TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

Closed circuit: You Are Here

A lecturer (R.D. Reid) stands before a projected image of rolling waves. He should like to instruct us in serenity and solitude. He warns us against the perils of allowing our eyes to follow the red dot darting across the screen, emanating from his laser pointer. The threat of the red dot isn’t specified, but the lecturer’s warning, stated at the very start of You Are Here, Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut, serves as a reminder that there may still be something dangerous about taking instruction, submitting to direction, or simply watching a movie.

Such deliberately vague portent clings to every new realm of activity introduced in You Are Here: the discovery made by a bunch of people named Alan (not a typo) of a door where there should not be a door; the control centre where dispatchers give directions to individuals walking the city streets, emissaries whose trajectories are without apparent purpose save the avoidance of convergence; the prisoner (Anand Rajaram) who has pages of Chinese script shoved under the door and must then consult a voluminous text entitled What To Do If They Shove Chinese Writing Under The Door; the abandoned things appropriated by a self-appointed archivist (Tracy Wright), each containing recorded information, in varying formats, that may or may not add up to anything yet compel her to provide them with a home.

Each realm of activity, or thought experiment, constitutes a plastic component of You Are Here’s ornate circuitry—which is itself the film’s protagonist. At times this circuitry hints at a critique of technology’s promise to track and organize every last item in the world for posterity; at others it alludes to forms of interconnectivity that can only be understood once the individual (ie: one of those emissaries told not to interact with the other emissaries) rebels agains the dominant hegemony. Which is to say that You Are Here is playful, enigmatic and very cerebral. If the larger meaning strikes you as elusive, then you’ve just about got the point.

Press materials and clippings about the film keep invoking Jorge Luis Borges (though, given the film’s interest in found things and urban geography, I think Paul Auster is a more apt literary allusion) and Charlie Kaufman (though, given the film’s preoccupation with interlocking structures, I think Christopher Nolan is a more apt cinematic allusion), but such comparisons should come with one major caveat: each of these artists are storytellers (yes, Borges included), as engaged with narrative and character, with form and meaning, as they are with metaphor. You Are Here is fun, smart, inventive, and enjoyably puzzling—to be sure, I recommend it—it’s also pretty cold, and satisfies itself above all through the realization and careful arrangement of its concepts.

You Are Here is now playing at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. It opens at Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Monday.

Trigger: the song has ended, but the memory lingers on

Trigger opens with a series of brief clips from a rock and roll show: two women on stage, chugging through tunes, the guitar player all shaggy hair and finger-fumbling grace, the singer preening. They exchange licks, both figuratively and literally. These excerpts unfold in a staccato rhythm that suggests something of the visceral, choppy energy of the music we imagine they’re playing, though we can’t hear it. The images are bathed in a soft string-laden drone peppered with stray notes from a piano; they’re over-exposed, the women’s skin bleached out, masking age, bringing things closer to a feeling of timelessness.

The dissonance between the sound and images evokes the distance between an event and its oft-replayed memory. This wordless montage is one of the strongest sequences in the film, cutting to the heart of this story that’s rather less about the music life than it is about friendship, recovery and time. Trigger is a love story of sorts, between two old collaborator-antagonists who reunite uneasily in middle-age, years after they called it quits. It’s now available on DVD from Entertainment One.

Trigger is also the last screen performance from Tracy Wright, who died shortly after the production wrapped from pancreatic cancer. Her ghost looms heavily over the film, not only because she was such a wonderful, sadly under-used talent, but because she really is the heart and soul of this project. Molly Parker as Kat, the aforementioned preener, gives a performance that’s typically precise and even heartfelt, but Wright’s Vic is the more convincing as a veteran rock and roller struggling to stay clean. She comes across as someone who’s burned out more than once, or, as she puts it, someone who’s had mornings where she’s woken up disappointed to still be alive.

Director Bruce McDonald seems to be in his element here, a maker of feature films (among them Highway 61 and the mighty Hard Core Logo) who sometimes seems to long for movies that can skip that story stuff and just cut to the rock show parts (i.e.: This Movie is Broken). But Trigger has its awkward moments (the evil twin bits, the longer monologues), partly because the script from the great playwright, filmmaker and actor Daniel MacIvor is at times too eloquent, too theatrical-sounding, in the words it gives its actors to speak. It’s a cliché to think of rock and roll as inarticulate and crude, but I still think Trigger could have used a few rougher edges--though let it be said that I’ll take flowery MacIvor over the prose of most screenwriters any day.

Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.

Hiding all over the world: Hot Docs 2011

The 2011 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival draws to a close today in Toronto, where the belated arrival of spring has failed to lure filmgoers away from lining up and huddling into theatres throughout the city. I’m at least sitting near a sun-warmed window as I write this, my report on some of the festival’s highlights, in a quiet converted coach house deep in Parkdale, hidden off Sorauren Avenue, where it’s slightly easier to reenter my unlikely to ever be realized fantasy of hiding from the world altogether.

The hermits, monks, freaks, fascists, dropouts, druggies and survivalists of French filmmakers Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove’s Somewhere to Disappear, all of them male, all of them American, all of them unmistakably incurable misfits of one kind or another, have gone to greater lengths to hide from the world than most of us could ever fathom. Flammarion and Uyttenhove’s film is the product of a protracted road trip with US photographer Alec Soth, who has forged an ongoing project out of making portraits of those who have attempted to fall off the grid, nearly all of whom, ironically, are more than happy to be photographed and to talk about their lives once tracked down in their hovels, shacks, caves and campsites. Soth spends part of Somewhere to Disappear shopping around for a remote piece of land of his own, yet he confesses that what appeals to him is not genuine escape from civilization but “the idea of escape.” He’s an artist, not a recluse. He wants to get a lost a little, “to be carried along,” yet he keeps a GPS on the dashboard of his minivan. He’s our surrogate, cruising the outer margins to convey the eerie allure and obvious hazards of life lived in rejection of all we take for granted. The filmmaking in Somewhere to Disappear is (perhaps inevitably) grubby, lacking the distinct highly personal perspective, craft and precision of Soth’s work, but it ultimately serves its theme very well, evoking a sense of rough roads rarely taken, rabbit holes in a world hard at work to keep its every corner tracked and measured, hovering in cyberspace.

Bobby Fischer tried to hide from the world, but it’s not so easy to pull off when you’re the greatest chess player in history, an ideological pawn in Cold War one-upmanship, and quite probably, and flamboyantly, mentally ill. Liz Garbus’ Bobby Fischer Against the World attempts to map out Fischer’s story, his peculiar and precarious sort of single-minded genius, his uneasy relationship with fame and urge toward isolation, his erratic behaviour and the grotesque politics he adopted late in life. She doesn’t entirely succeed, utilizing a treasure trove of archival images and footage and drawing upon a number of fascinating interviews with Fischer’s colleagues, but arranging these pieces into a somewhat muddy narrative arc that more than once abandons the path it seems briefly invested in. If you don’t know chess deeply, the film doesn’t help you much, and once it does begin to offer some insights, it does so only after working through the period in Fischer’s life when understanding chess is most useful. The general style of this HBO production is perfectly conventional, though, given the amount of biographical information and cultural context it wants to convey, its structure finally feels not quite conventional enough. Still, Fischer’s a fascinating figure who couldn’t resist the opportunity to expose some parts of his troubled psyche to the public, so the film, flawed or not, is very much worth watching.

The Forgotten Space (pictured both above and in the lead-off image), easily the finest work I caught at Hot Docs this year, is a collaboration between photographer Allan Sekula and theorist Noël Burch, a sort of follow-up to Sekula’s 1995 book Fish Story. This “film essay,” shot on both Super 16mm and digital video, traverses the world to investigate the global transportation industry, so much of which remains hidden or invisible to consumers, exploits labour, and undercuts the economies of developing countries. Sekula and Burch are especially interested in sea transport, in the “floating warehouses” that, for example, carry cod from the North Atlantic to China for cheap filleting and then sends it back again, or moves American wastepaper to recycling factories in the developing world. 90% of the world’s commerce travels by sea, packed into shipping crates than renders the cargo anonymous, unloaded in yards where its shuffled around by robots and rarely inspected, even in the post-9/11 US. As an elegantly structured critique of late capitalism whose visual refrain is an image of ships sailing onward, it’s tempting to think of The Forgotten Space as the coherent version of Godard’s Film Socialisme, but this is finally a very distinct, arguably singular kind of film, its discourse so thoroughly grounded in interviews (with laborers, with historians, with the homeless) that you occasionally forget how exactingly conceived it all is.

