Last Thursday I saw “The Blue Dragon”, a play written and directed by Quebecois theatrical maestro Robert Lepage. He’s among the most reknowned living theatre artists in the country and abroad, famous for designing wondrous, whimsical theatre experiences.
A sequel to his “Dragons’ Trilogy”, “The Blue Dragon” tells the story of a Montreal artist and gallery owner living through his middle age in China. He’s got a promising young Chinese artist for a girlfriend, and lives a life of quiet sparseness. This life is thrown into flux by the arrival of Claire, an old flame, who hopes to adopt a baby as a single mother.
But don’t go see this play for the plot. As Colin Thomas puts it, “the narrative is less than complex and it’s riddled with holes”. Nor for the themes–Lepage offers some pedestrian ideas about interationalization and middle age. Go for the stage spectacle, which (unless you’ve already seen a Lepage production or his excellentwork on Peter Gabriel’s tours), is like no play you’ve ever seen before.
Working with set designer Michel Gauthier, Lepage creates a playful, contemporary production. This is a 21st century theatre, that acknowledges the rise of film and television. For example, early scene changes happen, literally, in a instant. There’s a sound queue, the lighting changes and it’s later. Later, we see Lepage’s mastery as he plays with all sorts of visual devices on-stage. One scene is played out in silent silhouette. Another happens three times with a slightly different outcome. Another captures the energy of a bike ride through the busy streets of Beijing.
Watching the play, you enter into this perfectly-crafted yet delightfully unpredictable Lepage’s world. I’m struggling to do the play justice, so perhaps this ‘trailer’ will help:
I was pleased to get a chance to see the new The Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in the Woodward’s complex. It’s a beautiful space (and, if you’re listening SFU, I’d love a tour).
It’s a pity that the story of “The Blue Dragon” doesn’t match its visuals, but I can’t imagine that any theatre-goer would leave the show disappointed.
I’m on the media list of a few Vancouver theatres now, and I’m hoping to write more reviews on this site. It occurs to me that I’ve never been explicit about how I disclose when I’ve received tickets to something for free, and when I’ve paid for an event.
My standard practice is to say something like “I was invited to the opening night…” (as with “Tesla”). Though I missed doing that for my recent “Beyond Eden” review. If I don’t mention something along those lines, assume I paid for the event myself. Which I did in the case of “The Blue Dragon”, incidentally.
For many British Columbians, the words ‘Haida Gwaii’ speak of mystery. The words mean ‘Islands of the People’, and refer to the misty, cold Queen Charlotte Islands on BC’s coast. They’re familiar to most of us from Emily Carr’s paintings, if nothing else.
The Haida Gwaii is the backdrop for Bruce Ruddell’s “Beyond Eden”. The musical premiered last Thursday at the Vancouver Playhouse, one of the many events of the Cultural Olympiad. Here’s the plot summary:
In the abandoned Haida village of Ninstints stand totem poles. They have stood there for decades. Lewis Wilson and his long-time friend and colleague Max Tomson are on an expedition to rescue these totem poles and save them from their waterlogged, beetle-infested and fragile condition. On their journey both men struggle: Wilson with his authority and resistance to removing the poles; Max to find his place between the white world and his Haida ancestry.
The play is based on actual events. A young Bill Reid–bound to become a famed sculptor–made the actual trip in 1957.
Clever Projections and Inoffensive Songs
Director Dennis Garnhum and set designer Bretta Gerecke cleverly realize this world–the deck of a ship and the trees of Haidi Gwaii–through crisscrossing ramps, intersected by huge timbers that reach into the theatre’s fly tower. They make excellent use of projections, both to simply establish location and, in the more mystical scenes, to evoke mood. During one song–”Carving”, I think–the Haida totems are brought back to life through tricky use of animated projections, a technique which so often goes wrong in contemporary theatre.
The cast is mostly strong, with John Mann (yes, of Spirit of the West fame) and Jennifer Lines (a former UVic classmate of mine) standing out. There were some opening night jitters, and a little clunkiness from some of the chorus members, but Mann’s performance carries us through the meandering storyline.
