Monday, December 29, 2008

Musical high


What's astonishing about High School Musical 3 (I must plead ignorance on numbers 1 and 2 which didn't get theatrical releases) beside the joyous sweat and cuddly vim of the performances (was there a story there?) is how much cultural clutter the filmmakers must sweep away nowadays before we partake of goodhearted wholesome song and dance numbers.

And I don't just mean the de-sexed gay character, sashaying his choreography moves with his rhinestone jeans, asymmetrical argyle sweaters and pink-buuffanted backup dancers, though I can totally see Ryan Evans and his artsy prom date Kelsi boogying at a gay club in the East Village two or three years after graduation, if they're not already doing it on the weekends. Nor do I mean how the black kids get to be almost-main characters but not quite and how they can only date each other, each colour of this rainbow-coloured universe staying safely in its place. Or how Troy, because he's good at dancing, has to compensate by being hyper masculine in other ways: A glossy teen with perfect hair wouldn't have rummaged through a salvage yard for jalopy parts in any era, not even Archie Andrews. Or the victory party without drinks of any kind and the absence of drugs. I mean how everybody has to get out of the way of the heroine, Gabrielle, because she has to have zero personality characteristics except being sweet.

All the other female characters--and I should point out that the female friendships in HSM3 are closer to particle physics than intimacy--have singular defining characteristics: Sharpay's star-struck consumerism, Taylor's political ambitions, Martha's big-girl brains (she'll be at the clubs with Ryan and Kelsi soon), Kelsi's offbeat funkiness, Ms Darbus's striking similarity to Mrs. Doubtfire. Appropriately uniformed, they all do one thing extremely well. In the male world, you make your lead stand out among his peers by having him do everything well: Troy can sing, dance, play basketball, fix his car, bond with his friends, haze the juniors. His is alpha dog in all arenas. But Gabrielle? We're told repeatedly how great she is, but we never see her do anything particularly great except her swooning numbers with Troy. She's sweet, period. Even at Stanford, all she does is wander by herself, a damsel in distress as yet unaware that she needs to be rescued. It's true that near the end of the film they do say she's going into pre-law, but it might have been medicine or film studies or engineering--I'm sure the writers just made her major up on the day. In order for her to be the romantic female lead, she has to be about absolutely nothing. It's the zen approach to femininity. Girls might be good at one thing or the other, but all that's going to get them is a beta. To rise to the top, to be the one everybody aspires to be, they must effortlessly be little more than a vessel for the leading man's dreams.

Doing research for a piece on Medea, which opens Jan 11 at Toronto's Canon Theatre, I've been struck by how the version that continues to intrigue us, Euripides' version that begins after Jason has left Medea for a princess, does not give us a Medea at the height of her powers or even in full awareness of what she is capable of. The full myth starts long before this when Medea puts her witchy talents to use to help Jason obtain the Golden Fleece (which, with my comic book upbringing, forever make think of Scrooge McDuck in The Golden Fleecing. She is much more powerful than Jason. But we don't want to seem to know about her superhuman powers. Why do we want her to be humiliated and vengeful like we are, rather than "over it" like she should be able to be? Perhaps we erase that part of her history in order to understand her weak as like we are, justified in letting go to our more vicious tendencies rather than rising above them.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A little good news to close off 2008.

I remember the day I first heard Peggy Lee sing "Is That All There Is?" I was eating a bagel at the corner of Davie and Denman in Vancouver and I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe the song had been recorded. It seemed so... immoral. It seemed to be pulling back the curtain on how the world worked, showing something dark and then, perplexingly, celebrating it. I still have a problem getting my head around it. Is it satire or philosophy? Are we meant to take the chorus as a consolations for life's disappointments or are we meant to roll our eyes?

Monday, December 22, 2008

Sunday, December 21, 2008


I never thought I'd ever come to the defence of George W. Bush and, really, the whole shoe-throwing incident gives me great delight. But what do people think he should have done? Declare a fatwa? Abandon Iraq? Ducking and shrugging it off was the best response anybody could have made. If it was how world leaders typically handled insult, we'd be living in a much more peaceful world now.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Is it just me, or does it seem absurd that a wildly popular unscripted reality show is too expensive for CTV to produce, even in these tough times?

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." This 2006 Entertainment Weekly article on the history of "Merry Little Christmas" has stuck with me. I have to say the Judy Garland lyrics are my favourites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC9o4oYMIqI

Monday, December 15, 2008

Regarding that Bell Canada Christmas ad where one son gets a modest reaction for giving his father a flatscreen TV while the other gets appreciated for giving a Bell recording thingie--is the message that Bell makes you an asshole? It's almost as bad as the Rogers ad where the nubile friends fawn over the dog named BlackBerry? You may not know what 3G is, but apparently it's hard to clean out of the carpet. At least the dog is cute.

