Three stereotypes walk into a diner…

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

CBS

Michael Patrick King, the creator of 2 Broke Girls, thinks he’s helped the cause of diversity by creating an Asian-American character who says things like, “You can’t tell an Asian he made a mistake, he’ll go out back and throw himself on a sword.” The comedy, the biggest new hit of the TV season, has been pilloried for stereotypical, under-written minor characters. Most pilloried of all, beating out the lecherous Ukrainian cook and the elderly, jazz-loving black cashier, is Han (Matthew Moy), a Korean with an exaggerated accent. The Hollywood Reporter called it a “sorry minstrel show,” and Marissa Lee, who writes for the site Racebending, calls Han “an unimaginative, lazy and flat stereotype.” King responded to hostile critics by pointing out that “the big story about race on our show is that so many are represented.” But Lee says people who wanted to see more minorities on TV are being “asked to pick between two disappointing options: ‘Would you rather be depicted poorly, or not depicted at all?’ ”

Several recent comedies have brought ethnic stereotyping back to TV to an extent not seen since the ’80s. Journalist Amanda Dobbins wrote an article comparing Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara to Charo, the ’70s actress known only for “sexy outfits and Spanish-tinged catchphrases,” and Vergara herself told journalist Maria Elena Fernandez, “We are yellers, we’re pretty, we’re sexy, and we’re scandalous. I am not scared of the stereotypes.” Rob Schneider’s new sitcom Rob, where he marries into a Mexican family, consists of broad jokes about Mexican culture. Even in political commercials, any stereotype goes in the name of comedy. An ad for Senate candidate Peter Hoekstra featured an Asian woman speaking broken English and boasting that her country is taking American jobs; the campaign defended it by claiming it was supposed to be “satirical.”

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REVIEW: George & Hilly: The Anatomy of a Relationship

By Anne Kingston - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

When he was the “nightlife” reporter for the New York Observer, Gurley wrote an avidly read column based on transcripts from the therapy sessions that he attended with his girlfriend, Hilly, to fix their seemingly doomed relationship. Dr. Harold Selman entered the couple’s lives to solve an impasse when they’d been together three years. Hilly, a fashion PR-type with a princess complex, was desperate for George to commit (or at least to buy her a big, sparkling ring). George, a charming man-boy approaching 40, was conflicted: terrified of becoming an Upper East Side “castrati” but also afraid of losing Hilly, the first woman to make him think a “real relationship” was possible.

Now George and Hilly’s privileged travails aired over their six years of therapy have been immortalized in a book—which will cheer those left hanging when Gurley’s column ended in 2008, and anyone else who delights in reading about screwed-up relationships being salvageable. Gurley, who’s locked in a Bright Lights, Big City ’80s time warp at the outset, is amusing and often insightful as he charts the couple’s seemingly frivolous First World problems: his bad-boy ways, Hilly’s Manolo Blahnik and nightly Sancerre habits, their tension-filled trip to Rome, and being forced to live together due to the astronomical New York real estate market.

Through it, they face mutual addictions—booze and debt—and share an evolving maturity and acceptance. Exactly why their therapy succeeds is never quite clear. Is it because the “abstracted and guarded” Dr. Selman is a genius? Or because the couple’s mutual frustration with his methods and attitude forged a common bond? Or maybe, as they both suspected, because they’re meant to be together? Whatever the reason, it worked: Hilly has her ring (if not her big wedding) and George has abandoned his boyish ways. “Boring became the new exciting,” Gurley writes—and fortunately is savvy enough to end it there.

REVIEW: The Castrato and His Wife

By Brian Bethune - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Mozart composed for him, and Gainsborough twice painted his portrait. Giusto Tenducci (1736 to 1790), an opera singer with a rock-star-level female following, was famous even before his notorious scandal. He eloped, at 30, with his singing pupil Dorothea Maunsell, the 15-year-old child of a prominent Dublin barrister. That, of course, was bad enough in itself. But Tenducci was no ordinary tutor.

He was a castrato, subjected as a boy to a dangerous, illegal but tolerated operation to remove his testicles to preserve his prepubescent voice. And therein lies Tenducci’s final claim to fame: when Dorothea, nine years after their wedding, wished to marry another man, she launched an annulment claim that became one of the celebrity lawsuits of the age. Berry, a historian at Britain’s Newcastle University, turns all these events into a fascinating exploration of 18th-century concepts of sex and procreation, love and marriage.