It’s hard to write one good song, let alone fifteen. The music was unremarkable and, for the most part, inoffensive. A few days later, I find I can still hum the tune from the title song, so that’s something. More interesting was the a capella First Nations music–it’s a form you usually don’t hear outside of tourist traps and documentaries.
Though the play is set in 1957, the script is oddly free of period slang or more than a few token cultural references. Elvis is mentioned a couple of times, but that’s the extent of it. I was also thrown by phrases like “I get that” and “is there a problem here?” which have a much more modern feel to them.
Reid’s Work Makes a Strong Case
The play’s central question–should the characters take and preserve these totems or leave them to rot?–seems at first like a question ripe for debate. In his director’s notes, Garnhum refers to “the true cost of the removal of the [sic] Totem Poles”. While the village where the totems stand has long since been abandoned, the play’s Haidi characters demand that the totems should be left in their rightful spot, to decay and be reclaimed by the forest, as has occurred for thousands of years. However, there will be no new poles to replace the old ones. As the play points out, that cycle has been broken.
At the same time, the Bill Reid character–born of a Haida mother, both in the play and in real life–wants to take and preserve the poles so that he can learn from them. He says, “When I am ready, I will raise a pole of my own. And another and another.” Of course, Reid turned out to be an extraordinary artist and preserver of Haida culture (I count his Raven and the First Man as one of my favourite pieces of Canadian art). From the year 2010, Reid’s accomplishments since taken the poles are incredibly convincing evidence in support of his decision.
“Beyond Eden” isn’t without its cliches. Growing up on the West Coast, I got exposed to a lot of First Nations-themed art. I’ve seen plenty of magical realist plays where there’s some raven or eagle or muskrat who wears a goofy costume and dances around the stage prophesying and telling fables. “Beyond Eden” has ‘The Watchman’, clad in Haida regalia, who serves a similar purpose. Plus, the play name checks the familiar injustices the white man inflicted upon the Haida–residential schools, banned potlatches and small pox.
They’re familiar stories, capably told. I’d probably discourage my more cynical Vancouver friends from attending. On the other hand–and this seems to be the litmus test, in light of the Olympics–I’d probably recommend the production to out-of-towners who didn’t know this part of our province’s history.
It is so Canadian that, when the world comes to visit, we trot out our historical misdeeds for their entertainment. It’s an impulse that both frustrates and delights me.
“Beyond Eden” runs through February 6. You can watch a trailer for the show on the Playhouse’s website.
Yesterday I saw the sixth film in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the The Half-Blood Prince. It’s the first of the movies that I’d call “quite good”. We’re watching the cast mature on-screen, and the audience is getting older too. As a result, movies seem to be getting more interesting.
The young leads are much better actors than they were eight years ago. They’ve earned some confidence and chemistry onscreen that makes them much more watchable. Given the series’ success, the producers took a huge casting gamble. Any three actors would be a gamble, it just happened that these turned out without:
Looking hideous
Engaging in a crippling public scandal (drug addiction, sex change operation and so forth)
Quitting acting for a quieter life
As a producer, the only casting decision I’d regret is Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley. She’s pretty plain, in both performance and appearance. In light of the international cadre of Hogwarts honeys giving him the doe eyes, one finds oneself asking what Harry sees in Ginny. The producers might be forgiven, as they probably cast her in 1999 or 2000. According to Wikipedia, only three or four books had been published, so they may not have had much insight into Ginny’s importance to the later films.
The addition of the superb Jim Broadbent is also a treat. I was recently remarking on how difficult it is to convincingly act drunk, and he does an exquisite job in one scene.
Which reminds me of the underlying drugs-and-alcohol motif of this movie. Everybody seems to be constantly high on this potion or drunk on that brew–it’s like Dazed and Confused with wands and robes. Harry Pothead, indeed.
The Half-Blood Prince manages to avoid a lot of the irksome ruts of the earlier movies. They were often a combination of Choose Your Own Adventure and a Cast of Wand-Wielding Thousands, neither of which made for natural pacing or easy watching for those who haven’t read the books. The film’s opening moments really grab you in a very unexpected way. Plus, this movie is less married to the standard year-at-Hogwarts structure–the action goes off the reservation in a satisfying way. For a change, the special effects feel streamlined and underplayed. I even found the Quidditch scene to be happily brief and kind percussive.
