Iceland may be a cold place, but it’s got a warm heart, if Ragnar Bragason’s latest film, Bjarnfredarson, is anything to go by. The film, at the Montreal World Film Festival, is based on a popular Icelandic television series about three misfits whose only commonality is a criminal past.

Leading a double life, Daniel is married with two small boys. His family thinks he’s going to med school when in fact he’s studying art, and graduation is looming on the horizon. Petty criminal, Olaf lives with them, and though he’s no relation, the kids call him “Uncle.” With his white, platform sneakers and a retro haircut that looks like a pitch black bear rug out of the Eighties, Olaf screams 40-year-old Peter Pan.

Into this bucolic dysfunction comes Georg, recently released from prison. His mother, an icon of the country’s feminist movement, is shocked that her son is out so soon from prison. He was supposed to serve ten years for murder but served only half of that due to his exemplary behaviour. So, Georg ends up on Daniel’s doorstep, the man he tried to frame for the murder he committed. Surprisingly, and over the objections of his wife who is secretly in love with her driving instructor, Daniel takes him in. It’s the beginning of a wacky romp through the lives of petty criminals doing their best to find happiness in a world full of fanaticism and repression.

Repression is the backdrop for another film, the romantic comedy, Beloved Berlin Wall directed by Peter Timm. Set in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Franzi is a young woman who has just moved to Berlin for her studies. The only place she can afford is a place right near the Wall. Her window overlooks the East German border tower where Sascha and his comrades vigilantly look for escapees – that is when they’re not writing up comical entries for their superior like the one about the most recent runaway, a cat.

Low on money as most students are, Franzi takes the advice of her neighbour and crosses the border into East Germany where food is half-price. On the way back, her arms are loaded down with groceries. She just makes it back into the West when she drops everything. The eggs break, the milk spills, and Sascha crosses the few steps into the West, coming to the rescue with a broom and a pail. He walks slowly but steadily towards Franzi, his eyes full of the smile on his lips, heroically oblivious to his Communist co-workers, their rifles pointed at his back, screaming for him to stop. Franzi is terrified, rooted to the spot, as she watches Sascha clean up the mess and then gallantly hand her the one loaf of bread that escaped ruination. Then he returns to his post. So begins a romance of Shakespearean proportions, complete with Stasi fools, counter-espionage intrigue, and identity swaps.

These are not-to-be-missed films, not just because they’re funny and warm-hearted, but because they show that humour may be the best weapon against conformity.

Freelance writer Elizabeth Johnston teaches at Concordia University.

Focus on World Cinema

LIEBE MAUER, 2009 / Colour / 107 min, Dir. Peter Timm, Germany.

Schedule :
September 02, 2010 • 17:00 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 9 • L9.02.4

BJARNFREDARSON, 2010 / Colour / 109 min, Dir. Ragnar Bragason, Iceland.

Schedule :
September 05, 2010 • 10:30 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 11 • L11.05.1
September 05, 2010 • 21:40 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 10 • L10.05.6

What do these things have in common: one of the last remaining matriarchal societies; an architect who has shaped a brave new world; and an exploration of the misunderstood despot, Vlad the Impaler? Answer? How our world is built and destroyed. Showing at the Montreal World Film Festival are these three wildly different documentaries – The Fall of Womenland, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, and The Truth About Dracula.

Directed by Chinese-Canadian Xiaodan He, Womenland explores the world of the Mosuo people, a community of about 40,000 people who live in southwest China and practice a form of marriage based on “free love and sexual satisfaction.” When a couple is attracted to each other, they meet in the woman’s bed at night, but the man must leave before sunrise. They can hang out together during the day, but each lives separately in their mother’s house. When children are born, they stay with the mother, and it is the matrilineal uncles who provide the father figure for all children who bear their mother’s last name. When either party is no longer satisfied with the relationship, whether emotionally or physically, they find other partners, and no family member intervenes. There are never any jealousies, conflicts, or violence. To a Western audience, this is hard to imagine. However, the encroachment of modern civilization has effected profound changes on the Mosuo, bringing with it prostitution, disease, and new architecture in the form of tourist accommodation.

