Just a wee link...

... to a Daily article of mine on two new city films: Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy and Terence Davies's Of Time and the City.

View it here.

TIFF kicks off

If I haven't been blogging much in the last month, I DEFINITELY will not be doing much for the next ten days. I will, however, refer you to the online extracts for the Toronto International Film Festival Daily, for which I am Editor-in-Chief this year.

Happy reading!

Alt Cinema(s)

So, sometimes it takes a kick in the head to get me back into things, and the kicks have been flying thick and fast, at least cinema-wise, lately.

I have found myself knee-deep in the annual floodwaters of preparations for TIFF, working the fifteen-hour days, trying to convince a crew of highly motivated new staff that they need to stay even more motivated throughout the grueling next few weeks, and trying to pry programme notes from the programming team who are as busy as usual corralling new films from around the world to bring to Festival audiences.

I last posted in May; I blinked, and it was almost August. Sad, but also exciting as the summer has delivered some amazing films. The TIFF selection will have to be something I - hopefully - talk about in subsequent posts (though I certainly draw everyone's attention to Us Chickens, a stunning film that is playing in the Festival's Short Cuts Canada programme...). Instead, I wanted to write about two recent, both rather pulpy movie-going experiences: the drive-in and the Trash Palace.

First, the Drive-In.

What does it say about how incomplete my graduate education has been that, while already an ABD in film studies, I had never been to a real drive-in movie until two weekends ago? (I use the qualifier "real" here to keep myself honest, as I once sat in my car in an alley behind a business supply store in Hollywood, trying to stay awake through the projection of an LA indie filmmaker's "pirate" drive-in. I remember some incredibly befuddled narrative, maybe something involving an island, and a desperate, unrequited craving for licorice.) So, after discovering that The North York Drive In Theatre was close enough to make a night of it, plans were hatched.

I suppose I imagined that the only things that still played on drive-in screens would be retro films... something animated by Ray Harryhausen maybe... So seeing The Dark Knight (the first half of a double bill with Get Smart) the Saturday after it opened and set box-office records across North America was not what I had expected. Afterall, the people who are really geeking out about it are freaking about seeing it in Imax. It is a visually lavish, Michael Mann-esque city film that revels in reflections, steel, glass and no small amount of flame, so waiting til the last bits of twilight are faded and trying to take it all in through a dashboard, with the occasional flitting-bys of nighttime bugs and the incessant distortion of the radio sound system, is probably not high on a lot of would-be viewers' lists.

But the experience was perfect. There are many glowing (yes, truly) things that I would say about the film, almost all of which relate to Heath Ledger's Phantom-esque turn as the Joker, and director Christopher Nolan's brilliant decision to make this a film about the villain more so than the hero.
The longer I sit with this film, the more I wind up thinking about its incredible moments of near-orchestral beauty (the image here epitomizing that facet of the film for me) and strange humanism. (On another day, with more time, I'd like to write about the "strange humanism" of the superhero genre more generally.) And the longer I think about how truly amazing Ledger's performance really was. I assume Jack Nicholson has been looking back at his own work in the 1989 Batman and lamenting what could have been.

But the things I liked about the film were only part of what I loved about the drive-in. Let me paint the picture. The North York Drive In is not, in actuality, in North York, but rather in the area of Holland Landing, outside of Newmarket, Ontario. It is, in effect, in that gray zone where a small suburban city like Newmarket rubs up against its completely, fantastically rural surrounds. The crowd was, I'd say, drawn from these communities. I felt like we stuck out rather obviously... not so much for our "urban" conspicuousness, however, as for our evident rookie approach to the event. Sure, we were there two hours ahead of sundown, anxious not to be shut out on the blockbuster's opening weekend. And naturally we brought a picnic, including a couple of tall cans of Strongbow. But we still lacked even the basic fundamentals: lawnchairs, a frisbee, a deck of cards, about twenty noisy, cigarette-smoking friends (that seemed to be a popular accessory), dogs, air mattresses, even laptops such as the one on which the middle-aged couple next to us watched another movie (Batman Begins?) during the wait til twilight. We brought snacks, and some work to edit.

The drive-in has three screens, the audience for each of which no doubt formed separate small communities, so I can't really say what went on in the parking lots for Mamma Mia or Hellboy 2. But at Screen 1, a carnival broke out. Children ran willy nilly like something out of a Roald Dahl tale; entire families seemed to gather; and eventually, as though everyone knew the code and as though the 1960s-era concession stand had sold its last freezie pop, the horns and flashing headlights started... a subtle inveigling to the (presumably) veteran projectionist camped away in the bunker-style booth (the door of which, strangely, seemed to be barred from the outside...) to start the show.