I even enjoyed the teen romance. It’s refreshing, in light of how chaste the previous movies were. After all, these are a bunch of teenagers living away from home.
The movie isn’t without its flaws. No director has worked out how to really sell the wand-to-wand combat scenes, which always come off as goofy Latin shouting matches. Plus, at 153 minutes, it’s pretty long and drags here and there.
Director David Yates is apparently signed on for the remaining two films, and the franchise feels like it’s in sound hands. I was listening to the Slate Spoiler Special podcast (I tried finding a home page for that badboy, but no joy) for his film, and guest Dan Kois aptly refers to the next film as “Harry, Hermione and Ron Go Camping Forever”, so Yates will have those hands full.
Ranking The Latest Movie
I have a poor memory of the Harry Potter movies, but I feel like this is the best of them. I thought I’d hit up a couple of review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, to see how they thought this movie stood up. In both cases, the films are rated out of 100.
Movie
MC
RT
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
64
78
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
63
82
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
81
89
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
81
88
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
71
77
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
78
84
Like I said, I can’t remember them well enough to assign more than a vague order. I’d say the first movie was definitely the worst, but after that I’m a bit lost.
Speaking of teen romance, I saw the trailer for the second Twilight movie. I don’t know about the movie, but the trailer is an incomprehensible hack job. I’ve seen the first movie, and I was still kind of lost. And, surprise, surprise, there’s a werewolf.
Watchmen is not as much a movie as it is a nearly-three hour treatise on post-modernism in the superhero genre. It’s two hours of back story followed by 45 minutes of story.
I use the word ’story’ there because the movie unfolds with barely a causal event. A writing prof taught me that story was “the king died and then the queen died”, while a plot was “the king dies, and then the queen died of grief”. Because of the movie’s dense exposition and constant flashbacks, we see Watchmen’s story unfold around the characters, instead of them making the plot happen.
This makes for a remarkably dull movie. The film’s themes–is vigilantism an effective replacement for organized justice?, is the survival of the many worth the sacrifice of the few?, how does the threat of nuclear annihilation change our behaviour?– were pretty revolutionary in 1986, when the comic book was released, but they’re utterly familiar to comic readers and movie watchers today. That’s to writer Alan Moore’s credit–the comics are kind of a Citizen Kane for the industry. Watchmen have been so influential and imitated that the originals have lost some of its effectiveness.
There’s a lot to like in the movie. It looks great, and the cast is refreshingly free of household names (save for the excellent Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, who spends most of his scenes nude and glowing blue). It’s also intensely violent–we’re talking Sin City in full colour. Some of the dialogue is clunky, but I imagine we can blame that on adherence to the original comics.
The movie also takes itself way too seriously. I’ve said it before, but (with rare exceptions) great movies always find ways to make us laugh. This ought to be doubly true when the film’s about a bunch of vigilantes running around in latex.
Metacritic gives the film a 56, which feels about right to me. There was plenty of eye candy (beginning with Malin Akerman, if she could lose the indie bangs), and some entertaining tropes, but too often I felt bored and fidgety. What did you think?
Rogers has been criticized for its underwhelming advertising. When the iPhone was announced they had nothing on their website until a teaser appeared. AdHack member Brendan Wilson though the teaser was “lame.” Doesn’t a great device deserve better? We think we can do better. Yeah — we know you can do better!
We call this challenge Assignment #9: Create the iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada. You can praise it, you can hate on it. The choice is yours. Remember to tag your submission with “Assignment #9″ when you upload!
Here’s what I came up with:
It references the fact that Rogers promised an early bird breakfast to those standing in line. But Travis says “the only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people”.
Thus far, I’m quite happy with my iPhone. I’ve never had a GPS-enabled device before, and I find identifying my location kind of existentially thrilling. The UI is everything people say it is, and I can certainly type on it way faster than I could text on my old phone. I haven’t really discovered any must-have apps yet. I just read about AirMe, which may become my Flickr uploader of choice.
Complaints? I want a one-tap (the iPhone term for ‘click’) means of returning to the audio I was playing from elsewhere in the UI, or from when the device is in sleep mode. More importantly, the battery life is kind of pitiful. If you’re using data functions on the phone, you pretty much have to plug it in every day. I can live with that, but it’s not really satisfactory.
