemeral subject matter combined to give off a fringe groove, in the best way.

Wartime-era romance feels remarkably timely

To use a Second World War metaphor, the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre production of Ken Ludwig’s comedy-drama Dear Jack, Dear Louise offers a strategic entertainment that cunningly operates on two fronts.

One: It’s a production that feels safe to view in pandemic conditions. Forsaking WJT’s usual Asper Campus venue in the Berney Theatre, it is performed in an open-sided canvas tent on the Asper Jewish Community Campus field, with socially distanced reserved seating. Unlike most of Ludwig’s farcical oeuvre (Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You), it’s a modest two-hander, and even the actors spend most of their time at a safe distance on a bifurcated split stage (designed by James Moore), appropriate, since the play depicts a courtship via mail.

Two: The play is set in the years 1942-45, when the war threw “normal” life into chaos, speaking to our times of tribulation, sacrifice and dreams maddeningly deferred.

That is the state of affairs for Jack Ludwig (Justin Stadnyk) and Louise Rabiner (Becky Frohlinger). Jack is a doctor, serving in the army as a captain in the 121st Station Hospital. Louise is an aspiring actress-singer, resolute in her ambition to perform on Broadway.

Winnipeg-shot film a homecoming of sorts for actor

It was apparent the movie Flag Day was going to be a family affair when it started production in Winnipeg in the summer of 2019.

Actor-director Sean Penn, adapting a memoir by journalist Jennifer Vogel titled The Flim Flam Man, cast his own daughter Dylan Penn as Jennifer and himself as Jennifer’s career criminal father John Vogel. Penn also cast his son Hopper Penn as Vogel’s son Nick.

Penn went outside the family to cast Canadian actress Katheryn Winnick as Jennifer’s troubled mother Patty. But for the Toronto-born Winnick, coming to Winnipeg allowed her to make a family connection of her own.

“My father immigrated to Winnipeg when he was a toddler,” says Winnick in a Zoom interview from Sante Fe, N.M., where she is shooting David Kelley’s ABC series Big Sky.

Parents’ courtship correspondence inspires playwright

Playwright Ken Ludwig’s latest play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, premièred late in 2019, just three months before COVID-19 shut down most theatrical productions around the world.

Call it a matter of kismet that Ludwig’s play proved to be an almost perfect production for pandemic times. It is a two-hander, for starters, meaning it does not require lots of actors breathing all over the stage at the same time. And because it denotes a letter-writing relationship, even the actors are not required to be physically close.

Ludwig, in a phone interview from his home in Washington, D.C., acknowledges most of the comedies he writes, including hits such as Lend Me a Tenor, Crazy for You and Moon Over Buffalo, average out to about eight actors apiece.

“People are surprised that I wrote it before there was any such thing as COVID-19,” the 70-something Ludwig says. “And I don’t usually write two-handers either. I really usually write muscular comedies with a full cast.”

Winnipeg Theatre Awards recognize local voice coach whose passion is seeing her students achieve their dreams

In her younger days in the Philippines, Joy Lazo put aside a desire to become a professional singer at the behest of her parents. Instead, she went to Manila’s University of Santo Tomas to get a degree in economics.

But the dream never faded. Her eventual husband, Ramon, supported her ambition, and she would become a professional singer in the 1970s. When she and Ramon came to Winnipeg in 1988, Joy would nurture that ambition in others, including at least one future Broadway star.

That, in a nutshell, is how Lazo, 70, came to be the recipient of an honorary Evie at this year’s Winnipeg Theatre Awards in the category of Theatre Educator. Lazo says she has always felt the need to share the gift of music, in addition to her and her husband’s need to help others.

“When we got married, we were inspired to work with young people, especially the troubled youth in our community,” Lazo says in an interview with the Free Press. “So we organized them into choirs and sports teams as an alternative against the streets.

Lovely performance from an unlikely source

Udo Kier is currently 76 years old and remains an impossibly busy actor, parsing out his singular presence in everything from American studio movies (Downsizing) to tawdry low-budget horror (Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich) to Brazilian action/art films (Bacurau) to Guy Maddin-directed dreamscapes (The Forbidden Room).

Taking a rare lead role as an elderly gay man confronting his past in Swan Song, the German actor comes perhaps as close as he ever has to, if you will, straight drama. Ever since he first made waves in some ’70s-era shockers such as The Mark of the Devil or Flesh for Frankenstein, or The Story of O, filmmakers have not been able to resist casting Kier in roles that suggest an epic perversity behind those supernaturally pale grey eyes.

Writer-director Todd Stephens (Edge of Seventeen, Gypsy 83) evidently saw a sweet melancholy in Kier, and he allows the actor to explore that side in this tale, “inspired by a true icon,” as an opening title says.

We find Kier’s Pat Pitsenbarger, a retired hairdresser, living out some sad final days in a retirement home outside Sandusky, Ohio. Pat sneaks “More” brand cigarettes when out of sight from the nursing staff.

Ryan Reynolds battles gunfire with a grin in comedy with a few design flaws

He’s a young, handsome, happy and single guy in the big city. Life should be a dream… if it weren’t for all the bad guys randomly beating and killing him all the time.

Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is not aware his hometown is actually an open-world video game. He is also not aware that he is an NPC, a non-playable character whose purpose in life is to serve as digital cannon fodder for an ultraviolent shooter game called Free City.

So he goes through life with a very Ryan Reynolds-y chipper attitude, working as a bank teller and taking joy where he may, in his morning cup of coffee (cream and two sugars) or in his encounters with his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), a security guard at the bank.

But something bothers Guy. He finds himself attracted to a badass, gun-toting woman called Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer) who is identifiably not an NPC because she wears the glasses of a real-person player, or as Guy and Buddy call them, “the glasses people.”

WJT takes it outside with al fresco show

Winnipeg Jewish Theatre will be the first local theatre company to perform a play live onstage to in-person audiences this season, even if the show comes as a surprise entry as a one-off season-ender.

WJT will be presenting Dear Jack, Dear Louise by playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor), a two-hander starring Justin Stadnyk and Becky Frohlinger, from Aug. 28 to Sept. 5.

Instead of being mounted in the usual Berney Theatre venue, the 90-minute, no-intermission show will be presented in an open-sided canvas tent on the Asper Jewish Community Campus field, allowing for socially distanced reserved seating.

The play follows the letter-writing courtship of U.S. army Capt. Jack Ludwig, a military doctor stationed in Oregon, and Louise Rabiner, an aspiring actress and dancer in New York City. It is based on the story of playwright Ludwig’s own parents.

An American movie with an unmistakable Canadian vibe

Sure, the upcoming action-comedy-fantasy Free Guy may be an American studio movie, shot in Boston.

But there is an unmistakable Canadian vibe to it, beyond the fact that its star, Ryan Reynolds, and its director Shawn Levy are Canadian boys.

In the film, Reynolds plays Guy, an unflappably friendly dude who works in a bank in a literally booming metropolis. Guy is blissfully unaware that he is, in fact, an “NPC,” a non-playable character in an ultra-violent, open-world video game named Free City.

But when Guy meets a beautiful player proxy called Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer), our hero suddenly aspires to break out of his passive rut when she teaches him the truth about the violent digital universe in which he dwells.

Glib Suicide Squad serves up plenty of comic-book gore

Prior to making The Suicide Squad, filmmaker James Gunn was best known for injecting a lot of cheek into the Marvel universe by writing and directing both chapters of The Guardians of the Galaxy.

You have to go back still further to uncover Gunn’s penchant for cinematic outrage in films such as Super (2010), a film that deliberately subverted superhero tropes with a sad-funny tale of a deluded vigilante (Rainn Wilson) who dons a costume to avenge himself on the drug dealer who made off with his addict wife. Gunn started his career in the outrage factory known as Troma, a low-budget exploitation house that also savagely parodied the superhero genre with films such as The Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD.

Gunn was, in short, a good bad-attitude guy to rescue DC’s supervillain franchise after director David Ayer’s 2016 misfire Suicide Squad.

Any studio protestations to the contrary, Gunn’s film is both a sequel and a reboot, or perhaps, a rewrite, given that it maintains a few characters from the first film, including Margot Robbie’s kinky minx Harley Quinn, straight-arrow soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and the malevolent brains behind the project Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). But it also reinvents Will Smith’s Deadshot character as Bloodsport (Idris Elba), who also happens to be a deadly marksman, reluctantly taking the mission to protect his only daughter.

Animation studio suddenly closes; 100 local artists lose jobs

Tangent Animation, an animation studio with offices in Winnipeg and Toronto, made the surprise announcement to its staff of animators Tuesday morning that it is shuttering its operation.

One non-artist employee of the company, who asked not to be named, said she had been informed on Wednesday morning.

“All of the artists were told (Tuesday) the contracts were lost and all of them would be let go,” she said.

“In my case, I inquired about it (Wednesday) morning after hearing from many different people that this was happening,” she said.

Statue commemorates signing of Treaty 1

To mark the 150th anniversary of the signing of Treaty 1, Winnipeg artist KC Adams unveiled a document of her own in a quiet spot just south of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, written in steel 11 feet tall.

In the Tuesday morning ceremony, Adams, who said she is “part Cree, part Ojibway and part British,” presented her sculpture Tanisi keke totamak …. Ka cis teneme toyak, which translates as “What can we do, to respect each other.”

Commissioned by the Winnipeg Foundation, the sculpture’s base is a powwow drum. Atop the drum are two forces representing “the benevolent spirit Wesakechak and the Wolf,” explained Adams. “Wesakechak represents the Indigenous People, and the Wolf represents settlers.

“Wesakechak is a carrier of knowledge: community, family, land, water, plants, creatures, and the spirit world. The Wolf brings forth wisdom and power when embodying ‘community’ but is disastrous when acting as a lone wolf.

Reliably funny Exchange hits close to home

The setting is quickly established in an opening title -- “Hobart, Ontario - Godforsaken Canada, 1986” -- superimposed over a lonesome highway with snow blowing over it in that wraith-like way so familiar to anyone who has driven a prairie highway in winter.

Despite screenwriter Tim Long’s Brandon, Manitoba birthplace, the inspiration for the town of Hobart is actually Exeter, Ontario, where Long’s dad ran a tractor business when the family moved from Brandon when Tim was just four years old.

Still, the movie will strike a painfully familiar chord with anyone who has walked into their house in blizzard conditions and demanded to know from their parents: “Why do we live here?”

That is our introduction to teenage Tim Long (Australian actor Ed Oxenbould), a smart, friendless kid who simultaneously loves the high art of the French New Wave and feels the absence of the most basic cultural touchstones in this rural Ontario backwater: “Hobart has no McDonalds!”

Problematic Shakespeare production blends tragedy, comedy, French and English

This production of The Winter’s Tale, often deemed one of William Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” allows for the virtual pleasure of a visit to the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park to enjoy the work of 10 different Winnipeg actors.

Even so, the filmed production, true to its categorization, is… problematic.

A reason for its status is, in most basic terms, the play begins as a tragedy and ends as a comedy. The tragedy comes courtesy of King Leontes of Sicily (Gabriel Daniels), who asks his faithful wife Hermione (Ava Darrach-Gagnon) to help convince his good friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia (Simon Miron), to stay on an extended visit. Hermione succeeds, but that only spurs Leontes to suspect the pregnant Hermione has been unfaithful to him with Polixenes.

Simpsons writer plumbs his small-town past

If you happen to know that screenwriter Tim Long was born in Brandon, you may not be surprised to see the opening shot of the film he wrote, The Exchange, shows snow sweeping across a desolate country highway, with the title: “Hobart, Ontario, Godforsaken Canada. 1986.”

But you know what happens when you assume.

The inspiration for the fictional town of Hobart is actually a province away from Manitoba, in the little burg of Exeter, Ont., 40 kilometres north of London. Take it from Long, who clarifies all in a Zoom interview from his home in Los Angeles, where the writer-producer has been working for the better part of the past socially distanced year at his day job as a writer and producer on The Simpsons.

“I was born in Brandon, but we moved to Exeter, Ontario, when I was four and I haven’t been back to Brandon,” he says, adding, “I have always wanted to make a trek back, but I haven’t made the trip yet. Exeter is really my hometown. I’m back to Exeter all the time and I love it. I have no beef with Brandon.”

Oka crisis informs powerful coming-of-age story

The title of the movie, Beans, is a cute nickname for a cute 12-year-old Mohawk girl with a considerably more dignified traditional name: Tekehentahkhwa.

As with the movie, the name is disarming. By these stealthy means, it allows some tough material — both personal and historical — and very strong emotions into the movie experience.

It’s a first dramatic feature for director/co-writer Tracey Deer, whose past work has been in the field of TV comedy (the APTN series Mohawk Girls). For this film, Deer excavated some of her own experiences, coming of age during the so-called Oka crisis of 1990, a 78-day armed standoff between Mohawk protesters and an escalating opposing force including the Quebec police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and ultimately the Canadian Army.

The crux of the conflict was a few acres of land desired by the Oka community to transform its nine-hole golf course to 18 holes. For that purpose, they needed to level an ancient forest, known on the adjacent Kanesatake Mohawk reserve as “the Pines.”

Film’s comedy comes from ‘rich’ life on the rez

While movie theatres have been open to the public since Saturday, the Gimli Film Festival is proceeding with a mostly online festival, with one notable exception. The RBC Sunset Drive-In is a safe, socially distanced alternative to the usual beach screenings that have long made Gimli unique among film festivals.

This festival-within-a-festival kicks off Wednesday night with a movie that checks off many of the boxes one expects from drive-in fare. It’s a raucous comedy. It has con artists, a cache of hidden money, a loaded, adversarial romance, and even some supernatural elements.

Almost all of it is set on a British Columbia reserve, a place the movie’s hero, Hank Crow Eyes (Ajuawak Kapashesit), struggles to leave.

Indian Road Trip is partially lifted from the experience of its writer-director Allan Hopkins, who refers to himself as “a proud member of the N’quatqua First Nation,” located about 200 kilometres north of Vancouver.

Gimli film fest puts focus on Indigenous horror

Like so many of us, Daina Warren admits she was a fan of horror films when she was in her teens, only to become a “scaredy-cat” later in life.

But Warren, an artist, curator and the director of the downtown Winnipeg gallery Urban Shaman, was still intrigued when she was invited by the Gimli Film Festival to curate a series of horror films, both shorts and features, under the heading Indigenous Horror Focus.

“It was something in the back of my head last year when they invited me to guest curate,” Warren says in a phone interview. She says she has seen other similarly themed programs in international festivals, “like in the United States and Australia and New Zealand.

“But there haven’t been a lot of lineups like that in Canada,” she says. “I just thought this would be a really good opportunity to try to program something, and put some selections together that are really cool ideas.”

Satirical series pokes fun at artifice of old musicials

Schmigadoon!, a six-episode series newly available on Apple TV+, has a priceless premise, but it’s not as fresh as you might think.

