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More deets on the Dogwood Dell July 4th celebration

Dogwood Dell’s July 4th celebration is going to be a terrific family-friendly affair. Parking is available at U of R stadium with shuttles beginning at 4 PM. Schedule of events: 5PM: Vocalist group Bak N Da Day will be singing tunes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. 7PM: Larry Robinson will play the Carillon bells [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Becoming Jane

photo credit: Jake Lyell Becoming Jane is easy to describe in one sentence: a cheap trick designed to lure in the dreamy escapist ladies who start to panic during those years without Pride and Prejudice adaptations. Luckily, I am one of those dreamy escapist ladies, and although the rational part of me screams, “You are [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Ratatouille

photo credit: Jake Lyell Remember when Pixar was so insecure about the way their newfangled technology represented humans that they only sporadically showed them – always in a rush and always only bit by bit? Now, as my moviegoing friend reminded me, they are able to digitally portray humans so realistically that they have to [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Transformers

photo credit: Jake Lyell For someone who has never seen an episode of this apparently life-altering cartoon, Transformers sure isn’t a difficult movie to follow. And even if I wasn’t following the basic (er, only) premise – (bad guys want to take over the universe, good guys try to stop them) – I wouldn’t have [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

photo credit: Jake Lyell The inside of Captain Jack Sparrow’s brain is a marvellous thing: richly detailed, over the top, and full to the brim with nonsense. Disney’s new Pirates of the Caribbean installment, At World’s End, occasionally opens a tiny window into the character whose massive popularity was brought about, and let’s give credit [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Ocean’s 13

photo credit: Jake Lyell Recently, I made some sweeping statements about the seemingly indefatigable trajectory of trilogies as of late, fueled by my bitter and almost personally offended disappointment in the final installment of Pirates of the Caribbean. One is enough! I said. Two is indulgent, and three is simply showing off effects, recycling jokes, [...]

This week @ the Byrd: 300

photo credit: Jake Lyell Things I learned from this film: Spartans are the hottest ancient Greeks, Persia’s king was an eight-foot-tall drag queen, and shirts should really be optional as they serve no purpose except to limit a (my) healthy appreciation of pectoral muscles.

This week @ the Byrd: Zodiac

photo credit: Jake Lyell The Oscars are exhausting for those of us who obsess about films – weeks of predictions and nail-biting, followed by a few days of scoffing and/or gloating. The weeks after the Academy Awards are usually a nice breather for me. Usually there’s a dearth of good movies in theaters, and I [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Queen

photo credit: Jake Lyell I’ve said this time and time again, but last year I should have tried to make money off of it — in order to win an Academy Award for Best or Best Supporting Actor or Actress nowadays, you must be impersonating a real figure in a biopic about that figure. If [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Night at the Museum

photo credit: Jake Lyell Ben Stiller plays Ben Stiller in this kid flick and/or two-hour-long advertisement for New York’s Museum of Natural History. I know I’m coming across as really harsh, but it just so happens that usually I like Ben Stiller, I like kids’ movies, and I’m down with some CGI history. And with [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Casino Royale

photo credit: Jake Lyell Is it or is it not true that modern-era James Bond movies are, as a rule, laughably bad? I thought that this was understood – certainly Pierce Brosnan got the picture. You only (and without exception) go to a Bond movie because your boyfriend makes you, and you get to gloat [...]

This week @ the Byrd: The Departed

photo credit: Jake Lyell I have never been a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, or Martin Scorsese. I’m sorry. The first two annoy me, and Gangs of New York got me a speeding ticket (well, it was really long and I was tired and irritated when we got out of the theater, so I [...]

This week @ the Byrd: Flushed Away

I honestly never thought I’d say this about a movie that revolves around rats and sewers, but Flushed Away was denied an Oscar nomination. Possibly this is because no one actually saw the film, due to its incredibly poor marketing. If you remember, this film was a collaborative effort between Aardman Features, the people behind [...]