A price and consent: Chester Brown on sex, choice, and Paying For It

Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) begins with a depiction of the author’s amicable break-up with his third and what turned out to be final girlfriend, the actress and former VJ Sook-Yin Lee. The year is 1996. Chester Brown was only in his mid-30s. In the subsequent decade and a half Brown neither became a monk nor decided her preferred his own gender. Rather, after some hesitation, he started visiting sex workers, very gradually arrived at the conviction that what we conventionally call romantic love is bullshit, and that the world’s oldest profession is not only acceptable but that its decriminalization was a cause worth fighting for. Brown, who previously authored a celebrated comic-strip biography of the contentious 19th century Métis leader Louis Riel, is an intelligent, even-tempered artist whose work is consistently engaged in issues of individual freedom. Paying For It is an overtly politicized memoir. It’s not incidental that Brown has twice ran as the Libertarian Party candidate for Toronto’s Trinity-Spadina. (Monday’s election earned his 454 votes, placing him fifth in his riding.)

Paying For It is a fairly unusual graphical novel. An emblematic panel features Brown, rendered as rail-thin, his opaque spectacles obscuring his eyes, laying on his side, ding-dong dangling, in post-coital conversation. “My stuff’s quite different from Archie,” he explains to a sex worker curious about his profession. There’s much humour in the book, often arising from Brown’s politeness and uncertainty regarding etiquette. (Brown's customary neutral facial expressions, his Bressonian drawing style, if you will, also contributes to the overall air of deadpan humour.) One chapter finds him visiting a prostitute that continues to watch soaps during the entirety of their transaction. A not atypical line: “She began to lick and suck my balls. Not this again…” Brown is endearing in his attempts to communicate his needs with respect and clarity, but he insists that he’s a fairly typical john, and that the dangers associated with prostitution are grossly exaggerated or misunderstood. While compelling and entertaining, Paying For It, which features a number of sometimes heated conversations between Brown and his friends about prostitution, as well as a series of exhaustive, informative appendices, is very much a didactic book. That’s not slander—its didacticism is one of the book’s strongest attributes. And, once read, I can’t think of a single reason why any thoughtful person would dismiss it, regardless of how firm their feelings are on the subject.


JB: What do you think a comic-strip memoir about being a john offers that a strictly prose-based memoir wouldn’t?

Chester Brown: I’m not sure that there are advantages. In fact, there’s a disadvantage in it because of my decision not to show the faces of the women. It might have been easier to protect their identities in a prose work without the disguising device being so intrusive.

JB: Let’s talk about that. The book’s foreword explains how important it was for you to not include any details in Paying For It that might endanger the privacy of the sex workers you’ve visited. Did you ever consider contacting some of them to ask if you could include their personal stories?

CB: In most cases I don’t think I would have been able to track them down. I’m not sure I would even know how to go about that. Obviously, I showed the book to the woman I’m currently having sex with. Other than her there are two prostitutes that I might have been able to get in contact with, but it didn’t occur to me to try. Maybe I should have.


JB: You’re meticulous about facts, very precise about dates. I don’t know that people read a literary memoir expecting it to be purely factual, and when you read a memoir in comic-strip form it’s that much more obvious that the form itself will impose a certain layer of artifice.

CB: You may be right. There was a point where I was considering doing Paying For It as fiction. But because I really believed in this as a cause, I felt that the message would come across better if I was clearly speaking from personal experience, that creative license was not an option.

JB: Paying For It addresses very thoroughly the question of romantic love and whether it holds any inherent value, but something that isn’t directly addressed is the idea of seduction. When your sexual activities are pre-arranged and the transaction makes explicit what’s expected from both parties, do you ever miss the ambiguity or anticipation of seduction?

CB: I never liked that part of romantic love, the uncertainty of what was going to happen. I can see why some people do, but it’s not something I responded to. I prefer things this way, where it’s clear what’s going to happen. Although things don’t always happen the way you hope. You can see in the book that in more than one case I ended up not having sex with the woman I’d arranged to see, so there is still some element of uncertainty.


JB: The most interesting narrative thread in Paying For It comes from seeing your attitudes toward love and sex shift as you try to sort out your feelings and arguments about being a john. The book closes on a really interesting note, with your relationship with the prostitute “Denise,” one that’s gone on now for years and seems to be exclusive. Would you describe this relationship as your compromise between conventional romantic love and financially arranged sex? There’s the implication that you enjoy a kind of companionship, which some would consider the central benefit of long-term romance.