Castratos, who were also outwardly recognizable (because their lack of testosterone meant their bone joints did not harden, allowing their limb and rib bones to grow unusually long), were the stuff of prurient fantasy. Famous for rumoured affairs with noble ladies desirous of infertile lovers—an exaggeration at best, given castrati’s low sex drives—the singers were also mercilessly mocked for their appearance and their maimed masculinity. Catholic to boot, Tenducci was never going to be a welcome son-in-law for Dorothea’s stoutly Protestant father.

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The trouble with girls

By Flannery Dean - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 5:09 PM - 0 Comments

uncurable_hippie/Flickr

What does it feel like to be a girl on the cusp of adolescence, too young to be considered a woman yet old enough to think twice about hugging your dad? The question keeps both songwriters and screenwriters busy, wracking their brains for words that rhyme with crying, as they desperately seek out fresh takes on those eternal storylines: first period, first crush, first heartbreak.

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Introducing The Charles Taylor Prize finalists

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments

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.”

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REVIEW: Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

By Brian Bethune - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

All around the developed world, people are increasingly living alone. In the U.S., that’s 31 million American adults, forming 28 per cent of households, more than any other domestic unit, including the nuclear family. And that’s still short of international levels, including Canada’s: the peak rate is found in social democracies like Sweden, where it reaches 47 per cent of adults.

The growth of living solo has sparked warnings over everything from increased loneliness to the utter collapse of civil society. Klinenberg, a prominent U.S. sociologist who first ran into the phenomenon when investigating the 500 elderly and isolated people who died during a 1995 Chicago heat wave, is well aware of the risk factors. Single old people who lack an active support network—frequent phone calls and visits most importantly—are vulnerable to almost imperceptible health and nutrition declines and to sudden shocks like heatstroke. Women, more skilled and more practised at cultivating social networks, tend to fare much better than men, who often let those relationships slide.

But Klinenberg mostly focuses on the positives, some of which are surprising. Nuclear families tend to hunker down at home, while middle-aged and older singles, socializing together, keep urban amenities going. Art and music classes, public lectures, volunteerism and booming urban condo markets would all wither without them.

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The decentralization of partying

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Lebeastsphotos.carbonmade.com

Gary Lachance sounds exhausted when he answers his cellphone. “My brain’s a little slow in the morning,” he says in a flat, expressionless voice, neglecting to acknowledge that it’s 4 p.m. “I’m more of a night person.” It becomes clear that’s an understatement as Lachance explains how, the night before, he led hundreds of people on a roving dance party through the streets of Phoenix, Ariz. The next night, the Vancouver filmmaker drove more than 1,600 km so he could do it again in Austin, Texas.

Such is the life of the self-described “twentysomething” who declines to name his suburban Ontario hometown and instead claims to have travelled from the future to change the world, one decentralized dance party at a time. “Our goal with these parties is to create something that’s novel and revolutionary and unique,” says Lachance. And he’s pledged to bring one to every country on Earth—even North Korea.

Lachance and his partner “Tom” came up with the idea to remove the dance party from the confines of a single location while “decentralizing” the source of music by dispersing hundreds of boom boxes to the crowd. Each stereo is dialled to the same radio frequency, which receives audio from a portable FM transmitter connected to Lachance’s iPod. His playlist is loaded with “booty bass,” ’90s dance tunes, and crowd-pleasers like Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith. The result, says Lachance, is a “really cool, distributed sound effect” amid a party atmosphere that’s spontaneous and mobile.

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Bestsellers – Week of February 13th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Two languages walk into a bar…

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Roger LeMoyne

Samir Khullar, the smarmy, potty-mouthed comedian who goes by Sugar Sammy, has a joke about the NDP in his new show. “Their slogan was ‘Working Together,’ ” he says, referring to the party’s unexpected breakthrough in Quebec in the last federal election, “but once they won it became ‘Holy S–t What Do We Do Now?’ ” The delivery, however, is hardly straightforward. He says the first part in English, the slogan and the bit about winning in French, then goes back to English for the punchline. He deliberately says the slogan with the tortured accent of an anglophone trying to speak French—“trah-vay-on en-som-bluh”—a not-very-subtle poke at the NDP’s earnest attempts to make the party appear more bilingual after its landslide win.

