Well, there have been a lot of films made about the ongoing conflict in Iraq and its effect on soldiers, and here’s another one! Stop-Loss is probably the glossiest, most-Hollywood looking attempt so far (no mean feat, considering Paul Haggis has had a shot already) and it remains to be seen if anyone in America really wants to be reminded that its sending its army off to fight a war that the majority of......

Toronto principal in controversial controversy over explicit poems he wrote and posted to his website. This is of course the first recorded case ever of somebody getting in trouble for something they wrote on the Internet, and the scandal has sent shock waves through the online community. "Wait, somebody actually reads this shit?" said Patrick Metzger. "Dammit, I better re-emphasize that my erotic snuff story about Geri Halliwell is purely a work of fiction!"......

Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is a show about the 1937 genocide of the citizens of Nanking committed by the Japanese army. The atrocity, which claimed the lives of at least 300,000 Chinese, is an often-overlooked tragedy, and Chan's story focuses on a young woman named Irene who has written a book exposing the truth about the massacre. Chan's play is inspired by Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten......

Michael Frayn's play Democracy, currently playing at Tarragon, is not always easy to follow. For some reason, this doesn't particularly matter. The second political drama set in Berlin in Tarragon's current season chronicles the rise and fall of Willy Brandt, West Germany's charismatic leader from 1969 until 1974, and is crammed full of politicians, spies, treaties and references to the nuances of Cold War-era Germany that may occasionally go over your head. But it......

The coolest movie opening this week is Be Kind Rewind, which is a treasure trove of Things White People Like, as it stars Jack Black and his black friend played by Mos Def, and is directed by Michel Gondry, and has lots of irony, seeing as how it is about a couple of people who erase all the videotapes in their video store and then make their own mocking versions of the movies they......

While some may scoff at modern rituals surrounding Valentine's Day, simple expressions of love and sentimentality held a deeper meaning in Toronto towards the end of World War II. Tucked amidst the newspaper coverage of the Yalta Conference this week in 1945 were stories on how Torontonians expressed their admiration towards each other and loved ones fighting overseas. A sense of nostalgia for peaceful times affected the valentine cards that were available. Top sellers......

Photo of d’bi.young.anitafrika and her son, Moon, courtesy of Women’s Press. Last week’s literary listings featured a number of events celebrating one man (Michael Redhill, who is likely exhausted and has since gone back to Narbonne, France) and One Book (Consolation). This week the obvious literary picks are two very talented, very different women. Recent winner of the Toronto Arts Council Foundation Emerging Artist award and one of Canada’s most celebrated young performers, d’bi.young.anitafrika......

A protest outside the Toronto office of Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty Thursday drew attention to the housing crisis in Canada, demanding that resources spent on military action in Afghanistan be diverted to provide an additional 1% of the federal budget for social housing.......

Reg Hartt, everyone's favourite dude with a movie theatre in his basement, is promoting the new(ish) film version of off-Broadway tittilator Naked Boys Singing by screening a mini Queer Film Festival at the Cineforum over the next few weeks. Each Thursday night for the next four weeks, he'll screen Naked Boys (which is exactly what it sounds like) at 9, with a different gay movie as a lead-in at 7. While the main attraction......

Palace of the End, Judith Thompson's most recent play, is not only her most political work, it is also her best. As most auditioning actors in this country have discovered, Thompson's greatest strength has always been her monologues, and in this piece, she uses that strength to its full advantage. In fact, she dispenses with character interaction altogether and breaks her show into three long monologues, each spoken by someone who has been greatly......

Films! Films films films films. Sometimes it’s hard to get this column started, so we just sit in front of a blank word document and type the word "films" until it doesn’t make any sense to us any more. But by then, we’ve got started typing, at least, and so we continue. Cloverfield! Also, we just type the names of the films that are out that week with exclamation marks! In an attempt to......

If you're up for a little subversion on Thursday night from 5–7 p.m., check out our old pal Fauxreel's talk, Resistance in the City, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at U of T (7 Hart House Circle). Done in association with Signals in the Dark: Art in Shadow of War, an exhibition opening that evening, Fauxreel will "talk about his work as a street artist and give a mini-demo/workshop on techniques and tactics......

The Falconer report on violence in Toronto schools talks of a "culture of fear," saying that many students bring weapons to school, and many crimes go unreported. Some of the basic recommendations to fix things include more social workers and after-school basketball, fewer suspensions, more diverse teaching staff, and gun-sniffing springer spaniels to roam the halls. Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who was the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest,......

In some households, hockey is a key element during the Christmas break. Skates under the tree. That long-desired California Golden Seals sweater from Santa. Fans that cannot be pulled away from the TV during holiday games and tournaments. Christmas songs recorded by a favourite player. We didn't make the last one up. There were people who believed that goaltender Johnny Bower had patrolled the net since the dawn of man, which wasn't far off......

Really not much on in terms of Christmas films this week. The Bloor is showing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (which is about as far away from a Christmas classic as we can imagine without being a film about aliens from another galaxy that have never heard of Christmas) and White Christmas. We’re still happy to recommend Enchanted (we just saw it, and it was absolutely lovely), but for those of you who want to......

