'Shipyard Shindig' coming to Bridgewater
Atlantic Watch
The organizers of the first ever Shipyard Shindig Music and Arts Festival share some of the events coming to Bridgewater, N.S.
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Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead: Succession's successor sharply satirizes a new class of billionaire
Before he transformed the idea into a hit HBO television series, the British screenwriter Jesse Armstrong first wrote Succession as a film. I've always been curious what kind of movie Armstrong's original screenplay – which landed on the so-called 'Black List' of best unproduced screenplays of 2010 – would have resulted in. Armstrong's new HBO film that premieres in Canada on Saturday night on Crave (8 p.m. ET) may be the closest we'll ever get to seeing what that would have looked like. While not a Succession spin-off per se, Mountainhead certainly seems to exist in an expansion of its universe – where the characters and the satire are both extremely rich. The film begins with a bit of exposition, efficient if not all that elegant, that sets up the background of the story through news footage. Traam, a social media site used by billions around the world, has introduced a new suite of artificial intelligence features. Without any moderation, they have led to bad actors to create real-time deepfakes that have quickly sparked violent and even genocidal conflict all around the globe. Despite this worldwide chaos he's created, Traam's cocky owner Venis (Cory Michael Smith) – the richest man in the world and, from a brief glimpse of his parenting style, at least partly modelled on Elon Musk – is headed off on a weekend retreat with his tech-bro besties. An oversized SUV, private jet and helicopter ride away is a new mountaintop mansion in the Canadian Rockies that has been built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who, with a net worth of merely $500-million, is considered the poorest of his billionaire pals. Indeed, he's nicknamed Soupy, short for Soup Kitchen, for that reason. (Yes, Hugo has named his retreat Mountainhead in an apparently non-ironic homage to objectivist novelist Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.) Also joining on this jaunt are Randall (Steve Carrell), described as a 'Dark Money Gandalf' and unwilling to admit that all the wealth in the world cannot cure the type of cancer he has; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has a modicum of ethics compared to the others and a rival AI platform that quickly could undo all the damage that Traam is doing – but only if Venis names the right price. Full of poetically garbled tech jargon and inventively profane put-downs, Armstrong's screwball dialogue in this film is as enjoyable – and unquotable in this newspaper – as Succession's at its most absurd. His satire is sharpest in the ways he parodies tech-bro libertarian stances. In self-serving denial of the effect of Traam is having, Venis recalls that when the Lumière Brothers showed their first movie of a train, the audience jumped for cover. 'The answer to that was not stop the movies,' he says, with the type of specious argument one normally has to pay big bucks to hear at a Munk Debate. 'The answer was show more movies.' Randall follows up with his own risible reasoning to ignore the suffering of others, delivered in a sarcastic tone: 'There will be eight to 10 cardiac arrests during the Super Bowl. Stop the Super Bowl!' For all its line-by-line dark pleasures, Mountainhead would quickly grow tiring were it not for the fact that Armstrong's plotting of shifting power dynamics among these four is pretty clever as well. Venis has to dance around how to get Jeff's AI without compromising his pride, while Randall goes deeper and deeper into dangerous delusion as he imagines that perhaps Traam's 'creative destruction' might speed up the eventuality of transhumanism and the ability for his consciousness to be uploaded to the mainframe. Then, there's insecure Hugo who will go along with any plan as long as someone invests in his meditation app that he hopes might finally push him over a billion in net worth. There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of Mountainhead, as there was in Succession, between how much the audience hates these characters and also enjoys spending time laughing at (with?) them – and how to balance the fact that the ultra-rich are beyond the reach of consequences, while satisfying the desire to punish them. Unable to really have his characters develop or truly grapple with the implications of their actions without humanizing them, Armstrong returns to his old underwhelming stand-by – scenes in which his monsters stare into the distance miserably, or look at themselves in the mirror as if try to the find shreds of humanity behind their mask. Ultimately, with so much of Mountainhead's action taking place in a single location, you see how Armstrong's style of writing is suited for a TV screen over a big one – and why it's for the best Succession didn't happen as a movie. Indeed, you could even see Mountainhead dropped on a stage, with minimal edits to the script. Finally, male actors who wanted to explore the depths of toxic masculinity and American capitalism would have a more up-to-date work than David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (incidentally, now on in New York starring Kieran Culkin).
