Recent Stories with tag the office

Every time I visit Victoria BC, it's a different city. A different, yet still completely crazy city. A constantly evolving kind of crazy, so that I am never able to get my bearings, to feel comfortable or oriented, despite a mostly shared culture and language. I've felt more at home in Tokyo than I do in Victoria.

My last visit to Victoria was among the most depressing holidays of my life. We saw a show at a club that shall remain nameless to protect the pathetic, a Stygian hole featuring the musical stylings of the clinically depressed bartender, who sang about his part-time job working in a retirement home in a manner that was neither funny, nor plangent. It was the most horrifying exhibition of talentless narcissism I have ever had the misfortune to witness. I cringed on his behalf, even as I longed for him to slit his wrists on stage, in order to put us all out of his misery.

This visit was better, for the most part. I had a poutine of duck confit over truffle fries at The Office (the fries were tasty enough, but there was too much duck in the confit and the curds were more like half-melted cubes of bland mozzarella), and Hermann's Jazz Club, self-billed as "suitable for ladies without escorts," is a terrific venue.... (more)

Nicholas Terry made a quality feature film for peanuts (between $100 and $300, depending on who you talk to). It's screening at the most-attended film festival in the country. Without trying, he's getting the kind of regional media attention that most aspiring filmmakers would kill for. And he's navigating the avalanche of press interviews like a pro. In a lot of ways, it's a typical story of a first-time director getting his vision seen by a large and appreciative audience, except for the fact that the director in question hasn't yet graduated high school.

With his slender frame, slightly mussed head of red hair, and polite smile, Terry's combination of awkwardness and precocious smarts suggests Neil Patrick Harris by way of Topher Grace, but he possesses a clarity of focus that'd be impressive in anyone--never mind a seventeen-year-old. That singularity of purpose makes sense in the context of the movie he's made.

Senior Prom received its world premiere to a packed house at the Seattle International Film Festival's SIFF Cinema last Friday (it also plays at 4:30 p.m. today at the same venue). It's one of the buzz movies of the festival, largely because of its solidly homegrown pedigree. Terry, a Mountlake Terrace High School senior, devised and directed the movie as a senior class project. He cast several of his school drama pals in the leads, and encouraged them to freely improvise on his basic outline of a story about high-school seniors preparing for that most momentous of hurrahs: senior prom.

Rough around the edges as it is, the movie's incredibly entertaining, more Waiting for Guffman than Sixteen Candles. Its characters alternately conform to and transcend expected high-school tropes: There's Miles (Michael Ward), the not-as-cocky-as-he-acts sorta-jock with an unrequited crush on all-business ASB president Brittany (Jessica Weight); exuberant nerd Zach (Max Watson), who pines for razor-tongued wiseacre Lynsey (Lynsey Lorraine); and the annoyingly lovey-dovey steady couple Shelley and Shawn (Alix Deenan and Alan Garcia), among others. Senior Prom manages to be funny as hell, while still acknowledging the little pains and dramas at the root of being a teenager, and it pulls that balance off with a first-hand immediacy that could only come from someone living on those front lines.... (more)