Author: Alex DiMeglio

Maguire may catch you in his web, but the film itself may leave you unsatisfied

In chess, once you’ve made your first move, you have over three billion possible combinations to choose from. Bobby Fischer may have known about each and every one of them, and managed to choose the best possible one in a limited amount of time.

Pawn Sacrifice is a biopic depicting the life of the chess master—exposing Fischer’s genius, as well as his slowly unraveling undiagnosed mental illness, which essentially holds him back from possibly achieving even more than he had already achieved as a young man.

​Pawn Sacrifice stars Spider-Man—I mean Tobey Maguire—as the game-changing Bobby Fischer and Liev Schreiber as Fischer’s biggest rival, Boris Spassky. The film covers Fischer’s life in the 1970s as he studies in hopes of one day trouncing Spassky and becoming the first American chess player to be considered the best in the world.

The cast was the film’s saving grace. Especially Maguire, who proves that he is more than just the man behind the mask. Rather, he is someone who can compete with Hollywood’s elite when it comes to the “best actor” candidates at the Academy Awards. Watching Maguire portray Bobby Fischer’s paranoia, dedication and egotistical personality was the most entertaining part of the film. Maguire will sadly be overshadowed by the likes of Johnny Depp and Michael Fassbender come awards season, but his performance in Pawn Sacrifice should serve as a cautionary reminder to everyone that he has the chops to hoist the most prestigious award in film sometime in the near future.

Unfortunately, this film suffers from a disease I just invented called “biopicsafeobia,” which can be described as being just like every other run-of-the-mill biopic that has ever been released. This causes it to lack any kind of originality that would make it stand out to audiences and Academy voters. Unfortunately, the whole film is just utterly forgettable. At times, I felt like the director slowed down the pace, especially in the middle of the film, which caused me to shift in my seat and immediately become less interested in the Fischer story.

Overall, I would have to say the performances by Maguire, Schreiber and Peter Sarsgaard were the saving grace of this film. Without them, I feel like I would have said, “meh” and been unable to write this review because I wouldn’t have remembered a thing. I left the theatre amazed by the fact that one man changed the perception of chess, turning it into a sport the whole world would stop to watch.

One just can’t help but wonder what else Fischer would have accomplished had his undiagnosed mental illness been cured, or never manifested itself in the first place. My final score for the film is three stars out of five, one star for each actor’s stellar performance. Hopefully, filmmakers will see this as an opportunity to find a new way to break new ground on the tired biopic genre.

As we bid farewell to the summer, here are five books we read while on vacation

 

1. Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill (By Lydia Anderson)
   

 

Maybe it was because I read it lying underneath trees and blue skies on grassy knolls, but Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Montreal’s own Heather O’Neill, was a book that surpassed the rest of the reads on my summer book list. Little did I know how fitting it would be to read this novel when I first returned to Montreal—most of the novel takes place in this fair city. The book is written from the perspective of Baby, starting from her 12th birthday, and follows her as she navigates her youth with a heroin-addicted father. Not well-off to say the least, the two bounce around apartments as Baby grows more knowledgeable about street life with each passing chapter. Baby’s is a perspective that maintains some innocence and remnants of a childlike worldview, but also introduces readers to the realities of her rougher situation. From foster homes to becoming involved with a pimp, the readers follow Baby as she navigates her reality and speculates about what she’s experiencing. O’Neill’s ability to embody tainted innocence was impressive and prevented me from leaving the book out of my hands for too long. The weather still allows for some reading on a nearby grassy knoll, but not for long, so grab a copy of this novel and enjoy it as much as I did.

 

2. You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery by Mamrie Hart (By Marco Saveriano)

When I look back at my summer, the first things that come to mind are STIs, hallucinogenic drugs, and endless drunken nights. No, I didn’t spend the last few months on shrooms, getting drunk, and having sex with strangers—my loss, I know—but I did read all about it in Mamrie Hart’s You Deserve A Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery.
In a world where it seems like every YouTuber has a book deal, it’s hard not to write them all off, but Mamrie Hart is an exception. Anyone who watches Hart’s videos (notably, her “You Deserve A Drink” series) knows that she has great comedic timing and a gift for coming up with perfect puns—as well as being a master mixologist. I had no doubts that her book would be equally as hilarious.

You Deserve A Drink flawlessly captured Hart’s voice and shared stories so outrageous that if it were anyone else, I would have assumed they were exaggerating. Even though I was tucked away in my basement, curled up in a ball with her book, I felt like I was right there with Hart on spring break at a gay nudist resort, or when she accidentally set her coat on fire—twice—while tripping on shrooms at a Flaming Lips concert. The best part is that Hart never seems like she’s trying too hard. She’s authentically funny, which made for one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a while. After restraining myself from reading this book cover to cover in one night, I definitely deserved a drink.

 

3. Paper Towns by John Green (By: Alex DiMeglio)

While vacationing in Paris I decided to pop my John Green cherry and give Paper Towns a read. The coming-of-age novel follows Quentin “Q” Jacobsen as he spends his last days of high school searching for the love of his life Margo Roth Spiegelman when she goes missing after a night of debauchery.
​Whether I was reading the book on the sands of Saint-Tropez or at a café in Paris, I always managed to forget my surroundings and fall for the witty writing and engrossing mystery, which frustrated me to the point where I just kept on reading because I craved the answers to all the ridiculous questions brought about by the novel. This novel was bought from the ‘young adult’ section, but should be required reading for all of our inner-teenagers that we still cling to, because youth reminds us that we are alive and we should be embracing such a precious gift, as opposed to complaining about it day in and day out. This novel managed to transform an unlikeable main character into a likeable one because his tireless pursuit taught him a valuable lesson. Our life is like a novel—what sort of things can you do to make others want to read it? A truly remarkable read from start to finish, full of humour, passion, romance, a few surprises and enough cheese to remind you that the word impossible shouldn’t exist in our vocabularies.