Spinning off from the fantastical plot of the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon, it’s about a smart, contemporary couple, both New York doctors, who have come through years of co-habitation to hit a romantic rough patch. They go on a healing camping trip, but get lost in the woods.

Trying to navigate a way home, they cross a charming stone bridge and find themselves in the remote small town of Schmigadoon.

Here, the townies wear old-fashioned clothes and sing a rousing welcome song to their visitors, Melissa (Cecily Strong) and Josh (Keegan-Michael Key), leading the couple to believe they’ve wandered into some kind of tacky Disney fantasy village. But as they mingle with the citizens, they come to realize they are in a Twilight Zone-like place where people behave as anyone would behave… in a movie musical of the ’40s and ’50s.

Schmigadoon’s stealthy satire is music to star’s ears

In his comedy career, whether as half of the comedy duo Key & Peele alongside Jordan Peele, or on Mad TV, Keegan-Michael Key has been proven as a master of the reaction shot. Whatever bizarre thing put in front of him, Key is singularly capable of matching it with his expressions of disbelief or awe.

Fortunately, there is a lot for Key to react to in the new six-episode musical comedy TV series Schmigadoon!, on Apple TV+.

Key, 50, plays Josh Skinner, a surgeon who goes on a camping trip with his live-in love Melissa (Cecily Strong).

Getting lost, they stumble into the titular community, a magical town where everyone is stuck in a 1940s movie musical. To exit, musical fan Melissa and musical hater Josh can only leave under the spell of “true love.” And that proves to be more difficult than either of them thought.

Today’s online fringe schedule

l 7 p.m. — For Science! on Sabbatical, created and performed by Christine Lesiak and Ian Walker. This Edmonton duo, who gave us the 2019 fringe show For Science, present all-new experiments while on their summer sabbatical. Phoebe on the Farm, presented by Winnipeg’s Sherri Pierce, is a family-friendly farm visit.

l 7:30 p.m. — Poetry Slam Round 3, with Amber O’Reilly, SamanthaX, DMP, Jules Stevenson, Charmaine Bloomfield, and Brooklyn Alice Lee

l 8 p.m. – On My Way to Nashville, created and performed by Winnipeg artist Ce-Lee (Rachel Smith), tells a truth-based tale of an aspiring musician who finds herself living on the streets in a strange city. Salt Water, by Joel Crichton, is a drama of a man sitting alone writing at night by the hotel pool when he is confronted with a provocative young woman. Club Soda Improv Presents: Every Fringe Show sees the high-energy local comedy troupe taking suggestions from viewers, setting the stage for an improvised play that will never be seen again.

l 9 p.m. — Sweet Alibi, a Winnipeg folk-roots-pop trio, a.k.a. Jess Rae Ayre, Amber Nielsen and Michelle Anderson, fill tonight’s fringe concert bill.

Today’s online fringe schedule

● 1 p.m. — Kids Shows: Sabook & His Special Drum, by Winnipeg’s Jazz Haz Productions, is a folktale about a little boy’s determination to bring joy and prosperity back to his fishing village after it’s hit by a terrible flood; The Magic That Is Me, by Calgary company Colour Me Sad, is an excerpt from the musical of the same name, in which a girl named Max notices that the colour from her bedroom has completely disappeared.

● 7 p.m. — MiniQuest, from local company Meraki Theatre, is a musical mini-play, targeted for young audiences, following the “Adventure Scouts” introduced in the 2019 production Quest, now coping with the loneliness of the pandemic; Living Room Conversation, created by Toronto’s Quondam Dreams, offers a Toy Story/Secret Life of Pets comedy concept wherein two chihuahuas, a wooden giraffe, a lamp and a medicine ball find plenty to discuss while the humans are away.

● 7:30 p.m. — Poetry Slam Round 2 with Paul de Bruijn, Mason Kanne, Noelle Dandonneau, the P.O.E., Laurie Fischer and Kimmy Martin

● 8 p.m. — Living with a Magician, presented by Winnipeg’s Sensible Chuckle Theatre, is a comedy spinning off a History Channel series Rough Roommates focusing on an episode in which a call centre worker is forced to cope with a magician roommate who claims to be a “1,000-year-old wizard who specializes in the mystical and fantastical”; Se’ed, written and performed by Beausejour organic farmer Wayne James, offers an assessment of the state of our polluted, profit-obsessed future; Barney’s Virtual Party is written and performed by Franco-Métis Barney Morin of Otterburne, offering a selection of choice stories and jokes; A Deep Dive Into My Mom’s Facebook is presented by Toronto comedian Eric Andrews, who gets to know his Mom better through a series of online quizzes she’s done on social media.

Landmark opts to keep Winkler movie theatre dark for now

Manitoba movie theatres can start up their projectors this weekend. But just because cinemas can reopen amid eased COVID-19 pandemic restrictions doesn’t mean they will.

The province has stipulated only those who have been fully vaccinated for two weeks may attend a cinema, at up to 50 per cent capacity. That means if you qualify, you may be able to catch Black Widow or F9 at Winnipeg’s Grant Park Cinemas or Landmark Cinemas 9 in Brandon.

But if you’re waiting to see a movie at Landmark Cinema 5 in Winkler, where the vaccination rate is only 23.7 per cent (compared to the larger Manitoba rate of 59 per cent), you’re out of luck.

That theatre will not be reopening for now, said Landmark Cinemas Canada chief executive officer Bill Walker.

Documentary explores life and death of Canadian CEO -- and the disappearance of $215 million of cryptocurrency

Among the films on view at this year’s Gimli Film Festival, Dead Man’s Switch feels unique… yet familiar.

For classic film buffs, there is a scent of Citizen Kane in its premise: An investigation into the life of a mysterious, brash and extremely wealthy entrepreneur, whose death leaves a trove of tantalizing, unexplained mysteries.

But this story is all too real. The film by Vancouver-based documentarian Sheona McDonald examines the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Canadian CEO Gerald Cotten, who died at the age of 30 in India, apparently as a result of Crohn’s disease.

His death might not have been an especially big story if not for the fact his cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, suddenly lost $215 million, which seemed to vanish, leaving 115,000 creditors facing losses that ranged from decimating to devastating.

Fallow spell can’t faze fringe performers

Beginning today, the Winnipeg Fringe Festival goes with a combination of scheduled short live shows, as well as an array of longer digital shows available throughout the week.

It’s impressive that fringe artists can keep producing, since a year-and-a-half is a long time in the pandemic desert for performers to go without performing for live audiences. Those fallow periods can result in a loss of performance mojo.

That doesn’t appear to be an issue for the members of the Winnipeg sketch comedy troupe HUNKS, who will present a 15-minute show titled Lil’ Skits in the Tuesday evening block of shows from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Since HUNKS has always incorporated pre-recorded video components into their raucous live shows, the prospect of going all-digital is not intimidating, says Matt Nightingale, who will be presenting the show alongside fellow members Dana Smith, Tim Gray and Rory Fallis.

“We’ve been focused on the question of: how do we exist in the new online Zoom medium?” says Nightingale. “But we were well-positioned to make that transition.”

Black Widow gets to the bottom of the Avengers' stealthiest member

There is the feel of a consolation prize about Black Widow, which is not so much the promised entrée into Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it is a footnote to the third.

This mostly has to do with the fact that (spoiler alert), Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow character, Natasha Romanoff, was killed off in Avengers: Endgame. That makes this a prequel, set in the aftermath of Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War. As Natasha goes on the lam from S.H.I.E.L.D., we find our heroine edging ever closer to her home turf — Russia — for a reckoning with the brutal spy agency that helped create her.

This necessitates a family reunion, of sorts, with the faux mom, dad and sister she once had while part of a sleeper cell operation, posing as an American family on an undefined intelligence mission.

In the opening flashback sequence, we see their cover is blown, and how young Natasha is traumatically sent back to Russia to learn the dark arts of espionage in a facility called the Red Room.

Movie mosaic tells cinematic story of Manitoba

It is appropriate that the key film at this year’s Gimli Film Festival is: a) a mosaic of hundreds of images culled from radically different viewpoints over more than a century and b) budget-wise, cheap as borscht.

What could be more Manitoban than that?

What We’ve Pulled Off… So Far is a documentary about the history of Manitoba film by Kevin Nikkel.

The Winnipeg-based Nikkel, 51, has made all kinds of films in the past few decades, but has settled into documentary for most of his career. A filmmaker with the heart of an archivist, Nikkel has often explored our history as it ties into cinema in films such as On the Trail of the Far Fur Country (2014), an epic retracing of a 1919 film crew expedition into Canada’s Far North.

Cast, crew of Marvel's first female superhero flick dish on filming of origin story

Of all the heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. the Black Widow, may be the coolest: calm, capable and kickass, and all unenhanced by special serums or gamma rays or mutant powers.

She is also perhaps the most enigmatic, and since Scarlett Johansson first took the role in the 2010 movie Iron Man 2, it’s been up for debate if her mysterious origins were being held back to enhance the enigma, or if Marvel couldn’t be bothered to give over a whole movie to a female superhero. (Remember, D.C. was the first to take that particular plunge with Wonder Woman in 2017.)

Black Widow finally gets her solo project, ironically (SPOILER ALERT) after the character met her demise in 2019’s Avengers Endgame. The long-delayed Black Widow, which takes place immediately following the events of Captain America: Civil War, sees Natasha evading a manhunt and returning to her Russian roots, where she joins members of her cobbled-together family of deep-cover spies, including her “father” Alexei, a.k.a. the Red Guardian (a Russian response to American super-soldier Captain America played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour), “mother” Melina (Rachel Weisz) and little “sister” Yelena (Florence Pugh), a superspy made from the same mould as Natasha, trained in her deadly arts in the Russian spy training facility, the “Red Room.”

The cast, director Cate Shortland and producer Kevin Feige, the man largely responsible for juggling all the Marvel properties into a cohesive universe, all participated in a Zoom press conference where they discussed the character, the movie and Black Widow’s legacy in the Marvel universe going forward.

Paws for laughs

For the fright-averse, this horror-comedy from director Josh Ruben (Scare Me) and screenwriter Mishna Wolff skews harder to comedy than horror. But it’s an unexpected delight from the get-go, starting with an ominously presented title card with a quote from… Mr. Rogers.

After a preface in which a townie is attacked by some kind of wild beast, we meet Finn (Sam Richardson of Veep), the new forest ranger come to the town of Beaverfield, an eccentric little forest community in Vermont.

In short order, Finn meets oddball postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), dangerous hermit Emerson Flint (Glenn Fleshler), kindly inn owner Jeanine (Catherine Curtin), the craft-obsessed Trisha (Michaela Watkins) and her philandering husband Pete (Michael Chernus), local mechanic Gwen (Sarah Burns) and her dirt-dumb hubby Marcus (George Basil), gay couple Joaquim (Harvey Guillén) and Devon (Cheyenne Jackson), enigmatic environmentalist Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson), and finally Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall), an oil man causing flare-ups among the townsfolk selling his plan to run an oil pipeline through the town.

Also stirring the pot: a werewolf has begun a campaign of terror by slashing both Jeanine’s errant husband and the town’s generators. As a winter storm approaches, more townies are on the menu.

All your home’s a stage

From gourmet cooking to candle-making, the pandemic has brought all kinds of hitherto external activities home. Why not theatre?

That’s the pretext of a Vancouver theatre company, Boca del Lupo, which has now produced five box sets of plays from across Canada that can be performed at home with the members of your family/pandemic pod.

Months into the pandemic, Boca del Lupo’s artistic director Sherry J. Yoon and artistic producer Jay Dodge realized that creating an alternative to the remote digital performance was something theatre lovers were going to need.

They came up with the Western Canada edition of Plays2Perform@Home, featuring four works by British Columbia playwrights Hiro Kanagawa, Tara Beagan, Karen Hines and Jovanni Sy.

Gimli film fest expands and offers drive-in fare

The Gimli Film Festival will still be primarily an online festival, even as the threat of COVID starts to recede in the province.

But the good news is that the annual fest, commencing July 12, is expanded from five days to two weeks. And it will still be possible to attend in-person screenings. Specifically, the festival will be holding a drive-in theatre in Pavilion Park (where the Icelandic Fest annually sets up its carnival) at a cost of $15 per vehicle. Audio will be broadcast via FM radio signal. The drive-in operates in its final week from July 21-25 as a substitute for the much-loved free beach screenings that were the most visible feature of the 21-year-old film fête.

The drive-in fare only occasionally matches the drive-in movie ethos established in past festivals, which generally featured more recognizable action-comedy fare. This year, the most popular of the drive-in movies, which screen nightly at 10 p.m., will be The Empire Strikes Back, which plays on the festival’s final night of July 25.

But the drive-in mojo is still strong in the program, which kicks off Wednesday, July 25 with Indian Road Trip, a sexy comedy with an Indigenous cast about a couple of con artists transporting an elder to see her estranged sister, only to encounter supernatural forces along the way. A visit to a nude beach features prominently in the movie’s trailer.

Voice underscores the necessity of listening, understanding

Show, don’t tell.

That rule of writing is emphatically flouted in CBC host/rapper Ismaila Alfa’s first play Voice, which is currently being streamed via Prairie Theatre Exchange instead of being performed live.

The original plan was that Alfa himself was to have performed the piece in front of a live audience in May. Fate intervened, of course, as it did frequently in 2020. After hosting the local radio show Up to Speed for years, Alfa moved to Toronto when he scored a gig hosting Metro Morning for CBC Radio. By that time, he had already commenced writing a play at the behest of PTE artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones, before COVID numbers soared. The play changed again with the in-plain-sight murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

Liam Neeson on thin ice in locally shot thriller

Early in his life, writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh saw the 1953 Henri-George Clouzot thriller The Wages of Fear, and his future career as a filmmaker was sealed. Hensleigh would go on to pen films such as Armageddon, The Rock, Jumanji and Die Hard with a Vengeance, all of which are stamped in the template of ill-assorted adventurers taking on a deadly mission.

The Ice Road, while not a remake of The Wages of Fear, is his most explicit homage. Instead of carrying nitroglycerine to stop a raging oil fire, three semi trailers are assigned the task of transporting three massively heavy cast iron wellheads to far-northern Manitoba, where a diamond mine collapse is threatening to slowly extinguish the lives of the miners trapped inside.

Hensleigh signed on to both write and direct the film, which was shot in Winnipeg and various Manitoba locations in early 2020, with the COVID crisis coming close to shutting down the production in March of that year. It was apparently the last film to remain in production in all of North America as the pandemic swept over the world.

Liam Neeson stars as Mike, a trucker whose fate is tied to his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), a veteran whose abilities as a mechanic are hampered by the effects of PTSD. With employment options diminished, Mike and Gurty sign on with Winnipeg truck company owner Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), who takes on the challenge when the call goes out for three trucks to transport those wellheads over the unnervingly thinning ice roads of Manitoba’s lakes.