CB: It’s certainly a relationship that brings both of us some degree of emotional comfort, though without the disadvantages of what most people consider to be romantic love, what I call possessive monogamy. There’s that whole question of what is romantic love. Toward the end of the book I have several people trying to define it. Depending on your definition, I could characterize my feelings for Denise as feelings of romantic love, but there are surely some people whose definitions would not accommodate our relationship at all. So I’m leaving that a bit open. I have deep feelings for this woman, but because we’re not trying to pin it down, because we’ve made no formal commitment to each other, what we’re engaged in is distinct from what a lot of people want from romantic love.

JB: I’m personally hoping that you continue to develop autobiographical work. One of the demands of that path is the willingness to keep interrogating some unresolved aspect of your life. Now that you’ve published Paying For It, do you feel there are any aspects of your private life that will remain off-limits, or is it all up for grabs?

CB: Unfortunately, there are things that do have to remain off-limits. We’ve been talking about Denise. You may recall she has that line where she says that she’d appreciate it if I put her in the book as little as possible. If I’d told the complete truth about our relationship and how it developed, that would have made a much better book. But I can’t talk about that stuff. I have to respect her wishes. I can’t see her changing her mind about that in the future. So she being a big part of my life means there’s a big part of my life I can’t talk about. With regards to other aspects, we’ll see. There might be some other interesting things that happen to me that I’ll be able to write about. I have no idea what they’ll be, but hopefully that’s part of what will make them relevant when they appear.

Images 2011: Two images, one colossal sound, and water, water everywhere

The first screening of the 2011 Images Festival (not counting the “bonus” pre-fest ‘Landscape as Expression’ series, which included a Chris Marker) was Lou Li’s Rivers and My Father. The first river that appears in Rivers and My Father is a miniature, almost obsidian stream flowing along an undulation in some rain-dappled pavement, a gorgeous image, plucked from the banal and hoisted up onto the screen to hurl the viewer into watery reverie, one of several strong images scattered throughout the film, though the only one with such velvety texture. Shot in black and white, Rivers and My Father shifts from Canada to China and back again. It features maps, children, water and various forms of transportation, and recreates by the simplest possible means memories of the filmmaker’s father, prompted by said father’s memoir, entitled An Account at 60. The film becomes a platform for dialogue between father and son. Stories are told over suppers and lunches. Dudes wearing fanny-packs push scooters up stone steps. A child rides a train with a broken leg. The whole thing ends, delightfully, with a detailed critique of the film thus far from the father and the son’s equally exhaustive response. The tone remains tranquil, or sometimes just sleepy, with the filmmaker’s soft-spoken voice-over and the film’s hazy grey scale. Certain sequences lack rhythm, while others come to life via stirring discoveries or amusing discrepancies, or thanks to a quiet sense of mischief that arises in unexpected moments. Rivers and My Father won this year’s Images Prize.


Lina Rodriguez’s silent, three-minute ‘Einschnitte,’ screened in the 'Stone and Salt and Stars and Skin' program, was gleaned from three rolls of Super 8 shot while the filmmaker traversed Europe before being blown up to 35mm. It is a collage of details of aging monuments, never providing context nor revealing the sculptures in full, thus stripping them of their ostensible meanings and emphasizing surface. The imprint of history lies only in the sensual smoothness of time’s eroding effects. There are many cuts given the subject and run-time, and through these cuts we sense a suppleness, a fluidity in the immobile. That’s the element I found most alluring. The feeling that one carved slab of stone was reaching out to touch another.


Images closed with a work that combined old images with new sounds. Tod Browning’s exotic, progeny-obsessed 1928 revenge drama West of Zanzibar was shown in a 35mm print, courtesy of George Eastman House, in the hidden yet massive subterranean movie palace that is the domain of Toronto Underground Cinema. A live score was performed by Toronto’s own Fucked Up, a band that if nothing else possesses the ideal moniker to accompany Browning’s wonderfully perverse masterpiece, in which the amazing Lon Chaney, with lame legs and shaved head, lives in an African veldt where he turns the natives into slaves and fellow American ex-pats into drunkards, patiently plots against the man who cuckolded him 20 years ago, and snuggles a chimp. Fucked Up constructs a colossal sound from the get-go, with two-chord snap-crackle building and building along to thunderous drums. Eventually you get thundered out: the thunder is utterly impressive in its own right, yet makes it tough to fully become absorbed in the bizarre narrative unfolding and the subtleties of Chaney’s performance in particular. The term ‘silent film’ is something of a misnomer generally, but when Fucked Up arrive on the scene it assumes a new level of irony. I did very much enjoy the well-oiled African dancers rocking out to what becomes the world’s loudest acoustic guitar performance.

