Rick Mercer Report: The Book (Book Review)

Rick Mercer The Rick Mercer Report:  The Book (2007) Rick’s Rants, some complete, some excerpted, along with a few photos and snippets of dialogue. How little has changed, and yet how soon we forget! Politics is still a mix of farce and tragedy, and we, the electorate, still forget the scandals, corruption, and foolishness within weeks or months. If people had the contents of this book top-of-mind during the last election, Harper would not, I think, have garnered a majority.
     Mercer on the page doesn’t have the impact he has on the screen, but that’s a good thing: we can see both his tricks and shticks, as well as the substance of his complaints. A lot of the time, Mercer’s comedic, satiric style assists us in coping with the appalling contempt for democracy evinced by our leaders. But we rarely laugh out loud. Someone once said that war is too serious to leave to the generals. I wish more of my fellow Canadians realised that politics is too serious to leave to the politicians. ***

In the Frame (book review)

Helen Mirren In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures (2007) I don’t often read biographies, auto- or otherwise, but when I do, I’m  pleased to see how people’s lives are all the same mix of the ordinary and the surprising. That’s the impression, anyhow, but reflection shows that what’s surprising to me is ordinary to others, and vice versa. Mirren’s background is Russian: her family were what in England would be called “gentry”. Her parents, like many others, ended up on  England because of the Bolshevik Revolution. Many years later, Mirren was able to reconnect with the extant Russian branch of the family, an event that meant a lot to her. She is deeply committed to her family, and very proud of them all.
     She decided quite early on that she wanted to be an actor, and has worked hard at her profession. She’s generous with praise for the help and teaching she got along the way from many different people, and equally generous with praise for her fellow actors, for directors, cinematographers, costume designers – all the people that make a show work. It looks like she simply omitted mention of the jerks and doofuses that must have crossed her path. She does say she’s still angry at a couple of men who took advantage of her naivete when she was a student, but on the whole she has had a satisfactory love life, and is obviously deeply in love with her latest (and last) partner, Taylor Hackford. They married after 11 years together. Although she claims not to take weddings too seriously, she clearly enjoyed hers.
     Someone has pointed out that an autobiography by definition is false, since the author decides what persona to present to the world; and we all are more than and different from our personas. True; but truth is always incomplete. As with any history, the question is, Does this, incomplete though it is, have the ring of truth? For this book, the answer is Yes. I’ve liked Mirren ever since I saw her in Prime Suspect. If anything, this book made me like her more. Recommended. ***
More at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_mirren

Byzantine Churches of Alberta (Book Review)

Orest Shemchishen. Byzantine Churches of Alberta (1976) Edited by Hubert Hohn. Shemchishen was commissioned to record country churches serving Orthodox congregations before they dwindled away and the churches were pulled down. He succeeds admirably. Hubert Hohn, at the time curator of the Edmonton Art Gallery,  contributes an Introduction of several pages and many words, which can be summarised as “Documentary photography succeeds when we see that the subject of the photograph mattered to the photographer.” This happens to be true for Shemchishen’s work: the pictures both record the fact of the buildings’ existence, the details of their architecture and settings, and also the sense that economic and social changes have made them superfluous. They stand on the prairie, isolated. The light clarifies their substance. The interiors, silent and empty, allude to the performance of the sacred rites for which they were built.
     There are no people in any of the photos. One is surrounded by cars and trucks that indicate a liturgy is in progress in the church: it stands out as an anomaly. Most of the churches, although well-kept, already seem like relics of a past that few recall, and fewer will narrate.
     This collection of photographs is more than a source book. Hohn is right: Shemchishen’s work shows that these buildings meant something to him. Worth looking at more than once. ***

The Nephew (Movie review)

