Howie Mandel revisited his past when he returned to his hometown of Toronto, where he was the guest of honour at the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Canadian National Exhibition on Friday, Aug. 19.
02.08.2022 - 20:47 / deadline.com
A lot of people, when asked what they would do differently if they could go back in time, insist “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Not Brandon Lee.
In 1993, a 16-year-old boy going by that name enrolled in a Scottish secondary school called Bearsden Academy, located in a tony suburb of Glasgow. He claimed to have grown up in Canada, the son of a peripatetic opera singer who had been killed in an auto accident. His academic gifts dazzled, even if his social skills didn’t impress so much. With his precocious intellect, Lee appeared well on his way to achieving his stated goal of getting into medical school.
It took more than a year for the truth to come out: “Brandon Lee” was a fiction. Lee was actually Brian MacKinnon, a 32-year-old former Bearsden pupil who had returned to the school in the guise of a teenager. The strange tale is told in My Old School, a new documentary directed by Jono McLeod and featuring Scottish actor Alan Cumming as Lee. The Magnolia Pictures release is now playing in select cities.
“One of the most incredible stories of the last 30 years,” McLeod says. And he should know. He was a student at Bearsden back when Lee showed up out of the blue.
“He looked older than us, that’s for sure,” McLeod remembers, but says he and his fellow students weren’t inclined to question what their elders set in stone. “We were told by our homeroom teacher that this new kid had arrived from Canada, here he is at 16, so we bought that. And she’d been told [that] by her superiors… So, yeah, we just kind of went with it. And there were always kids at school who looked a little bit older than the other kids.”
Brandon Lee sported curly hair, owlish spectacles and a diffident manner. At first, he didn’t exactly fit in.
“This was
Howie Mandel revisited his past when he returned to his hometown of Toronto, where he was the guest of honour at the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Canadian National Exhibition on Friday, Aug. 19.
Loyle Carner has announced his third album is on its way, sharing a release date and tracklist for the forthcoming ‘Hugo’.The English-Guyanese rapper shared the news yesterday (August 19) with a teaser video, in which he spraypaints the release date — October 21, 2022 — on a ‘Hugo’ poster.The ten-track record will feature his recently released singles ‘Hate’ and ‘Georgetown’, the latter of which was produced by Madlib and samples a performance by the Guyanese poet John Agard of his acclaimed poem Half-caste. “John Agard’s poem Half-caste had a heavy impact on me,” Carner said in a press statement. “To see someone who was older, that looked like me, sharing a reflection of a similar lived experience made me feel comfortable/proud to not fit in. It kinda gave me the permission to finally write explicitly about being mixed.”See the full ‘Hugo’ tracklist below:1. ‘Hate’ 2. ‘Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)’ 3. ‘Georgetown’ (feat. John Agard) 4. ‘Speed Of Plight’ 5. ‘Homerton’ (feat. JNR Williams & Olivia Dean) 6. ‘Blood On My Nikes’ (feat. Wesley Joseph & Athian Akec) 7. ‘Plastic’ 8. ‘A Lasting Place’ 9. ‘Pollyfilla’ 10. ‘HGU’Speaking to the Guardian about the forthcoming album last month, Carner — real name Ben Coyle-Larner — said: “There’s a whole other side to me that’s darker.
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