Herrmann, Welles, War, Time, Art(ifice)

Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of all film composers, died on Christmas Eve, 1975, expelling his final breath, as legend has it, shortly after completing the score for Taxi Driver, his final masterpiece. Were Herrmann still with us we'd be celebrating his 100th birthday this June. The coming of the Herrmann centenary was the first prompt for the Art of Time Ensemble's production of The War of The Worlds, which opened at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre in Toronto on Thursday and closes this afternoon. I attended last night, along with a packed house that included Micheal Ondaatje and Atom Egoyan. Yet, since the original Mercury Theatre/CBS Radio broadcast did not actually feature much in the way of original music from Herrmann, Art of Time decided to preface their man event with a marvellous surprise: a suite of Herrmann's film music inventively pastiched and arranged by Dan Parr, accompanied by a wonderful montage of images from the films referenced. Thus, as the music undulates with doomed romanticism, shrieks and bellows, whirlpools and crashes, the paths of Marion Crane and Travis Bickle, Max Cady and Charles Foster Kane, cross in dream-space; Cary Grant's drunk driving leads to Robert Ryan's wintry footprints which lead to Jimmy Stewart's endless descent; plumes of NYC steam merge with the smoke of burning books; and Klaatu disintegrates rifles gripped by baffled US troops over and over in a lulling apocalyptic rhythm.

What followed intermission was a condensed recreation of Orson Welles' (in)famous 30 October, 1938 alien invasion radio drama. The stage became a studio, occupied by the Ensemble, conducted, as was the Herrmann suite, by Art of Time Artistic Director Andrew Burashko, a trio of actors, including Don McKellar in the Welles roles, and Foley maestro John Gzowski, all of them in period dress, shirt sleeves rolled up, Luckys dangling from their lips, huddling around elegant chrome microphone stands under a suspended glowing sign announcing that we are ON THE AIR. I loved it when all the musicians joined in the vocal hubub to scream together in deathly agony the alien slaughter of earthlings commences, some of them cracking up while doing so. The Brechtian dissonance between the visual and aural experience made for superb entertainment: laughs when eyes were open, chills when shut. Gzowski was inevitably the star of the show, darting silently in stocking feet between a dozen or more bizarre devices, including, of course, a Theremin. It took a moment to adapt to McKellar, given that some degree of imitation is inevitable and he simply doesn't possess Welles' full-bodied resonance, but his cadences were nearly impeccable, his readings compelling, and the prankster's focus he conveyed while instructing his collaborators his impatient gesture and eye contact added to the sense of Halloween mischief.

The most captivating passage of The War of the Worlds however arrived with the broadcast's final section (the one I completely forgot about), in which the mock-live reportage falls away and is replaced by what is virtually a monologue, backed by eerie underscoring, from a lone survivor of the Martian attacks describing in past-tense his journey through the ruins of New York and New Jersey. This part was read by Nicholas Campbell, whose hair has turned white sometime in the past few years, and who settled in under spotlight and delivered a performance of engrossing intimacy, at once playing it for the microphone and, more subtly, the watching audience.

Tracy Wright, 1959-2010

One of Toronto's finest talents, a subtle, deeply funny and adventurous actor of stage and screen, has gone way, way, way before her number should have been up. The partner of frequent collaborator Don McKellar, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer only six-and-a-half months ago. Her film credits include Monkey Warfare (2006), Me and You and Everyone We Know (05), Last Night (98), and Highway 61 (91). Trigger, Wright's final film role, co-starring Molly Parker, directed by Bruce McDonald, and written, specifically for Wright, by Daniel MacIvor, is in post-production.

Super-fluous: Kick-Ass

Teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) tires of bribing bullies, lusting after babes who ignore him, and jerking off over National Geographic, so he buys a diving suit online and becomes a superhero. He gets his ass kicked, which only makes him tougher, but he still lacks the skills to take on serious scumbags, so Dave, alias Kick-Ass, joins forces with Damon Macready, alias Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), an ex-cop and ex-con hell-bent on exacting revenge on a local crime lord for ruining his life, and Mindy Macready, alias Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz), Damon’s adorable 11-year-old daughter. We first meet this curious pair when Big Daddy is firing a round into his darling child's chest (she's wearing a vest) in some abandoned lot. Both are highly trained, armed to the teeth, and eager to slaughter.