If you are a French person who doesn’t understand English, or if you’re an English person who doesn’t understand Quebec’s official language, then you’ll want to skip You’re Gonna Rire, Khullar’s new one-man show. Cheekily described as “50.5 per cent English, 49.5 per cent French” (another historical reference, this one to the 1995 referendum results), You’re Gonna Rire is thought to be the first bilingual stand-up comedy production in Canada.

There is a joke to be made about an Indian guy bridging the two solitudes—and yes, Khullar has one. But it certainly says something about Quebec, where English has long been seen as a threat, that You’re Gonna Rire has already sold out its 27-date run. “Five years ago this wouldn’t have happened,” Khullar said in an interview at Vallier, a francophone watering hole in Old Montreal. “When we get 1,000 positive comments, we don’t care about the three negative. Of course, it only takes one guy with a gun.”

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REVIEW: The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

Aung San Suu Kyi demanded a condition of Michael Aris, the English suitor who sought to marry her, before she would agree to the match: “I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”

Suu Kyi is the daughter of modern Burma’s greatest hero, Aung San, who led the country toward independence following the Second World War and died months before it was achieved. This history burdened Suu Kyi with great expectations, but for her first 42 years little suggested she might meet them. She had left Burma as a teenager and settled in Oxford with her scholar spouse and two children, but few achievements of her own.

All this changed in 1988, when she returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, as protests against the ruling military regime shook the country. The movement needed a symbol, a figure to rally around, and in a part of the world with a soft spot for familial dynasties, activists looked to Suu Kyi. And so the Oxford housewife, the “trailing spouse,” in the author’s words, found herself a vessel for the hopes of millions of Burmese.

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REVIEW: How It All Began

By Sarah Murdoch - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Charlotte, a retired English teacher, breaks her hip when she is knocked down by a mugger on her way home from the grocery store, and agrees to convalesce with Rose, her daughter, the personal assistant to Henry, which means Rose can’t accompany him to Manchester, where his lordship has been invited to speak, so Marion, his niece and an interior designer, agrees to go in Rose’s stead and leaves an affectionate voice mail to that effect on the cellphone of her lover Jeremy, which his wife, Stella, intercepts, resulting in Jeremy being summarily ejected from the marital home.

And that is just the beginning of How It All Began, Lively’s latest inquiry into the human heart. Here she explores how Charlotte’s fall sets in motion a cascade of unanticipated events for her characters. That one event leads to another, of course, is the bread and butter of storytelling (and life), but Lively wants to bring happenstance to the foreground, demanding that readers notice that chaos theory and the butterfly effect work their capricious magic even on everyday life.

Her characters’ stories are seamlessly interweaved as brief passages; the men and women are beautifully drawn, her rendering of contemporary London spot-on. This is Lively’s 17th novel for adults (she has written many more for children over her 40-year career). At this stage in her life (another great female British writer toiling late into old age), she seems to be drawn to her fictional contemporaries; certainly, her seventysomethings get the best parts.

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REVIEW: All That I Am

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

Fictionalizing real people and events is laden with benefits and peril: history provides stranger-than-fiction plots yet real-life characters are never fully the author’s own. That fact flits through the mind reading Funder’s riveting first novel tracing the story of four German anti-Nazi activists—the celebrated playwright Ernst Toller, the feminist writer Dora Fabian, her cousin Ruth Blatt and Blatt’s husband, journalist Hans Wesemann. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the four flee to London to continue their dangerous Resistance work.

The narrative unfolds in alternating chapters written by Ernst Toller and Ruth Blatt over a 63-year divide: Toller in 1939 as he finishes his autobiography in a New York hotel room; Blatt as an old woman living in Australia in 2002. The tale, packed with suspense, heroism and betrayal, illuminates a horrific era. Funder’s pellucid prose captures in equal measure political machinations, romantic intrigues and daily life in Bloomsbury amid the intelligentsia and aristocracy. (Even W.H. Auden makes an appearance.)