And start it did. The night unfolded despite audio difficulties (I don't think drive-in broadcast systems are especially satellite-radio-friendly), bugs, humidity, rain and even, eventually, Get Smart, leaving me with a newfound respect for the event of cinema and the communities it creates. Something was different from the usual anonymity of theatre-going at the drive-in. It didn't change the way I felt about the film, so much as the way I felt about watching a film. Taking part in a really, really old concept, going to the movies felt new again, and that was a powerful thing.

And then there was Trash Palace.

What can I really say about the Trash Palace? Check out the link and you will see just how much irony inheres in their self-description as Toronto's "classiest cinema." A labour of love for local print-shop runner and film-print collector Stacey Case, who devotes the 1,800 square feet of his shop to screenings every second Friday night, the Trash Palace is a shrine for the scummiest, B-filmiest, most pulpy cinema out there. We were invited by friends who moved to Toronto just over a year ago, and how they found out about the hushed-up screening programme before I did is something of a puzzle for me. The procedures for getting tickets are somewhat arcane - involving being at a certain coffee shop, at a certain time, on a certain day, as near as I can tell - and the address kept secret until you are officially a paid customer.

The roster of films, including pre-feature shorts (mostly trailers for some of the most egregiously unscary B-horrors ever made with some of the scariest, campiest soft core ever produced alongside them), are luridly, startlingly bad; so horrible they're amazing. Once discovering the secret downtown print-shop turned B-movie grotto, the uninitiated go underground into a realm of really uncomfortable seats (kinda like being back in the Spanish class room at my high school), where one can buy a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for $3, can pee in a bathroom that's a like a glorified outhouse all dolled up (rather literally) in retro kitsh, and can - if one has purchased a membership - locate their card on the wall and punch it in on the time clock. And one can join a surprising, small population of hipsters and cinephiles and watch a film like The Thing with Two Heads, a social-problem horror film that borrows as much from blaxploitation and Dukes of Hazard's cop-hating car chases as from Frankenstein. It cannot easily be described. All I'll say is: two heads, one body; a monster at the motocross course; and a final scene in which three characters (one of whom recently lost some irksome extra weight that looked a lot like Ray Milland) driving off singing "Oh Happy Day." (Perhaps they were heading to their local drive-in?)

The feature was preceded by a (too long) short film produced decades ago by the Dairy Farmers' Association of America (I think), designed to terrify bankers with a Machiavellian hybrid of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and It's a Wonderful Life that would convince them to invest in more milk farmers.

There were shrieks and giggles, give-aways and custom-made truffles shaped like the Thing with Two Heads, and there were even some yawns as the feature's long final-reel chase sequence, well, dragged. But, in a way much like the experience I had at the drive in less than a week before it, last Friday's trip to the Trash Palace thrilled me. For someone working two jobs (a job with two heads?) related to cinema, and for whom film is a constant backdrop, generally associated with stress and to-do lists, it was amazing to make an event of the movies... even if what was onscreen was downright trashy.

Man on Wire ... coming soon

This is cheating. I am a dirty, despicable, cheater of a blogger... This is not the post on the documentary Man on Wire -- about tightrope walking urban interventionist Philippe Petit -- that I have been meaning to write for a few weeks. Rather, this is a placeholder... a slight glimmer of hope that this humble blog is not entirely dead in the water.

The film was fantastic. The feat that inspired it even more so. I will write about them soon.

The Incomplete Age

Clearly, "completion" as a concept has been a challenge for me lately, as I have tried to make great strides with my dissertation while on a leave of absence from work. Every moment I am not typing great and meaningful things is laden with guilt. Even when I have been writing away at chapters, I've allowed a drought of posts here on my poor, infant blog to cause me no end of remorse and bad feeling.

So, wrapping these emotions up with the novel that I have recently begun to read, The Book of Dave, by Will Self, I found myself puzzling over a web-era phenomenon this morning: that is, all the languished, obsolete blogs that have been started then abandoned by well-intentioned folks across the past decade. The picture below is a screen-grab of the first blog I ever started, which was born - and died - in May of 2005. It only ever had one post, in which I referenced all the things I'd write about: film, travel, politics on either side of the border, life between Toronto and Los Angeles, etc. Poor Exorbitant City might have met a similar fate were it not for today's flurry of inspiration. (Of course, it likely will yet.)