Black Hole founder a caring prof, creative artist

Chris Johnson, former professor at the University of Manitoba’s department of English, film and theatre and the man who created the Black Hole Theatre Company, died unexpectedly this past weekend at the age of 76, leaving behind his wife Barb Donovan, son Zachary, and extended family Erin and Stephen Donovan.

During his 36-year career at the U of M, Johnson’s most visible accomplishment may have been how he lobbied tirelessly for the university to build a decent theatre to replace the dark, barely functioning space in the basement of University College. It was Johnson who dubbed it the Black Hole in an effort to shame the university administration into building a professional-quality stage.

By the time the university succeeded, finishing construction of the Conklin Theatre in Taché Hall in 2015, Johnson was set to retire.

“It feels like I finally did the job, so it’s time to go,” Johnson told the Free Press in a 2015 interview marking his retirement. “In a way, it’s a good punctuation.”

Odenkirk film, shot in Winnipeg, would not have been possible 'anywhere else,' director says

Today’s release of the movie Nobody on DVD means that a great deal of information — some of it startling — is coming out about the film itself, shot in Winnipeg in the late fall of 2019.

On the commentary track of the film, star Bob Odenkirk reveals that the premise of the film — which starts with his character’s non-response to a home invasion — was partly inspired by the fact that Odenkirk himself had experienced a couple of break-ins while his family was home.

His efforts to minimize damage or violence spawned personal anxiety about whether he should have taken a more aggressive posture (exacerbated by the fact a police officer insinuated that Odenkirk himself should have resorted to violence).

At the same time, director Ilya Naishuller offers a few revelations about the original vision of the film, compared to how it actually ended up.

The art of the brawl

In a movie, a fight scene is more than an action interlude, or a distraction from the necessary momentum of story and character.

A good fight scene is character. A good fight scene is story, with its own arc, plot twists and reversals.

That is a driving principle for stunt co-ordinator Greg Rementer, the stuntman/mixed martial artist who managed the fight choreography in the Winnipeg-lensed action movie Nobody.

If you’ve seen any serious action movie in the past 10 years, you’ve seen Rementer. In the Marvel Universe alone, say, Captain America: Civil War, Rementer stunt-doubled Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Don Cheadle and Frank Grillo, as well as doubling Josh Brolin in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If you want to see him unencumbered by someone else’s costume, watch him fighting Charlize Theron in the brutal, one-take staircase fight in Atomic Blonde. He has worked in other action universes: he was the stunt co-ordinator in the Fast and Furious offshoot Hobbs and Shaw, and part of the stunt ensemble in the Star Wars offshoot The Mandalorian.

My brother, the King

He was kind of a big deal.

David King was an actor, playwright, screenwriter and songwriter. He was born in Winnipeg, and began his journey here as an artist before spending most of his life on the West Coast.

In the interest of full disclosure, he was also my older brother. He died Jan. 22 at the age of 71. Cancer.

David was the second eldest in a family of five kids, spending the first years of his life crammed into a tiny three-bedroom house on Marjorie Street in St. James. His father was musician Jimmy King, a towering figure — literally and figuratively — in the Winnipeg music scene at the time. (His mother, Fay did not tower, but her support for her son was an unshakable structure nonetheless.)

Playwright’s debut tackles fatherhood, future

For Ismaila Alfa, “playwright” is now the third description in a hyphenate that previously included “rapper” and “CBC radio host.”

The add-on comes with the opening next week of Alfa’s play Voice, premièring as a digital-only production from Prairie Theatre Exchange, starting June 24.

The play encompasses huge transitions both in Alfa’s personal career and in the historic context of 2020-21.

In Alfa’s own life, last August the longtime host of CBC Radio’s Winnipeg show Up to Speed upgraded to host of CBC Toronto’s daily show Metro Morning, after he was called to Toronto to “fill in.” Even then, he was already at work on the play, which a year ago had been tentatively scheduled to be performed live in May and June of this year, with Alfa himself appearing onstage.

PTE's new season delivers a combination of digital and live productions

Theatre companies across the country, having been battered by a season and a half of cancellations, postponements and pivots, are proceeding with understandable caution as the prospect of opening up once again becomes more of a post-vaccine reality.

With the announcement of their new theatre season, Prairie Theatre Exchange is still playing it safe, with a mix of remote digital performances and live productions in its lineup. The company’s first show in October is digital only, the second, in November, is live at the Portage Place venue, with extended digital performances throughout the month of December. It’s not until the end of the season in May of 2022 when we can expect to go to the theatre and see a gang of six performers onstage, shamelessly singing and acting in naked masklessness.

PTE artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones says the company had positive experiences with its digital shows of this past season, including Yvette Nolan’s short tribute to live theatre, Katharsis, and the Hannah Moscovitch drama Post-Democracy, both of which were widely seen in their digital formats beyond Manitoba’s borders. That precedent made Jones open to keeping the digital option throughout the upcoming new season.

In that spirit, a couple of shows in the season — 11:11 and Deer Woman — are digital performances from companies outside the province. But the remaining three shows are all world premières that will be performed live on the PTE stage. It’s a picture of how theatre has evolved post-pandemic.

In the Heights lavishly brings Latin-flavoured musical to the big screen

Any other year, or any other summer, the movie musical In the Heights might impress as just another musical confection, coming from director John M. Chu, the guy who gave us zero-cal amusements such as Step Up 2: The Streets and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.

But this adaptation of the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda (pre-Hamilton) and Quiara Alegría Hudes is much more. It’s a lavish production, filled with wall-to-wall Latin-flavoured music and beautiful, talented performers who are emphatically not observing social distancing protocols. (It was shot pre-COVID-19.) It is set in a hot summer in the titular neighbourhood, on the northern tip of Manhattan: a Latin community enduring a rude push towards gentrification.

In a framing device, we meet our principal hero, Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos), regaling kids with his story from a beach in the Dominican Republic, the homeland of his now-deceased parents.

The Porter, based on Winnipeg's Black history, is set in Montreal

For better and worse, the eight-episode Winnipeg-lensed CBC drama The Porter, set mostly in the Montreal of the 1920s, will be filled with rich historical detail when it is scheduled to be broadcast next February.

The detail may be grim. The whole practice of hiring Black porters to serve on sleeping cars was conceived in a post-slavery world by train magnate George Pullman as a consolation to white passengers who yearned for the quality of eager servility in Black servants.

But it won’t all be grim — one of the main sets will be an early jazz club — and there is quirk too. In the 1920s, controversial Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey spread his own gospel with the formation of the United Negro Improvement Association, which saw a volunteer force of “Black Cross nurses.”

“It was kind of a play on Red Cross nurses who went around the community and helped Black residents, giving them health information and sanitary information,” says The Porter showrunner Marsha Greene, who promises that will be in the show.

Theatre Projects bids farewell to longtime artistic director

Ardith Boxall, the artistic director of Theatre Projects Manitoba, is departing the scrappy Winnipeg theatre company after 15 years.

Lest anyone thinks the pandemic drove Boxall from the position, she asserts the decision was made before COVID-19 happened. Boxall says she, general manager Rea Kavanaugh and the board of directors “started this conversation several years ago, because it’s an inevitable conversation for most arts organizations.

“This was going to be the 30th anniversary and this past year, we were getting ready to announce the coming season and that it would be my last,” Boxall said.

Boxall began her tenure in 2005, and she subsequently oversaw the development and production of 21 Manitoba plays, five seasons of the writer-performer series In the Chamber and seven years of the Salon Series. TPM has produced new plays by playwrights including Lara Rae (Dragonfly), Debbie Patterson (Sargent & Victor & Me), Armin Wiebe, Carolyn Gray, Steven Ratzlaff and Ellen Peterson.

Raising their voices

A need for representative Indigenous voices in theatre has existed for decades. But in the aftermath of the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried on the grounds of a Kamloops residential school, the urgency of that need feels even more pronounced.

It is a need addressed in the Pimootayowin Creators Circle, an initiative supported by the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Led by established playwright Ian Ross (fareWel, The Third Colour), the circle started meeting online weekly in November with the goal that each of its six Indigenous or Métis participants would create a play. The novice playwrights include Lynette Bonin, Jim Compton, Rosanna Deerchild, Kathleen MacLean, Dave McLeod and Tracey Nepinak.

Today, the fruits of that labour go public with five evenings of readings; all seven plays will be broadcast free on YouTube from Tuesday to Saturday. (In addition to the six playwrights, Ross’s circle assistant, Winnipeg Métis performer Katie German, is also contributing a play.)

In a phone interview, Ross says he initially did not expect the group would all produce finished scripts, adding that he encouraged participants to come up with a draft, but didn’t put pressure on them to complete anything.

What possessed them?

The so-called “Conjuring universe” is so successful, it’s scary.

The franchise of horror films built around the exploits of married ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren has scared up a tidy $1.8 billion in box office revenues since the first Conjuring movie debuted in 2013.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, is the third official film in the series, which also encompasses three Annabelle movies and The Nun.

It’s also perhaps the least likable of the series. Proximity may have something to do with that. The best film of the bunch was the last one, Annabelle Comes Home, a fun haunted-house romp reminiscent of some goofy William Castle thrillers of yesteryear. Part of its appeal was that it jettisoned the religious overtones that run through many of the other films.

Winnipeg actor puts spotlight on invisible disabilities

During what would be a chaotic family vacation when she was just 11 years old, Sarah Luby’s world changed.

The day after her mom had to visit a walk-in clinic in Minneapolis because of a tick bite, Sarah was taken there when she got very sick. She would have to be hospitalized for two days.

“It was probably the worst way of learning you have Type 1 diabetes,” Luby says.

Now in her mid-20s, Luby recalls how the diagnosis shook her world.

Finding shades of grey in infamous villain Cruella

In explaining the rationale behind making the Disney origin story Cruella, Australian director Craig Gillespie offers the clearest explanation.

“Villains are always so fun to portray,” says the I, Tonya director in a Zoom press conference for the film. “You just have more licence to do things that aren’t quite appropriate or push the boundaries, and create these larger-than-life characters.”

Notwithstanding the bifurcated look of Cruella De Vil’s hair, “it was really important to me that it was not black and white,” he says.

“I wanted there to be this grey area and be able to empathize with the choices that she was making, and the situations that she was responding to,” Gillespie says of the character, who originally appeared onscreen in animated form as the puppy-coveting villain of 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians. “And I wanted to do it in a way that was really fun.”

Baddie backstory

Disney should get a new theme park to jockey up against Fantasy Land and Tomorrow Land.

Call it Moral Relativism Land, where no bad guys are entirely bad.

Expect the kids to be greeted by Captain Hook, entertained by the magic of Jafar, and maybe go apple-dunking with the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Consider that Disney has been busy lately with what would have been an unthinkable strategy in Walt’s time: giving villains the spotlight. It started with Angelina Jolie black-swanning her way through two Maleficent movies, exploring the backstory behind the wicked witch who put Sleeping Beauty in a coma.

Porter production seeks hundreds of Black extras

As the CBC/BET TV series The Porter prepares to go before the cameras in Winnipeg next week, the need for extras remains urgent, says Kari Rieger of the local casting agency Kari Casting.

“We are still in need of hundreds of Black extras, specifically men between the ages of 18 and 70 years,” Rieger says.

“We will be booking throughout the four-month shoot of June 3 to Sept 17,” Rieger says. “They will be in various scenes such as a jazz club, church, union meetings, the town of St. Antoine in Montreal, train stations and many more.

“Eighty percent of the extras on the show will need to be Black,” she adds.

Gimli film fest opts for tentative drive-in plan

In the midst of a third COVID-19 wave in Manitoba, the Gimli Film Festival is not just insisting the show must go on. In fact, the 21st edition of the fest will run longer. At the same time, it’s still finding a way to facilitate a safe way to screen movies for a live audience.

Hence, from Wednesday, July 21 to Sunday, July 25, the festival will replace its popular free beach screenings with an old-fashioned drive-in movie experience in Pavilion Park, where the Icelandic Fest annually sets up its carnival. Each screening would commence at 10 p.m., with possible midnight movie fare to be announced later. The fest will charge $15 per vehicle.

That plan is tentative, cautions festival director Aaron Zeghers. But it is a potentially safe way to screen films while following public health orders.

“We’re just trying to adapt our beach screenings to provide a little bit of entertainment for Manitobans who have been cooped up for far too long,” Zeghers says.

Dark, stark and brutally fatalistic

Director Guy Ritchie is a film stylist who made his bones with crime movies combining visual flair and a unique comic brutality, evidenced in his better British caper movies — Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Rocknrolla — as well as his more grandiose studio offerings, notably a pair of Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr.

Wrath of Man then arrives as an answer to a question no one asked: What would a Ritchie movie look like if altogether stripped of the director’s caustic humour?

The answer is: Grim. Maybe even a little scary.

The violent prelude of Wrath of Man sees an armoured car heist from the perspective of a fixed security camera. A driver and his partner are waylaid and killed, and there is a suggestion a bystander is also gunned down in the chaos.

Two Emmas revel in playing against type in Cruella

In the original 1961 animated movie 101 Dalmatians, the character of wicked fashionista Cruella de Vil is so very evil, she is intent on skinning the titular puppies to make a coat from their black-and-white fur. (When you come to think of it, such depravity lurked beneath the surface of so many movies in the Disney catalogue.)

In the new live-action movie Cruella, a kind of prequel in what might be called the 101 Dalmatians universe, young Cruella — played by an uncharacteristically glaring Emma Stone, is actually the protagonist. Cruella is out for revenge against the Baroness, the ruling fashion doyenne of swinging London in the ‘70s, whom Cruella holds responsible for the death of her mother. Suffice to say: The Baroness amps up the wickedness to the extent that you can expect to root for Cruella.

Assuming the role of the Baroness is Emma Thompson, taking a big leap beyond her usual métier of sympathetic characters in films such as Sense and Sensibility, Remains of the Day and Howard’s End.

“I’ve been asking for quite a number of years if I could be a villain, a proper villain,” says Thompson, 62, in a Zoom press conference for the film.

Graphic restraint

An enduring horror movie type is centred on setting of a sorority/boarding-school-for-girls. Notwithstanding the occasionally prurient approach to this setup, the subgenre is marked by a few standout thrillers such as Black Christmas (1974), Phenomena (1985) and Suspiria (both 1977 and 2018), as well as lesser lights such as The House on Sorority Row (1982) and the Spanish proto-giallo The House That Screamed (1969).

It’s a tricky kind of movie to take on these days. The sex-violence mix of giallo thrillers, for example, doesn’t fly in contemporary films.

So writer-director Simon Barrett negotiates the Winnipeg-lensed Seance — his first feature — with surprising restraint, given the violent excesses of his past screenplays such as You’re Next and The Guest.

The setting is a snooty boarding school, the Edelvine Academy for Girls, where we are immediately privy to the demise of Kerrie (Megan Best) after a prank in which a former student is seemingly summoned from the dead in a midnight ritual.

