Goodwill Lager helps families
Every year, the Donnelly Group oversees one of B.C.’S largest privately run toy drives.
During the past 18 years, the Vancouver-based hospitality company has ensured that almost $1 million worth of playthings reached local families.
This year, the Donnelly Group has added some fizz to the festive season by teaming up with the Truck Stop Diner at Red Truck Beer on a new brew, the Goodwill Lager. Each sale of one of these cans will generate even more funds for this worthy charitable endeavour.
“We love the holiday season, but the reality is that every year there are kids who might not get toys under their tree,” Donnelly Group’s Damon Holowchak said in a news release.
This variation on a Vienna-lager style beer will be available starting Thursday (November 1) at all Donnelly Group locations, as well as at the Truck Stop Diner. It’s 5.1 percent alcohol by volume and it clocks in at 20 IBU (International Bitterness Units), which is relatively low on the scale. There’s a mix of grains—30 percent Vienna, 30 percent Dark Munich, 30 percent Superior Pilsen, and 10 percent Caramunich.
The can is adorned with a message never before seen on a beer: “Some kids don’t get gifts over the holidays. Drink this beer to change that.”
This less than subtle branding will enable beer drinkers across Metro Vancouver to make a public statement of their goodhearted intentions every time they go out for a cool one with their friends or their work colleagues.
“Matching our love of local craft beer with our toy drive seemed like the most natural way to raise more money for toys and brighten up the holidays for a bunch of local families,” Holowchak said.
MELISSA MCCARTHY plays it straight and gets the role of her life in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, named after the memoir of her real-life character: a caustic New York writer called Lee Israel, who finally found success by pretending to be famous people.
Movies have always had a difficult time portraying the lives of writers. I mean, all that typing and shit? In this case, the typing—kind of—is the point, as Israel, who garnered attention as a show-business biographer in the 1980s, sees her prospects dry up at the start of the next decade. As her snarky literary agent (SNL great Jane Curtin) is forced to explain, Lee’s abrasive personality and refusal to play the bookpromo game are much more serious problems than lack of talent or ideas.
The irony is that Israel has chosen a purely commercial niche but wants to be treated like an artiste. This theme is subtly teased out by director Marielle Heller, who made the terrific Diary of a Teenage Girl. (She’s also helming the still-untitled movie with Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers.) The witty script is from Nicole Holofcener (whose film The Land of Steady Habits is now on Netflix) and Broadway-musical veteran Jeff Whitty. And they find the right balance of dark comedy and underlying sympathy for a character who exhibits little of the slapstick confidence Mccarthy is known for.
Israel, who lives in a fly-specked Manhattan hovel with her sick cat, softens slightly when she starts hanging out with emblematically named Jack Hock, a genial hustler who gets by on the charm she clearly lacks. (This gives U.K. great Richard E. Grant one of his best parts since Withnail and I.) They’re both hard-drinking and gay—he actively so, while human contact is something she avoids, even after attracting the attention of a shy bookseller, played by Doll & Em’s endearing Dolly Wells. When she brings the seller some legit letters signed by Funny Girl Fanny Brice, Lee realizes there’s gold in them there oldies. That’s where the (antique) typewriters come in. If you’re going to forge correspondence from Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and the like, you don’t do it on an IBM Selectric.
To describe more is to give away the downbeat fun. But it’s rare to see
This Mountain Life.
a mainstream effort let its scenes play out so organically, goosed along only by superb acting and a sharp jazz score that—like the movie itself—always manages to avoid the obvious notes.
Ken Eisner
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