But Funder, author of the acclaimed Stasiland, uses the epic canvas for more: a meditation on love, loss and how life’s fabric is woven. The wise Blatt is a wry observer, noting a woman on the street is “as square-bottomed and tidy as a tug, a box of cakes dangling from a stork’s triangle from the plastic bag on her arm.” Reflecting on her deep bond with Fabian, she concludes you can’t ever get the “human measure” of someone you love: “You cannot see how someone so huge to you, so remarkable and unfathomable, can fit, complete, into that small skin.”

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REVIEW: The Lifespan of a Fact

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

The faceoff/collaboration between writer and fact-checker is invisible to most magazine readers, but stick-in-the-eye obvious to anyone who has toiled on either side of that divide. Umpired by an editor viewed as a slippery ally at best by both sides, such clashes often bring to mind Bismarck’s remark about sausages and legislation—reader, sometimes you don’t want to know what goes into the making of a magazine article—and are fodder for countless tales in the trade. But none quite like the one between D’Agata (writer) and Fingal (fact-checker), and not just because this epic battle went on for seven years.

Most writers would admit to a bias in favour of well-crafted sentences over clunkier versions that get the mere details straight, but few would cheerfully admit, as D’Agata does, to altering the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas given by a source “because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31,’ so I changed it.” Nor do most fact-checkers, not even truculent and ferociously keen interns like Fingal, take advantage of a friend’s Vegas wedding to wander the locales mentioned in an article, just to get a leg up on the assignment. With such players taking the stage, small wonder that the to and fro over the very first sentence of the article takes up two pages of the book.

The exchanges quickly degenerate from mutual incomprehension to sarcasm. After D’Agata explains, yet again, that he “streamlined” a quote to “create a bit of resonance—it’s what writers do,” Fingal replies, “Okay, so now I understand. The rules are: there are no rules, just so long as you make it pretty.”

D’Agata: “That’s a bulls–t interpretation of what I just said.”

Fingal: “I thought you were the great defender of people’s rights to ‘interpret’?”

Amusing as all this is, what makes the book compelling is the way the two men eventually develop a wary mutual respect. Lifespan becomes a sustained meditation on the differences, should there be any, between “truth” and “accuracy,” without offering any definitive answers.

REVIEW: Worth fighting for: Love, Loss, and Moving Forward

By Joanne Latimer - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

When movie star Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008, he and his wife of 32 years had already survived fame, failure, a miscarriage, his alcoholism, and rehab. “I felt finally beaten,” confesses Lisa Niemi Swayze in Worth Fighting For, a heartbreaking memoir about the battle to save her husband’s life. While this book follows shortly after Patrick’s autobiography, The Time of My Life (2009), co-written with Lisa, there is little overlap. A widow’s sequel about encroaching grief, loneliness and fear, it isn’t for sissies: don’t expect a “can-do” treatise on being a survivor.

Lisa bulldozed through her fear. She was determined to find an aggressive clinical trial for a new drug. She found the right oncologists. When, in the middle of scans, test results, chemo and blocked stents, Patrick shot a TV series, The Beast, in Chicago, Lisa was at his side every moment, handling logistics, transport, nutrition and meds. Her tireless contribution to his care threatens to capsize readers’ sympathy—especially when she convinces Patrick to force A&E to let her direct an episode of The Beast—but she wins us back when she forgets the scorekeeping and describes how Patrick’s illness made her intermittently angry, sad and guilty. This cycle is the same, no doubt, for celebrity spouses and civilians alike. Fame is not a factor when it comes to a “do not resuscitate” order for your spouse.

Patrick’s notoriety may be why readers pick up this book, but it isn’t what keeps them turning the pages. We get caught up in Lisa’s heartfelt contribution to a sad genre—the spouse’s procedural for terminal illness. Still, this particular reader has a note for the book’s editors: shame on you for allowing so many cringeworthy diary entries, ellipses, one-word paragraphs. And. One. Word. Sentences.

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.”

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‘Potted Potter’ comes to Toronto

By Jessica Allen - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:59 PM - 0 Comments

Jeff Turner and Dan Clarkson in Potted Potter (photo courtesy of Seabright Productions)

Two former BBC children’s hosts, Dan Clarkson And Jeff Turner, have co-written a hit show called, Potted Potter: The Unauthorized Harry Experience – A Parody by Dan and Jeff in which they’ve boiled down all seven of the Harry Potter books into 70 minutes. The two entertainers, who have affability to spare, also star in the production, playing every character in the hit show, which had four sold out runs in London and Edinburgh and generated rave reviews in the U.K. Toronto marks the show’s first North American stop. Dan and Jeff recently spoke with Maclean’s; they even performed the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in under a minute (almost). And we’ve got the video to prove it.