While the ancient landscape of the Mosuo is destroyed by modern society, Norman Foster, a septuagenarian British architect, creates new world orders across the globe with his innovative approach to architecture as seen in Norberto Lopez Amado’s documentary, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? Foster is particularly known for his transformation of airports that are more user-friendly and put the fun back into travel. Flight bears a significant influence on Foster as many of his design ideas stem from aerodynamics and the airy feel of flying. This is particularly evident in the bridge he designed in Millau, France. When it opened in 2004, journalists likened it to butterflies and cobwebs of steel.

This feeling is captured beautifully in the documentary with a fluid camera gliding across, over and under the structure aiding the audience in understanding the scope of Foster’s achievement. Making a utilitarian object seem lovely, and in harmony with nature is laudable, but in Foster’s Shanghai building for HSBC, and others like it, the architectural grandeur is more about China staking its claim in the world than fostering harmony.

Staking out territory also preoccupied Vlad the Impaler, and in his documentary, The Truth about Dracula, director Stanislaw Mucha travels Romania in search of the origins of one of the most evil characters in Western literature. Surprisingly, what is revealed almost immediately is that most natives know nothing at all about Dracula. They have heard about Vlad, though, and for many, rich and poor alike, the country people long for another stellar leader like Vlad. Many relate the story that, during Vlad’s reign, thievery didn’t exist because punishment was swift: immediate impalement. Another said that the nation actually needs three Vlads because there is so much corruption.

As Mucha takes us on a tour of the country, pausing to film people staring at the camera like portraits in the style of Vlad, we see how little bearing our Bram Stoker understanding of Dracula has on the real, poor Romania. In fact, while some foreign investors bankroll Disneyland-type amusement parks in Romania, the majority of the citizens still wait for a strong leader who will rebuild their country that lies in literal and figurative ruins.

Together, these three documentaries tell us something essential about the rise and fall of nations, and how the march of progress leaves many more in the organic rubble than it ushers into aeries of power.

Elizabeth Johnston, author of No Small Potatoes, teaches at Concordia University.

Documentaries of the World

HOW MUCH DOES YOUR BUILDING WEIGH, MR. FOSTER?, 2010 / Colour / 78 min, Dir. Norberto Lopez Amado, Carlos Carcas, United Kingdom – Spain.

Schedule :
September 06, 2010 • 10:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 13 • L13.06.1

THE FALL OF WOMENLAND, 2010 / Colour / 46 min, Dir. Xiaodan He, Canada.

Schedule :
September 01, 2010 • 14:40 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 14 • L14.01.3

DIE WAHRHEIT UBER DRACULA, 2010 / Colour / 82 min, Dir. Stanislaw Mucha, Germany.

Schedule :
September 05, 2010 • 10:00 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.05.1
September 06, 2010 • 21:40 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.06.5

Women often bear the burden of childrearing and community-building while men absent themselves physically or emotionally. In Hamseyeh (The Neighbor), this universal phenomenon, and much more, is explored from the perspective of Iranian immigrants in Vancouver.

The film opens with grainy home movies of a woman wearing a hijab, walking dusty, empty streets, watering the garden, or pushing her way through gossamer sheers. It’s a low-budget aesthetic that suits the themes of dislocation and isolation explored so poignantly by first-time American writer and director, Naghmeh Shirkhan.

Shirin, a single, middle-aged Canadian woman, watches the television as the muted pastels of faded memories fill her small, starkly-lit apartment. At the same time, she listens to the many phone messages from her mother, in California, complaining in Farsi that Shirin never calls or visits. Meanwhile, the old woman in the home videos proffers clichés: “Life is short; so be happy.” It’s advice that Shirin doesn’t follow very well.

After an unsatisfying rendezvous in an expensive hotel with her long-distance lover, Shirin pulls into her parking space in front of a non-descript apartment building. A woman’s pair of stiletto boots appears in the rear view mirror. Shirkhan’s eye for detail is precise and economical in this framing. The boots are tiny in the mirror, almost an afterthought, but they foreshadow that sexualized Leila will walk into Shirin’s life and change it.

Later in the apartment hallway, Shirin introduces herself to Leila in Farsi. The young woman clearly wants nothing to do with her neighbour from across the hall. But, when Shirin realizes that Leila has a young daughter, Parisa, that she leaves alone while she goes out, Shirin finds herself unable to mind her own business.

