Monday, April 27, 2009

Looking at the Sky

It's tricky reviewing Sky Gilbert if you have any sense at all of his career as a writer and theatre artist. In any production, his voice is always one of the most overwhelming factors. This time, you think, I'm going to focus on the performances or the set design or even the music, but no. You can't not dedicate the lion's share of a 300-word review to a voice that drives everything else. This time especially, Gavin Crawford so explictly channelled Gilbert, it was impossible to ignore it. Then there are Sky's writing habits: the fantastic one-liners and the wry observations floating along on a shaggy structure. For audiences who have seen Gilbert's work before, the most important information a review can give them is whether these two boxes--inscapable voice and whether it needs editing--are ticked or not. For newbies, I suppose they'll find out for themselves.

If I see a light flashing

I'd never be one to disagree with a Helder,but I do think, though it's a tough call, the new Calvin Harris track , is a tidal wave compared to the pretty storm of Basement Jaxx's "Raindrops". The Jaxx track is slicker, more layered and more thoughtful--these guys are producers' producers--but the jaggedness of "I'm Not Alone" makes it more dramatic: the unsteady vocals, the change in tempo give it an emotional fragility. And the lyrics of a 25-year-old who is tiring of club culture are particularly evocative.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Boyled over

Susan Boyle: It's not so much that people are surprised that a dowdy person has a good voice, but that a dowdy person has the confidence to stand up on stage and show it off, head held high.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The politics of wind

Wrote a piece for CBC.ca on the politics of wind in Canada and the strange convergence of forces that have made something that seems so innocuous controversial.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Red wine's got him gaga


My admiration of Sasha Frere-Jones’ writing on music for the New Yorker, though enough in itself, also makes me feel a little smug to see that he’s fallen into the much derided “red wine” trap in his analysis of Lady Gaga. The cri de guerre at the beginning of “Just Dance” certainly sounds something like “red wine/got me/gaga.” It's what I sang for a long time until online flamers set me right. The spoken phrases are actually the part of the song where its architects are announced: Red One/Konvict/Gaga. I’m sure Lady Gaga is more of a vodka drinker; red wine is for the bourgeoisie.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Taxation without navigation

Does this mean that as a non-driver I should get a rebate on the money spent on 400 series highways, where my bike and me are not permitted?

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Angry old men


Glengarry Glen Ross is not one of my favourite movies. It's way much too bleak and pessimistic for that. It's a snapshot from the particularly grueling cold-calling circle of hell, a dystopia cynically presented not as a warning but as a callous reprimand against a callous humanity. With its real estate salesman strugging to keep their awful jobs, it is one of the movies I can watch over and over again and watch in pieces--15 minutes of Al Pacino seducing a schlep or five minutes of Kevin Spacey in a high prick dudgeon. It's one of the the only DVDs I own that's earned its keep as something to re-review, not as something that sits on a shelf proclaiming my superlative taste in film.

While the film version is fluid and textured, following our real estate retailers from argument to argument, sale to sale, the camera tying each diatribe together into a rain-soaked whole, the stage version is much more episodic (and does not contain the famous Alec Baldwin rant: "Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only. You think I'm fucking with you? I'm not fucking with you. I'm from downtown."). Each of the first act's two-handers ends with an exclamation point, while the second act is an extended set piece where the men act out during a police investigation into who stole the real estate leads.

Soulpepper's production of what is probably David Mamet's best known work corrals the scenes into tight pens, so tight they flash by before you quite know what's happened. In the first act, only one of the characters even gets up out of his seat. Certainly the well-stuffed red booths at the Chinese restaurant seem comfy enough, but the tables so restrict the movements of the actors, it denies them the possibility that they might reach out to each other (to hit each other, of course, not to comfort--this is Mamet, after all). Though there is more motion in the second act, the blocking seems particularly self-conscious, just a way to get the characters on and off the stage at the right time so there are no snarls in the dialogue. The effect is engrossing--we're left to focus on the words, which is the intention--but distancing.

Eric Peterson, in his second nasty role post-Corner Gas (after Festen last fall), does exceptional work as Shelley "The Machine" Levene, his pathetic pleading gradually slipping away to show the angry scheming underneath. But it was actually Peter Donaldson as Moss, in his conspiring with William Webster that seemed most authentic and original. The weakest link was Albert Schultz as the salesman of the moment, Ricky Roma. Schultz just didn't seem to be able to find the character's throughline, which moved through charismatic outlaw to spoiled brat to generous cheerleader and back to hack. I realize that nobody can beat Al Pacino, but there were times when Schultz's lack of charisma threatened to slow everybody else down. when, of course, they're all supposed to be catching up to Ricky Roma.