The thing about Kick-Ass, adapted from Mark Millar’s comic, is that it presents itself as irreverent, quirky, and iconoclastic, the story of an ordinary goofy youth who hurls himself absurdly and recklessly into harm’s way. But the promise of not-another-superhero movie is thwarted by an over-stuffed plot that’s finally exactly like every other superhero movie, complete with extra-gory spectacle, fantastic technology, multiple deus ex machinas, and that final bit where the surviving villain vows to return, offering abundant franchise investments. Kick-Ass is supremely conservative in both senses, falling in line with genre clichés and oozing ultra-right wing vigilante revenge fantasy.

If Kick-Ass were more adolescent comedy and less bloated actioner it might have distinguished itself. Dave’s relationship with a girl who only becomes his friend because she thinks he’s gay could have been developed into something fun and insightful. The movie succeeds more with the smaller items than the grandiose ones, with imaginative little details like the duct-taped busted window at the school entrance, the dorky dinosaur stickers on Dave’s full-length mirror, or the poster announcing a band called Frantic Yogurt. However, the use of Toronto as a stand-in for New York reaches unintentionally hilarious heights of implausibility, with glimpses of Tim Horton’s and Country Style and umpteen car shots where our hero simply drives up and down Yonge Street past Dundas Square and the big HMV over and over. I’m surprised they managed to keep the CN Tower out of the establishing shots.

Manic repression: Sentimental Exorcisms

There are forms of oppression so subtle, draconian, and fully incorporated into our shared way of living as to press their hoary bulk upon us only in guises of kindness, invitation, and concern. The stifling embrace of altruism. Trevor Spate offers a curious case study. He’s a market analyst having some sex problems at home, which is to say he’s having a tough time working up the energy to perform the sex act with his wife Gillian. Gillian wants a baby, which, requiring sex, only increases the pressure. Trevor takes to visiting a peeler bar to get him in the mood, but his gallant efforts to defend the dignity of an ungrateful waitress—who not coincidentally resembles Gillian, at least from a certain distance—yield nothing but troubles. He’s forced to take a leave of absence, coerced into going into analysis as part of his legal defense, urged to visit his sister and brother-in-law and their wriggling new child in Tofino, of all places. Next thing you know he’s trapped with a self-described reformed rapist with a ponytail who co-opts Neil Young to justify his own neuroses and plies Trevor with experimental drugs that ostensibly produce only “positive emotions” and the most tender-loving desires. Trevor has fallen victim to the “tyranny of sympathy.”

Trevor’s one of several such protagonists inhabiting Sentimental Exorcisms (Coach House Books, $18.95), Toronto author David Derry’s eloquently titled debut, a collection of blackly comic stories in which the Victorian era lives on in the collective unconscious of the white Canadian middleclass male. Stories in which no man is allowed to tend the garden of their own repressed impulses in peace. Stories of men with thorny mom and dad issues, neighbour issues, spouse issues, workplace issues, poo issues. In some cases organized transgression becomes a form of self-medication, but unforgiving society seems unable to appreciate such valiant efforts to take matters into one’s own hands. In Derry’s taut, arrestingly witty opening tale “one of the University of Toronto’s top English undergrads,” employing perfectly sound solipsistic logic, arrives at the conclusion that the only way to fully realize his inherent and sturdy normalcy is to extinguish his compulsion to peep through peeping. “Attainment is annihilation,” he explains. He buys a ladder and a painting suit. He limits his technically criminal therapy to two nights a week. If only he could just manage to see a woman sodomized then surely he would revert to the pristinely well-adjusted individual he and his looming parents know him to be. (In a sly bit of detail, Derry has his protagonist alternately studying The Portrait of Dorian Gray and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ both being works not only involving sexual repression, but more importantly, looking.)

David Derry, photo by Shannon Bramer

The risk with this sort of material is that the author inevitably condescends to his characters, smugly stacking their often-tormented psyches with so much fodder for gags cheap or otherwise. Derry largely avoids this through writing in the first-person and stressing identification through sheer desperation and what would appear to be a large number of characteristics shared by both the author and his creations. Only a short piece that takes the amusing form of a letter addressed to real-life author Austin Clarke—written by a lawyer convinced that two of Clarke’s stories were based on true events in which the lawyer himself played an instrumental role—seems to stumble through an awkward balance of exposition and the narrator’s somewhat tiring, pedantic tone. Yet the most sympathetic protagonist in Sentimental Exorcisms turns out to inhabit Derry’s only tale written in the third-person. The eponymous hero of ‘The Eventual Eponymization of Tim Pine’ is a Polish-Canadian stamp collector whose washroom experiences epitomize that horror of the log that won’t drown so often described by Slavoj Zizek. I mean it as no small compliment when I say that Derry really knows how to write shit. In the story of Tim Pine Derry transforms an innocent bowel movement into a form of disaster fiction. Here’s a sample:

The aforementioned swirls suggested heavy use, but the water had been clear, and he’s noticed nothing unusual in his advance flush. This time the contents gurgled and started to rise. Back up against the door, he fumbled the lock open, eye on the bowl, and twisted out of the stall with his belt still undone, as the soiled, matted surface paused at the rim before overflowing, just a trickle.