Q: How did you manage to get JK Rowling to give you guys her blessing?

Jeff: Well, some of her team came to the show very early on so obviously they know it’s happening and she knows it’s happening and that’s kind of where it’s at. We are very much the unauthorized Harry experience. But I mean, she’s been lovely because obviously she’s huge and powerful and could pretty much do anything, and yet we’re here in Toronto doing the show so we’re doing something right.

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How Whitney Houston changed MTV

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Race in popular culture is still a touchy subject, but Whitney Houston may be one of the people who made it a little less touchy: according to Tris McCall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, she and Michael Jackson played a crucial role “in the desegregation of MTV.”

The music video channel took over pop culture at a time when racial divisions were particularly acute in pop music, after the ferocious backlash against crossover forms like disco. It was often alleged that MTV was not a hospitable place for black performers, initially reluctant even to play Michael Jackson. “There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t used on MTV,” David Bowie said in 1983, to which MTV host Mark Goodman dismissively replied “we have to play music we think an entire country is going to like.”

Whitney Houston was one of the artists who proved Goodman wrong. In the mid-to-late ’80s, when Jackson and Prince weren’t making as many videos, it was Houston who became one of the signature artists on MTV: in a 1987 book on MTV culture, author E. Ann Kaplan wrote that “until the recent advent of Whitney Houston, Tina Turner was the only female black singer featured regularly, and even so, her videos were few and far between.” Houston’s famously eclectic, broadly-appealing style ruled out any attempts to pigeonhole her as appropriate for only one segment of the audience or one type of time slot. Like Jackson, she helped to erode the disco-era bias against dance music and its ability to appeal to white suburban viewers on MTV. Continue…

REVIEW: The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith

By Brian Bethune - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Polls recording the number of Americans who say they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon have held steady (at 25 per cent) for years, while the number who say the same about a gay person—now at 33 per cent—has been dropping. That raises the striking possibility that more Americans will soon be prepared to see a lesbian in the Oval Office than, say, Mitt Romney. Given that Mormonism is the all-American faith, the one religion rooted in the cultural DNA of the U.S. alone, the fact that so many Americans distrust and even hate it demands explanation. As this account by Bowman, a historian of religion who is a Mormon himself, makes clear, there is a lot of history between Americans and their native-born faith, much of it bloody.

Mormonism’s origins couldn’t have been more American. Its founding prophet Joseph Smith (1805-1844) grew up in northern New York state, known as the “burned-over district” for its fiery religious revivals. He was one of dozens of charismatic preachers of his day, all of whom, in Bowman’s lovely phrase, “heard the voices of angels outside their windows at night.” Even Mormonism’s bans on alcohol and tobacco are in the mainstream of 19th-century American Christianity.

But there are, of course, aspects well outside the norm too, including polygamy and, in the early days, a kind of communism. It was that last practice that brought the rapidly expanding faith into violent confrontation on the frontier, leading to Smith’s death when a mob stormed the Illinois jail where he was held, and leading also to the Mormons’ great trek westward, out of the U.S. to a new theocratic Zion in Utah.

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Bestsellers – Week of February 6th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:57 AM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

‘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:

Alberta ranch is home to lupine stars

By Anthony A. Davis - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Marie Schneider

As a car crunched up the dirt driveway to Andrew Simpson’s isolated ranch in the cattle country north of Calgary, his alarm systems went off. All 22 of them. It was a chorus of mournful howls that raised hairs on the neck.

There could hardly be better rural sentries than the wolves Simpson, 44, keeps on his ranch behind tall fences. “Don’t worry,” reassured Simpson as he opened the gate and his lupine sirens went up a few decibels. “They’re just saying hello.”

There are Arctic wolves and Canadian timber wolves with golden-eyed gazes and names such as Cooper, Tyka and Sweet Pea. A few lope gracefully across the grass to nuzzle Simpson, but it’s rare these days that the animal trainer gets to spend time with his pack. His company, Instinct, is in big demand for commercials, television and film. Though he trains other animals, including bears and big cats, wolves are 80 per cent of his business.

