If you don’t remember him from his breakthrough film J’ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother) that won him more awards internationally than he has room for in his Montreal loft, you certainly will this time around. Quebecois prodigy, and Canada’s cutest hipster, 22-year-old Xavier Dolan back with his sophomore film Heartbeats.

Here we are introduced to forlorn Francis (Dolan) and his best friend Marie (Monia Chokri, Quebec’s Audrey Tautou) and how their dangerously dependent and interwoven friendship gets wrapped up in a love triangle.

Enter Nicolas (the steamy Niels Schneider), the Audrey Hepburn-loving, classic literature-referencing, blond Adonis with a hippy, happy-go-lucky chip on his shoulder whose smouldering, pouty sexiness draws them in. And you can’t blame them. Nico is irresistible and by showing them each equal attention, his overwhelming energy starts eroding the friendship.

Does this sound simplistic and trite? It’s neither. Dolan is an understated screenwriter and director and a real heartthrob onscreen. He is smugly cute and boy does he know it, but his heartbreakingly grounded performance is beautiful. Dolan is inherently watchable.

As Francis and Marie slowly hit rock bottom and their sullen emo selves shine through, Stephanie Anne Weber Biron’s cinematography takes over. Her jerky zooms and continous basking in slow motion makes the film into a twentysomething hipster dream.

Above all else, Heartbeats, which should be translated from its original French to Imaginary Loves, dissects how friendship is affected by competition, and how we create internal lives for people that simply aren’t there. With lines like “a high IQ is a vital counterpoint to brown eyes” and “cigarettes keep me alive until I die,” it will no doubt be added to the DVD collections of any young artist in the city who’s looking for a little love in all the wrong places.

As an out gay man living in Vancouver I’ve got it easy nowadays, more or less.

Compare our contemporary city to the plight of the 1960s New York City homosexual: homosexual acts are illegal (even between consenting adults), queer gathering spaces are shut down by the police , those who are caught there are arrested and their names, addresses and employers are published in the paper, media depictions mark homosexuality as illness, and many are forced into horrifying medical treatments in an attempt to “cure” them.

A lot has changed.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s haunting documentary Stonewall Uprising, based on a book by David Carter, sheds an unsettling eye-opening light on the 1969 Stonewall riots, known as the beginning of the queer rights movement.

In 1969 The Stonewall Inn was the gathering place within the East Village. Though it had seen raids before, one June evening police showed up with a vigour not previously seen and the queers inside decided enough was enough.

They resisted, and then fought back with words, with drag, and with violence, leading to the police being barricaded inside the Inn itself. It lasted hours, and then days and led to the formation of the first Gay Liberation Parade on June 28, 1970, which would usher in the Gay Pride movement.

There is little to no footage of the riots themselves and at the time, there was hardly any media attention from the mainstream press. Most of the footage in Stonewall Uprising is simply footage of the era or reconstructions of certain key events, but they are of little consequence.

The heart and soul of the film is felt through interviews with former Stonewall Inn patrons and uprising starters as well as New York politicians and police workers who offer up incredible the emotion, “There was no going back now. We’d discovered a power we didn’t even know we had”.

Yes, a lot has changed, but not as much as we’d like to think. Look at the massive mainstream media attention that five gay teen suicides have garnered in recent weeks. Look at the homophobic attack that occurred at the Stonewall only last week. In watching films like Stonewall Uprising we see what we, as a queer community, are capable of, and how much fight we still have in us.

Stonewall Uprising screened as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Music lovers have a complicated relationship with Richard Wagner. For some, his music is revolutionary. He is the inheritor of a German musical tradition that includes Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Alternatively, Wagner is an anti-semite.

To further complicate matters, Wagner’s music was adored by Hitler. Hitler made many trips to Bayreuth to pay tribute to the master and the Wagner family was an early supporter of Hitler.

Stephen Fry, the “me” of Wagner and Me, believes the former but must come to grips with the latter. This, in a nutshell, is the narrative of this documentary.

As a film, Wagner and Me is better suited to the television screen than the cinema screen. Like far too many documentaries, the filmmakers fail to consider the cinematic aspect of the film experience. One would think that a film about Wagner, intended for the big screen, would invoke the grandeur of Bayreuth.

More problematic, though, is Stephen Fry’s fanaticism towards Wagner. We listen to Fry go on about Wagner’s genius, but there is scant attention paid to the basis of this genius. Other than a fascinating scene describing the significance of the Tristan chord (the chord that structures and sustains Wagner’s opera “Tristan & Isolde”), there is little discussion of the music beyond superficial biographical details.

Granted, music is notoriously difficult to speak about, but a documentary about Wagner’s genius should, at the very least, contain a substantive discussion of the music so as to ground the claims of its narrator.

Wagner & Me
Part of the Vancouver International Film Festival
Empire Granville 7
Remaining screenings:
Monday Oct. 11, 3:45 pm
Wednesday Oct. 13, 2:50 pm

it

It is a great day! Our magazines are coming and we are getting the final preperation for Sad Mag Live done! We are so excited to see all our friends and our Sad Family this weekend. And it is Thanksgiving! Double Life BONUS!
Check out what the internet has to say about it:

Vancouver is Awesome

Vancouver Observer

Only Magazine

We can’t wait til the curtains open! See you Saturday night!

Tickets online or the Cultch Box Office 1895 Venables Street at 604-251-1363.

–Sad Mag Team

Luke Cyca and Devon Lougheed are a strange and wonderful combination. Individually, Cyca is a therapeutic protein molecule designer and electronics recycler and Lougheed is a doctoral candidate and comedian. Together, they are Beekeeper – an irreverent indie band breezing into Vancouver’s music scene.

