Author: Brendan Flaherty
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U2 – Songs of Innocence
U2 release their latest album for free via Apple; Brendan takes a hard look at the music that wants to free us all. (Sarcasm much?) Last week, the popular Irish band U2 announced their new long playing album ‘Songs of Innocence.’ They did so by announcing Oprah-style that everybody should look under the seats of…
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Concert Review: Saskatoon – St. Vincent
St. Vincent plies her musical wares at an intense, worthwhile show at The Sasktel Saskatchewan Jazzfest to an audience that should have been much bigger. Today, everybody has been asking me if I’m going to the sold out Lauryn Hill concert at the Sask Jazz Festival. I have been responding truthfully, in the negative. It’s…
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The Wolf of Wall Street
Somewhere about five minutes from the beginning of The Wolf of Wall Street, the increasingly notorious new film from Martin Scorsese starring Leonardo DiCaprio, it becomes clear that this film will be uncomfortable. It’s probably the part where DiCaprio’s stockbroker character Jordan Belfort is introduced, a scene that combines sex and drugs in a relatively…
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Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Story
For a couple of years in the late 80s, America — the ‘real’ America — had a voice. It was a smooth, sonorous, irritated, chain smoking, bellowing voice: Morton Downey Jr.’s voice. In a time before the term ‘reality television’ was even a synapse in the calloused brain of Mark Burnett or Simon Cowell, Downey…
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Marc Maron – Thinky Pain
Marc Maron doesn’t care about what you think of him. As demonstrated in his new special Thinky Pain (Netflix), he’s going to do his stand-up comedy in his own way, a method cultivated through decades of struggle and hard work and drugs and marriages and failures and even some successes. He will probably spend most…
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Hell Baby
October is almost upon us, the month of all things horrifying: family gatherings (gasp!), harvest (shudder!), pumpkin spice everything (cringe!). Fall is truly a bone-chilling time and it can be difficult to face this season without turning to horror films as an escape. Just when the transformed foliage reminds us of the cycle of birth…
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Classic TV: Columbo
“Y’know, Columbo…you’re almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks…the humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family, the wife…Lt. Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along, but it’s always the jugular that he’s after. And I imagine more often…
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The Canyons
It’s hard to get a handle on The Canyons, one of those rare films able to develop a reputation (though not necessarily a good one) based solely on a few names of those involved. Yes, it’s that Lindsay Lohan comeback attempt you have heard about. Yes, it’s that one that was written by Bret Easton…