Daring RMTC season proceeds with caution

You can say this about Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre artistic director Kelly Thornton: She is not afraid of Virginia Woolf.

A certain amount of fear is to be expected in the theatre world just now. So in announcing a new season, emerging from the long, dark shadow of the COVID pandemic, Thornton must answer the question: How do you balance being cautious and bold at the same time?

The answer is that you try to be logistically safe while taking artistic risks.

For a beleaguered theatre community, it’s been more than a year of cancellations and pivots and optimism and… crushed optimism. So, in one sense, Thornton is exercising abundant caution by stalling the season into a late November start, a slot that typically sees RMTC’s second, holiday-themed show taking to the mainstage. Also, RMTC is jettisoning a homegrown Warehouse season altogether in favour of two presentations from other companies in 2022.

A fascinating human experience in just over an hour

Warning to literalists: The title 1 Hour Photo does not quite describe the running time of this playful one-man show from Vancouver playwright Tetsuro Shigematsu.

In fact, the show is about 68 minutes. But, gosh, that time flies, given its expansive mission: It describes the fascinating life of a Japanese-Canadian man encountering the worst the 20th century had to throw at him, and somehow prevailing over it all.

The man in question is Mas Yamamoto, a man who toiled in his life as an apple picker, a medic (working above the DEW Line above the Arctic Circle), a pharmacist and finally the owner of some Japan Camera franchises in the 1980s (before the digital revolution drove many of the stores out of existence).

Shigematsu, a former CBC radio host (note the gentle jab at CBC music programming in the first few minutes of the show) became friends with Mas Yamamoto through his daughter Donna, Shigematsu’s producer. Realizing Mas had a profound story to tell, Shigematsu employed the same approach he used for his previous play Empire of the Son, which told the story of Shigematsu’s own father. (That play was produced in 2018 at Prairie Theatre Exchange, the company facilitating Shigematsu’s “virtual tour” of this show in Winnipeg.) He recorded hours of their conversations, and whittled that down to 18 minutes of recorded material, which he plays on a clear vinyl record, deejaying Yamamoto’s life, as it were.

Manitoba prairies ‘the star’ of Percy

Released in Canada last year as Percy, the Christopher Walken movie about Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser was titled Percy Vs. Goliath in the United States, possibly because Percy alone lacked conflict.

Feel free to speculate on the Canadian identity thing if you sign up to see Percy free of charge at the WFP Movie Night event. Both guests and viewers — limited within Manitoba borders — can contribute to a running live-chat commentary.

To prepare, here's a few points to ponder about Percy:

The film received a healthy 79 per cent score on the Rotten Tomatoes site, which aggregates movie reviews from around the world.

Four local playwrights get online RMTC debuts

Getting a play produced at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre is a tough nut to crack for a local playwright. Four playwrights getting four RMTC debuts simultaneously feels like nothing less than a game-changer.

But that became a reality for four local artists behind Tiny Plays, Big Ideas, a set of four short works available online Friday via RMTC’s website. The show was originally set to be performed in person, promenade-style at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in November, before rising COVID-19 numbers in Manitoba scuttled those plans. The shows were moved to the RMTC mainstage where they could be safely filmed for home consumption.

The theme of human rights remains in this four-show program.

Where.Are.You.From. is a 14-minute piece by local playwright Primrose Madayag Knazan examining an exchange between a busker and a Filipina-Canadian woman centred on the loaded question of the title.

Revealing biographical drama a snapshot of history

While his own father was dying, playwright Tetsuro Shigematsu found consolation and inspiration through deep, personal conversations with another older Japanese-Canadian man. As they chatted at a dining table, the man’s fascinating life unfolded, a life Shigematsu realized needed to be shared.

The result is 1 Hour Photo, a play that starts streaming via Prairie Theatre Exchange today and runs through Sunday. It sees the return of the actor-playwright to the PTE venue in a “digital tour,” owing to the ongoing pandemic.

The Vancouver-based Shigematsu, 50, showed up in the flesh last time for a performance of his show Empire of the Son in November 2018 as part of PTE’s Leap Series of one-person plays. In that very personal piece, Shigematsu examined his relationship with his own distant father, Akira Shigematsu, who died weeks before the play premièred in 2015.

In some ways, 1 Hour Photo may feel like a companion piece, he admits, as it also examines the life of an older Japanese-Canadian man.

Strum und drang

When he caused a stir in his 1968 TV debut on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, one had the sense the artist known as Tiny Tim was going to have a limited shelf life.

There he was, with a hippie’s shoulder-length hair at odds with a shabby plaid suit, pulling a ukulele from a shopping bag and trilling, in a wholly unique soprano vibrato, a dusty but catchy old pop song: Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

But Tim, born Herbert Khaury in 1932, was determined to have a sustained career as a star, as this startling, funny, sad documentary reveals.

Given access to Tim’s personal diaries, director Johan von Sydow tries to get a peek into the soul of Tiny Tim, who aspired to stardom, and frequently exhorted Jesus Christ to help him on this mission.

Going Native host Drew Hayden Taylor chooses laughs over lectures

It couldn’t happen at a better time.

Next week, the TV network APTN will première the first season of Going Native, a documentary series hosted by Anishinaabe humorist and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor.

The premise of the 13-episode, half-hour series is a look at how Indigenous Peoples have changed the world, and are reshaping culture in the 21st century.

Evidently, that lesson is sorely needed following a recent noxious speech by CNN Republican political commentator Rick Santorum, who told a gathering of young conservative Americans that settlers essentially created American culture on their own.

Manitoba-made films to stream on small screens

Two locally shot feature films are coming home in May, and a third will première in June.

Stand!, the feature film based on the play Strike: The Musical by Danny Schur and Rick Chafe, is coming to Canadian video-on-demand platforms on Tuesday, May 18.

Another feature, Percy, starring Christopher Walken as Saskatchewan canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, will be viewable free in Manitoba on Thursday, May 6, at 7 p.m. via WFP Movie Night.

The latter film, shot in 2018 on Manitoba locations including Stonewall, Elie, Selkirk, Rockwood and Starbuck, will be screened courtesy of the film’s Canadian distributor, Mongrel Media, which happens to be launching its own streaming service on April 30.

Dark Harvest on horizon for film industry

Something wicked this way comes to Manitoba this fall.

Dark Harvest, a horror thriller produced by MGM, is slated to go before the cameras by mid-August.

No cast has been announced yet, but the film’s director is something of a genre star in his own right. English filmmaker David Slade directed the nasty but effective 2007 vampire thriller 30 Days of Night, as well as one instalment of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, in 2010. Slade announced himself as a director to be reckoned with the 2005 revenge thriller Hard Candy, starring Elliot Page and Patrick Wilson playing a cat-and-mouse game between a pedophile photographer and a not-so-harmless teen girl.

Ironically, the Alaska-set 30 Days of Night scouted Manitoba locations but ultimately filmed in New Zealand.

Don’t expect surprises or smarts in game-basedgrindhouse fare

Fun fact: This new iteration of the movie Mortal Kombat was filmed in Australia. So, hey, maybe Warner Bros. could produce an animated kiddie spinoff: Mortal Wombat.

No, that would never happen. While it is based on a video game, it is a very gory and foul-mouthed property, not suitable for young kids, as the 18A classification makes clear. Indeed, this film really mainstreams the kind of gore typically reserved for R-rated horror. (James Wan, co-creator of Saw, is a producer. Coincidence?)

While it’s technically not recommended for kids, it’s a movie that seems specifically designed for juvenile amusement, with people or creatures having limbs chopped off, or having their hearts pulled out, or being buzz-sawed in half, lengthwise. This movie, unlike the PG-13-rated 1995 iteration, fully embraces the outlandish violence of the video game.

The premise is the same: Two worlds are engaged in a secret war. Every 10 years, Earthrealm — that’s us — is obliged to pick champions to engage in hand-to-hand combat with champions from Outworld, a gang of sleazy but powerful warriors fighting under the leadership of Shang Tsung (Chin Han), a boss who is literally a soul-sucker (surely a topic of discussion in the Outworld Mortal Kombat break room). Outworld has won nine consecutive times, and Shang Tsung wants to game to the competition by defeating Earthrealm’s fighters in advance of the upcoming competition.

Irish horror-com reimagines origins of Dracula

Vampires have never been a homogenous species.

In Asia, there are abundant variations including Jiangshi, hopping corpses. Christopher Lee has always embodied the English vampire, elegant yet vicious. American vampires may be typified by the feral bloodsuckers in David Slade’s 40 Days of Night or, if you’re a tween-at-heart, the mostly benign sparkly folk of Twilight. If you’re interested, you can even check out a Canadian vamp in Holly Dale’s 1995 comedy Blood and Donuts.

Writer-director Chris Baugh steps up to the stake with the Irish vampire movie Boys of County Hell, making the persuasive argument that the mythology started in the Emerald Isle since Dracula author Bram Stoker was, in fact, Irish.

The setting for this horror-comedy is the sleepy backwater of Six Mile Hill, where the primary tourist attraction is The Stoker, a pub where Bram Stoker was reputed to find the inspiration for his classic novel.

Reality catching up to director again

For anyone who has been paying attention to the local film scene, one could be forgiven a bout of cognitive dissonance when you notice that the director of the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is the same woman who directed the 2007 feature film The Stone Angel in Manitoba.

How exactly does one go from a solid dramatic adaptation of revered author Margaret Laurence to the slam-bang realm of the Marvel Universe?

The Ottawa-born Kari Skogland was never a director to be put in a genre box. Her television work has encompassed everything from horror (The Walking Dead, Penny Dreadful) to historical (Vikings) to political (House of Cards) to hardcore action (The Punisher).

In a Zoom interview with the Free Press, Skogland draws a line between her work on the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which continues the story of the two titular heroes. Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) were last seen in the movie Avengers: Endgame with the retiring Captain America (Chris Evans) passing his star-spangled shield to Sam in the belief he should assume the mantle of Cap’s all-American hero.

Bob Odenkirk shows he has a particular set of skills in the Winnipeg-shot action film Nobody

Shot in Winnipeg before the lockdown, director Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody is the first of two major action movies to be filmed here in the past couple of years. (We still await the Netflix première of the Liam Neeson shoot-’em-up The Ice Road.)

It must be said, the city actually lends itself to the premise in which an anonymous suburban everyman turns out to have extraordinary gifts underneath his placid surface. While Winnipeg is substituting for an unnamed American metropolis, cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (who enhanced the terrible beauty of Ari Aster movies Hereditary and Midsommar) has a marvellous talent for making the most of downtown locations — the glitzy and the grimy — as well as suburban emptiness and industrial park grunge.

It’s all the prosaic turf of Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk, best known these days from Better Call Saul), a guy living a life of workaday drudgery, toiling in a middle-management job for his father-in-law (Michael Ironside), barely communicating with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and starting to feel alienated from his teen son Blake (Gage Munroe).

The Porter looking for Black extras for local shoot

The TV series The Porter will be going to camera in Winnipeg on May 31 with a promise to be the biggest Black-led production ever in Canada.

With that in mind, the show is putting out a call for Black male and female performers aged five to 75 to play a variety of roles, including train porters, nurses, conductors, church congregations, union members, and families and residents in the community.

“Hundreds of Black background performers are needed in order to accurately portray historical fictional scenes throughout the series,” according to the show’s press release.

The roles require no previous experience, and will be fully paid. But according to the show’s co-creator/writer/executive producer Arnold Pinnock, who expects to spend the next six months in town shooting the series, it will also present a more spiritual opportunity for applicants, owing to the history it portrays of how railway porters helped create a Black middle class in both Canada and the U.S. through the formation of the continent’s first Black union.

Thriller is high on schlock, low on shock

The movie adaptation of the horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s is reportedly beginning production this spring with director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) at the helm. It’s potentially exciting stuff given Columbus’s flirtations with the horror genre. (Columbus wrote the screenplay of Gremlins and spent years trying to remake the Vincent Price classic Theatre of Blood.)

In the meantime, if you’re truly desperate for a substitute, there’s the shambolic thriller Willy’s Wonderland that — ahem — pays homage to Freddy’s premise, in which a night watchman must survive in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like facility where the animatronic characters come to homicidal life.

(imageTagGull)

Instead of a security guard, we get a nameless drifter in a muscle car, played by a slumming Nicolas Cage. The guy gets stuck in a small town when his tires are punctured by a suspiciously placed spike strip on the road. A sleazy auto repair guy wants to charge him an even $1,000 to repair the damage. Suspiciously, a blowhard businessman shows up to offer the drifter the necessary money to get his car repaired, if our hero will spend the night cleaning up the long disused restaurant/emporium of the title.

Light-hearted Tomson Highway musical a tuneful time at the theatre

Life — and death — is a cabaret in playwright Tomson Highway’s musical The (Post) Mistress. 

The Manitoba-born Highway, best known for grander works such as The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, would appear to have created The (Post) Mistress as something of a lark, spinning a loose narrative around some 11 songs he composed. 

While this filmed version gets the full main-stage treatment at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, it could just as easily be performed at any rinky-dink fringe festival venue, preferably one that serves drinks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a lark. To its credit, this is a show that spurns too much seriousness, even when the subject matter gets decidedly tragic.

Winnipeg filmmaker impressed with Prince Philip

Many people may have had the chance to meet Prince Philip in a receiving line or at an official reception or tea party, but few have had the chance to meet the Duke of Edinburgh person-to-person, let alone the experience of giving him direction.

That was the experience of Winnipeg actor-filmmaker Jon Ted Wynne, who met Prince Philip in 2011 while making his six-part documentary series Standing on Guard, a look at Manitoba's military units. In his capacity as the colonel-in-chief of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, Prince Philip consented to filming an introduction to that chapter of Wynne's series, which was later broadcast via MTS Stories from Home.

In the wake of Philip's death Friday, Wynne, 62, remembers the experience fondly, and not just because he got to get into a cab at London's Victoria Station and tell the driver, "Buckingham Palace, please."

"It was a very special circumstance," Wynne says. "I’m sure his demeanour for meeting individuals was a little bit different than meeting groups. It’s more down to earth, more immediate.

PTE production explores morality in a world of unlimited wealth, privilege and ambition

A scion of wealth has his powerful position threatened when it emerges he may have had a sexual encounter with an underage girl.

So yes, Toronto playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s new work, Post-Democracy, has a topical sting, since its release coincides with a scandal south of the border involving scion/U.S. congressman Matt Gaetz.

Be assured, as the famous caveat goes, resemblance to any person living or dead is strictly coincidental.

In fact, Moscovitch’s spare, one-hour drama has been in the works for more than a decade, going back to when she was commissioned to write the play by former PTE artistic director Robert Metcalfe. Its origins also precede the HBO series Succession, which dives into the twisted family dynamics of a ruthless billionaire and his ambitious offspring as they vie for his position.

