Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Movie review)

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Premiere, CBC, Sunday 12 February 2012) A nice little movie, of the type that has "Canadian" written all over it. Think Anne of Green Gables, The Wind at My Back, Lives of Girls and Women, Who Has seen the Wind, and so on.
     But Stephen Leacock it ain't, despite the copious use of dialogue from his book, and allusions to several of his best-known pieces from Literary Lapses etc, Blending facts from Leacock's life with loose adaptations of two of the Sunshine stories, it gives us what is now a typically Canadian coming-of-age and life-changing-insights story that our film-makers are so adept at creating. It's well-done: we spent an enjoyable two hours including commercials (which have their own bizarre charm.)
     There's an issue of truth-in-advertising here. I don't think the movie should have borrowed Leacock's title. It's too far removed from the original. Call it Mariposa Stories, or something similar that will warn the viewer that it's not Leacock's work. Malcolm MacRury imposed his own story on the material, which in itself not a bad idea. But did he have to revise the characters and their relationships so far from the originals in Sunshine Sketches? I don't think so. There was no need, for example, to make Peter Pupkin's inamorata the Reverend Drone's daughter instead of Judge Pepperleigh's.
      Leacock's Sunshine Sketches has an acidly dark subtext, which MacRury used as an opportunity for surreal farce. This, too, is fine as far as it goes, but it weakens the satire. Or maybe not: Canadian politics have often descended into farce, and recently have taken on more than a tinge of the surreal.
     Bottom line: a well-done movie, worth watching, but not an adaptation of Sunshine Sketches. It has the feel of a series pilot. **-1/2

Wild Turkeys (Music Review)

The Wild Turkeys are a country band located in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. They call their variation "swamp stomp country", but it sounds more bluegrass to me. Their concert on 11 February in Blind River was fun. Young (Sheldon Jääskeläinen appears to be under 30, he plays a mean fiddle) and energetic, they do a good show. Their hollers are quite funny. Only downside: their pieces all have pretty much the same tempo and licks, which gets a bit wearing after a while. Devin Alexander on bass guitar did a good cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and Jay Case on guitar did a creditable blues. So they do have the versatility that would raise their show from very good (***) to excellent (****).

They have pages on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/thewildturkeys) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wild-Turkeys/23002227647).

Update 2026-05-08: The band's last Facebook post was in 2013, so I guess it's defunct. There's another band with same name that has a YouTube presence.

Link to classic art, altered

Art works altered to include a science fiction theme or motif. Fun.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/01/art-history-through-sci-fi-colored-glasses

Cabaret (Movie Review)

Cabaret (1972) [D: Bob Fosse. Liza Minelli, Michael York¸ Joel Grey] This is one of those movies that succeeds in spite of itself. The performances of the central actors hold the movie together, and while the movie runs, we overlook the cliches, the uneasy mix of social and character study. It’s a very competently done movie, nominated for ten Academy Awards, and winning eight (but not Best Picture). Like most “Oscar movies”, it consists of a self conscious mix of entertainment and attempts at serious social significance.
     The main plot is sad romance. York plays Brian Roberts, an Englishman spending time in Berlin to study German, and earning extra money giving English lessons. Minelli plays Sally Bowles, an American working at the Kit Kat Klub trying to become a star. Grey plays the MC at the Kit Kat Klub; he has found his milieu, and is the only character completely at home in his own skin. The time is 1931,  when the Weimar Republic was declining into insignificance. Sally shows Brian around the boarding house, and eventually they start an affair, which is briefly diverted by a the interference of Maximilian von Heune (Maximilian Griem), a bisexual decadent, who seduces them both. Sally becomes pregnant, but she can’t give up her show business ambitions, so she has an abortion. Brian and Sally part.
     A second love story concerns Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper), a respectable bank clerk who wants to marry a rich woman. He finds a likely candidate in Anna Landauer (Marisa Berenson), daughter of a very rich Jewish family, whom he meets at Brian’s English lessons. Wendel is a Jew, but has been passing as Christian. Their romance ends happily with a wedding.
     The glue for this combination of tales is the Kit Kat Klub. The skits and songs are alternately satirical, burlesque, and romantic, and provide a chorus-like commentary on the action. There’s no question that the lovers are doomed: Fascism is on the rise and will soon engulf Germany and Europe. But in the meantime, enjoy yourself as best you can. “Life is a cabaret, old chum....”
     I first saw this movie when it came out 40 years ago. It holds up well. The performances are superb, the photography well done, the overall look and feel convincing enough. Several of the songs (written especially for the movie) became hits. But the narrative rhythm frequently falters, especially when the rise of the Nazi Party is depicted. Unusually for an Oscar-winning film, its sociopolitical message is restrained, and the focus is on character and mood. Unusually for a musical, several of the major characters sing no songs.
     Sally’s self-destructiveness elicits pity, Brian’s naivete sympathetic wonder. Grey’s frenetic and knowing performance is all show business, a reminder that a professional performer hides his true self so well that we cannot even guess at it. Wepper and Berenson’s courtship is both amusing and moving.
     All in all, the movie works well: while I watched it, I was drawn into its world. But on reflection, after the effects of the Kit Kat Klub have worn off, it fails to convince. I think it’s the short scenes of the Nazi Party’s rise that punctuate the central stories that mar the overall effect and break the movie’s unity. They seem more contrived than the bizarre performances at the night club. Is the movie about the clash between the anarchic freedom of the Weimar Republic and the disciplined regime of the Nazis? Or is it about two pairs of lovers, whose contrasting stories engage our sympathy and interest? ***