Note: This website is habitually G-rated when it comes to language (okay, maybe 14 Years). By necessity, this post features use of the F-bomb. If that troubles you, skip ahead.
Yesterday I saw Young People Fucking (here’s the trailer), a charming Canadian sex comedy. It’s a highly-structured movie, following five couples through five stages of an evening of sex (from ‘prelude’ to ‘afterglow’). The couples represent a variety of typical relationships–the first date, the exes, the friends, the couple and the roommates.
So, we end up with a movie in 25 short scenes exploring and poking (heh) gentle fun at the foibles, morays and politics of sex. It’s a reasonably witty film, with enough laughs to sustain the formal structure. Despite the title, there’s actually very little nudity in the film–you’d see as much on an average episode of The L-Word. Roger Ebert sums up the film nicely:
No great lessons are learned. There is little high drama. As it stands, the screenplay could supply fodder for countless theatrical companies. It’s…engaging, that’s what it is. These are all essentially nice people. Canadians, you know.
The ensemble cast is generally good, with Callum Blue (previously seen in the excellent and gone-too-soon “Dead Like Me”) and Carly Pope (previously seen in “Popular”) standing out. I think Ms. Pope has gotten a bit of a short shrift from Hollywood, she can punch well above her current weight class. Plus, she has terrific eye brows. I did have a trivial complaint about the title. Nearly everyone in the cast is on the wrong side of 30, so I’m not sure it’s fair to go with ‘Young People’. I rather like the shorter title People Fucking.
It’s no great masterpiece, and it’s a bit risque for a first date movie, but I recommend it. The movie had a ridiculously short run here in Victoria, and probably won’t last in other cinemas across the country in the busy summer season. Seek it out or rent Young People Fucking. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
She mentions that he “employs classic Singaporean comedic devices (the fake phone call, the “I told you so” disclaimers, stating the obvious to the camera, and swearing in Mandarin in-between the English dialogue).” Be sure to look for those–I would have otherwise totally missed them as, you know, narrative and comedic devices.
I’ve known a number of Singaporean-Canadians in my life, so his accent and speaking cadence feels very familiar. And very Vancouver.
How bad is it? It’s the Lada of shredders. It’s the Gigli of shredders. The Italian army was better at invading other countries in World War II than this thing is at slicing paper.
We’d built up a bunch of stuff to shred, so we went to town. We read the instructions, and were very careful to only feed it the recommended 8 or 10 sheets (and we often did less). What’s the result? The thing is entirely gummed up. It no longer carries out its only function. It shreds no more.
The above photo shows the state of the blades and gears after I spent an uncomfortable half-hour pulling paper out of the thing.
I’m a firm believer in caveat emptor. We should have taken some time to do a bit of research. Still, if your customers unilaterally tell you that a product doesn’t work, it behooves you to stop selling it.
As you might imagine, the next time I need something for our office, I’m going to Staples.
The Film Club by David Gilmour is a true memoir of three years in the life of the author and his son Jesse. In the introductory pages, Gilmour explains how his sixteen-year-old son was having serious difficulties with school. He was failing courses, cutting classes and was generally (though not unusually) frustrated by the process.
Gilmour and his ex-wife, Jesse’s mother, decide to take their son out of school. Gilmour makes a deal with his son. Jesse can live at home and doesn’t have to get a job as long as he’ll watch three movies a week that his father selects. Hence, the film club of the book’s title.
The rest of the book is one part film criticism and one part parenthood memoir with a pinch of home-schooling. Gilmour tells us about their pre- and post-film conversations, and we get little tidbits and trivia about famous movies. Meanwhile, we learn about Jesse’s girl troubles, his aspirations to be a rapper, and his dubious (thought not unusual) teenage habits of sleeping late and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Gilmour is also struggling a bit–he’s can’t find work.
An Irksome Read
I found The Film Club a particularly irksome read. I wanted to, but I couldn’t get interested in or sympathize with either of the main characters.