The Nephew (1998) [D: Eugene Brady. Niall Tobin, Sinead Cusack, Luke Griffin, Pierce Brosnan] Chad Egan-Washington, the biracial American son of Karin Egan, a wayward Irish girl who emigrated to the US, goes to his mother’s home village in Ireland to spread her ashes. His arrival stirs up old memories and forces people to confront their wrongful past actions. His Uncle Tony has had a grudge against the pub owner Joe Brady ever since Karin left. Brady’s daughter Aislin and Chad develop a relationship, which pleases neither of the older men. Peter O’Boyce, who has a crush on Aislin, complicates the plot. Of course everything turns out OK in the end, with confessions and secrets shared leading to understanding and redemptive self-insight.
     That’s the story, a farrago of cliches, so the question is how well the film riffs on them. Very well, I’d say. It’s low key, does a lovely job of developing the characters’ slowly accumulating awareness, and even though we figure out what the revelations will be, they are done well enough that we care. On-line ratings are barely above average, which was my initial reaction, too. I think the rather thick lathering of Irish charm has something to do with some viewers’ negative responses.
     But this is one of those movies whose images stick in your mind, and which make you angry at the harm done by hiding shameful secrets and making respectability a prime value. So I’d say the movie is successful. ***

Bullitt (Movie Review)

Bullitt (1968) [D: Peter Yates. Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bissett] This is a noir film in colour. The situation is simple: protect a mobster who will give evidence at a grand jury hearing. An ambitious D.A. wants to ensure he gets credit for bringing down “the organisation”. But the man is killed, and Bullitt knows something is seriously wrong. The dead man was not in fact the mobster, so Bullitt has two tasks: to find the killers, and to find the real witness. He must also fend off both the ambitions politician (played creepily by Robert Vaughn) but also the mob (who want to ensure the victim is truly dead.

     Bullitt’s an honest cop who doesn’t like being pushed around by VIPs. He goes his own way to find his quarry, but knows how to work with his team. At the turning point, he sees he’s being followed, so he dekes up a side street and begins to follow the car that pursued him. It turns into a deadly chase, one that film makers have studied and borrowed from ever since. I recall seeing it on a large screen. It looks pretty good on the smaller TV screen, too. It really is one of the best ever filmed. Many of its tricks have become standard, so anyone seeing this movie for the first time would probably be somewhat blase about the car chase.
     The plot is intricate but clearly delineated, step by procedural step. Steve McQueen’s Bullitt is laconic, unwilling to show his deeper feelings (there’s a perfunctory love subplot), and he’s finally worn down by the violence he must perforce witness and commit. The final act shows us another classic sequence, a chase across the runways of the airport at night.
     A good movie, well worth seeing again, or for the first time. ***

Get rid of veggies in front yard! (Link)

In Drummondville, Quebec, a couple are being told to remove their vegetable garden from their front yard:

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/thank-goodness-the-authorities.html

Away From Her (Book Review)

Alice Munro Away From Her (2001, 2007) Re-titled from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, one of Munro’s best collections. Munro has the ability to make us see and care about people, from the most ordinary to most strange. She  displays how her character’s lives are shaped not merely by the accidental meetings and events that fate bestows, but by the follies and weaknesses, the strengths and wisdom that control the responses to those accidents. Munro does this with neither pity nor cruelty: the lives she shows us simply are what they are. She leaves it up to us to make sense of them.
     The occasional first-person narrator ends the story with some summing up, but we know it’s not the final word, it’s just another fragment in the puzzle that is a person. It marks the end of an episode, but it doesn’t explain a life. Sometimes the story ends with a character’s reaction to what has just happened, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, whatever revelation was vouchsafed to the character, it’s not a solution to a mystery, nor is it a sign of what's to come. What will happen next is as imponderable, as inevitable, and as contingent as everything that went before. The events of the story appear as part of a life, yet they contain the whole life. In this, Munro’s stories have the depth and resonance of a novel.
     It’s difficult to summarise an Alice Munro story. Describing one of the central events is not enough. In Away From Her a woman develops Alzheimer’s. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage a woman marries an apparently unsuitable man. In Floating Bridge, a woman kisses a young man, almost a boy, who has taken to show her a floating bridge while her husband negotiates some business with his father. In  Comfort an undertaker tells a widow, whom he kissed many years before, how he has prepared her husband’s body for burial. In Nettles a woman meets her childhood sweetheart many years later. What is Remembered tells of a single but very satisfying sexual encounter between a young wife and a man who drives her to the ferry that will take her home after a funeral.
     In all these stories, people remain mysterious to each other, their relationships made incomplete by the limits of language, the constraints of social expectations, the wounds that make us fearful of suffering another injury. And yet. And yet. There are glimpses and hints of happiness and joy. Moments when some barrier is breached, some separateness transcended. Recognition that the only morality is to be with each other, and not use each other. ****