Noelle Hannibal for Curtains Up Super-heroes, villains and droids, will be swooping into town this weekend for the annual Montreal Comiccon. I’ll be there too! My first experience with Montreal Comiccon was in 2009. I was invited to participate as a guest for my appearances in Star Trek: […]
Books
Metal on Ice: Tales from Canada’s Hard Rock and Heavy Metal Heroes (Dundurn, $19.99)
by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! I’ll never forget the day: September 6th, 1983. My first rock concert. For an anxious fan barely into his teens it was a huge thrill; a monumental, influential event in a young life. That night I began down a path that encompassed my high school years and […]
Point Your Face At This by Demetri Martin (Grand Central Publishing, $13.99)
By Stuart Nulman When I first saw comedian Demetri Martin perform at the Just For Laughs festival back in 2006, I was intrigued. In fact, I was intrigued how his minimalist comic observations were so way out from left field, that they not only made a lot of sense, they also brought out a lot […]
What You Want is in the Limo by Michael Walker (Spiegel & Grau, $30)
by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! “Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact” -Homer Simpson Whenever asked what my dream job would be, I reply with the following: Either film director in the 1970’s (in my opinion the last golden age of Hollywood pictures), writer for Saturday Night Live from […]
Shirley Jones: A Memoir by Shirley Jones with Wendy Leigh (Gallery Books, $29.99)
By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! Here’s a story for you: Shy, pretty small-town girl enters beauty contest as a lark and to her surprise wins. That leads to an audition for a part in the chorus of a Broadway show where she is discovered […]
Everything is Perfect When You’re A Liar by Kelly Oxford (HarperCollins, $24.99)
By Stuart Nulman While many people who tell a lie – whether it be a little white one or a big career devastating one – can either get away with it or suffer the consequences if caught, writer and tweeter Kelly Oxford has somewhat managed to make the art of telling a lie work for […]
Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution by Brett Martin (The Penguin Press, $29.50)
By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! “…shifting economics revealed that maybe it had always been advertisers, rather than audiences, who were so averse to difficult characters…” -from Difficult Men by Brett Martin Over the last decade there has been a changeover in prestige from the cinema […]
The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel (Grand Central Publishing, $31)
By Stuart Nulman In December of 1972, while Barbara Cernan’s husband Eugene was in outer space as part of the Apollo 17 mission – the final mission to the moon — she commented on his remark while he was orbiting the moon three years earlier with Apollo 10, in which the job of being an […]
Flip: The Inside Story of TV’s First Black Superstar by Kevin Cook (Viking, $28.50)
By Stuart Nulman Forty years ago, the late comedian Flip Wilson was one of the most popular entertainers on television. His “Flip Wilson Show” on NBC was a Thursday night viewing habit for millions of Americans, and gave such ratings titans as “All in the Family” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” a run for their […]
Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movies Business by Lynda Obst (Simon and Schuster, $29.99)
“If they don’t know how to sell it, they won’t make it.” -Lynda Obst By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! If you have ever wondered why Hollywood is currently churning out unwatchable remakes and unoriginal schlock based on obscure comic books or board games, I have a book for you. Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales […]