Gordon Pinsent and his band

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jaime Hogge

It’s often said an actor is an empty vessel. That doesn’t seem to apply to Gordon Pinsent. Take his charred cask of a voice. As enveloping as single malt, it sounds like it’s been steeped in more stories than the Ancient Mariner. It still bears echoes of Newfoundland, although Pinsent sanded the edges off his accent when he left the Rock at 17 to seek his fortune as an actor, hitchhiking across the mainland—the place islanders call upalong. By now, his legacy as one of the great Canadian actors of his generation, along with his pal Christopher Plummer, is safe. But he’s never been content to be just an actor. Pinsent has written two novels, a memoir and half a dozen movies for film and TV, most memorably The Rowdyman (1972), a lost Canadian classic. And next month, at the unlikely age of 81, he makes his songwriting debut with Down and Out in Upalong, a CD of his poetry set to music by Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo and Travis Good of the Sadies.

Like a ghost ship emerging from the shadows of a life, Pinsent’s verse sails a tide of memory that stretches from his wayward youth in backstreet bars to a widower’s enduring love—his wife of 44 years, actress Charmion King, died in 2007. As he wrote poems over the years, he always thought of them as “lyrics” and would nudge them into music with a guitar. “Charm used to love the fact that I would sit in the kitchen and play and sing while she was cooking,” he recalls.

The genesis of the album came when Pinsent was shooting a TV biography, Still Rowdy After All These Years, with cameraman Mike Bolland. During a break, the actor read some of his poems, musing that he’d like to see them turned into songs. Long story short: Bolland contacted Travis Good, and Good visited Pinsent at his condo in downtown Toronto. Over a few beers, the actor treated him to a reading then sent him off with a batch of 20 poems. The musician then recruited Keelor, who recalls showing up to find Good “already a little drunk, sitting in the dining room at the table, scattered with wine glasses, ashtrays and a stack of lyrics.”

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Bryan Adams onstage in Paris

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

My photographs of Bryan Adams performing at Le Zénith arena in Paris, after our interview in his dressing room:

Bryan Adams still sings straight from the heart

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Le Zénith: Bryan Adams rocks out March 17 in Paris, singing a back-to-back parade of hits

Photo Gallery: Bryan Adams onstage in Paris

We’re in Paris, but you wouldn’t know it. There’s nothing Old World about Le Zénith, an arena in the shape of a concrete clamshell that sits next to a sculpture of pointless girders in a paved park inspired by a deconstructionist philosopher. The arena was built in 1983, the same year a 23-year-old Bryan Adams scored his breakthrough with the album Cuts Like a Knife. Now he’s 52, performing the title track at Le Zénith for 6,000 fans. During a two-hour show of wall-to-wall hits, the French fans, singing in perfect English, join in on every number. You can tell, because Adams often holds back a lyric to let the crowd fill the vacuum. “It’s like f–king karaoke!” enthuses his veteran manager, Bruce Allen, who’s watching from the edge of the stage—still amazed by the kid who, at 18, vowed he’d be his biggest act ever.

No male Canadian singer-songwriter has sold more records than Bryan Adams—some 65 million albums. He’s sitting on a massive repertoire of hits, and is not about to let them go stale. He’s been touring the world with a show designed to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Waking Up the Neighbours, the album that confirmed him as a superstar. And next month Adams is bringing it all back home with his first full-scale Canadian tour in two decades, a string of 21 shows that will kick off April 11 in St. John’s.

So what has changed? “I’d like to say nothing,” he says backstage in Paris, “but everything has changed. I can actually remember where I am now, whereas back then it just folded into a blur. In the old days I would have done 20 shows in a row, banging them out in a month.” But Adams will spread his Canadian tour over three months, hitting the eastern provinces and Quebec in April, Ontario in May, and the West in June. “It’s not cost-effective,” he says, “but it’s not about the money.”

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Monstrous mash-ups: ‘Mirror Mirror’ and ‘Wrath of the Titans’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 12:08 AM - 0 Comments

Julia Roberts as the Queen (left) and Lily Collins as Snow White in 'Mirror Mirror'

Don’t mess with the classics. That’s one message you could take from Mirror Mirror and Wrath of the Titans, two new Hollywood concoctions that mangle the Brothers Grimm and Greek mythology respectively. Mirror Mirror‘s fractured fairy tale puts a cutesy-poo, post-modern spin on the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, sapping the venom from its villain and turning its heroine into a pro-feminist princess warrior. Wrath of the Titans plunders Greek myths of gods and monsters to present an overwrought spectacle of volcanic special effects that can be best described as fireball porn. Although it’s difficult to judge which of the two films is more tedious, Wrath of the Titans takes the prize: it’s in 3D, and nothing makes a bad movie worse quite like 3D. And to be fair, although both movies try to make virtues of excess and bad taste, Mirror Mirror‘s assault on the senses is at least esthetically pleasing.

Not unlike the wicked queen played by Julia Roberts, Mirror Mirror is consumed by its narcissism. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a movie so obsessed with looking good above and beyond all else. Between the production design and the opulent costumes—which aren’t worn so much as inhabited, like sets—the film is a big, awkward doll house of cartoon fantasy come to life. Filmed on a soundstages in Montreal, it makes Cirque du Soleil look spartan. Continue…

‘The Hunger Games’ hits the mark

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 3:34 PM - 0 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss in 'The Hunger Games'

I’m light years removed from the target audience of The Hunger Games. Wrong age, wrong gender. And I haven’t read the hugely popular young adult novel by Suzanne Collins on which the film is based. So I feel qualified to see it as a movie, not just a pop culture phenomenon. And as a movie, The Hunger Games is not just good. It’s a knockout: stylish, suspenseful, smartly acted—and endowed with more depths of  meaning than you’d ever expect from a blockbuster franchise.

There have been inevitable comparisons to the Twilight franchise, another life-and-death teen fantasy that has a heroine juggling two suitors in a love triangle. But the similarities are superficial, so let’s dispense with them right away. Twilight is supernatural fantasy that flips between extremes of earnest romance and cheesy camp. The Hunger Games is a dystopian drama with classical roots, gripping drama and a keen edge of political satire. And the love triangle plays a minor role, at least in this first movie of the series. But what makes The Hunger Games outshine Twilight right out of the gate—aside from a superior script and better direction—is the quality of the acting, especially the superb performance from Jennifer Lawrence. Continue…

A new documentary finds perfection in a piece of sushi

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 16, 2012 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

EONE

Jiro Ono is Tokyo’s most famous sushi chef. At 86, he is also the world’s oldest chef to be honoured with Michelin’s coveted three-star rating—quite a feat considering that his restaurant seats just 10 diners at a bar and serves nothing but sushi. No sashimi platters. No bento boxes. No California rolls. Just divine morsels of fish on rice, presented one at a time to customers who have waited up to a year for a reservation. Each piece of sushi must be eaten the moment it lands in front of you. A typical $400 meal, consisting of 20 pieces, can be over in less than half an hour.

Fish and rice. You have to wonder, how hard can that be? But Ono has spent seven decades working day and night to perfect his art, and even now he insists there is always room for improvement. Take the octopus. Not so long ago, Ono discovered that, for optimal tenderness and taste, one must massage the octopus for 50 minutes, not 30 minutes. During its spa treatment, of course, the creature is dead, but hours earlier, as a fishmonger struggled to coax it into a clear plastic bag, it was very much alive.

That’s a scene from a remarkable new documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a reverent portrait of the octogenarian chef by Los Angeles filmmaker David Gelb, who, at 28, is as green at his craft as Ono is experienced in his. The film belongs to a growing subgenre of documentaries about ultra-serious chefs who take perfectionism to absurd extremes. Last year saw two of them. A Matter of Taste showed New York wunderkind Paul Leibrandt pushing back the frontiers of the palate with such dishes as “espuma of calf brains and foie gras” and “eel, violets and chocolate.” And El Bulli explored the laboratory cuisine of Spain’s temperamental Ferran Adrià, who concocts edible experiments in avant-garde art; his proudest creation was a cocktail consisting of just water, oil and salt.

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‘Payback’ reaps a cinematic dividend

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 16, 2012 at 12:15 AM - 0 Comments

A scene of BP's Gulf oil spill in 'Payback'

Payback. Although the title sounds like it could belong to a Nicolas Cage thriller, this is a wake-up call from the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. And the only fireball you’ll see belongs to BP’s drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, I know it doesn’t sound like a good time, a National Film Board documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s book of Massey Lectures about myriad forms of debt—societal, personal, environmental, criminal and economic. Not an easy sell. But bear with me. This captivating film comes from one of the most seductive, least didactic documentary artists at work today, Canada’s Jennifer Baichwal. Her subjects have ranged from expatriate writer Paul Bowles and Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams to the toxic visions of Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes) and exotic tales of lightning-strike survivors (Act of God). Like almost all her documentaries, Payback was shot by Baichwal’s husband, Nicholas de Pencier, a cinematographer whose lens seems almost magnetically drawn to poetry.

Wisely, Baichwal chose not just to illustrate Atwood’s book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, but to extend its ideas to fresh and vivid ground. Just as the book takes the notion of debt beyond financial matters to broad arenas of moral and political obligation, the film takes its ideas out into the world, as it unearths half a dozen specific stories in very different realms. Baichwal explores a irreconcilable blood feud between an Albanian farmer whose belly is scarred from bullets fired years ago by his neighbour. She drills down into the indelible environmental debt of BP’s Gulf oil spill. She makes us thinking twice about the beauty of tomatoes with stories of plantation-like slavery among Florida’s migrant farm workers. In examining the notion of “paying one’s debt to society,” Baichwal finds empathy for a drug addict who can’t stay out of jail, and presents media mogul Conrad Black in a tolerant light—the philosopher con turns out to be one of the film’s more thoughtful subjects. Continue…

21 Jump Street’s F-bomb bromance

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 11:45 PM - 0 Comments

Jonah Hill (left) and Channing Tatum as each others' prom dates in '21 Jump Street'

Before anyone can lambast Hollywood for cynically recycling yet another ’80s TV show, the movie spin-off of 21 Jump Street is a jump ahead with an early line of  preemptive dialogue. As a police captain reassigns the movie’s odd couple of loser cops—Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum)—he tells them the force is reviving a cancelled undercover program in the high schools. Making a crack about the lack of originality among the brass, he says, “All they do now is recycle shit from the past and expect us not to notice.”

One thing that this movie’s writers (Michael Bacall and Hill) cannot be accused of is milking ’80s nostalgia. The original TV series, which famously launched Johnny Depp’s career, was a relatively earnest teen drama that tackled some serious issues. With almost gleeful disrespect, the movie strips the series for parts and remakes it as R-rated action comedy. The notion of Hill, 28, and Tatum, 31, actually passing for teenagers in a high school is not remotely credible, but the movie is smart enough to send up the absurdity of its own premise. This Jump Street is flat-out farce, turbo-powered by drugs and a plethora of penis jokes that skate a stoned, wobbly line between gay-positive and homophobic. That said, this comedy has charm, wit and some good laughs. And yes, Johnny Depp inevitably does pop up in a priceless cameo— no matter how braced you are for that payoff, believe me, you’ll never see it coming. Continue…

REVIEW: Zona

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

Any writer reading Zona, especially a film critic, will likely be stricken with envy. British writer Dyer has done the authorial equivalent of getting away with murder: he’s devoted an entire book to a rambling essay on a somewhat obscure Russian art film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). To summarize Stalker in a sentence, rather than 228 pages, it’s a metaphysical journey about three men in a bar (Stalker, Writer, Professor) who travel through a postwar wasteland of rusting artillery into a puddled wilderness called the Zone, and more specifically the Room, a grail-like gulag where all one’s wishes come true.

The film left a radioactive imprint on Dyer’s psyche—eventually he lets drop that around the time he encountered it, he was ingesting a lot of LSD and magic mushrooms, while immersing himself in cinema. Dyer conducts a shot-by-shot tour of Stalker, but Zona is not some microscopic act of cinephilia. He doesn’t revere the film. Instead, he marvels at it, argues with it, makes fun of it—and basically uses it as a daydream machine to launch flights of digression and memoir. As footnotes start crowding out the text, Dyer’s tangents skip from Kafka and Wordsworth to Bergman and Tarantino, from his love for quicksand to the aesthetics of Chernobyl, from his wife’s resemblance to Natascha McElhone to his unfulfilled desire for a threesome. A rotary phone rings in the film and prompts an aside on the evolutionary decline of the index finger and the ascendancy of the texting thumb.

It’s all great fun, and astute in the bargain. Like a literary love child of Pauline Kael and Henry Miller, Dyer strays from his subject with guiltless delinquency, but never loses sight of it. As he sifts through Stalker’s archaeological layers, puzzling over the point of the movie—and his book—he concludes: “If someone will deign to publish this summary of a film that few people will have seen, that will constitute a success far greater than anything John Grisham could ever have dreamed of.” Immodest but true.

Skip ‘John Carter’; go ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 9, 2012 at 5:01 PM - 0 Comments

Amr Waked (left) and Ewan McGregor in 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen'

John Carter, the year’s first big blockbuster opens this weekend, and looks like it’s headed for box-office disaster. I certainly found it pretty tedious. It feels about half an hour too long. And it plays like a cheesy rip-off of Star Wars and Avatar—but that’s because it’s based on the century-old work of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose work exerted a primal influence on both George Lucas and James Cameron, back when they were fanboy bookworms. So even though John Carter is based on the original prototype, it plays like a knock-off.

It’s the sage of a Confederate Civil War veteran who is mysteriously transported to Mars (aka Barsoom), where he plays Lawrence of Arabia to a horde of  green, four-armed, tusked barbarians. The movie marks the live-action directing debut of Pixar wiz Andrew Stanton. It also launches the action-hero career of Canadian Taylor Kitsch, who is as buff as the movie is bloated. If he’s lucky, the movie’s box-office failure will nip any future sequels in the bud. As Kitsch has already proven in Friday Night Lights and The Bang Bang Club, he’s too good for this shlock. To read my recent interview/profile of this 30-year-old actor from Kelowna, B.C, go to: The next action hero.

So, unless you’re still looking forward to puberty, you should avoid John Carter. But do try to see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, one of the biggest hits at TIFF last fall. Continue…

‘Monsieur Lazhar’ sweeps the Genies

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 8:17 PM - 0 Comments

Genie winners Sophie Nelisse and Fellag in 'Monsieur Lazhar'

Philippe Falardeau’s beloved Monsieur Lazhar took the Genie Awards by storm tonight, winning six of its nine nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for its French-Algerian star Fellag. The film’s Genie triumph crowns a string of honours including an Oscar nomination, the best Canadian feature prize at TIFF, and the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.

Based on a Quebec play, Monsieur Lazhar is the touching drama of an Algerian refugee who takes over a teaching job in a Montreal classroom traumatized by his predecessor’s suicide. Continue…

Bucking the War Horse hype

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

A scene from the Toronto production of War Horse

After a triumphant march from London’s West End to Broadway, War Horse opened last week at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre to rhapsodic reviews. Sporting a Canadian cast, the Mirvish production has wowed audiences and critics alike with its robust spectacle of horse puppets brought magically to life amid the fury of the First World War.  So when I had an opportunity to see a recent performance, I was pumped. Unlike some of my film critic confreres, I’d actually liked the Spielberg film War Horse (adapted from the same 1982 children’s book by Michael Morpurgo). I’d surrendered to its epic sentiment, flung myself through its barbed-wire gauntlet of sentiment and cliché, and quietly wept. The acclaim for the play was far more unanimous than for the movie, so I was fully expecting to be blown away.

To voice a dissenting view on War Horse, the play, is as uncool as confessing affection for War Horse, the movie. But the play was hard to love. Before I get lynched for crimes of critical insanity, let me clarify. I loved the staging. And I loved the horse puppets. Everything people say about these strangely animated creatures is true. Even though they’re being trotted around by clearly visible puppeteers, you watch those horses and believe they’re real. The suspension of disbelief is uncanny. The horses are fully formed characters, layered with uncanny nuances of motion—and emotion.

I wish I could say the same for the humans. I’m no theatre critic, but I was shocked by the strident pitch of the performances and the unleavened melodrama of the dialogue. Most of it was shouted, not spoken. Of course, drill sergeants and soldiers in the battlefield are supposed to be yelling at each other. But even on the farm, before Joey, our horse hero, gets sent into battle, virtually every scene is shouted.

Yes, I realize this is theatre, not film, and the actors have to play to a massive house. But after being spoiled by the naturalist  brilliance of dramatists like Robert Lepage, I’m always surprised that the old declamatory style of stage acting is still considered normal in a Broadway-scale production—especially one that employs such breathtaking innovation on other levels.

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In conversation: Sylvester Stallone

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Thirty-five years ago at the Oscars, Rocky won Best Picture, beating All the President’s Men, Network and Taxi Driver. The movie scored 10 nominations, including Best Actor and Original Screenplay for its creator and star, Sylvester Stallone. He’s never been nominated since, but has racked up a record number of Razzies for “worst actor.” Now 65, Stallone is still scrapping for comeback, with two movies coming out this year, Bullet to the Head and Expendables 2.

Q: When you were broke, you turned down $250,000 from a studio that wanted to make Rocky without you. Did you have any idea at the time that it would take off the way it did?

A: Not at all. I thought I was making a film for drive-in theatres. I approached it as a coming-of-age story about the frustration I felt. I thought a regular character wouldn’t work, so I put it in the body of a boxer.

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The Oscar montage that never was

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

Now the Oscars are dead and buried, devoured by the microbial enzymes of countless Twitter feeds, let’s take one last look at a year in movies that the Academy only half-recognized. Lost in Oscar’s myopic gaze were films like Melancholia, Shame, Tintin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Attack the Block, Drive, A Dangerous Method, Café de Flore, Le Havre, Mysteries of Lisbon, Into the Abyss, Project Nim and Nostalgia for the Light. Those titles were among the 2011 movies honoured by the Toronto Film Critics Association—along with many of the Oscar picks. So here’s the Oscar montage that never was, a mash-up of the TFCA’s 28 nominees and winners, edited by yours truly, using music only from the soundtracks:

Follow Brian D. Johnson on Twitter: @briandjohnson

Taylor Kitsch: the next action hero

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Frank Connor

Soon there will be no escaping Taylor Kitsch. Over the coming months, a trifecta of Hollywood blockbusters will christen this 30-year-old Canadian actor as America’s new action hero. As a Herculean gladiator in John Carter, a massive sci-fi opus opening next week, Kitsch battles great white apes in the Martian desert, while playing Lawrence of Arabia to a horde of tusked, green, four-armed barbarians that look like mutant exiles from Avatar. With an estimated budget of $250 million, it’s the kind of behemoth that could launch a franchise or shred a studio. Almost as ambitious is Battleship, a $200-million epic based on a board game. It hits theatres in May, with Kitsch in command as a U.S. Navy officer saving the world from an alien invasion. And in July he stars in Oliver Stone’s Savages, as an ex-Navy SEAL turned pot grower who goes to war against a Mexican drug cartel. Altogether, Hollywood is betting about a half-billion dollars on Taylor Kitsch.

None of this would have happened were it not for the blessed misfortune of a torn knee ligament. Growing up in Kelowna, B.C., he set out to be an action hero who would carve his exploits on the ice, not onscreen. As a Junior A star with the Langley Hornets, Kitsch was set to make the leap to a pro hockey career when a knee injury dashed his dreams. So he made another kind of leap, moving to New York at 20 to pursue a modelling offer and study acting. Now, a decade later—after proving his talent as a troubled football star in the acclaimed NBC series Friday Night Lights—this mild-mannered Canadian dreamboat has stepped into the ring as Hollywood’s new Great White Hope.

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Portrait of the Oscar as an Old Man

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, February 27, 2012 at 8:57 AM - 0 Comments

Oscar, that 84-year-old naked guy with a wandering eye, has always had a soft spot for an Old World accent. And at last night’s Academy Awards, it looked like the French are the new Brits. The silent, black-and-white marvel of The Artist—finally a French film without subtitles—won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Jean Dujardin. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which paid homage to the silent era with a 3D adventure in a Paris train station, also won five Oscars, including cinematography, but all were in the so-called technical categories.

Canada’s Christopher Plummer, 82, made history by becoming the oldest actor ever to win an Oscar, accepting the award for Best Supporting Actor prize for his role as gay father who comes out of the closet while dying of cancer. Even on the red carpet, he already seemed to be warming up for his acceptance speech.  “It’s about time I suppose,” he said, looking dapper in a black velvet tuxedo. “There’s not much left of me.” Later, as he clutched the Oscar, he delivered a graceful, witty script: “You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life? I have a confession to make: when I first emerged from my mother’s womb I was already rehearsing my Academy acceptance speech.” He ended by thanking “my long-suffering wife, Elaine, who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.” Continue…

Eight rules for Oscar pools

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 24, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Shutterstock/Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Every year at this time, people ask me for inside dope so they can win their Oscar pool. Problem is, I’ve never won my own pool, and now refuse to join one. For a film critic, it’s a lose-lose situation—if I win, I have an unfair advantage; if don’t, I’m unqualified. This year looks more predictable than ever. With the rising profile of the Oscar primaries—critics’ lists, Golden Globes and guild prizes—the Academy Awards have become anticlimactic. But they’re still the only ones that matter. So for the love of the game, let’s play Oscarball! Here are some rules, and a batch of predictions from an unreliable oracle.

1. Oscar loves a good juggernaut. The Artist has swept the Directors and Producers Guild awards with no backlash in sight. Expect it to take Best Picture and Director. Caveat: Oscar loves to upset a juggernaut—Hugo and Martin Scorsese could do just that.

2. The best actors are not in the best pictures. The notable exception is The Artist’s Jean Dujardin. Otherwise, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are favoured to win Best Actress and Supporting Actress for The Help, which was shut out of every non-acting category but Best Picture. And Christopher Plummer has a lock on Supporting Actor for Beginners—its only nomination. Conversely, Hugo, which leads the pack with 11 nominations, doesn’t have a single acting nod.

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City of Toronto bans Baruchel ‘Goon’ poster

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 1:39 AM - 0 Comments

Banned in Toronto, the 'Goon' poster features star and co-writer Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel, the Montreal-based writer and star of the hockey movie Goon, seems to have goosed the City of Toronto into giving his movie some free publicity. Yesterday, the day of the film’s red carpet premiere in Toronto, the city took down 38 posters promoting the movie, according to Goon distributor Alliance Films.

The poster  features Baruchel, Goon’s co-writer and star (How To Train Your Dragon, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Tropic Thunder) gesturing in a way that the city found inappropriate. Alliance Films reports that the posters have been up for two weeks yet it  received neither prior notice nor any explanation as to why they were removed.

The cast of the film has been in Toronto for the last several days promoting the movie’s release.  “I question whether this has to do with Jay’s tongue or his ability to burn Maple Leafs’ jerseys, neither of which are offensive in any way,” said Goon director, Mike Dowse.

Commented Baruchel: “Another classic example of the cultural divide between Quebec and Ontario, I guess.”

Goon, a hockey comedy, delivers a wicked slapshot of profanity and violence, undercut with a sharp wit and a sweet streak of sentiment. The film has already offended some critics’ sensibilities with its unabashed romance of the enforcer, and its giddy embrace of violence—especially after last year’s deaths of three former NHL enforcers. Now, with the City of Toronto’s help, Goon‘s publicity campaign, like its hero (Seann Williams Scott), is mixing things up.

Does embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford have anything to do with the ban? Is he hoping to stir up a bit of culture war to distract the citizenry from his woes? Who knows. Alliance reported the city’s poster action in a press release at 12:36 a.m. today. And I’m sure as hell not phoning the Mayor’s house in the middle of the night.

Toronto and Vancouver: Hollywood can’t quite disguise them

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Kerry Hayes/Vow Productions; Shutterstock; Photo Illustration By Levi Nicholson

In a scene from The Vow, Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum park by the Chicago waterfront, strip down to their underwear, and scamper into the lake for a frigid late-night dip. But the lake is Ontario, not Michigan. The couple is cavorting on Cherry Beach in McAdams’s home city of Toronto, and the skyline is visible—minus the CN Tower. Canadian locales routinely impersonate American cities in Hollywood movies, but what’s striking about The Vow is how blithely it shows familiar glimpses of a city that’s supposed to be incognito. The lovers first cross paths at City Hall, and exchange their vows at a guerrilla wedding staged in the Art Gallery of Ontario. The movie is punctuated by postcard vistas of the real Chicago, but whenever the actors are in the shot, Toronto backdrops shatter the illusion, at least for anyone who knows the city.

There’s nothing wrong with faking locations. It’s something Hollywood has always done and always will. Movies, after all, are in the business of make-believe. But after so many years, the routine casting of Toronto and Vancouver for American burgs has become irksome, especially now that these cities have more personality and profile of their own. Ontario film commissioner Donna Zuchlinski claims local audiences enjoy spotting their hometown onscreen—“it adds to the movie-going experience, that sense of pride.” But stripped of its character, a surrogate city exudes blandness. In a confection like The Vow, despite a spirited performance from McAdams, that cavalier lack of authenticity penetrates deep into the bones of the movie, from the generic characters to the formulaic script. It seems to say: what the hell, the audience will never notice.

When American studios shoot movies north of the border, would it kill them to set one there? That almost never happens. Although Canada is the only country in the world that’s lumped into Hollywood’s domestic market, apparently we’re not domestic enough to be a place where people would actually live. “Americans want to see American cities,” says Toronto production designer Sandra Kybartas, a veteran of both Canadian and U.S. shoots. “They have a limited palate for exoticism.”

Continue…

In Darkness, our other Oscar nominee from the sewer

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jasmin Marla Dichant/Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection

When the Oscars are handed out on Feb. 26, Canadians will have plenty to root for, with Christopher Plummer favoured to win Best Supporting Actor and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar vying for Foreign Language Film, not to mention nominations for two animated shorts from the NFB. But another Canadian triumph, the most unlikely of all, has almost been lost in the shuffle. Competing with Monsieur Lazhar for the foreign language award is In Darkness, a Holocaust drama co-produced by Poland, Germany—and Canada. Although it’s directed by Polish veteran Agnieszka Holland, and is Poland’s official Oscar entry, it was created by a Canadian writer and developed by Canadian producers before the Europeans came on board.

The film unearths an astonishing saga. Just when you thought there was no more Holocaust lore left to be mined, In Darkness dramatizes the true story of a group of Jews in Nazi-occupied Lvov who hide in rat-infested sewers for 14 months, protected by a Polish Catholic thief and sewer worker named Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz). This Schindler of the sewers is a reluctant saint. At first he’s the ultimate slum landlord, agreeing to hide the fugitives from the Nazis for cash. But as the war grinds on, he becomes fiercely protective of the people he calls “my Jews,” risking his life and family to save them. But the film is no fable. Like the exquisite cinematography, which draws light out of the darkness, the moral tone of this claustrophobic thriller is deeply shaded. Intolerance and opportunism infect both sides.

“The characters are very nuanced,” says its Toronto screenwriter, David F. Shamoon. “I didn’t want that typical division between good and evil, the good Jews versus the bad Nazis or Poles.” A former advertising man, Shamoon, 64, was born in India and moved to Canada at 23 after living in Iran and the U.S.—his Iraqi parents fled Baghdad to escape anti-Jewish persecution in 1941. In Darkness is his first script to reach the screen and he spent eight years getting it there. He first stumbled across the story in a local newspaper, which led him to Robert Marshall’s 1991 book In the Sewers of Lvov. Shamoon says he turned down an offer from a well-known American director, because “I just did not want the Hollywood treatment, even though I was thinking of having it in the English language.”

Continue…

‘The Vow’ is empty; so is ‘Safe House’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:29 AM - 0 Comments

Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams in 'The Vow'

There are few Hollywood stars who appear to be as genuine, innocent, and downright likable as Canadian actors Ryan Reynolds and Rachel McAdams. Both have movies opening this week, his-and-her titles that present a fatal date-night choice of gonzo male action versus chick-flick romance. Reynolds co-stars with Denzel Washington as a CIA man  relentlessly on the run in the hellbent thriller Safe House. And McAdams co-stars with Channing Tatum as an an amnesia victim who loses all memory of her husband after a car crash in The Vow. Both of them do a decent job, but their respective talents are squandered in stories that go through motions of Hollywood formula.

The Vow is soft-headed romance and Safe House is gritty action, but both are disingenuous confections that don’t add up. Which is not to say they don’t provide some pleasures. McAdams has never looked more adorable, and Reynolds bulls his way through the bloody gauntlet of Safe House like that steed tearing through the barbed wire in War Horse. Men all over North America will be dragged to The Vow. It’s the designated date movie for Valentine’s Day, while Safe House pays fleeting lip service to romance with a token girlfriend who’s abandoned for a frantic marathon of gunplay, chase scenes, and torture.

The Vow

Rachel McAdams cruises merrily through The Vow as if she’s humouring her co-star, the script and the audience. Don’t get me wrong. I love Rachel McAdams. Who doesn’t? Not just because she has the beauty, warmth and candour of a true movie star, but because she can act: she seems incapable of a false note.  So what is she doing in a phony valentine like The Vow? As Canada’s sweetheart racks up another Hollywood romance, threatening to become the Meg Ryan of her generation, she should be holding out for movies worthy of her potential. She has, in fact, wrapped a new film directed by Tree of Life director Terrence Mallick, which is exciting. But in the meantime she deserves better than The Vow‘s shlock. She deserves a more substantial suitor than an expression-challenged Tatum Channing,  Hollywood’s hunk du jour. And finally, if she’s going to shoot a movie in her hometown, it should look more authentic than The Vow‘s lame attempt to pass off Toronto as Chicago. But then, everything about this romance seems inauthentic. Continue…

Talk about Tilda in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11:59 PM - 0 Comments

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'

Tilda Swinton has already won an Oscar, for playing a corporate bitch in Michael Clayton. So let’s crown her this year’s Queen of the Anti-Oscars—poster girl for the gallery of overlooked actors who gave incendiary performances in movies that were  too dark and weird for the Academy’s taste. Namely: Michael Fassbender in Shame, Ryan Gosling in Drive, Charlize Theron in Young Adult, Michael Shannon in Take Shelter, Woody Harrelson in Rampart, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia. And what a fine bunch they are. But it’s probably safe to say that no performance among the 2011 awards contenders is as irredeemably dark as Tilda Swinton’s in We Need to Talk About Kevin, which opens this week in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

Based on the prize-winning novel by Lionel Shriver is the story of a mother’s worst nightmare—raising a problem child who grows up to commit a monstrous act as a teenager. The boy is a demon seed. In that sense, the question of nature vs. nurture doesn’t really arise, certainly not to the same degree as it does in Shriver’s novel, which unfolds as a series of letters by the mother, who is haunted by how much her poor aptitude as a parent may have contributed to her son’s evil disposition. In the movie, we feel harrowing empathy for Eva (Swinton)—as she tries to cope with the hellish aftermath of the crimes her first-born son, Kevin (Ezra Miller) has committed, and, in flashbacks, as she struggles to establish a bond with a child whose malevolence grows to psychopathic proportions over the course of 15 years. Continue…

Nazis invade from the dark side of the moon!

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments

I knew there was a reason Berlin Film Festival should not be missed. Apparently the hot ticket at the Berlinale is not Angelina Jolie’s Bosnia drama, The Land of Blood and Honey, or Werner Herzog’s Death Row documentary, Into the Abyss. It’s a B-movie called Iron Sky about a Nazi colony on the dark side of the moon that, after 70 years of regrouping, is staging a full-scale invasion of Earth.

The 7.5 million euro Finn-German-Australian co-production has been sold to 30 countries and is set to open in April. As the film’s PR folk deliver this breathless news, almost more hilarious than the movie’s premise is the earnest tone of the filmmakers in boasting about their kampf, er, struggle to get the damn thing made, as if it were some kind of populist triumph:

“It was extremely difficult to make a movie like this. Honestly, it’s amazing we ever finished the film,” says Timo Vuorensola, the director of Iron Sky. “The many hardships and all the trouble we went through to make an indie product like this was staggering, but we pulled it through.” Says producer Tero Kaukomaa: “The concept of Iron Sky is strong. . . We really believe it can compete against the big Hollywood blockbusters ten times our budget. We aim to give these giants a good run for their money, and show what power a community like ours really wields. We are encouraging our fans to grab the trailer and spread it through the Internet like it was the end of the world.” [italics mine]

So here’s your chance to contribute, and make the Iron Sky Nazi invasion go viral:

Busting ghosts in ‘Albert Nobbs,’ ‘Woman in Black’ and ‘W.E.’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Glenn Close (left) and Mia Wasikowska in 'Albert Nobbs'

We have three period films opening this week, all written or co-written by women, directed by men, and all about tormented folks in what we used to call the British Isles. Two of them, Albert Nobbs and The Woman in Black, are both adapted from stories that originated in 1982; both take place in dour climes of the Victorian era; and both feature Janet McTeer in supporting roles. What all those coincidences mean, I have no idea.  W.E.,  as in Wallis Simpson, is unlike anything else. It shuttles between the 1930s and the present—but for all intents and purposes it’s set in the thoroughly post-modern mind of Madonna, its self-possessed writer-director. All three films, meanwhile, feature bold attempts at transformation: Glenn Close playing a man, Daniel Radcliffe not playing Harry Potter, and Madonna playing at being an auteur.

Glenn Close has a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her uncanny performance in the title role of Albert Nobbs, as a woman who disguises herself as a man to work as a hotel butler in 19th-centry Dublin. For Close, Nobbs has been brewing as a passion project ever since she starred in a 1982 stage version of the story. And her command of the role is so complete it’s creepy. Close is mesmerizing as Nobbs, a character who is so fastidiously repressed he/she is like a ghostly apparition on screen, even more haunting than the supernatural spectre that stalks Daniel Ratcliffe in The Woman in Black. The role is not about cross-dressing so much as annihilating identity. Nobbs is like an asexual alien; a visitor from the same austere planet that brought us Edward Scissorhands and any number of characters played by Tilda Swinton. She’s not the only cross-dresser in the movie. Janet McTeer portrays a robust lesbian who masquerades as a married man, an example that inspires Nobbs to embark on a deluded courtship, hoping to marry a capricious young maid (Mia Wasikowska) and invest her life savings into a mom-and-pop tobacco shop. Continue…