First off, Gilmour comes off as a pretty irresponsible parent. He devises this film club strategy on page four of the book. What are the alternatives he considers before letting his son quit high school? Private school. That’s it. There’s no mention of other alternatives, of which I’m sure there are dozens (private tutors and work-study programs spring immediately to mind). After all ‘kid frustrated by high school’ is hardly an unusual problem.
And once Gilmour decides to home-school his kid, what curriculum does his choose? Movies. His only pedagogical tool is Some Like it Hot and Full Metal Jacket? It’s no coincidence that Gilmour is a former film critic. The author seems to say “heck, this is the thing I know about, so I’ll just teach my son about that”.
To his credit, Gilmour frets over his own shortcomings as an instructor. Halfway through the book a sixteen or seventeen-year-old Jesse asks his father where Florida is. Florida! That’s one of the easy states. And yet, Gilmour doesn’t change his approach.
Jesse, for his part, seems to be your typical unmotivated, self-absorbed teenager. While he’s obviously special to Gilmour, he comes off as flat and ordinary. He mopes, he sleeps late, he gets his heart broken. He does seem to be quite a sensitive lad, but this did little to endear me.
My Dad (who read and liked the book with reservations) pointed out that despite never having a job, Jesse always seems to have money. This, like many aspects of their lives (where is Gilmour’s wife in all those? why do we see so little of Jesse’s mother?), goes unexplained or recognized by the narrator.
Gilmour spends a lot of time in the second half of the book describing Jesse’s love affairs with a couple of women. They are, again, the usual drama-filled teenage romances. And we only ever get second-hand accounts, which makes them all the less interesting. Gilmour has a kind of creepy disdain for Jesse’s girlfriends. His jealousy is pretty unflattering.
Jesse seems to mostly exist as a foil for Gilmour to hold forth on the things he cares about: parenthood, movies, his own ex-girlfriends, and so forth.
Two Guys Who Made Dumb Choices
I don’t have to like the characters to enjoy a book. But it helps to care about them, particularly when the book in question is a factual memoir. To me, they seemed like two guys who made some dumb choices and couldn’t (at least for most of the book) see their own mistakes. I’d sum it up as “teenager has ordinary crisis. Father devises ill-informed alternative solution and puts all his eggs in his only basket”.
To top things off, the film criticism was uninteresting. That’s not surprising. We receive the film discussions through the lens of teaching a reluctant teenage learner about famous movies. Even if you’re Pauline Kael, you’re going to simplify your rhetoric, and lace it with enticements that might appeal to a high schooler. I’m not accusing Gilmour of being a bad film critic–I just think his hands are tied by the circumstances he creates.
From a technical perspective, I admire Gilmour’s writing. The book is well-constructed, very cogently written and feels well-edited. Despite my feelings for the characters, I could see it being included on the syllabus of a creative non-fiction writing class.
The Film Club is, at its heart, a book about parenthood. I know three people who have read the book, and they all liked it. As it happens, they’re all parents. I am not. Maybe I’m just not in the target market for this book. It even feels a little risky criticizing Gilmour’s parenting decisions–that seems like sacrosanct territory in our culture. Even if you do have progeny, though, I can’t recommend it.
This is totally unrelated, but I went searching for an image to accompany this review. I searched Flickr for ‘film club david gilmour’. I got all of three photos in the results. It’s fascinating to me that there are more than two billion photos in Flickr, yet I see results like this all the time. What are all those photos of? Vacations? Endless loops of self portrait projects (”085 of 365: Me With No Pants”)? Or are the photos just under-described?
One of my favourite writers, Nicholson Baker, recently wrote an essay on Wikipedia for The New York Review of Books:
Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat—a little generic—fair-minded—compressed—unpromotional—neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences muted—to some extent—natural antagonisms.
I’ve always admired Baker’s awesome vocabulary. To pick a random example, he just slides the word ‘panjandrum‘ into a concluding paragraph, as casual as a drop pass.
The essay is ostensibly a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. However, like almost all literary book reviews that I read, the book itself seems an afterthought. This tradition of literary review seems like it’s centuries old–I wonder how it started? It’s unique among the art forms in mainstream media. Movies, plays, dance, visual art–they all only get the same standard treatment, entirely focussed on the artwork itself. Why did books turn out differently?