ALSO: This is two Soulpepper productions in a row that use a set backed with a flat, symmetrical linear design. I think they're taking too many cutes from the wood slats on the seating--I'd love to see a little chaos up there.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Overheard in the YMCA lockerroom

Two guys on the opposite side of the bank of lockers, so I can't see them very well. This is slightly condensed with names changed.

Guy #1: Fucking assholes! Douchebag!...(more loud, irrate sputtering).
Guy #2: Don't worry, man, don't worry.
Guy #1: And fucking Gina and fucking Jim! Fuckers! They think I'm on crack again! I'm totally clean! I'm fucking clean, man! And those shitheads think I'm using crack again!
Guy #2: It doesn't matter what people think. It matters if you're using or not. You know you're clean...
Guy #1: I fucking know I'm clean, man. I haven't been this clean in long time. And if I was going to use, I'd be fucking slamming heroine! Crack, no fucking way!
Guy #2: Exactly, exactly, man.
Guy #1: Why would they, why would they? I mean, okay! (Pauses, thinks.) Okay. You know what, I'm off my meds! I stopped taking my fucking medication. Maybe that's their fucking problem!
Guy #2: You seem fine to me, budddy.

No shame in Shameless


Like so many foreign cultural phenomenon, I stumbled across the British comedy/drama Shameless purely by accident. A DVD of the first season (the sixth is currently in progress in the U.K.) was very cheap at a used book shop on Yonge Street because it was region two—having a multiregion DVD player finally paid off. I've made it to the end of season two.

I instantly fell in love with the show, based on the council-estate upbringing of creator Paul Abbott. It’s a laugh riot and a celebration of life. And that’s saying something since the show presents you immediately with a major learning curve—you have to learn to find the humour in a drunken Keith Richards-without-charisma father who absconds with any money that comes near the family’s townhouse in a Manchester council housing estate. Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) is a totally useless leech who exploits the sweetness of his conscientious eldest daughter Fiona (played by Anne-Marie Duff), turning her into a surrogate mother while he runs around town. He’s not even particularly goodhearted, looking down on most people as his moral inferiors. Our entry point into this world of welfare scams, substance abuse, casual teenaged sex and pregnancy is Steve McBride (played by James McAvoy, who left the show in season two to head off to Hollywood—Atonement and Wanted with Angelina Jolie), a seemingly posh fellow who courts Fiona. He owns his own house and drives a nice car. The two meet cute in the first episode when her purse is stolen in a nightclub and he makes a valiant effort to rescue it. His infatuation with Fiona quickly expands to include the whole family and their cavalier attitude toward adversity and it through him that we see how loveable they are.

But midway through the second season, Steve develops his own serious problems (and by serious, I mean more serious than the everyday perils of his profession as car thief) and his own descent into reprobateness meant he was no longer the outsider—he was deeper in the muck than anyone else on the show. That’s when I realized, like father’s hand quietly removed from the seat of a child on a bike, I didn’t need him anymore as my fascinated proxy in Chatsworth Estate. I had myself accepted all the bad behaviour—kidnapping a child, accidentally shooting an acquaintance or poisoning the neighbourhood—as normal and funny, heartwarming and life affirming. And that’s what makes Shameless so special. It uses a magic realist style to juggle the awful and the rib-tickling. But it also avoids using purely black humour that would set us to laugh at the bad things in life—there’s no “He’s dead, ha-ha.” We don’t actually laugh at the crime and the misery per se. Each episode keeps the focus sharply on the family’s skewed reaction to their problems—and that’s where the humour lies. We don’t laugh at Frank Gallagher blacking out behind the sofa as much as we laugh at his youngest daughter Debbie bringing him tea—she’s a trooper who will never give up on a lost cause and we laugh at the futility of what she’s doing even as we admire her.

At a certain point in season two, I thought, “Aren’t there too many pregnancies driving the storyline? Are they jumping the shark?” But then I realized that unwanted/unexpected pregnancy is not a plot device on Shameless, it’s ambiance, it’s what happens in the down moments between crises, a well-worn worry that doesn’t require the extreme reaction everything does.

All the characters except Fiona—the show’s Bob Newhart—are offbeat and delightful. But they’re not quite circus freaks. On any other show, a tantrum like horny neighbour Violet (Maxine Peake) threw during her mother’s birthday—plunging it into dark silence by yanking out and tossing the fuses—would make us dislike the perpetrator. How can she treat people so badly? But we develop such a sharp sense of Violet as a real character, we can still like her without sweeping her horridness aside. She’s of a piece, the good and the bad. We come to expect that her mother will bring out the worse in her and realize it’s up to the other characters to help her negotiate it. We are all programmed defectively and must turn to the collective to help us overcome it.