Coach House’s lovely packaging of Sentimental Exorcisms features reproductions of paintings by Greg Denton excerpted from a series entitled Out of Date: 365 Self Portraits. Denton himself joins Austin Clarke by playing an actual role in one of Derry’s stories. In ‘Greg Denton Dons Golden Threads in Anticipation’ a 42-year-old stockbroker unexpectedly becomes one of several subjects—all of them named Greg Denton—to be painted by Denton. The irony that drives the story emerges from the protagonist feeling singled-out and redeemed by an invitation received explicitly for no other reason than his bearing an apparently very common name. Yet, come to think of it, our titular Greg Denton does prove himself a unique individual as the story reaches its conclusion by clothing himself in what reads as one flamboyantly ugly motherfucking suit.

Well, there may be a lot of Greg Dentons in the world, but there was surely only one Raymond Carver. Or was there? Controversy still lingers around the degree of authorship shared between the late Carver and his devoted editor Gordon Lish, crediting with having excised massive chunks of Carver’s most beloved stories and even changing endings, titles and names of characters. My friend Salvador insists that Lish was responsible for what he refers to as “the Carver twist.” (Salvador always places finger and thumb in close proximity and then flips his hand over whenever he says "twist.") I’m not so sure. But it does make you wonder about how many people can claim some part of the person we all know as Raymond Carver. Also, according to Wikipedia there’s also a famous darts player with the same name.

In any case, the Library of America has recently published Raymond Carver: Collected Stories ($50), which offers the whole canon between two covers. These stories remain some of the most influential and enduring in modern American letters, and the nicely packaged collection should make a superb Xmas gift for completists.

In the flesh: Cronenberg on Videodrome

The story goes that when Roberto Benigni met David Cronenberg he got down on all fours and kissed the director’s shoes. This was Toronto, many years ago, and it seems Benigni was in a state of euphoric relief. Cronenberg’s films, he explained, made him afraid to visit the city. It came as a surprise to discover that Canadians really were as polite as they say, that head-combusting telekinetic killers weren’t terrorizing Bay Street, that our televisions behaved. Cronenberg told the story when he dropped in on a screening of Videodrome at Jackman Hall last night. He reminisced about his stars, fondly recalling James Woods as the only actor he’s ever yelled at, and explaining how his work with Deborah Harry was essentially a matter of shrinking her performance down from rock-theatrics exaggeration to the eerily sexy hush it became. The film was presented as part of the Cinematheque Ontario’s Toronto on Film series, so Cronenberg was also there to talk about the city. There was something strangely warm and fuzzy about sitting in a capacity crowd to immerse ourselves in Max Renn’s descent into the sadomasochistic, surreal and cancerous world of Videodrome while taking note of the many glimpses of Toronto circa 1982. So much has changed since then, but it was oddly comforting to note that local legend Reg Hartt’s black and white photocopied posters for his “Cineforum” home screenings of classic films, which can still be found on lamp posts all over Toronto, looked exactly the same.

A filmmaker who truly aims for the guts

I have no idea how many times I've watched Videodrome in the last 27 years, but I can honestly say that even after multiple viewings as a child, a teenager and an adult, the movie remains absolutely fucking bananas. In his introduction to Cronenberg’s introduction Adam Nayman recalled the extra layers of taboo the film accumulated by having to be smuggled into his family home on VHS. Indeed, the film’s resonance as a home video product is a central element in its legacy, yet seeing it on the big screen with an audience reminds you how enduringly discomforting—and kind of hilarious—an experience the film offers. “It has a philosophy,” one character warns another about the titular underground torture porn, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” That’s also what makes it deliciously goofy. The walls are electrified wet clay, the wizard is nothing but a library of videocassettes, and Renn feeds a gun to his stomach vagina cavity. The film wasn’t prescient on purpose, Cronenberg emphasized. In fact it looked backwards to some degree, to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who haunted the University of Toronto when Cronenberg was a student there. And it responded to what was in the air in the moment, like the presence of soft-core porn on Canadian television, and fears of the medium’s potentially corrupting powers that had been circulating for decades. “All you have an artist that makes you original is your antenna,” asserted Cronenberg, whose own antennae have been picking up often brilliantly perverse broadcasts from the collective Id for nearly four decades.