Following the release this year of Neil Young's 1971 Massey Hall concert and a third tribute album comes Chrome Dreams II. Featuring ten new songs and covering a range of musical styles, there is something for all of his fans on this recording. "Where Living With War and Everybody’s Rockin' were albums focused on one subject or style, Chrome Dreams II is more like After The Goldrush or Freedom, with different types of songs......

This Friday, November 16, we (Newmindspace) will be hosting our very first lightsaber battle! This summer at Burning Man, we witnessed a 10,000-person lightsaber battle put on by a camp called Watto's Junkyard, easily the largest lightsaber battle since the Jedi Civil War. However, with our limited resources, we realized that without a large donation from a rich weirdo (which are plentiful in San Francisco), we would probably not be able to get the......

It is a peculiarity of our city that its grandest monument was erected to honour a largely forgotten and misunderstood war. Yet, the life of the South African War Memorial—the tall granite column overlooking the intersection at Queen and University—reveals a great deal about how the city’s priorities and values have evolved over time. Although University Avenue terminated at Queen Street at that time, it acted as a stately boulevard connecting the new government buildings......

Hannah Moscovitch's play East of Berlin is familiar territory for Tarragon's extra space. Remember Rosa Laborde's Léo, which was remounted last season? Well, here's another show in the same space that's set in South America, has political subject matter, spans the life of its main character, and features only two other actors, a man and a woman, both of whom he has sex with. This may be a bit of a tangent, but Torontoist......

Trampoline Hall, the lecture series/literary salon with a reputation for being playful and inventive, is upping its quirk factor slightly this week in two ways. Instead of being held at its usual venue, Sneaky Dee's, this week's lectures (on robotism, hyperbolic crochet and diverse curiosity) will be delivered at Fort York. The event's organizers have also found an experimental new way to capture the evening's events: a group of Toronto-based comics artists will act......

October 16 is the day that the Walt Disney Company was founded (1923), the day that Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping (1970), and the day that President Bush signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (2002). It is also, though you may not know it, World Food Day, as deemed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United......

This weekend, Toronto will be a rockin' city, as the 2007 World Rock Paper Scissors Championships cut into town. The game of Rock Paper Scissors has been settling scores on playgrounds since long before little brothers came into existence. In fact, some say it originates back to the year 200 BC in Japan, where it was referred to as "Jan-Ken." Others say it started as an early Scandinavian pastime, while others trace it back......

Anyone who grew up in Toronto has been on at least one school field trip to historic Fort York. You've smelled the horseshit, eaten the biscuits, and probably watched some corny performance by someone in a costume telling you how things used to be in the olden days. So it might be tempting to dismiss Crate Productions' new play The Fort at York as an educational play, or worse, historical reenactment. This would be......

Earlier this week, The New York Times ditched their Times Select subscription thing, a move that saw content previously available for about $8 a month––like some well-liked columnists, for instance––unlocked and made free for everyone. Best of all, though, was the huge amount of material from the newspaper's archives that was set free, dating all the way back to 1851. The rest of the internet has already been having some fun uncovering the gems......

Toronto factory worker finds World War II-era hand grenade in a box of used clothing. The bomb squad was called in. If Torontoist had found the grenade, though, you know we would be all like, "Hey! Free hand grenade!" Facebook declares breastfeeding pictures to be "obscene content." It's cleverly following the example of Livejournal in caving to uptight moralistic fuckwits. Dalton McGuinty promises to freeze taxes. Again. Despite all the new-spending promises he's made in......

Today’s Contest: For your chance to win one of three pairs of tickets to tomorrow’s screening of Reclaim Your Brain, starring Run Lola Run’s Moritz Bleibtreu (at 12:30 p.m. at the Scotiabank 2) email us your name at contests@torontoist.com. Winners will be randomly selected and notified by the morning of the screening with ticket pick-up information. Today’s Reviews: No Country For Old Men BY DANU MANDLSOHN The villain is Javier Bardem, looking like a......

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with the Toronto International Film Festival Group to run a contest each day until the end of the festival for tickets to next-day screenings. Today’s Contest: For your chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to tomorrow’s Doc Talks panel discussion Covering War (at 4:00 p.m. at the ROM Theatre), featuring directors Michael Tucker, Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro debating filmmaking in war-torn nations,......

If you missed it, yesterday our Toronto International Film Festival preview began with a look at the Gala and Contemporary World Cinema programmes, and if you didn’t know, tickets go on sale tomorrow morning online, at 416-968-FILM or 1-877-968-FILM and at the TIFFG Box Office at the Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor Street—so after you’ve read this, you might want to start queuing. Today we have our preview of the Special Presentations, Real To Reel......

We’ve mentioned the Bicycle Film Festival a few times before, but we’re going to give special mention to it again today because tonight at 7 p.m. is the screening of the festival’s first shorts programme, featuring Warriors: The Bike Race. The Warriors is basically one of the most excellent films ever, and in August of 2002, 89 gangs of bicycle riders took an all-night race from the Bronx to Coney Island in a sort......

Torontonians outraged by satirical ads for a children's camp where kids learn to be soldiers. The posters (which we wrote about earlier this week) are the brainchild of War Child Canada, which promotes aid and awareness for child soldiers and why that's bad. This story is further proof that satire is not only dead, but has in fact become a zombie. (The campaign's website is here.) New training and licensing regulations for Ontario's security......