Main Stage spotlight: Rayland Baxter

Oscar Moments: The night emotion won, for better and worse

Also streaming: “How to Survive a Pandemic” and “When We Were Bullies” on Crave, “Revenge of the Black Best Friend” and “Topline” on CBC Gem.

Dazed and confused stoner comedy hard to get right

Stoner comedy has always been kind of a dude thing. Think of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Cheech & Chong, Ice Cube’s Friday franchise, Harold & Kumar, basically any movie with the young Seth Rogen.

Screenwriter Dylan Meyer (Moxie) provides a much-needed gender swap in her directorial debut, giving us Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as ride-or-die roommates Frankie and Molly. Dipping in and out of the gig economy and perpetually broke, they share their Los Angeles bungalow with two cats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Celine Dion and an enormously complicated “bong-a-tron” that takes up most of the living room.

Finally, finally, it’s women who get to be messy, aimless and really high.

Unfortunately, stoner movies — no matter the gender — are surprisingly hard to get right. The Wrong Girls is sweet and shaggy and intermittently funny, but Meyer ends up struggling with the genre’s common buzzkills.

PCs say Hutterite colonies singled out by Bill 21

SOURIS — Members of Hutterite colonies in the province took aim at the NDP government’s proposed changes to drinking water legislation during a public meeting Thursday in Souris.

The meeting was hosted by Progressive Conservative MLA Colleen Robbins (Spruce Woods) to hear from rural residents about their concerns over Bill 21, which the government says will improve oversight on wells and other water systems in the province.

“There’s not enough clarity, but I feel that the overreach that this bill will bring is not clearly defined, and it could have a lot of negative consequences,” attendee Gilbert Hofer, a member of Green Acres colony near Wawanesa, said after the meeting, which drew about 20 people.

The legislation would allow public health officers to designate the type of water source based on its intended use, water quality and use duration rather than solely the number of connections it has.

Vanderhaeghe ruminates on literary greats, writing, history and more in new non-fiction collection

Veteran Saskatoon author Guy Vanderhaeghe has assembled 37 of his non-fiction pieces written over the last 40 years in a new book — mostly, to paraphrase the book’s title, because his fans have asked him to.

His work is collected into six sections: “Books and Writers 1,” “Recollections 1,” “The Writer and Writing 1: Thinking by Dreams,” “Books and Writers 2,” “Recollections 2,” and “The Writer and Writing 2: History and Literature.” There are insightful book reviews, lively articles, personal memories and a few speeches, such as the Margaret Laurence lecture he gave at the Writers’ Union’s annual general meeting in May 2014.

Vanderhaeghe made an auspicious debut on the Canadian literary scene in 1982 with a much-praised short-story collection called Man Descending. To his great surprise, it won the annual Governor General’s Award for fiction. Early in the Laurence lecture, he said he knew he had not deserved the award. “Self-doubt and embarrassment were making it impossible for me to get on with the next book,” he writes. It was Laurence herself who assured him that “nothing mattered besides getting on with the work and doing it as well as I could manage. Everything else, whether praise or criticism, was in the long run nothing but mere noise, clamour, distraction.”

Vanderhaeghe has since won the Governor General’s Award two more times — in 1996 for his novel The Englishman’s Boy and in 2015 for his collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories.

Russian missile strike hits crowded shopping mall in Ukraine

KREMENCHUK, Ukraine (AP) — Russian long-range bombers struck a crowded shopping mall in Ukraine's central city of Kremenchuk with a missile on Monday, raising fears of what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called an “unimaginable” number of victims in “one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.”

Zelenskky said that many of the more than 1,000 afternoon shoppers and staff inside the mall managed to escape. Giant plumes of black smoke, dust and orange flames emanated from the wreckage, with emergency crews rushing in to search broken metal and concrete for victims and put out fires. Onlookers watched in distress at the sight of how an everyday activity such as shopping could turn into a horror.

The casualty figures were changing as rescuers searched the smoldering rubble into early Tuesday. Ukraine's emergency services reported late Monday that at least 16 people were dead and about 60 wounded.

Soldiers worked into the night to lug sheets of twisted metal and broken concrete, as one drilled into what remained of the shopping center's roof. Drones whirred above, clouds of dark smoke still emanating from the ruins several hours after the fire had been put out.