Monday, December 08, 2008


As far as bio pics go, Milk was moving. But bio pic it was. Gus Van Sant has been playing with form for his last few films, so it was entirely possible he might have evaded the traps. He did so in the minor notes, mostly in how Harvey Milk picked up the men around him--the harmony of the movie was flirtation and seduction. But its melody was as plodding as Walk the Line. He promises his partner he'll quit after the next election, but he runs again and leaves. A fellow politician tells him he's got to offer the people hope and, in his next public speech, he's talking hope all hopefully. It's like the writers made a list of defining moments, then sat down and thought, "How are we going to foreshadow that?" Everything becomes cause and effect, warning and punishment. So many of the movie's small moments are signals for the big ones that it comes as no surprise that, just as he's about to be killed, things go into slow motion as if there's no way to over-foreshadow his death.

Friday, August 01, 2008



HBO should have had Mad Men. It would have been 13 minutes longer and had more gratuitous flesh--Jon Hamm's butt, anyone? But instead, it's abandoned the dead for the undead. It remains to see how auteur #1, Alan Ball, distinguishes his creatures of the night from those of auteur #2 Joss Whedon. Except, of course, for the extra minutes and the gratuitous flesh.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Brideshead Revisited: The Movie. Mostly it condenses the right things. I'm ashamed to say where it goes wrong. it's that Sebastian Flyte is too gay from the beginning. He's too effeminite, too much an accumulation of all the stereotypes of the day and today. Considering that Charles eventually falls in love with his sister-he's mostly straight--this is a fatal mistake. Sebastian must intrigue and seduce Charles Ryder. You have to believe that Charles becomes fascinated by Sebastian and then, like a lottery winner, discovers he is connected to wealth and power and hereditory freedom. But the movie, in making Sebastian a problem so quickly, turns Charles into a bigger sort of predator. He indulges Sebastian and then, boom, he sees it in. The joy of the miniseries and the novel is to see a straight guy fascinated by another man for a sustained period before the bling comes out.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The end of the G-A-Y - Times Online

My second time to G-A-Y, which was my first time smelling poppers, I was wearing a lumberjack shirt. Declasse, I know. But it was one of three shirts I had packed to go to India. I had only hiking boots and sandals. I'm in this gorgeous ensemble in the cocktail lounge and a local comes up to me and asks, "Are you from Canada?" I answer yes, assuming he's a mind reader. He asks his next question, "And do you all dress like that?" and I realized he was just being a bitch.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Previous generations of gay men identified with Dorothy the escapist or Judy the victim. But anyone who grew up in the 80s or with 80s reruns wanted to be Sophia, who never missed an opportunity to be a bitch. But not a Bette Davis bitch. An old, scattered-brained bitch who is essentially harmless, tolerated because of her seniority.

Golden Girl Estelle Getty Dead at 84 - E! Online

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Wednesday, July 16, 2008



Australia usually produces bands with short shelf lives. For every INXS and Silverchair, there's a few Eurogliders. The country never seemed to get over the parochial hump, with all its thrashing around chasing the next big sound, that Canada did when it gave birth to Jane Siberry who begot Sarah McLachlan, who begot Nelly Furtado and so on. I don't know whether Cut Copy has any legs, but I'm prepared to wring as much pleasure out of the single "Hearts on Fire" as I can. It packs so much '80s/early '90s into a few minutes--Echo and the Bunnyman vocals, Depeche Mode electronics, New Order guitars, Duran Duran-in-Rio saxophones, Black Box whoop-samples--it negates the interceding decades. But it's cheerful. Go figure.


All the buzz about the Obama-as-terrorist New Yorker cover hasn't quite lured me to read the article. It's huge.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Entertainment Weekly, always a candied popcorn kind of magazine that provided the best 45-minute read of the week, has tossed away its colourful palette for a Time magazine dowdiness. Even the photos seem stripped of vitality. The worst new feature by far is the random bolding that seems intent on replacing pullquotes. They don't. It's not like it's The Atlantic, for God's sake.

Friday, July 11, 2008

The thing about the Andrew Coyne's Maclean's cover story urging Canadians to adopt a law on abortion--because that would be the end result of his demand that we have a debate on it--is that it presumes that no Criminal Code law on abortion equals no policy. But health services are provincial in this country, hospitals and clinics have their own policy. If we are decentralized on so much of how health care is delivered in this country, why single out abortion as something that needs to be standardized?