Cyca, a prairie boy from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, began his musical career at home, singing with his father and sister. After a prototypical string of garage bands in high school, Cyca moved to Vancouver and bought a drum set. “I was in a band called The Kitchen, I played in a couple other projects, and I play with Piper Davis now. That brings us to Beekeeper,” says Cyca.

Lougheed followed a similar musical vein, always instilling his trademark cheekiness. While in his home province of Ontario, Lougheed was in Tomate Potate – a band known for their onstage martini consumption. “Fans started sending us martinis and it turned into this game of ‘How many martinis can these guys drink in a twenty minute period?’ Then one day the bassist, Nich, came up to me and said, ‘Just so you know, I don’t really like martinis,'” Lougheed smiles. “So that’s why I’ve got a bandmate now who likes martinis!”

Beekeeper melds high-energy beats with unconventional time signatures, appealing to both light-hearted listeners and music nerds. Lush earnest vocals are balanced with playful melodies. “It’s indie-rock made by reformed hard-core kids who are suckers for male/female harmonies and singalongs,” says Lougheed.

Cyca and Lougheed keep things interesting for themselves with constant experimentation. “Devon writes two new songs every week, so there’s no shortage of challenges,” Cyca explains. “An mp3 comes to my email box and it’s got the shittiest synth instruments playing drums – they’re not sequenced, just played live. I listen to it a few times, we jam on it and it changes a bit into a real song. And that’s how they’re made.”

The recording of Beekeeper’s first album, BE KEPT, was an adventure in itself. Recorded throughout Canada, from parties to bedrooms to studios, the resulting poshness of the tracks surprised the band. “We did everything wrong in terms of how you’re supposed to record,” says Cyca. “And then we dumped everything on Colin Stewart at Hive Studios,” laughs Lougheed. “He’s the godfather of the Beekeeper baby.”

Lougheed means this quite seriously. “Interviewing us about the album is like interviewing new parents about their first baby. I like everything about it! I even like when it poops!” Cyca nods in agreement, “Normally, after making an album, I’m totally sick of it, but this one I can actually listen to and enjoy still.”

BE KEPT follows the narrative of a man searching for something to keep. While Beekeeper’s core consists of Cyca and Lougheed, they often feature musical guests in their live performances and a variety of female vocalists, a violinist, and saxophone player were recruited to fill their sound on the album.

“I’m the most proud of Beekeeper,” says Lougheed. “My mom has been driving around with a copy and singing along, every once in a while she’ll call me and say things like, ‘What is this song about? I just like it so much! This is such a significant improvement!'”

Beekeeper’s album BE KEPT is available online and download cards will be available at SAD MAG LIVE this Saturday, October 9th!

Photographs by Tina Krueger-Kulic.

Last night Sad Mag attended the opening of Fair Enough: A Little Mountain Art Show. Showcasing the work of Little Mountain’s artists who live and work in the Mount Pleasant Community. The show is open this weekend for the Drift-Art on Main Street festival.

Fair Enough: A Little Mountain Art Show
Part of The Drift – Art on Main Street

September 28 – October 3, 2010

Drift Hours Saturday and Sunday 12-5pm

Artists:

Kathryn Best
Helen Eady
Dan Elstone
Kristina Fiedrich
Robert Fougere
Tanya Goerhing
Tina Krueger Kulic
Scott Lewis
Justin Longoz
Korey Moran
Marina Nazarova
Eric Thompson
Xiaoyu Zhang
Nicholas E. Zirk
Daniel Zomparelli

Made Possible by the Vancouver Foundation and
Mount Pleasant Community Centre Neighbourhood Grants Initiative

Sad Mag was joined by friends from Poetry is Dead, Megaphone, and Lester’s Army at the Magazine Life Tent at this year’s Word on the Street festival. Thank you to everyone who came out to hear us talk about “How NOT to Publish a Magazine.” We had a great time hearing from the editors how—and why—they started their magazines.

Please support these visionary and hard-working publishers by subscribing or donating:

• Poetry is Dead website
• Megaphone website
• Lester’s Army website

If life gives you lemons, put on a play that features a supposed encyclopedia saleswoman, a lonely bachelor and, of course, lemonade. Oh, and make sure the audience is hydrated (free-of-charge!) with cute little glasses of the refreshing citrus beverage before the show begins. Such is the prerogative of Relephant Theatre’s presentation of Stewart Lemoine’s short play, “The Exquisite Hour.”

Set in the early 1960s, wit, whimsy and a minor dose of nostalgia are stuffed into this hour-long two-hander, which provides the audience with a good many laughs and even a few rather tender moments.

Josue Laboucane is fantastically uptight and nerdy as the bachelor Zachary Teale, whose backyard the whole play takes place in. And Nevada Yates Robart plays the enthusiastic encyclopedia saleswoman, Mrs. Darimont, with such a balance poise and neuroses that we’re not surprised to discover more than we bargained for in her. A nod must be given to director Julie McIsaac as she provides a strong cohesiveness and momentum to the piece as a whole.

Lemoine’s words are so hilariously chalk full of pop-cultural and historical references, that we not only get swept up in the blur of plot and characterization, but we might also learn a thing or two about a Catholic Saint with a hallucinatory dedication to animals and nature or a European royal family who names all of their men Frederick and all their women Agnes.

Played out in real time, “The Exquisite Hour” is an hour of theatre that does great things with a certain proverbial sour citrus.

The Exquisite Hour
Part of the Vancouver International Fringe Festival
Carousel Theatre
Remaining Performances:
Saturday Sept 18, 7:45 pm
Sunday Sept 19, 4:00 pm