Several formulas help contextualize the show’s situations so we are able to laugh as things fall apart. Firstly, friends will always help you out in the end. Secondly, the characters never come out ahead—no matter how much money is waved in their face. And thirdly, all problems are eventually solvable. Fourthly, there’s always a party to take the edge off.

In this, Shameless is closer to the work of P.J. Wodehouse than its makers would care to admit. You can only laugh at problems when they happen in a world where they are time and time again solved or contained, a world that has proved itself totally and absolutely safe even if—and this is where Shameless diverges from Jeeves—justice is totally and absolutely absent.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Adventureland for boys


Though I thoroughly enjoyed Adventureland--set a grease fire in 1987 and I'd watch if only to hear "Dancehall Days" in the soundtrack--I came out feeling that it drew its female characters so thinly you could see misogyny through the ensuing rips and tears.

The film--its script, its direction and sensibility--certainly liked its male characters and the lead James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, the library-card-owner's Michael Cera) deserved it, wearing his heart so loosely on his sleeve it fell off a couple of times. In some ways, it's a fantasy piece for the underdog in all of us. The film liked underdog Joel and even liked womanizer Mike Connelly (a blank faced Ryan Reynolds--who writes a summer teen comedy without writing a scene for the stud to take off his shirt?). Connelly might be a player and the villain (the first always leading to the other in Hollywood), but never raised his voice or made threats or did anything particularly degrading to his conquests. His worst crimes were wanting it all and lying about music (which sadly remains only a summary offence conviction, despite all my lobbying efforts).

But the ladies! The two moms were unforgiving shrews who, though one had her hair and one didn't, might have been interchangeable. There was the racist Catholic girl. There was the dumb, slut Catholic girl (who seemed to be in a more satirical movie than the twee gang around her) and then there was the love interest, Em, which had Kristen Stewart playing an even blanker slate than she played as Twilight's heroine. I don't think the film hated her. She was the love interest after all. But she was such a lobotomized object-of-desire, she was well beyond the realms of likeability. We have no idea why she's attracted to James, but she is, maybe. She seems smart, but not smart enough to see that she's one in a long series of girls sleeping with the stud. She's a bad girl, but one who confronts racism like a 90s activist. Her strange behaviour comes off as something of a midway game--those pop-up gophers, perhaps--that the hero must deal with in order to keep the plot churning along. But it does seem like the behaviour of a real teenager.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Bacterial coincidence?

I was doing my semi-annual viewing of the CTV National News last night and noticed something strange--and it wasn't that Lloyd Robertson looked disoriented and a little constipated.

The kicker item was about how probiotics might help people with depression and chronic fatigue. Those are good bacteria that are now being pressed into service in supplements and some kinds of yogurt and other packaged food. The story was totally oversold--researchers studied only people with chronic fatigue, so any claims about depression or "other mental disorders" were purely speculative. As well, they only studied 39 people, a pretty small sample. They also failed to do much of a job explaining why having good bacteria in your gut would have any effect on your brain chemistry. And, hey, speaking of your gut: in the commercial break between the teaser and the item was an ad for Danone Activia yogurt, the one where a--how to describe it?--floating projection of a slim bare midriff floats over the stomach of a woman eating yogurt. It's good for you because it's... probiotic.

An eerily well-timed ad. It was also strange that in the examples of products that contain probiotics, Danone wasn't seen or mentioned, although it's the industry leader in shilling the stuff. You would have had to make a special effort to take them out. Was it possible that Danone knew the story was running and asked to be placed just before it? And that the editorial team knew the ad was running and made sure the product wasn't in the story? It seems like a big coincidence.

The other interesting twist is that in January 2008, many media outlets including CTV ran a story about the launch of a class action lawsuit in the U.S. against Danone, that claims the company's health claims for Activia are unproven. Ad Week just reported this week that the company is in settlement talks about the suit. So while Danone tries to make a deal about its dubious health claims, out comes a piece of research demonstrating that probiotics do improve your health--but in your brain, not your gut. So now they'll be able to run ads with Einstein's head floating over your head as you're eating yogurt.

Either way, Lloyd Robertson could use some yogurt.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

President or news anchor?

Obama seems to be on TV far more than any of his predecessors. It's nice that he's "out there" but you wonder, with all the travel and speech-writing and make-up that TV entails, when he has time to come up with solutions to talk about.