By BERNIE FLETCHER A flying sleigh? A rugged Santa who looks like he just stepped out of a Quentin Tarantino western? Yes, there were some strange sightings reported from the Leslieville area last winter. Santa was the talk of the neighbourhood around Coady Avenue and Queen Street East. A wisecracking Santa (Kurt Russell) came to […]
Has there ever been a more anticipated hockey season for long-suffering Leaf fans? Dare we dream? It’s been over half a century since Toronto last held a Stanley Cup parade. Who remembers Bobby Baun scoring with a broken leg? I have fond memories of those long ago Saturday nights, the last strains of the Hockey […]
I never did receive an invite to the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Maybe my invitation was lost in the mail, but one lucky guy from the Beach attended the ceremony at Windsor Castle in May. You could even say Patrick J. Adams walked the future Duchess of Sussex down the aisle […]
Someone yelled “Harry! Harry!” to the young couple strolling down a Toronto street. No, it wasn’t Prince Harry and a certain lovely actress from the TV show, Suits. According to Elan Mastai, the screenwriter and executive producer for The F Word (2014), the shout-out was for the magical Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, who was […]
Leslieville resident Guillermo del Toro deserves an Academy Award for making the Don River and Gardiner Expressway look romantic in his enchanting fantasy The Shape of Water, nominated for a lucky 13 Oscars, one short of the all-time record. After capturing the Golden Globe statue, the Mexican filmmaker is a favourite to win the Best […]
“So you want to be a director?” These words were magic to the ears of aspiring filmmaker Angie Lawrence, especially coming from Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar-winning writer/producer famous for The West Wing, The Social Network and A Few Good Men. Sorkin and crew were on location in November 2016 at the Lawrence home on Pine […]
I confess. I’m hooked on true crime mysteries like Making a Murderer, The Jinx, The Menendez Murders, The People v. O.J. Simpson (spoiler alert… he did it) and now Alias Grace, the CBC/Netflix mini-series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1996 historical fiction novel. This has been Atwood’s year. The Handmaid’s Tale won eight Emmys, including Outstanding […]
November is a month to remember the courage and sacrifice of our war veterans. Many soldiers did not return home. Others survived, but never fully recovered from the horrors of war. This is the story of one unsung hero, Phil Marchildon, a baseball pitching star, Royal Canadian Air Force officer and prisoner of war who […]
“Out of the blending of human and animal stories comes the theme that I hope is inherent in all my books: that man is an inescapable part of all nature, that its welfare is his welfare, that to survive, he cannot continue acting and regarding himself as a spectator looking on from somewhere else.” – […]
Some strange things landed in Toronto last year: creepy clowns, zombies, lizard creatures from beneath the sea. Don’t worry, it’s all fantasy from the dark imaginations of writers like Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro. Movies and television shows with supernatural themes have become very popular these days and Toronto is front and centre in […]
