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.