Hugo

Hugo (2011) [D: Martin Scorcese. Ben Kingsley, Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Sacha Baron Cohen.] Hugo Cabret, an orphan living in and servicing the clocks of a Paris train station, is trying to repair an automaton, which his father had rescued from a museum. He strikes up a friendship with Isabelle, granddaughter of Georges Melies, who built the automaton many years before, and now runs a toy booth at the station. Since the tale is a fantasy, everything ends happily: the automaton is repaired, one of Melies’ films is restored, the station master marries the flower girl, and so on. The look of the movie is steampunk overlaid on 1930s Paris. A good deal of CGI is used, and a some of the scenes are gratuitous, notably a train wreck. We saw the 2D version, but it’s obvious that much of the movie was photographed to exaggerate the 3D effect.
     So is it a good movie? Yes, mostly because it’s not only a homage to the beginnings of movies, but because most of the story and all its nuances are conveyed through images and music, not words. I think it was Auden who noted that movies are like opera: The music is half the story. Sure, the conventions of movie music have become cliches, and when poorly applied become intrusive rather than supportive, often no more than a weak attempt to male up for bad photography and lackadaisical editing. But when well done, so that music and image complete each other, you hardly notice the music. That was the case here. The acting is also very good, with a lot of body language and subtle changes in expression, the kind for which the closeup was invented. And as in all properly constructed mysteries, the hero doesn’t know the significance of his knowledge until the puzzles are resolved. Am I blathering a bit? I guess so. I’m a sucker for romantic confections of all kinds, and this confection is tastier than most.
     The book on which the movie’s based also makes use of images: I didn’t read it, but when I saw Connor's on a visit, I noticed that about half of it was pictures. More or less, I didn’t actually count the pages.
     Good movie, recommended. From the comments of people who’ve seen the 3D version, I suggest you steer clear of it. 3D draws too much attention to itself as a medium. ***

Link to art (of a sort)

Boing Boing offered this link, so I'm offering it to you. It contains an expletive that is written, but bleeped when it's spoken. Odd notion of how to handle expletives in polite company.

http://safwatsaleem.com/#2498776/Oh-Shit

Heartburn (Book review)

     Heartburn by Nora Ephron(1985) 30-year-old chick-lit, written well before Bridget Jones (which I confess I haven’t read). The narrator, Rachel, is a cookbook author and TV presenter, who’s pregnant with her second child. Mark is her husband, a columnist and political commentator, and a self-centred jerk. The setting is Washington and New York, and the couples that form Rachel and Mark’s social circle. Mark is having an affair, and worse, has told Rachel he loves his mistress. So the plot question is: What will Rachel do about it? She ends the marriage, of course, by throwing a lemon-mint cream pie in Mark’s face. It takes a while for her to get to that point, partly because she interrupts the story with flashbacks and recipes, and partly because random events interrupt the steady progress towards freedom from a jerk. The recipes are clearly based on actual cooking.
     The style is self-consciously “witty”, in that archly ironic 70s mode that grates. But about halfway through the book I was surprised to find I actually cared about Rachel, and enjoyed her willingness to like and even love her friends and acquaintances, including the ones she claims she hates. This isn’t a great book, but it’s an enjoyable read if you’re in the mood for a funny broken-romance story. Meryl Streep starred in the movie version, which I haven’t seen. **
     Update 2016-03-22: Apparently, the book is based on Ephron's own marriage and divorce. She's been called "courageous" for using her own life as copy for a book, which i think is excessive praise. I'm listening to an interview with Jacob Bernstein, her son, who's just made a doc about his mother titled "Everything is Copy", his mother's principle for living and writing. But she hid her terminal illness, partly because she was directing a movie, and admitting her illness would have mnade it impossible to get insurance. But mostly, says Jacob, because she wanted to control her story, and an illness is inherently uncontrollable. If he's right, Ephron's use of her story as material for a novel is a way of keeping control. Maybe her portrayal of Mark as a jerk is the ultimate control. We all want our life to work out better than it does. Fictionalising it lets us live our life as we wish it were. The purest fantasy of all.