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
The summer Sook-Yin Lee spent in a noodle costume changed her life forever
At 17, filmmaker Sook-Yin Lee took a lowly job that nobody else would, as – get ready for this – a 10-foot-tall piece of pasta with a mustache named Mr. Noodle. Was the rocker by night, pasta piece by day humiliated? Demeaned? Did the future artist and MuchMusic VJ file the gig away forever in the embarrassing-job vault? She did not. In this instalment of 'How I Spent My Summer,' Ms. Lee shares how being Mr. Noodle turned into something delicious and eternally filling. I ran away from home as a teenager to become an artist. I was fortunate to meet a supportive queer community with a vibrant and collaborative art scene that encouraged expression. I was in a band, screaming didactic political songs mostly, and we had this gig in Vancouver in an underground nightclub. Literally underground. Above was this unpopular pasta bar. One day I was lugging my gear out of the basement when it caught my eye: this sad-looking, forlorn, empty noodle costume in the window. Kinda like Gumby, but a noodle. He was a 10-foot-tall foam rectangle with big googly eyes, a French beret and a mustache. Even though I didn't have an audience, I was into performance art and social experiments, so he was perfect. I went into the restaurant and asked the guy who ran the place, Lyle, 'Hey – is anyone here the noodle?' Lyle said, 'No, no one will be the noodle.' I didn't care about the money, which was minimum wage, and I didn't really need the job, but I wanted to see what being the noodle was like in society. Robert Munsch's first job in the French countryside turned out to be a stinky situation Artist Christi Belcourt on her first job that paid $17. Not per hour ... just $17. Lyle gave me the lowdown on Mr. Noodle. He said, 'Mr. Noodle is Motown and he walks like this.' It was like a jive turkey walk, super stupid. He wanted me to walk like that and give out menus. I did that in front of the restaurant, where Lyle could see me, but as soon as I was out of view I took on a different noodle personality entirely. I made rules for myself as Mr. Noodle: Never speak words, as then the spell will be broken. I let myself make strange sounds and onomatopoeias, like brrrrrrrreeeeakkkk! or kwauk-kwauk-kwauk! I lost the Motown strut; I didn't give out the menus. I just walked, kinda listless, being a noodle. It was hot in there, and Mr. Noodle was suspended on two strings on my shoulders. I'd stack dishtowels as padding underneath the strings but it still got pretty painful. A lot of people were intolerant or rude. Many told me to move or get out of their way. Children liked Mr. Noodle, though. They'd run up and say hello and want to introduce me to their parents. There'd be the dad, sunbathing on the beach, and I'd deliberately block his sun. Elderly European men were really nice to Mr. Noodle. They'd sit down and talk to him, like really talk to him, regaling them about their day. One day, I got beaten up on Granville Street by a gang of skinheads. They thought Mr. Noodle was funny, so a crowd gathered around and they started pushing him back and forth. Luckily the body was made of foam, so it wasn't physically painful, but I watched sadly from the inside through the mesh face. I stayed in character the whole time as Mr. Noodle got beat up. Every day, I kept a diary of what happened to Mr. Noodle. It resonated with me that he was the ultimate outsider, and I wanted to see who embraced him and who didn't. I didn't have any big plans, but later that summer a friend told me about a film contest she was entering. I decided to enter too, and had one weekend to get a submission ready. It was immediately obvious to me that I'd make Escapades of the One Particular Mr. Noodle. A few months later, I found out Mr. Noodle was one of 10 scripts that was chosen to get made. It became my first legit film. I basically mobilized my neighourhood to be actors. I filmed in my house, remade the Mr. Noodle costume and re-enacted my summer as Mr. Noodle. It got enough attention that I was hired to make another film, and that's how my filmmaking life was born. All of this happened because of Mr. Noodle. Had I not followed my curiosity, had I not taken a low-paying horrible job, had I not found inspiration in him and related his experience as an outsider to mine as a Chinese-Canadian, my life would have been different. Without Mr. Noodle, I might never have become a filmmaker. As told to Rosemary Counter
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Canadian teen Mboko falls to Olympic champion Zheng at French Open
Canadian teen Victoria Mboko's breakthrough Grand Slam run came to an end Friday at the French Open. The 18-year-old from Toronto was beaten 6-3, 6-4 by No. 8 seed Zheng Qinwen of China in third-round action at Roland Garros. Mboko, ranked No. 333 at the start of the year, had surged into the spotlight with three straight wins in qualifying and two more in the main draw — all in straight sets — before running into Zheng, an Australian Open finalist who won Olympic gold in singles last summer on these same Paris clay courts. Zheng won 70 per cent of her first-serve points and saved six of eight break points. Mboko was broken four times and won only 38 per cent of her second-serve points. Still, it was a major step forward for Mboko in her Grand Slam main-draw debut. She'll officially enter the WTA's top 100 when the tournament wraps.