Adoration: Atom Egoyan's patchy puzzle of truths, lies, theatre and technology

Stories fold in upon stories in Adoration. How their contradictions speak to one another forms the backbone of the film. High schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) tells one to his class about how his father nearly succeeded in blowing up an aircraft with his pregnant mother onboard. We see the story play out in flashback, but is the fact that the Israeli airport’s lit like a moody upscale nightclub a splinter in the scene’s verity or merely an expression of some production designer’s caprices rubbing elbows with budget constraints? A woman shrouded in a beaded Islamic veil lurks in a wintry Toronto suburb, complimenting Simon’s bigoted tow-truck driving uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) on his nativity scene while inserting a baldly provocative statement about Jews into the already uncomfortable conversation. Is anything about her visit genuine? Is it some sort of theatre designed to elicit a violent response from Tom? Is she a particularly insistent tommyknocker clinging to Speedman after The Strangers?

Atom Egoyan’s latest finds the writer/director still immersed in the search for where the truth lies, still viewing families with a dissecting eye, still questioning our largely passive acceptance of ever-more invasive technologies, and, rather wearingly, still feeling obligated to plot his stories with a leaden dramaturgical hand. (In a sense Egoyan’s concerns mirror those of Michael Haneke, with the precarious advent of a certain sentimentality that urges resolutions Haneke wouldn’t even sniff at.) A crisp sense of artifice allowed Egoyan’s insistence on coincidence and the unlikely interconnectivity of characters and events to function relatively fluidly in his earliest features. But recent attempts at ostensibly more accessible stories with newly broader, more “globalized” casts of disparate characters—I’d vote for Ararat (2002) as the nadir, though Where the Truth Lies (05) makes a strong contestant—have mangled otherwise potentially interesting movies into overwrought tapestries, contributions to that self-important trend exemplified by Crash (04), Babel (06) and Crossing Over (09).

The good news is that Adoration is a major improvement on its immediate predecessors. Its metaphors are intelligent, labyrinthine and generative. And its creakier conceits are made somewhat more palatable through the sheer conviction of its better actors, namely Arsinée Khanjian, charged with embodying the movie’s most absurd protagonist, a loopy Lebanese-Canadian drama teacher who seems implausibly oblivious to how her audacious actions affect the rest of the world. Khanjian, eerily beautiful and a fixture in Egoyan’s films since Next of Kin (84), remains a beguiling, mysterious presence. She’s the best thing in Adoration, which provides her biggest role in an Egoyan film so far this millennium. If Speedman and Bostick fare less well it may simply be that you need to have married Egoyan to really grasp the vibe. The former seems deeply committed if confused about how to balance Tom’s burbling, inarticulate rage with his ability to adopt new perspectives. The latter may simply lack the preternatural understanding and emotional range required to pull off a truly difficult role—if it can be pulled off at all. And it’s not his fault that he looks like a catalogue model. He’s got a huge weight to carry here, and it’s a relief to see him do something neutral once in a while, like eat cereal.

Simon’s story sparks a highly emotional debate between students and faculty alike, putting his teacher and co-conspirator Sabine (Khanjian) in hot water and allowing Egoyan to explore the film’s thematic threads of the radical religious devotion and the limits of multiculturalism through a multiplicity of images. Egoyan refrains from excessive explicit editorializing with regards to Simon’s dependence on devices to contextualize his experiences, probably because the images say more than enough on their own. Simon interviews his dying grandfather with a video camera between them. He debates with others about his father’s supposed attempts at terrorism through the filter of videoconferencing, every speaker contained in their own little box glowing on the computer screen. Technology, especially screens within screens, grants Adoration the very sense of interconnectivity that some of the characters’ face-to-face encounters strain to convey. When Sabine’s car gets towed by Tom—she knows who he is; he has no idea who she is—we can hear the rusty wheels of dramatic irony churning away, though the payoff is that it does lead to one of the oddest impromptu diner lunch dates in recent memory, affectionately set in the now-closed and much-missed Canary Restaurant.

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.