ARTS
Vic Picks
Singles you should be listening to, Courtesy of Vic Records “Take Your Picture with Me While You Still Can” —We Are The City Off their recent LP, Above Club, the Vancouver-based indie band tells the story of a liminal time. Their production—unique, theatrical, and unafraid—hides nothing, shows nothing, and only ...
Pushing Past Boundaries: We Are The City Is Not Your Typical Band
What does it mean when your favourite band disappears from social media? We Are The City, a progressive indie rock band from Vancouver, deleted all of their Instagram photos, tweets, and their Facebook page in the middle of 2015. Many fans were perplexed by their behaviour. “What happened to We ...
UC Follies Sketch Troupe delivers comedy at its finest
The UC Follies Sketch Troupe capped off their 2015-2016 season with a sold out performance in the renowned Second City Theatre in downtown Toronto. Second City is known as a cornerstone of the Toronto improv world, having launched the careers of John Candy, Mike Myers, and Eugene Levy. Their show, ...
VCDS’ RENT is saturated with brilliant staging ideas—to the point of losing clarity
The beloved musical Rent focuses on a group of bohemian artists living in Alphabet City during the AIDS epidemic. Their living circumstances are jeopardized when, coincidentally, they all decide not to pay their rent. (Who thinks they can get away without paying rent? Silly artists.) Various relationships are formed in this ...
A Closer Look into UofT’s Faculty of Music
When I first entered the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music building (just across the road from Vic), I was fairly surprised by the interior. This faculty is one of the highest-ranking post-secondary institutions for studying music in the country, yet the inside was outdated and lacklustre. Most people know ...
TCDS’ Cabaret was a Willkommen Delight
It may seem strange to praise a show for making me say “I hate Humanity” at the end, yet this is exactly the case for the TCDS’s 2016 production of Cabaret. Cabaret was originally a musical based on Jon Van Druten’s 1951 play I am a Camera, and was later adapted ...
A thousand or so words on Abbas Kiarostami
What is Kiarostami trying to tell me? That’s the question I keep asking myself as I’ve been introduced to his films over the past few weeks at his TIFF Retrospective. I’m told there’s a magic moment that comes to those going through Kiarostami’s work for the first time. For me, ...
A Dying Art Form: Does film have a future in Hollywood?
“On the surface, The Hateful Eight operates as a kind of homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing” was all the praise I needed to pre-purchase my ticket for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie. The fact that it was going to be shown in 70mm film, accompanied by an overture and intermission, ...
Misplaced Nostalgia: HBO’s Vinyl doesn’t manage to find its rhythm
Since Mad Men’s ending last year, I’ve been on the hunt for a new period piece to give my soul and procrastination time to. Vinyl, HBO’s new Martin Scorsese-Mick Jagger-Rich Cohen-Terrence Winter collaboration, seemed like a good candidate to fill said hole in my television-watching habits. However, the show falls ...
REVIEW: Son of Saul
Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes, tells a story of one man’s search for meaning in a world deprived of humanity. The film, set in the Auschwitz concentration camp, follows one prisoner’s quest for meaning after seeing the death of a boy he takes to be his long-lost son. ...