Manitoba-shot horror film recalls Stephen King's classic tale of helper-turned-captor

Winnipeg actress Sharon Bajer has a small part in the locally lensed movie Run, which is now playing on Netflix after a few months of being denied a Canadian audience on the American service Hulu.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Bajer’s character is named “Kathy Bates.” Since the movie stars Sarah Paulson, one might assume this is a homage to Paulson’s co-star from the Ryan Murphy TV series American Horror Story.

But it’s more specifically a shout-out to the role that won Bates an Oscar in the 1991 movie Misery, Annie Wilkes, a presumed helper who turns out to be a psycho.

Director Aneesh Chaganty, who co-wrote the script with Sev Ohanian, adds a familial twist to the hostage dynamics of that Stephen King adaptation, exploring the relationship of Diane Sherman (Paulson) and her daughter Chloe, played by real-life wheelchair user Kiera Allen, making an impressive movie debut.

The one-per-cent solution

It would seem Prairie Theatre Exchange is going for a Dallas/Dynasty kind of old-school melodrama with its upcoming new play Post-Democracy, set in the realm of the ultra-wealthy. Arne MacPherson plays the CEO of a large company hit with a sex scandal while abroad on business. It threatens not only the impending deal, but the corporation itself.

Surprise! It’s a play by Canadian theatre prodigy Hannah Moscovitch, whose roots are decidedly not in the old-money capitalist realm.

“It’s not my childhood environment,” understates the Ottawa-born Moscovitch, 42, on the phone from her home in Halifax. “In fact, my mother and father are social activists and union activists.

“My father’s a professor with some expertise in Marxist economics,” she says. “So it’s diametrically opposed to my childhood where we were constantly surrounded by folk songs and ... co-operation.”

Despite digital wizardry and a big-time cast, tale of gorilla and lizard with anger issues is a rerun

The spanking new big-budget blockbuster Godzilla Vs. Kong is not to be confused with its 1962 antecedent King Kong Vs. Godzilla, a product of Japan’s Toho Studios. The new film is a state-of-the-art monster movie, with elaborate special effects, a big international cast, and some very impressive actors navigating through the debris left by the titular titans. (Watch Rebecca Hall say the line “Kong bows to no one!” like a WWE announcer with Cambridge credentials.)

The older film starred two guys in suits, crashing around miniature cities before a climactic duel at Mount Fuji. It was long rumoured that the original had two different endings, one for western audiences, in which Kong emerged as the victor, and another for Japanese audiences, in which Godzilla prevailed. It was somewhat credible, assuming Japan and the U.S. might have been prejudiced in favour of their own monster products. But it wasn’t true.

This film, the latest in Warner Bros.’ own take on the franchise following Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) doesn’t bother nationalizing its two adversaries. It is suggested that they — or their fore-monsters — are ancient adversaries with animus presumably rooted in their respective simian/reptilian species.

But both have sets of human allies who takes sides on their behalf. In Kong’s corner is scientist Ilene Andrews (Hall), a so-called “Kong whisperer” who communicates with the big ape back on Skull Island, which we see has been retrofitted with a giant dome, keeping the beast trapped in an elaborate artificial environment. Ilene is aided by her adoptive daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last living human descendant of Skull Island, whose deafness provides an unexpected means of communication with Kong.

Emotional AGM results in ‘fresh blood’ at WFG

On the evening of Thursday, March 25, the Winnipeg Film Group held an annual general meeting that only occasionally resembled a nice, comfortable AGM, with hopeful open calls for “creative producers” and vague plans for an upcoming semi-centennial celebration in 2024.

Mostly, the emotionally charged online meeting displayed a schism that has torn through the 47-year-old institution in the aftermath of former executive director Greg Klymkiw’s departure, declared on March 17 with the blunt formal announcement: “The Winnipeg Film Group’s relationship with its Executive Director has ended.”

The AGM particularly focused on the “toxic” environment at the WFG, an accusation levelled mainly by former WFG employee Ben Williams, who posted an indictment of the leadership of both the executive and the board three weeks ago on his personal webpage.

Among other criticisms, Williams accused Klymkiw of “profane, socially backward and mean-spirited language at the workplace.”

Vague Izzard hometown 'thriller' forgets the Nazi devil is in the details

By any standard, director Andy Goddard’s Six Minutes to Midnight is an odd entry into the realm of the English espionage movie.

This isn’t some John le Carré-esque deep dive into the twisted mechanics of British intelligence. In fact, the film’s whole reason for existence turns on an interesting historical tidbit.

In the 1930s, a girls finishing school — the Augusta-Victoria College — was run in plain sight on the south coast of England in Bexhill-on-Sea. The place specialized in providing an English education to German girls, many the daughters of the Nazi elite, including Heinrich Himmler’s goddaughter and Joachim Von Ribbentrop’s daughter. The place was closed at the start of Winston Churchill’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939.

Bexhill-on-Sea happens to be the birthplace of female-identifying comedian Eddie Izzard, whose interest in the institute was aroused when she once caught sight on the provocative school crest in a local museum, bearing a Union Jack on its left corner and a swastika on the right.

Lively children's play performed in French, English and ASL

Plé is a play for kids that takes a joyously scattershot approach to the topic of interpersonal communication over the course of an hour.

It’s bold in one respect. It is told in three languages: English, French and American Sign Language. Occasionally, it proceeds in the knowledge that the audience might not get what is being said. Since it is intended for audiences between the ages of five and 10, that runs contrary to the usual approach for kids entertainment to spell things out in the clearest terms possible.

In short, the show leans into the fact that it’s not always going to be understood.

That’s a positive. The play acknowledges kids are basically in a perpetual state of trying to understand the world around them. Having your audience pay attention to every sound and visual nuance is not only ideal, it’s the point of the show.

Pandemic alert has cinema operators seeing red

Manitoba’s continuing code-red pandemic alert level means movie theatres must remain shuttered, and that’s a bone of contention for the Canadian companies that operate cinemas in Winnipeg.

“We are extremely frustrated and disappointed with today’s announcement,” said Cineplex president and CEO Ellis Jacob in a statement released Tuesday, after Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister announced the majority of code-red restrictions would remain in place.

“This is devastating news to our valued guests and employees in Manitoba,” he said. “Despite clear results showing that cinemas are demonstrably safer than other indoor venues, the provincial government continues to shutter movie theatres for reasons they won’t share with Manitobans.”

Cineplex operates five multiplexes in Winnipeg, including Scotiabank Polo Park, St. Vital Silver City, Kildonan Place, McGillivray VIP and Cinema City Northgate.

Fringe plans to expand on last year’s digital fest

The Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival will happen this summer, but don’t anticipate joining the mob at the beer tent just yet.

The fest, likely to fall on the week of July 12-17, will not offer in-person indoor programming, owing to anticipated COVID-19 travel restrictions still in place and ongoing uncertainty around in-person performances. Like last summer, it will be a digital-only festival.

But unlike last year, which saw the fringe compressed into four three-hour evenings of performances by local and international favourites, 2021’s model will run longer, with more choices for the fringe-goer.

“This year, we’ll be able to expand the number of opportunities we’re able to give artists, because we have gotten through the online digital component before,” says the fringe’s executive producer, Chuck McEwen, in a phone interview.

Doc takes viewers to smoky London jazz club

For jazz buffs, the documentary Ronnie’s is nothing less than essential viewing.

A portrait of a legendary London jazz club, the doc by writer-director Oliver Murray exploits riches of archival material from the club itself, including performances by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughn, Buddy Rich, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie and Roland Kirk, a blind musician given to playing three saxophones simultaneously.

Because club owner Ronnie Scott liked to colour outside the lines of conventional jazz bookers, we are also treated to musical curiosities, such as a melancholy duet between Chet Baker and Van Morrison on the song Send in the Clowns. Alas, there is only some surviving audio of Jimi Hendrix sitting in on a 1970 gig by Eric Burdon and War, the last gig Hendrix would ever play... at Ronnie Scott’s club.

Mainly, the film is a celebration of the place itself, a jazz club created by jazz musicians — both Scott and his partner Pete King were accomplished saxophonists — for jazz musicians.

Teen actors tackle tough truths in play about hate

It’s a play that has provoked protest rallies in some of the places where it has been performed.

And it is coming up on Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s slate of online productions next weekend.

The Laramie Project, written by Moisés Kaufman and members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, is a verbatim stage play set in the town of Laramie, Wyo., in the aftermath of the savage 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who was tortured and killed because of his sexual orientation.

It’s a provocative choice. Although the play, written two years after the murder, has been performed in high schools and community theatres, it has also met with protests, including pickets by members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a designated hate group whose membership cruelly showed up at Shepard’s funeral with signs bearing messages such as “Matt burns in hell” and “God hates fags.”

Kids play was six years in the making

It will have taken taken six whole years for the children’s play Plé to reach an audience. So its creators weren’t about to let a pandemic stop it, especially since the overriding theme of the show is that communication will find a way.

Two of its creators, Shannon Guile, of the celebrated Winnipeg comedy troupe Hot Thespian Action, and Joanna Hawkins, of the deaf mime troupe 100 Decibels — working alongside French-speaking actress Anna-Laure Koop — are also performers on the MTYP stage where the show has been taped for streaming to schools next week, and public availability in the weeks following.

In a Zoom call with the Free Press, Guile said the show will be available for the general public from March 24 to “at least through June, so there’s more opportunity for people to see it.”

“The show has been a six-year-long birthing process for us, so we really wanted it to get as far and wide as we could,” Guile says. “Every time the universe put up some blockade, we just deal with it and walk right through it.”

Humour, absurdity bring a light touch to bleak, Cohen-inspired Irish-Canadian drama

The Canadian drama is often beset by a certain blindness on the part of filmmakers, who believe somehow that there is a ravenous public appetite for the relentlessly downbeat.

Matthew Bissonnette’s drama Death of a Ladies’ Man stands as an example of how it is possible to present bleak material in an imaginative and even lively way.

Bissonnette, who directed the Manitoba-lensed Who Loves the Sun and the fraternal comedy drama The Passenger Side, has a gift for leavening a dark premise with bubbles of humour and even absurdity.

We shouldn’t laugh (but we often do) at the predicament of Samuel O’Shea (Gabriel Byrne), an English professor at a Montreal college.

Theatre fest brings together thinkers, doers, innovators

It takes a bridge-builder to make a Bridge.

That would be Kim Wheeler. The 52-year-old Anishinaabe/Mohawk writer and former CBC producer is the first curator of the inaugural Bridge festival at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, proceeding next week under the theme Art and (re)Conciliation.

The Bridge itself was the brainchild of RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton, designed to take the place of the company’s long-running Master Playwright Festival. Thornton’s notion of a “festival of ideas” has the potential to be as versatile as the Master Playwright Festival, focusing on a different theme each year. The first Bridge festival was to have happened in June 2020, but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“RMTC approached me in 2019 to curate the festival,” says Wheeler in a phone interview from her Wolseley home. “With this inaugural festival, Kelly and (RMTC general manager Camilla Holland) had an idea it was going to be Indigenous-focused.

Drama draws on spirit of ‘patron saint of Montreal’

The career of filmmaker Matthew Bissonnette has two throughlines.

One is songwriter Leonard Cohen. Bissonnette was raised in the west end of Montreal and has always felt a strong connection to the urbane fellow Montrealer, to the extent that Bissonnette’s very first feature was titled Looking for Leonard, a comedy-drama crime caper about a couple of low-level brothers-in-crime. The girlfriend (and sometime confederate) of one of the brothers spends a lot of time reading Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers. The 2002 film also intersperses clips from the 1965 NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen, acknowledging Cohen as a kind of sublime spirit floating through the movie’s sordid events.

The other throughline is producer Corey Marr, a Winnipeg-raised talent now based in Toronto. (His Wikipedia page includes the tidbit that he used to be the “Minahel,” or program director, of Camp Massad, a Hebrew-immersion camp near Gimli.) Marr gravitated to Bissonnette when they met at a film festival Marr was attending with his own short film while Bissonnette was supporting Looking for Leonard.

“We really struck it off,” Marr recalls in a Zoom interview from Toronto. “After that festival, he told me, ‘I’m working on this thing. Would you take a read of it? I’m looking for a producer.’”

Winnipeg-raised thespian performing on stage in pandemic-busting Australia

Imagine attending a play in an actual theatre.

It is not packed, but it’s not socially-distanced-sparse either, about 85 per cent capacity in a 1,000-seat house. The play is a musical, and the cast is singing their lungs out without masks ... and apparently without anxiety.

Now this happens to be a musical about the aftermath of a catastrophe, but the emphasis is on endurance, community, solidarity. The audience — themselves observing a mandatory mask policy — eats it up.

It’s not a fantasy. It is very much a sunny reality in Melbourne, Australia where Come From Away has been playing at the Comedy Theatre since Jan. 19. (Prior to the lockdown last year, it had been playing in Melbourne for almost nine months before being shut down last March.) It’s the only production of the Tony-winning show currently operating.

Freeze Frame festival films screen whenever you want to watch

In its 25th year, the Freeze Frame International Film Festival is taking its program of kid-friendly cinema and going home.

That is, the entire program of features and short films will be viewable at home for passholders, with individual movie-screening options available, as well.

Artistic director Pascal Boutroy says the festival is opening up in a way that audiences can view at any time from 12:01 a.m. Sunday until March 14 at 11:59 p.m.

“For the first time ever, Freeze Frame audiences will be able to enjoy films any time of the day or night,” Boutroy says. “With a full 24 hours’ worth of international cinema, there is a world of stories to explore.”

Reopening cinemas not risky business: Landmark CEO

In the next few months, two notable shot-in-Winnipeg films are expected to get a release in cinemas, including director Ilya Naishuller’s violent shoot-’em-up Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk, expected to hit theatres March 26.

A couple of months later, the horror film Seance, the debut feature from director Simon Barrett starring Suki Waterhouse, will also make its way into theatres courtesy of RLJE Films on May 26. (The plan is that it will simultaneously open digitally and in on-demand platforms, before heading to the horror streaming service Shudder later this year.)

Unfortunately, the cinematic experience is still out of reach for Manitobans for the time being since cinemas closed in November, with no reopening in sight.

That’s a frustration for Bill Walker, the CEO of Landmark Cinemas, which operates the Grant Park and Towne cinemas in Winnipeg, especially since many other more risky businesses are expected to be cleared to operate in various degrees as code-red restrictions may fall away in Manitoba.

Streaming play takes audiences to Martin Luther King's last night on earth in a production that delivers satisfaction of live theatre

While Katori Hall’s play about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. celebrates the civil rights activist, Hall announces early on in this 90-minute two-hander that she is not in the business of deification. It’s hardly a couple of minutes in before Dr. King (Ray Strachan), having entered his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, ducks into the bathroom for a quick pee. He later complains about the smell of his much-marched-in shoes.

This iteration of Martin Luther King is very much an earthly man.

And he does not occupy a temple. The room is your basic two-bed motel suite circa 1968 (although set designer Brian Perchaluk does build some cosmic surprises into this mundane space).

