Arts

With the Mayfair theatre’s Month of Silence Film Festival set to launch next week, local musicians, actors and composers are preparing to recreate an almost forgotten way of showing films, providing live accompaniment and sound effects to nine classic silent films.

Now in its second year, the festival emerged through the success of silent film screenings at the Mayfair, which began after coming under new management in 2009.

El Salvador is a small country in Central America, still recovering from a 12-year civil war that killed at least 75,000 people. This nation’s story is the one director Jamie Moffett depicts in his documentary Return to El Salvador, the product of a two-month stay in the country and the subject of a recent screening in Ottawa.

“El Salvador is a needle point example of how the United States’ policies affect other sovereign nations,” Moffett said.

Someone For Everyone
Directed by Patrick Gauthier
Arts Court Theatre

For those who have watched Woody Allen agonize over romantic relationships in films like Manhattan or Annie Hall, a play like Someone For Everyone may seem a little unoriginal. Boy meets girl, boy is passively rejected, boy spends life agonizing over girl/girls in general.

Smile Kid
We the Kings
S-Curve Records

We the Kings’ sophomore album, Smile Kid, isn’t a horrible record by power-pop standards, but it won’t knock your socks off either. By all rights, it’s fairly standard fare from the ever more popular power-pop sub-genre.

A Thousand Suns
Linkin Park
Warner Bros. Records

Linkin Park is dead. As a band who based their whole sound on one guy whining, followed by another guy angrily rapping about what the first guy whined about, Linkin Park’s death can only be seen as a good thing.

But through their death, they have risen like a phoenix from the ashes to be reborn. In doing so, they have crafted an album nearly as mythical as the journey itself.