For the next two years much of Simpson’s time will be spent in China with a dozen assistants, raising and training a batch of wolf pups for their roles in a lavish Chinese production called Wolf Totem. Because his own wolves don’t resemble the smaller, redder breed found in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia where the film is set, Simpson had a Chinese zoo breed some animals so he could imprint himself on the offspring—he had to get them before they opened their eyes at 21 days.

“You have to bond with them and get that intimacy and friendship with them,” says Simpson, who started 12 months of training last fall. “If they don’t trust you, there’s no way they will do anything for you.”

With more than 150 films under his belt and numerous television shows, Wolf Totem is Simpson’s biggest project yet. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Enemy at the Gates), the $30-million film, tentatively scheduled for release in 2014, is one of the largest-budget Chinese-produced movies ever made. Based on a Chinese bestselling book, Wolf Totem follows a university student’s government assignment during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The young man, appalled by his job imposing agricultural collectives on Inner Mongolia’s sheepherders, encounters a pack of wolves and is enamoured by the harmonic way they and the herders live in nature.

Simpson grew up on an isolated 19,000-hectare estate in the Scottish Highlands owned by aluminum-maker Alcan, where his parents worked. He loved the country life, and was often found with a frog or a mouse in his pocket, but as a teenager he dreamed of being a film stuntman. One sleety day when he was 20, his brother, after seeing Mel Gibson’s Mad Max, quipped that Andrew could, being single, skip off to Australia if he wanted to. Days later he did. There he found work as an extra on A Cry in the Dark, the Meryl Streep drama about the mom who claimed her baby was snatched by a dingo. Simpson worked with the dingo trainer for three weeks and found stints as an extra or animal training assistant before moving to Canada and working with Vancouver’s Creative Animal Talent. A few years later he started his own agency.

Filming is not easy on man or beast, and can strain the bond of trust. In the 2009 French film Loup, the script called for an actor and a wolf to fall through thin ice on a river. When Simpson’s wolf Digger scrambled out of the freezing water with confusion in his eyes, the trainer towelled him off and took him to a warm truck. Then the scene had to be reshot. Digger spent the next three nights curled up on Simpson’s bed.

Olivier Horlait, a French filmmaker who worked on Loup, hired the Alberta trainer for his own film, Nicostratos le pélican, released last year in Europe. Filmed on a Greek island, Simpson trained eight pelicans for the story about a boy and a bird.

“Andrew was amazing,” says Horlait, adding that finding a similar calibre of trainer in Europe is difficult. “He thinks like a director. And what I learned from Andrew is that we can get performance from an animal softly. Never with hard orders or behaviour.”

Reality TV is caught faking it

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Wenn/Keystone Press

Everyone knows reality TV is fake. Or do they? It turns out a lot of people were surprised when news broke that a recently aired scene on Kourtney & Kim Take New York couldn’t have been real or unscripted. Kim Kardashian and her mother were shown in a car, discussing the state of her marriage to athlete Kris Humphries. “It was portrayed on the show as taking place in October in Dubai,” says Keith Girard, editor of the online magazine The Improper. But she and her mother were wearing the same clothes as in a paparazzi photo snapped a month after the marriage broke up—and everyone knows reality stars don’t wear the same outfit twice unless they’re on Survivor.

As with most reality shows, Kourtney & Kim producers insist everything that happens is real, and the only manipulation is in editing of the real events; the host of The Bachelor, Chris Harrison, insisted last year that “the only fake thing on the show is me.” But the mix-up of dates and times on the Kardashian show seemed to confirm what a lot of people suspected: as Girard says, producers “attempted to backfill the storyline” to create a fictional substitute for events they didn’t have on tape.

Several media outlets pounced on Kim’s apparent foray into fiction. “The reaction to the story has been overwhelming,” says Lauren Rounseville, a writer for Reality Tea, one of the first sites to break the story. Other publications hinted this is par for the course: a source told the New York Daily News that “all reality shows are faked.” Girard notes that there have been other such reports, including charges that the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills “never socialize or interact with each other when cameras aren’t rolling,” and that everything they do is staged for the cameras. These reports, taken together, could have been reality’s version of the game show scandals of the 1950s: Girard says we’re learning that networks “have every incentive to coach the players, fabricate confrontations, fake scenes and create controversy just as the networks did with game shows.”

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