We see King on edge, fearful, even paranoid, and with good reason. He checks the room for hidden microphones, owing to a history of very real FBI surveillance. Claps of thunder outside send him into chest-clutching panic. Death threats have become a way of life.

RMTC’s the Bridge revamped in online format

It was in January 2020 when newly minted artistic director Kelly Thornton announced her first programmed season at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre — a little more than a year, and a lifetime ago.

By June, her inaugural season was abbreviated, and later in the year, jettisoned altogether in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Thornton, one of the more heartbreaking cancellations was the Bridge, a “Festival of Ideas” intended to replace the Master Playwrights Festival.

Conceived as a multi-faceted community event encompassing plays, panels, concerts, symposiums and communal gatherings, the Bridge would “balance great theatre with dialogue and insight,” Thornton said when she first announced it. “It’s a place to ask questions, laugh, listen and learn.”

“It came out of a talk about how do I serve my community? What do I do for next generation of artists that are wanting to feel included. How can I support them?” Thornton said.

Anderson, Jovovich do the mash… the monster mash

The opening credits of Monster Hunter are encouraging in that they announce the film is partly a product of Japan’s fabled Toho Studios. The movie automatically gets a little street cred, coming from the company that gave us the original Godzilla.

Alas, the monsters on view here are rote digital creations, and not guys in suits jumping around miniature sets in slow motion.

The project comes from writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson and his missus, actress Milla Jovovich, who collaborated together on the Resident Evil franchise.

With the first Resident Evil, Anderson established himself as the go-to guy to adapt hit video games for the big screen.

Producer transformed Manitoba film industry

Film producer Derek Mazur, credited with being one of the key creators of the Manitoba film industry, died of cancer Thursday, Feb. 11, in Winnipeg at the age of 73.

Mazur was the president of Credo Group, a company that was pivotal in launching the commercial film industry in the province with films such as Lost in the Barrens (1990), The Curse of the Viking Grave (1992) and The Diviners (1993). Credo went out of business in 2001, and Mazur subsequently worked as the CEO of the Nunavut Film Development Corp. (NFDC) from 2011 to 2017. But people in the local film community remember him as someone who made an indelible mark on the industry here.

“(Credo made) so many films that gave so many of us our first jobs in film,” says Louise O’Brien-Moran, director of film financing at Manitoba Film & Music. “Everybody that has been working in the industry for 20 years or more probably got their first jobs on a Credo show.”

Retired film editor Robert Lower, who has known Mazur since 1976, says he remembers Mazur for his sheer energy.

Van Gogh exhibition won’t reopen in Winnipeg

Imagine Van Gogh, a stunning cinematic exhibit of Vincent Van Gogh’s artwork, has been effectively mothballed in Hall D at the RBC Convention Centre since it closed in October because of COVID-19 restrictions.

It will likely move to another city in the coming weeks, says Justin Paquin, the exhibit’s point man at Paquin Entertainment, which helped bring the exhibit to Canada. Paquin says while it could safely reopen to local art lovers, Manitoba’s government will not consider it because of the convention centre venue.

Paquin is frustrated because smaller exhibit spaces will open to the public soon in the wake of relaxed restrictions commencing Feb. 12, including the Manitoba Museum, which will be allowed to open at 25 per cent capacity commencing March 4.

“We feel that our 25,000-square-foot space is probably the largest space in the province to have this kind of activity, especially with museums and art galleries opening,” says Paquin.

Take in a free screening of Winnipeg rom-com on Thursday

It’s a few days shy of Valentine’s Day, but you can get a jump on the calendar’s most romantic date with a WFP Movie Night free screening of Sean Garrity’s I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight at 7 p.m. on Thursday.

In its way, it may be the most romantic Winnipeg film ever. And the WFP Movie Night — a collective online viewing of the locally shot film that offers the ability to chat with other viewers and the filmmakers — certainly has the potential to inspire warm-and-fuzzy feelings for the following five reasons:

1. It almost qualifies as dinner and a date.

The Free Press partnered with GoodLocal.ca — a website that sells homemade goods from local small businesses — to develop a snack box full of fun treats from local vendors that you can order on the site for pickup prior to the screening. The $25 package includes goodies from Flour and Flower (white chocolate pretzel stems with edible flowers), Nutty Club (blue whales and pink popcorn) and Norget (cream soda and root beer).

Sisler students contribute to Oscar-potential work

A group of five Sisler High School students contributed animation to a Netflix short film that may be in the running for an Oscar.

The film is Cops and Robbers, an eight-minute animated short currently streaming on Netflix. The project spun off from a spoken-word performance by actor-writer Timothy Ware-Hill, filmed in the wake of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed, 25-year-old Black man, shot by a white resident of his Georgia neighbourhood while jogging.

Ware-Hill himself went jogging to film himself reciting the piece he had written years earlier, made sadly relevant by Arbery’s killing. Co-director Arnon Manor had the idea of embellishing the video with animation from around the world with the objective of creating an animated “quilt” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sisler High teacher Jamie Leduc, who also served as an animation and scene supervisor for the Sisler contribution alongside instructor Bernard Alibudbud, says the school was approached for the project by Digital Domain’s head of animation, Jan Philip Cramer, who had visited the students of Sisler’s animation program in late 2019.

PTE’s new managing director looking to listen

Toronto-based theatre producer Lisa Li says she is “going big” for her very first visit to Winnipeg next month, when she takes on the duties of managing director of Prairie Theatre Exchange.

Li will be replacing outgoing current managing director Tracey Loewen, who replaced longtime PTE manager Cherry Karpyshin in 2016.

Li started her theatre career as a performer and playwright before discovering a talent for producing at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, where she has been producing plays since 2016. She comes here having worked with many current notable figures in the community, including Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre artistic director Kelly Thornton, associate artistic director Audrey Dwyer and general manager Camilla Holland, as well as PTE’s artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones, with whom Li worked on a children’s fringe show “around 2003.”

“I’m in good company,” Li says in a phone interview from Toronto. “The job itself had a great appeal and I have been kind of following Thom for a few years. He’s an exciting artistic director.

Well-timed documentary takes audience on a way-out kooky-train trip to Conspiracy Town

Conspiracy theories, once contained to the outer realm of kooks, are now more widespread and dangerous than ever. They have potential for salient harm, at least if you happen to believe that COVID vaccines contain tracking devices, or that space lasers deliberately started California forest fires, or that Donald Trump was really re-elected as U.S. president in November.

A Glitch in the Matrix is a documentary film that examines what may be the ultimate conspiracy theory of our time: we all live in a computer simulation. Everything we see, hear and feel is dictated by an unseen user that feeds us our experiences like so much uploaded data.

It’s a notion that gained traction with the hit 1999 science fiction film The Matrix, wherein a computer programmer named Neo (Keanu Reeves) awakens to the harsh buzzkill that his life as a cool urban computer hacker is all an illusion. In reality, he lives in a fluid-filled pod being artificially fed human experience so that he’ll never grow wise to the fact that he is, in fact, one of a million human “batteries” powering an all-powerful machine.

Director Rodney Ascher digs deeper into this basic concept. Ascher has had some experience with this kind of material as the director of the 2012 film Room 237, examining nine different fan theories that sprang from Stanley Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation The Shining (1980). (One theory, for example, was that the film contained a subliminal apology from Kubrick for being responsible for faking the Apollo moon landing.)

FBI tale set in turbulent late-'60s Chicago sizzles with racial unrest reverberating more than 50 decades later

In the year 1969, most Americans’ view of the Federal Bureau of Investigation came from the TV series The FBI, in which straitlaced fed Lew Erskine (Efram Zimbalist Jr). fought crime in his by-the-book fashion, tidily arresting various psychopaths and other malefactors every week. (If you saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you get the gist of the show.)

The truth about the FBI at that time probably hews closer to the way the agency is portrayed in Judas and the Black Messiah, which culminates in the Hoover-approved murder of Chicago Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton. Directed by Shaka King, the film continually shifts focus between the fiery, charismatic Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), new Panther recruit William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) and federal agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), the FBI agent who compels the lifelong criminal O’Neal to infiltrate the Panthers with such success, he actually becomes the Chicago branch’s security chief.

Also an important relationship in the mix is the burgeoning relationship between Hampton and Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), a Panther volunteer who advises the fiery Hampton on when to temper his angry rhetoric with a conciliatory touch. Hampton’s ability to unite disparate communities into a “Rainbow coalition” is ultimately what made him more of a threat in the eyes of reactionary FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), who famously focused the FBI’s attention on black/student radicals instead of more salient threats such as the Mafia.

In the late 1960s, it’s a given that the Black Panthers radicalization was an inevitable product of police brutality, the political violence of the Jim Crow laws in the South, and the ongoing assassinations of black leaders including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Law enforcement — then as now — was equally radicalized, especially at the FBI. Hence, corn-fed agent Mitchell comes to O’Neal after the car thief has been busted for a scam in which he has impersonated an FBI agent in a bid to steal a vehicle. (Asked why he chose to impersonate an FBI agent instead of just taking a car at gunpoint, O’Neal pointedly replies, “the badge is scarier than the gun.”)

Film industry eagerly awaits the lifting of public health restrictions

A proposed plan by the Manitoba government to reopen the province's film industry next week has producers and industry facilitators excited at the prospect of returning to work after the target date of Feb. 12.

"Everyone is texting me: 'Back to work?'" says local producer Juliette Hagopian. "I'm telling them: I think you have to wait until it’s confirmed."

The province's code red shutdown on Nov. 12 last year allowed some productions, such as the CBC series Burden of Truth and the horror sequel Orphan: First Kill, to continue to conclusion. But the order also shut down new productions, which has left the province's film industry stagnant for the past couple of months.

With the province likely to rescind that shutdown next week, companies are expected to "start prepping next week," says Winnipeg film and cultural affairs officer Kenny Boyce. "As soon as they get the green light, they will be opening their offices and people will be coming in.

Hey! Get on my lawn! Theatre brings art to your yard

The name of One Trunk Theatre’s new performance program is called Knock Knock Ginger, a homage to a specific kind of mischief in which kids once indulged, although in my St. James neck of the woods, it was called “Knock on Ginger.” But the game is the same: You knock on someone’s door or ring the doorbell and immediately hide from sight.

The twist in the theatre company’s approach is that they knock on your door, and you immediately settle in by a handy window, and watch the play that will performed for your household free of charge, for a period of about 15 minutes.

One Trunk is proving the Shakespearean adage: “All the world’s a stage” with this program, says the company’s associate director Gwendolyn Collins.

“We have commissioned six different artists and each of them have an assigned week,” says Collins. “Some of the artists have chosen to perform solo and a few of them have chosen to perform with members of their family. We do have one artist whose entire family is going to come to show up at people’s houses, which I think will be just hilarious and adorable.

RMTC play explores last day of MLK's life

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

— Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Memphis the day before his assassination

Like theatre companies all over the world, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre has been forced to improvise when it comes to creating plays in the era of COVID-19.

The company has been quick on its feet to provide a drama that was never previously announced before this month. Playwright Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop is a two-hander about the final night in the life of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination on the evening of April 4, 1968. It will be produced on the mainstage, but will only be accessible in digital format, streaming from Feb. 26 at 7:30 p.m. to March 14.

Old-school cop thriller fails to read the room

Released at any other time, The Little Things would probably be deemed a nifty thriller, a refreshingly bleak take on the tried and true genre of the police procedural.

But the film, directed by John Lee Hancock, happens to arrive at a time when cop movies are in need of a rethink. After decades of audiences being trained to root for the good guys in blue, no matter what corners are cut or rules are broken, the film’s release just now feels awkward and untrue to the moment, even as it acknowledges a certain corruption in the system.

We find Joe (Deke) Deacon (Denzel Washington), a deputy sheriff in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, leading a quiet, almost semi-retired policeman’s existence, dealing with petty vandalism and such. It’s 1990, a time before widespread cellphone use and normalized gathering of DNA evidence.

An assignment to retrieve a piece of evidence takes Deke to his old precinct in L.A. where he learns a serial killer is randomly killing young women. The case reminds Deke of a similar case that took him to the brink, destroying his marriage, his health and his ascending career in one fell swoop.

Doc puts personal face on horror of Holocaust

Timed for release on International Holocaust Awareness Day today, the National Film Board documentary short Martha brings a light touch to a horrific subject.

Apparently, writer-director Daniel Schubert’s objective was to reach a younger audience with limited understanding of how Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party facilitated the genocide of six million European Jews during the years of the Second World War.

In the past few decades, feature films often broached the subject, most notably Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2003) and the especially harrowing Hungarian drama Son of Saul (2015) by László Nemes.

All those films boast considerable artistry, but they’re also tough to watch. Schubert tries for a stealthier approach, employing as his main character Martha Katz, the filmmaker’s own 90-year-old grandmother.

Fresh take on '90s cop-movie genre

As the oft-tweeted question goes: Wanna feel old?

The upcoming crime thriller The Little Things is set in 1990, not that long ago when it comes to the physical reality of Los Angeles, where it is mostly set.

But in another sense, it is a lifetime ago, hearkening to a time when police procedurals, and especially buddy cop movies, were standard Hollywood fare, with scant attention paid to current hot-button topics regarding corruption or racial injustice.

The good news about the script for the The Little Things is that it was conceived as a critical response to those movies, specifically the formulaic serial killer thriller. Director-screenwriter John Lee Hancock hasn’t really done the cop movie before, with the exception of his 2019 film The Highwaymen, about the hunt for Depression-era bankrobbers Bonnie and Clyde. His past efforts skew more to unconventional fact-based dramas such as The Founder, Saving Mr. Banks and The Blind Side.

Cynical, gory and eminently quotable

The title is juvenile, but that’s the whole point of this monster comedy from former Winnipegger Steven Kostanski.

With monsters created out of good old-fashioned latex appliances (instead of CG), the film is a deliberate throwback to the ‘80s and ‘90s, specifically the direct-to-video junk that Kostanski paid tribute in his 2011 homage Manborg.

The characters Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and her doormat older brother Luke (Owen Myre) are likewise callbacks to the days when kid characters could be obnoxious. (Think The Monster Squad, The Goonies, and a host of others.)

In the film, it is the aggressively terrible Mimi who gets the ball rolling when she uncovers a glowing amulet in the back yard. The orb is the power source of the titular warrior (Matthew Ninaber) who, like the genie from the lamp, is obliged to do Mimi’s bidding, a state of affairs that delights the naturally domineering girl, accustomed to shouting out orders to her mysteriously acquiescent brother.

Prairie Theatre Exchange tweaks season, adds filmed productions

Because of the COVID pandemic, the operation of a theatre company feels like the Agatha Christie story where a group of disparate people gather by invitation on a remote island, and one by one, start getting bumped off: And Then There Were None.

