Results tagged “northkorea”

North Korea agrees to shut down its main nuclear reactor and "eventually" shut down its nuclear weapons program. In exchange for a million tons of fuel oil, of course, but frankly nobody so far has come up with a better plan regarding North Korea than "keep bribing them to do nothing," so it boils down to a no-score win.

In a bizarre and tragic scene yesterday, former Toronto Blue Jay (and current New York Yankee) pitcher Cory Lidle perished after flying his plane into an apartment building in New York.

In today's news, Canada joins the global chorus in support of sanctions against North Korea as it threatens more nuclear tests. Korea promises to greet sanctions as an act of war. The US says it won't invade and wonders what more the dictatorship wants. The Toronto Korean Senior Citizen's society and Canadians teaching English in North Korea are nervous.

Competition was fiercer than the Daytime Emmys on Thursday at the 2nd Annual Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, but Michel Rabagliati took the prize for Best Book with Paul Moves Out.

The Gladstone Hotel hosts the second annual Doug Wright Awards this evening, honouring achievement in Canadian cartooning.

Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival begins tonight and there is a lot on offer with 99 films this year, so you’ll forgive us if we only cover this weekend’s picks today. After all, we haven’t even picked up our pass yet!

The Oscars are next weekend! And much like the fact that most people will skim over, or simply ignore the categories that don’t interest them, Torontoist is going to have to admit defeat to mentioning every single film out each week, particularly on a week like this one, with something like 12 new releases in the city this week. We mean, honestly. Some of it just isn’t worth reporting. Does anyone need to be told that Meda’s Family Reunion is clearly a pile of old ladies’ pants? That Spymate stars a monkey and is unlikely to interest anyone with an IQ higher than that of it’s star? That Doogal is an astoundingly inappropriate localisation of a beloved British children’s television classic, The Magic Roundabout, and should be ignored by everyone in the name of good taste? (Even if Jon Stewart is in it?)

Happy New Year, film fans! Or, perhaps, not. For we’ve slammed like so much booze filled new year vomit upon the tarmac of the post-Christmas lull, in which basically nothing of interest is released in any format. Certainly this week fans of more high brow cinema will have to hang on like those last few drips of chunky bile saliva for Cinematheque Ontario’s winter programme, starting on January 13th, which we’ll probably talk about then, and which features yet more Mikio Naruse, but lots of other exciting stuff like a limited run of The Passenger, the long lost hidden by Jack Nicholson flick.

Two photos stand out in Irwin Oostindie’s exhibit Axis to Grind: Inside North Korea showing at Gallery 1313 until Feb. 27. In one, a soldier stands at attention, bayoneted rifle by his hands. This photo is what most of us think of when we think of Kim Jong Il’s ‘rogue state,’ a country with a Stalinist security apparatus and a Maoist cult of personality, arguably combining the two worst aspects of Communist ideology. But it’s the other photograph, a blurred black and white print of a boy running through a stream, that more accurately represents Oostindie’s intent. He wants to portray North Korea as more than just a terrorist state, rogue nation and brutal dictatorship, to present a balanced and human picture of a vilified country. It’s a portrayal that’s hard to come by, drowned out by censorship and repression on one side and rhetoric and ignorance on the other.