 

4. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (By: Jessica Romera)

Despite it being nearly 400 pages, I devoured Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues in a matter of days during my summer break. I was away in Europe for about a month which meant lots of trains, planes and bus rides, so a ridiculous amount of time for reading. I had never read anything by Robbins before, but now my bookshelf is spilling over with more of his novels. This is the story of Sissy Hankshaw, a stunning girl growing up in small-town America. She embodies most of the feminine ideal—Sissy appears to be nearly perfect, except for the fact that she has gigantic oversized thumbs. While she sees these thumbs as a gift, everyone else around her sees them as a grotesque deformity. This prompts her to pick up hitchhiking and she ends up crisscrossing the country. She eventually finds herself on a ranch run exclusively by cowgirls and Robbins weaves Sissy’s narrative into theirs. He uses satire unapologetically while tackling larger social issues predominant during that time, like feminism, free love, experimental drug use and cultural identity (the book was published in 1976). Robbins’ style is easy to digest and ridiculously fun to read—he’s crude, but not unecessarily gross. He uses a ton of vivid descriptors to paint his scenes, but his words are not gratuitously flowery and redundant. If you’re looking for a funny, yet smart read for an upcoming trip, I recommend you give Even Cowgirls Get The Blues a shot.

 

5.  Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (By Elijah Bukreev)

Longing for more after falling in love with the prose and style of Madame Bovary, I found myself reading Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Like the main character, I was a young student living in Paris—it was during the last month of my exchange. I found the novel in a second-hand bookstore. It was brand new, probably bought by a high schooler for a French class, never read, and discarded as soon as the year was over. And now it was mine. I read it all over the city, sometimes in the very places that were being described.

As with Madame Bovary, which, as far as film adaptations go, has been somewhat misunderstood, it is acutely caricatural, with vibrant characterizations. If in Bovary Flaubert was mostly concerned with deromanticizing typically romantic characters, in Education he was drawing a portrait of the social and political life of his time, the mid-19th century, through the story of a young bourgeois man’s absurd infatuation with an older, married woman, which lasts for decades. Reading it now, in France, it is surprising to see that many things have remained the same.

One of the most poignant passages is the detailed description of a revolution, each step being thoroughly documented. The events unfolded unexpectedly and with shocking speed. Many speeches covered in the novel are things that are still being said today, and there is such recognizable dissatisfaction with the government in the air that many of Flaubert’s points still stand in today’s political landscape.

The world lost a wonderful filmmaker on August 30th. Here’s to you, Craven!

Those of you who haven’t already heard will be saddened to learn that legendary filmmaker Wes Craven passed away on Sunday, August 30th. The unfortunate cause of death was brain cancer.

One of the most astonishing things that could be said about Craven is that even after a career spanning 43 years, he never lost his touch when it came to finding new ways to shock the viewer to their very core. After a Wes Craven film, sleep is simply not an option to consider.

This all started back in 1972 when Craven released his first film, The Last House on the Left, which he directed, wrote, produced and edited. Since then, the name Wes Craven has become synonymous with setting the bar high for horror films and for delivering uniquely imaginative entertainments. With every film, he would set the theme of our newest nightmares, ones we never thought could exist.

Even when you aren’t watching his films, Craven’s scariest creations find a way to manifest themselves each and every single Halloween in the form of Craven’s two most iconic characters, Ghostface from the Scream franchise and Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Their masks have been worn by both kids and adults hoping to achieve the almighty goal of having the scariest costume, the one that will make people question the very reality that they inhabit.

Through his remarkable filmography and iconic characters that you both fear and embrace simultaneously, Craven has achieved legendary status, and will certainly keep inspiring young filmmakers to find new ways of scaring the pants off of an audience. Because hey, let’s face it, there is some fun to be had in getting scared.

To this day, A Nightmare on Elm Street has, in my humble opinion, the scariest scene of all time. I am talking about Freddy Krueger’s first appearance, as a mere silhouette walking towards us in a dark alleyway, which leads to his arms expanding to the length of the alleyway, making it truly impossible for anyone to run away.

To this day, having a vivid imagination, I cannot watch this scene without getting absolutely terrified and feeling trapped. Another trait that made Craven such a unique director is his devotion to the power of suggestion. He always chose suggestion over the impact of simply showing the carnage or destruction that took place, because, at the end of the day, the scariest thing isn’t necessarily something you can see, but rather something you can conjure with your imagination.

Craven always knew how to turn our own minds against us for the sake of entertainment and that is the sign of a truly gifted filmmaker—because there is nothing scarier than the unlimited power of our imagination.

It’s sad knowing that we can no longer expect a new Wes Craven film to scare us in a whole new way, so on behalf of all the fans—thank you.

Thank you, Wes Craven, for sending chills up our spine, for making sleep something we thought we could give up on and for somehow making counting to 10 one of the most terrifying things ever portrayed in film. We will miss you and we are grateful that you allowed us into your nightmares, because they are still gloriously terrifying.