Prairie Theatre Exchange is rejecting that outcome in an effort to preserve its season. In the announcement of an altered lineup, acknowledging the crisis in which Manitoba still finds itself, the company will be cancelling the planned production of Outside Joke: The Musical, a warmly anticipated show featuring a troupe of Winnipeg’s most skilled musical improvisers.

But artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones says the season will proceed with three shows that will be available digitally, starting with the world première of Hannah Moscovitch’s Post-Democracy, which sees four powerful executives brainstorming over how to circumvent a scandal in a foreign country. Originally scheduled to première in March, it will now be offered digitally commencing in April.

Imagine a stage play that skips live performance altogether and proceeds directly to the movie version. It will be like that, Jones says, but the filmed version will be performed and shot in the PTE’s Portage Place space.

There's gore, there are toxic monsters... but hey, why not make it a kids' movie?

When it comes to bloody mayhem, the movie Psycho Goreman lives up to its title. Heads are ripped off. Humans are blithely transformed into toxic monsters. And the title character, an extraterrestrial super-warrior, is given to threatening people with dark fates along the lines of: “You will suffer an eternity for this.”

The kicker is that the movie, for all its R-rated content, focuses primarily on the two kid siblings who find themselves controlling the title character through the mystical amulet that had been embedded in his chest. In particular, Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) gleefully lords it over this dark lord (and even gives him his name, “PG” for short) while her acquiescent brother Luke (Owen Myre) goes along for the wild ride.

Former Winnipegger Steve Kostanski, who wrote and directed the film, is unsure of how the film is rated before its release next week.

“I hope it gets an R rating,” he says in a phone interview from his Toronto home. “Otherwise the joke in the trailer — ‘PG, rated R’ — doesn’t really work.”

Prairie ‘dread’ amps up atmosphere in horror film

Calgary filmmaker Robert Cuffley has made only a few feature films, including the shot-in-Winnipeg kink-comedy Walk All Over Me, the wrestling comedy Chokeslam and the violent revenge drama Ferocious.

It’s surprising he has waited until now to dabble in horror. The genre has always attracted filmmakers looking to make maximum impact on minimal budgets. Also, contemporary horror films generally dovetail with Cuffley’s penchant for troubled female protagonists.

They don’t get much more troubled than Marcy (Siobhan Williams). The movie opens with an active-shooter situation in an office workplace where Marcy toils as an HR manager. Apparently, she’s not good at her job.

We find Marcy, grimly hungover and already downing airline bottles of vodka, too sick to notice the gunfire in the office that has sent other employees ducking for cover. The shooter, we learn, had made threats upon his earlier dismissal and Marcy was apparently too out of it to take him seriously.

Prairie-raised screenwriter Susie Moloney finds horror in isolation

The horror movie Bright Hill Road is mostly set in a small-town hotel/boarding house, which becomes a limbo-like waystation for troubled anti-heroine Marcy (Siobhan Williams).

The atmosphere of the film by Robert Cuffley (who shot the kinky 2007 crime comedy Walk All Over Me in Winnipeg) is steeped in a kind of Prairie dread, as Marcy — who makes a desperate road trip to California after witnessing a workplace shooting for which she bears some responsibility — finds she can’t escape the desolate, empty place.

Writer Susie Moloney is actually pleased to hear the ambience adds to the overall sense of danger in which the film is steeped. Moloney, known for horror novels such as The Dwelling and A Dry Spell, grew up in Winnipeg, but the movie was filmed around her current home base of Edmonton, so she says the Prairie feel wasn’t a given.

“I never really thought of Alberta as being a Prairie province, but they very much lean into the Prairie identification,” Moloney says.

Keep on rolling

If there was ever a year in which we would come to appreciate going to the movies it was 2020.

As Joni Mitchell once sang: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” And for large swaths of the year, the moviegoing experience was taken away from us as a protective measure against COVID-19 transmission.

That leaves the movie fan longing to return to the multiplex in 2021. But in the face of a slow vaccine rollout, it is more likely we must come to terms with the fact that this year, like 2020, movie enjoyment is at best going to be a mix of streaming, specialty channel exclusive releases and — fingers crossed — theatrical releases.

In light of that, where we usually offer up 10 reasons to go to the movies at the beginning of every year, we now present: 10 reasons to keep seeing movies this year.

‘Shotgun’ Winnipeg film shoot short but sweet

The setting is more than a little seamy. A bearded man waits by a cheap motel for an illicit assignation with a woman he’s never met. She appears behind him, beautiful, provocative and, in contrast to the man, poised and self-assured.

She invites him to her place, a room in the aforementioned motel, to complete their sordid transaction, which is, perhaps, not what you think.

The film is titled Lughead, and it is clearly a Winnipeg product, not only going by the joyously retro signage of Pembina Highway’s Capri Motel, but by the local performers: Aaron Merke (of the local improv troupe Bucko) and Jade Michael (recently seen in Hunter Hunter and with credits in upcoming films Seance and Orphan: First Kill).

Other names on the credits include local cinematographer Paul Suderman and production designer Gord Wilding.

The cinema that helped us make it through 2020

In March of 2020, the pandemic lowered the boom on the movie industry, scuttling the release schedule for the remainder of the year with only a few studio movies released. With a few exceptions, the major releases got postponed to 2021 in anticipation of fully vaccinated moviegoers reviving the industry.

But to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, movies ... um, find a way. In 2020, this was mostly due to streaming services, although Christopher Nolan did manage to get a theatrical release for his temporal extravaganza Tenet (earning US$362 million worldwide).

It turned out some of the movies released on studio streaming services weren’t worthy of the theatre anyway (Artemis Fowl, Wonder Woman 1984). Still, where there’s a will — or a Netflix account — there’s a way. With that, Free Press movie writers Alison Gillmor, Randall King and Jill Wilson offer up a few of the best of a bad year.

Alison Gillmor:First Cow

A pandemic gift to Manitoba

For one evening only, Manitobans will get an opportunity to see a movie free of charge that would otherwise cost at least $6.99 on a video-on-demand service.

The film is the 2020 release I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight, a Sean Garrity-directed romantic comedy set in Winnipeg about a blossoming relationship between a Filipina girl (Hera Nalam) and a Mennonite boy (Kristian Jordan) encompassing the cultural roadblocks between them.

The film will screen for Manitoba audiences only on Jan. 2 at 6:30 p.m. by logging onto januarysecond.com. Sponsored by SafeAtHomeMB.ca, the free screening is part of an effort to keep Manitobans at home during the COVID-19 crisis.

Garrity acknowledges the movie’s Canadian distributor Mongrel Media was concerned that the event might affect the money the film is currently earning on VOD platforms.

Watching through adversity

The whole world was watching in 2020.

Yes, the headlines. Yes, the press conferences. But yes, that old reliable friend, the television.

Just as before the pandemic began, there was too much new TV of which to keep track. New shows popped up and became momentary phenomena — Tiger King, The Last Dance, the weeklong American election night — leaving untold hours of sitcoms, prestige drama, and quirky comedies unseen and waiting in our “to-watch” lists.

It’s hard to know which shows to see and which to nod politely about while your friends tell you it’s “binge-worthy” or “totally worth the commitment.” So here are some new shows to watch that either came out this year or late in 2019, selected by the Free Press arts staff. They are totally worth the commitment.

Sequel to sensational 2017 comic-book adaptation a colourful disappointment

Failing to live up to its own high standards, the follow-up to the admirable Patty Jenkens-helmed Wonder Woman (2017) at least has many of the same elements as the impressive first movie.

It’s a period piece, for starters. The first movie was largely set in 1918, which saw Gal Gadot’s demi-goddess Diana leave the magical isolation of her Amazon island to engage with the outside world in war-torn Europe at a time when proto-Nazis are threatening to plunge the globe into death and darkness.

The followup is set in America in 1984, which means the movie’s colour palette is now as gaudily bright as a Cyndi Lauper music video. Diana still fights her good fight in secret in Washington, D.C., where her occasional penchant for wearing a metal-reinforced bodice doesn’t seem to draw as much attention as you’d think. (It was the year Madonna came out with Like a Virgin, you may recall.)

A new unwieldy menace arrives in this future paradise courtesy of charismatic con man Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) who comes to Diana’s museum to snatch a strange crystalline object from the grip of self-effacing wallflower/gem researcher Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig).

Cap the festive season with Aboriginal film fest

With just a week left in the year, the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival is getting in under the wire with an online fest to run from Dec. 27 to Jan. 1, 2021.

That allows for the good news/bad news dynamic common to pretty much all film festivals in 2020. The bad news is that it’s online only because of the ongoing pandemic crisis. The good news is that it’s now open to viewership across the country. And having an online festival was better than no festival at all, says festival founding director Coleen Rajotte.

“Originally, we had planned what we were calling a hybrid version of (the festival) with smaller, in-person screenings and online screenings,” says Rajotte. “When we went into code red, we were struggling to figure out exactly what we were going to do. Postpone it?

“But after thinking about it, people are staying home and I thought that it would be a perfect time,” she says. “You have a completely online festival during the Christmas holidays. Once people get finished with Christmas and Boxing Day it will give people something to watch in the comfort of their living rooms over the holidays.

Doc celebrates public television’s Soul! man

As far as I know, the talk-variety TV show Soul! did not air in Winnipeg over PBS affiliates during its five-year run from 1968 to 1973. That’s one reason why its existence, and its singularity in the TV landscape of the era, hits like such a bombshell in this documentary about the show, and the surprising man who brought it into the world.

His name was Ellis Haizlip, and he helped conceive the program as a producer but became the host almost by default. The initial hosts, including Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint, just didn’t have the magic.

Haizlip didn’t either, at least initially. But his passion for the idea behind the show — a celebration of Black culture in all its myriad forms — ultimately made him the best man for the job, given his intimate familiarity with all aspects of the subject.

The amazingly erudite Haizlip had contacts in literature — he was friends with James Baldwin — dance and especially music. The program would be an invaluable showcase for up-and-coming acts including Al Green, Ashford and Simpson (who made their TV debut there) and Earth, Wind and Fire, as well as more established stars, such as Stevie Wonder and Wilson Pickett.

RMTC delivers gift of online holiday cheer with free, online Christmas-themed variety show

Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s online show All Is Bright is intended as a gift from the company to Manitoba theatregoers in lieu of the productions the company has had to cancel this season (and much of the last).

Perhaps the more accurate term would be “consolation prize,” given the COVID funk in which we find ourselves.

In any event, it’s a relentlessly festive piece, kicking off with a cheerful Jennifer Lyon razzle-dazzling Here We Come A-Caroling, dashing from the front of the RMTC building on Market, into the lobby and eventually onto the stage, where she is accompanied by a four-piece band. By dint of her sheer familiarity, Lyon, a musical theatre mainstay in the city, might as well have been singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, because her presence supplies a certain comfort and joy for the musical theatre aficionados.

An outdoor blessing by Métis Elder Dolores Gosselin (the only part of the show not shot on RMTC’s premises) feels like a sombre but meaningful substitute to the usual land acknowledgement that begins most RMTC shows. It is also a signal that this production will make an effort to represent a wider cultural base than the theatre’s usual holiday-season show.

Gripping local film traps viewers in its teeth

Hunter Hunter, the third theatrical feature from Winnipeg writer-director Shawn Linden, involves a modern-day fur trapper, a dangerous lupine predator and an even more dangerous human predator; it has more than its share of shocks.

Perhaps its biggest surprise is what a rock-solid genre offering it is. Earlier in his career, Linden aspired to be a surreal stylist, evidenced by his first 2007 feature, Nobody (not to be confused with the more recent locally shot feature Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk and due out in February), a movie as visually striking as it was baffling.

Hunter Hunter is at once more straightforward and more gripping.

It’s about a family already in crisis as the film begins. Grizzled patriarch Joseph Mersault (Devon Sawa) is a man determined to live a spartan life with his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan) and daughter Renee (Summer H. Howell) in the remote wilds of Manitoba, observing a frontier work ethic: hunting for food, selling animal skins for other necessities, and home-schooling Renee so she will be able to fend for herself.

Summer Howell,16, is already a veteran of Winnipeg-shot horror films

In the new horror movie Hunter Hunter, Summer Howell is tasked with playing a young teenage girl who learns how to trap, hunt, and skin animals under the tutorship of her grizzled trapper father (Devon Sawa) in the remote wilds of Manitoba.

It’s a tough role in a movie that has more than its share of harrowing scenes. So keep in mind the reason the role of “Renee” exists at all is a testament to Howell’s talent, says the film’s writer-director, Shawn Linden.

“Her character was an eight-year-old boy before I met Summer,” Linden says. “After her audition, I had to take a week to rewrite (the role) into an older female character.

“There was just that much talent that instantly was apparent from seeing her.”

Panto impresario hopes to bring art form home

For proof that Canada is not the culturally homogenous country some people might assume, look no further than the tradition of the holiday pantomime.

Not to be confused with Marcel Marceau-style mimery, the “panto” is annual theatrical presentation, generally a Christmas-themed show spinning off from a different piece of children’s entertainment each year, from Peter Pan to Aladdin to Cinderella.

A product of the English music hall tradition, the show is a kind of mash-up of musical and kids show, with heavy dollops of political/social satire added for the amusement of parents (who, let’s face it, could use a break from the kid-centric nature of holiday shows). For added fun, it’s a show where audience participation is encouraged. Booing and hissing at the villain, cheering for the hero and singing along with the songs, it’s all fair game at the panto.

The funny thing is that Winnipeggers don’t necessarily know all this because the city has generally demurred on the pantomime. Bigger cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, have a reliable panto tradition that has somehow eluded us.

Film explores the collision of faiths

The start of the Manitoba-lensed movie The Corruption of Divine Providence may lead you to believe you’re watching a rehash of The Exorcist. A teen girl named Jeanne, played by Ali Skovbye, has apparently been possessed by a possibly malevolent spirit, a fact that reveals itself when Jeanne is put under hypnosis after nearly perishing from the bloody effects of stigmata. 

But what follows is not so much a battle between good and evil so much as between warring factions of faith. Jeanne’s Christian parents are compelled to choose between the traditional Indigenous healers who come to her aid, or a slick evangelical hustler from Texas named Peter Wolf (Corey Sevier), who tempts Jeanne’s infinitely corruptible father Louis (David La Haye).

It is one of the works of Winnipeg filmmaker Jeremy Torrie. An Ojibwa originally from Kenora, Torrie, 48, has explored indigenous themes as a producer or director in films such as Juliana and the Medicine Fish (2017) and Cowboys and Indians: The J.J. Harper Story (2003), the latter an adaptation of a book by former Free Press scribe Gordon Sinclair.

This film was inspired, Torrie says, by visiting the family of his French-Canadian Métis wife Tanya in 2001.

TV series about Black porters prepares to film in Winnipeg this spring

A television period drama about the lives and challenges of Black railway workers, promising to be the biggest Black-led production ever in Canada, will commence shooting this spring in Winnipeg.

It’s an appropriate location since, a century ago, Winnipeg is where the first Black railway workers union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, was formed in response to the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees union’s segregationist policies.