The descriptor given atop the page on my first blog informed my non-existent readership that this blog was to be "the only solution to a peripatetic, transnational, time-sapped existence in which i am never everywhere at once." The chosen design was garishly pink. Somehow, I recall sorting out the code to give the website a custom icon to appear in the navigation bar... that's still the way it appears in my Mozilla bookmarks list, though I guess the uploaded image has died a natural death, since it does not seem to load that way any more. The few scraps of writing to be found on the page are over-wrought, if sincere and, well, well intended.

I cannot make this blog disappear from the web. The email account to which it was tied is dead, so I cannot find the way to access "the dashboard" for the corresponding user and delete it. So out there it stays, floating on the net waiting for nothing in particular except my periodic checks to see if it is still there.

Or, perhaps, waiting for some future researcher to come along and sweep it into a net with thousands of other samples from The Incomplete Age. This is where The Book of Dave is no doubt taking over my thinking. The novel is, in part, about the radical attempts at interpretation (and the resulting misinterpretation) of a London cabbie's notebooks -- written during our epoch -- by a post-apocalyptic English society centuries after. His histrionic rantings are taken as nothing short of scripture and tremendous social consequences follow from that.

But think about it for a moment: all the detritus out on the web now... those very personal, well-intended blogs started to commemorate a group or a university seminar, to help keep people in touch over long distances, to document a love of experimenting with different recipes involving stout ale, and what-have-you, that got off the ground and then fell into neglect. Are these the cave drawings that anthropologists of some future era will sift through trying to understand that cryptic period in which the web exploded into life? What will they deduce? That we were a society with great promise and a tremendous affinity for beginnings, but with very , very poor follow-through? That we didn't clean up the virtual mess we made any better than the environmental one? That some of us misunderstood the word peripatetic? Will we be labeled "The Incomplete Age," laughed at beside the Stone, Industrial or even early Electronic ages for our megalomania and lassitude? All because I can't delete that old blog or may, one day, let this one die?

Reasons I Wish I Was Teaching...

... an undergraduate class on Ideological Hollywood:

(It's only one reason, actually...)

Drillbit Taylor.

It amazes me that this film was released. (Why did I go see it, you ask? I was both desperate for something fluffily non-dissertation-related and wrongly sympathetic to the plight of poor, charming Owen Wilson. I figured that if his movie tanks, he might try to do himself injury again. Little did I realize that this movie has to have been why he tried to do himself injury in the first place.)

Drillbit Taylor...
... glorifies high-school violence and resolution of said violence through front-yard ultimate-fighting showdowns in which the morally just will no doubt prevail.
... makes a mockery of a very really problem of security in America's schools.
... allegorizes (in the least subtle way imaginable) a lovely, humble, nature-loving and fundamentally sweet American soldiery that is unwilling to commit or witness any violence whatsoever... until someone it loves gets hurt. Then it (Drillbit, natch) will destroy you with lethal force and the commendations of all, all while blithely laughing off the loss of a little finger. (In non-allegorical terms here, we are no doubt reckoning with the equation that reasonable losses are to be expected if peace and security are to be ensured.)

Have you seen this movie? Probably not. It's a disaster. Badly made, ideologically Frankensteinian and offensive to: teenagers, adults, twins, rappers, the homeless, Canadians, Americans, Asians (I could go on at length about the sub-plot regarding how the homicidal high-school bully is portrayed as a grossly affluent "emancipated minor" whose indifferent parents have shipped him to LA from Hong Kong), Owen Wilson, you, me and Dupree.

Progress

Criminy! Way too long since a post, and I have a great deal of things back-logged to post about... another day. In the interim, I'm pleased to report that as of about a week ago, we have floors once more and as of pretty much yesterday, we've got the place not only set up, but better than ever.

(Now, however, after another massive snow storm and no resealing of the balcony - yet - by the condo management company, we're more than a tad worried about a repeat of the Dread January Flood... )

Also pleased to report that I'm finishing a chapter tonight. I'm on official leaves of absence from both work and my graduate department... on the surface of it, one might think I was living the most leisurely life ever seen... instead, the days are filled by the constant fear of looming deadlines, clicking clocks, turning calendar pages (note the intentional cinematic cliche) and, not nearly as often as I'd hoped, fits of mercifully prolific writing.

Everything else, including my planned/hoped-for response to this post at BLDGBLOG on architectural paranoia, anon... And, in that vein, here's a still from Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, one of the films that figures into my discussion of urban paranoia in Chapter 2.

And, yes, I am acutely aware that this blog long ago became an exercise in deferring tasks. One day, that diss will be done and gone and I will post non-stop. Then you'll be sorry.