Tentatively titled The Porter, the eight-episode series will be produced for CBC and BET+, the streaming service of the American cable network Black Entertainment Television.

While Winnipeg may be important in the history of the union, the city’s locations will be substituting for other urban centres, such as Chicago, Detroit, and especially Montreal’s “Little Burgundy” district, known at the time as the “Harlem of the North.”

Hunter takes aim at the shocking climax

Filmed in the fall of 2019, the movie Hunter Hunter comes with a different kind of parental advisory from Winnipeg director Shawn Linden.

“I’ve already told my mother that she’s not supposed to watch the last five minutes,” says Linden, 43.

An unapologetic horror movie set in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield, the film plunks us into a cabin owned by modern-day fur trapper Joseph Mersault (Devon Sawa), his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan), and their daughter Renée (Summer H. Howell). The patriarch resolutely tries his best to live off the land, earning just a little money from the fur pelts Anne is obliged to sell at a local store while teaching his daughter the trade. The economic hardship is compounded when a wolf intrudes on their world, eating the animals Joseph has trapped and terrorizing Anne and Renée.

When an even more dangerous predator arrives on the scene, Joseph decides to hunt the hunter.

Scorsese, Coppola take different paths in portraying mafioso in film

Here in the real world, New York mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo was murdered in 1972, shot to death while dining with his family at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy.

That event was vividly and presumably accurately portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman. True to Scorsese form, the murder had a voiceover by Robert De Niro, who played the titular hitman Frank Sheeran, explaining the strategy of killing Gallo. (“For something like this, you’re gonna use two guns, the one you’re gonna use and a back-up.”) The hit itself is shot with fluid economy, just two shots, with a typically Scorsesean choice of music in the background (Santo and Johnny’s Sleep Walk), all artfully portraying the quotidian brutality of Mob life.

For contrast, look at The Godfather Part III. The Gallo figure, named Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) finds himself the target of an elaborate setup during an Italian pride/religious procession in Little Italy, wherein Joey’s bodyguards are shotgunned by hooded assassins disguised as penitents and Zasa himself is finished off by Michael Corleone’s nephew Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), masquerading as a mounted police officer. From the moment a gun is drawn, director Francis Ford Coppola uses roughly 30 cuts with probably an equal number of callouts to the past two Godfather movies: the disguised cop and the doorway hit from the first, and the Fanucci stalking/religious procession from the second.

The two scenes, viewed side by side, reflect the polar opposite approaches of Scorsese and Coppola. Coppola was in the business of creating dense mythologies of the Mafia to suggest the mobster as the ultimate metaphor for the capitalist. In films such as Goodfellas and Casino, Scorsese never really elevates the mobster to a tragic hero. His practitioners of violence and savagery are generally greedy for money, power and privilege, with results that almost always end either in prison or ignominious death.

All the theatre's a virtual stage as RMTC brightens up the season

Had the COVID-19 pandemic not rudely interrupted life as we know it, we might have been enjoying a production of The Sound of Music on the mainstage of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre this month.

But of course, that was not meant to be, as first the early shows of the RMTC season, then the entire season, suffered cancellation in response to the pandemic. That left RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton with yet another mountain to climb after her plan of producing a series of mini-plays — Tiny Plays, Big Ideas — at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights also got postponed when the province went to code red in mid-November.

“I’m the queen of pivoting at this point,” Thornton says in a phone interview.

But her latest swivel has landed her helming a seasonal show on the mainstage that everyone can enjoy from the safety of their homes, at no charge.

Good sports

You might call the new Netflix series We Are the Champions a sports show for people who don’t watch sports.

Sure, the spirit of competition is very much present in the six half-hour episodes. But because the competitions range from out-of-the-ordinary to downright bizarre, the events don’t require much in the way of advance expertise.

For example, in the first (and best) episode, Cheese Rolling, the premise is hilariously simple. A roll of Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down a very steep slope in Cooper’s Hill, near Gloucester, England. The competitors chase the wheel down the hill. The first person to the bottom… wins the wheel of cheese. That’s it.

Ah, but what price cheese-chasing glory? Four competitions are held each year, three for men and one for women because, as the common wisdom has it: “Men are three times more stupid than women.” This episode focuses on reigning women’s champ Flo Early, seeking her fourth championship.

Straightforward documentary pays homage to beloved children's entertainer Fred Penner

The bland title of this documentary on Winnipeg entertainer Fred Penner is a bit disappointing. This Is My World sounds like a random album of pop covers by a ‘60s TV star trying his hand at the music thing, say, Gene Barry: This Is My World.

The title is a play on the premise of Penner’s most persistent legacy, the TV series Fred Penner’s Place, which ran in the ‘80s and ‘90s for 13 seasons on CBC and on the American cable network Nickelodeon Jr. You may remember the opening of the show, in which Penner hiked through the countryside, crawled through a magic hollow log and landed on the leafy, natural-looking set of the show to regale the kids with story and song, alongside some puppets — including the popular Word Bird — and assorted guests.

It was a lovely outdoor fantasy world where kids could fall into Penner’s mellow groove.

The doc, stuck in safe mode, is not about to shake things up in its more-or-less chronological examination of Penner’s life, though the 74-year-old artist has been through his share of tribulation, which, we see, includes an alcoholic father and the loss of a beloved sister, Susie, who died at an early age.

Oddball drama delves deeply into creative process

If pressured to come up with a easily grasped analogy for the movie Black Bear, the result would be a little tortuous.

It’s Run Lola Run meets Day for Night?

So yes, this is an odd, unique feature from writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine, but then, it’s at least partially about the creative process, which is as big and dark and mysterious as the title ursine.

Aubrey Plaza, best known as the goth trickster April of TV’s Parks and Recreation, is Allison, a filmmaker on a retreat to an idyllic lakeside property run by struggling musician Gabe (Christopher Abbott of Girls and The Sinner) and the pregnant Blair (David Cronenberg regular Sarah Gadon).

Filmmaker uses music to explore civil rights

The film How High Is the Moon packs in a windfall of cultural references in its 45-minute running time, starting and ending with movie clips from Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani’s 2002 feature, Agogo Eewo, and pivoting to other clips of mid-20th-century jazz greats, including vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, and the legendary drummer Max Roach.

The film, currently for rent via Cinematheque at Home, is about much more than music, to be sure. It’s a freewheeling allegory of cultural history and Black activism, encompassing the civil rights movement of the ‘60s and current activism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in July of this year.

It’s all the work of 25-year-old Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, a Nigerian-born multidisciplinary artist who came to Winnipeg in 2015 to study mechanical engineering at the University of Manitoba.

“But I switched to the school of fine arts in 2017,” he says in a phone interview from his downtown apartment. “I’ve always been someone who is curious about the arts, and I think moving to Canada gave me more liberty to pursue that.”

Monsters, madmen and mutants, all in one movie

The title Tales of the Uncanny would have been ideal for a horror anthology — one of those movies that tell three or four scary stories within a feature-length running time. The sub-genre reached a kind of peak in the 1960s and ‘70s with a run of releases from the British company Amicus, including Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, The House that Dripped Blood and Asylum.

In fact, Tales of the Uncanny is a deep dive into that subgenre, which dates back to the silent era and is still going strong. (The Winnipeg-lensed Tales from the Hood 3 is one of the most recent iterations.) 

The film, available for streaming today via Cinematheque at Home, was produced by former Cinematheque programmer Kier-La Janisse.

Reached at her West Coast home, the ex-Winnipegger explains that the film started life as a DVD extra.

Keeping it real

Fresh, funny, sad and just slightly chaotic, Rocks is a film about a girl on the cusp of womanhood who finds herself tested by circumstances beyond her control.

We are introduced to Shola (Bukky Bakray), “Rocks” to her friends, in a joyous light, negotiating teen life from the safety of a tight girl clique, which includes her wryly funny best friend Sumaya (Kosar Ali). The opening few minutes suggest this will be a pretty lighthearted tale of girls goofing in the big city, specifically East London.

But there is trouble on the horizon, hinted at in scenes showing the underlying tension of Rocks’ home life. We understand her single mom has a frail grasp on keeping the family together. When mom disappears, leaving a note of apology, Rocks is left to care for herself and her eight-year-old brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), a delightful child, but also a boy attuned to the instability of his family unit.

Rocks’ troubles feel like walls closing in, first as she leaves her apartment when social workers come calling. She and her brother stay with friends on “sleepovers” that can’t go on too long, as parents will eventually get wise to the fact their guests are, in fact, homeless.

New theatre initiative targeting Indigenous playwrights aims to unearth new voices

The next great Indigenous playwright may spontaneously spring up from anywhere, as great playwrights often do.

Or they may be hiding in plain sight among people who have already won accomplishments in theatre and other fields. That appears to be one of the operating principles behind the Pimootayowin Creators Circle, a new initiative supported by the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

Led by established playwright Ian Ross (fareWel, The Third Colour), the circle started meeting weekly this month — online for the time being — with the goal that each participant will develop a play to be shared in June of 2021 at the inaugural play-reading series Pimootayowin: A Festival of New Work (June 8-12).

The six aspiring playwrights include up-and-comers, to be sure, including Lynette Bonin, a Métis student who has just finished writing her honours thesis in psychology and is currently completing her double major in theatre at the University of Manitoba; and Kathleen MacLean, who may be best known for her work onstage. Earlier this year, the Métis-Settler artist from Saskatoon was a rollicking performer in Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade at the RMTC Warehouse and was a more dangerous presence last year in PTE’s production of Ross’s The Third Colour.

First-time playwright's struggles a window into challenges of fringe festival

For local theatregoers, one of those empty spaces caused by the pandemic was the absence of the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival in July.

Sure, there was a truncated streaming version of the fringe this summer, but it just wasn’t the same.

One way to fill that hole in our hearts may be to take in the documentary Vivi’s Vision, set to be broadcast on CBC-TV on Saturday evening at 7 p.m.

Produced and directed by local documentarian Leona Krahn, it’s about the making of a 2019 fringe play titled Passing. Written by Winnipegger Vivi Dabee, the play was adapted from a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen about a mixed-race woman who passes for white during the Harlem Renaissance.

Local film industry rolls on despite COVID

Though COVID numbers are up in Manitoba, the film industry is evidently down to keep production rolling.

Just days after the Brad Anderson horror movie Blood wrapped with star Michelle Monaghan last week, the prequel to the 2009 hit Orphan, now titled Orphan: First Kill has begun shooting in the province and will continue to shoot until mid-December.

The movie is being directed by William Brent Bell, who directed The Boy and Brahms: The Boy II.

According to Deadline, Orphan star Isabelle Fuhrman is returning to the role of the titular murderous adoptee. Rossif Sutherland is also attached to the project. Sutherland, the son of Donald Sutherland, has shot three films in Manitoba previously, including High Life, Trench 11 and Hyena Road.

Film veteran to offer course on costuming

So let’s says you were working on a TV show that required you to design a suit worn by a person who has just been neatly split in half. Where would you go for guidance?

In Winnipeg, you’d be advised to seek out costume designer Heather Neale, who has worked in the film/TV business for 18 years. She faced exactly that challenge while working in 2011 on the locally shot TV series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, a show that traded in different kinds of supernatural mayhem every week.

“Each script I got it was crazier and crazier with the things we had to figure out,” Neale, 51, recalls. “That show really helped me learn how to figure out complicated things in a really fast way. We were splitting actors in half, so we had to figure out how to cut their costumes completely in half perfectly.

“The mechanics of how to figure stuff out on that show taught me so much.”

A brief Katharsis for anyone missing live theatre

Coming in at a tidy 16 minutes, The Prairie Theatre Exchange production of Katharsis, by Yvette Nolan, is not so much a full play. It’s more of a placeholder.

It’s a theatrical event you can view from your own home, free of charge. It has one actor, minimal props and a spartan esthetic.

But for all its economy of production, it also has a hang-in-there, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel message, more cautiously optimistic than delusionally sunny. It acknowledges that COVID-19 derailed life as we know it, but it will pass. And the theatre will be waiting.

The film was shot in the empty environs of the Prairie Theatre Exchange, whose artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones also directed this production.

Beyond Bond, Connery characters funny, fierce

When I was a kid, many of my peers collected sports cards. I collected movie cards, starting with the 1965 run of James Bond 007 cards put out by the good folks at Fleer.

At that point, only three Bond movies existed: Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964). (Thunderball would be released later in 1965.) The cards were basically productions stills of Sean Connery’s Bond in action, with appropriate captions: “Hunted by a Helicopter” as seen in From Russia With Love, or “The Incredible Laser Ray” or “Oddjob’s Deadly Derby” from Goldfinger.

So the news of Sean Connery’s death over the weekend had a kind of visceral effect, as it would on those of us who valued movie heroes over champions of the gridiron or baseball diamond. Connery, who lived to the ripe age of 90, presented a different kind of hero than the TV do-gooders of the era, a fact announced in an early scene from Dr. No when Bond cold-bloodedly kills a would-be assassin after he’s emptied his own pistol. “That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six.”

Connery played Bond a total of seven times, and while he was undoubtedly the best of the Bonds, only a few of the movies hold up. Connery is certainly phoning it in in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), for example, letting his character devolve into self-parody. But his quest to escape the Bond brand resulted in a few interesting roles, including The Anderson Tapes (1971), in which he played a career criminal with a conscience (sans toupée), or Zardoz (1974), a delirious post-apocalyptic fantasy in which his primitive warrior goes up against a race of immortal intellectuals.

Evies recognize local theatrical excellence

The 2019-20 theatre season was cut short by COVID-19. But the memory of excellence in Winnipeg theatre survived, and was celebrated — from a safe distance — in a streaming broadcast of the Evie Awards Monday evening.

Hosted by Melissa Langdon and Matthew Paris-Irvine, the Evies bestowed an equal number of awards to the grand Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Color Purple and the Théâtre Cercle Molière production of La Cantatrice chauve et La Leçon, which swept the awards in the technical categories of costume, set and lighting design.

It was announced this third edition of the Evies will be the last to give gendered awards, but at the same time, the number of acting awards will increase. In subsequent years, awards will be given to outstanding lead and supporting performance in three categories: drama, comedy and musical.

The winners of the 12 juried awards were:

Horror, sci-fi, comedy mix uneasily in locally shot film

The forgettable title The Return has multiple meanings in this ambitious feature debut by local filmmaker BJ Verot.

It centres on a college student, Rodger (Richard Harmon), who returns to his troubled family abode after the mysterious death of his father (Erik Athavale).

Rodger is the last family member standing. His younger sister died years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Rodger’s mother (Gwendolyn Collins) went missing while working on a complex scientific project.

It later emerges that mom was distraught, not only because of the death of her daughter, but because of her husband’s two-timing with the psychiatrist (Marina Stephenson Kerr) who was being consulted about young Rodger’s traumatic encounters with a spectral “imaginary friend,” a blood-drenched female figure of mysterious origins.