Once Leila realizes that Shirin is willing to look after her daughter, she takes advantage of this kindness to hang out with Randy, a young, blond folksinger who considers Parisa unnecessary baggage. But at the coffee house, everyone sings songs Leila doesn’t know and drinks Sleeman’s beer while Leila drinks a Stella beer. The difference in beer choice says it all about the native/foreigner dichotomy that both Leila and Shirin seem to be caught within.

Even though both women have grown up in the West, they paradoxically live lives limited by their culture. Neither here nor there, they are mired in a no-man’s land. Indeed, the landscape is curiously lacking in male figures that are there for anything other than sex. Director Shirkhan cleverly conveys this lack of commitment in two separate shots that show both Randy and Shirin’s lover sleeping soundly after sex while the women remain awake and worried.

Abandoned by men and unable to integrate in either the immigrant Iranian or the mainstream Canadian communities, both women struggle with the grand question of how to be happy when the richness of life seems denied them. It’s a testament to Shirkhan that she doesn’t give any easy answers in this film. Instead, she lets the images speak for themselves: Shirin’s expressive face shaped by years of unrequited dreams; Leila’s gaze set on some faraway place; and then Parisa, with her insatiable appetite for Cheerios, dress-up, and her mother.

Note: This film is in Farsi and some English with French subtitles only. However, an intermediate understanding of written French should be sufficient to enjoy the film.

First Films World Competition
HAMSEYEH , 2010 / Colour / 104 min, Dir. Naghmeh Shirkhan, Canada – United States.

Schedule :
August 28, 2010 • 19:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.28.5
August 29, 2010 • 12:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.29.2
August 30, 2010 • 17:00 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.30.4
August 31, 2010 • 14:50 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.31.3

Writer Elizabeth Johnston teaches at Concordia University.

“No one suspects my music to have such precise references,” writes Elisabeth Belliveau, but it is precise references that give form to the work in her new collection, don’t get lonely don’t get lost. Poems, drawings, and animation (on an enclosed DVD) are assembled into one package, and Belliveau’s imagery unites it into a whole. Marie Antoinette; spiders; mountains; wolves; winter — these things and more create a web of references that gives Belliveau’s book coherence across its sprawl of forms.

The sections of the book alternate collections of pictures with sequences of poems. The artwork reflects the symbols that haunt the poetry, and vice versa; crucially, Belliveau is adept at using her symbols in cunning ways to reach emotional truths, while also letting them retain their ambiguity. For example, the first pages of the book show a drawing of a mountainside in Newfoundland; the last chapter, a transcription of the narration on one of the films on the DVD, is called “Margaret’s Mountain,” and we are told of the main character that “a mountain marks the middle of a city in her memory.” In between, over the course of the book, the image of mountains, of mountain ranges, of the island city centred by a mountain, repeats — the contexts slightly different, the complexity increasing.

If the book’s recurring themes are loss and loneliness, as fits the title, then the book mediates them with intimacy and history; the poetry presents relationships dissolving, lives lived in memories, but also ways to move on from these things. Still, the situations are enigmatic, presented glancingly, and I think sometimes might have been better served by being given more space, by being made more specific. I find the language, though spare and concrete, simple and unsurprising, and therefore occasionally unaffecting. At worst, the book seems too elliptical; when Belliveau draws faces, one wonders who these people are, what’s their story.

In a sense, that’s a testament to Belliveau’s artistic skill. Her drawing ability is remarkable. Organic forms are caught perfectly — trees and branches, owls and spiders, wolves and dogs — and the way they are deployed is intriguing. Shapes blend in collages, or are lent a gently occult air by fragments of text. Indeed, one of the sets of drawings is titled “Handbook of Spells,” tying in with a motif of spells in the poetry; it suggests ways to gain small powers, or ward off minor evils. This is everyday magic, growing from the everyday life of specific places.

The two short animated films, on the other hand, use stop-motion and collage to eliminate a coherent sense of place, fashioning surreal landscapes which deconstruct themselves, tearing themselves apart to let in new images or rearrange characters against a new landscape. “Margaret’s Mountain” is longer, at thirteen minutes; a heavily-accented narrator reads one of Belliveau’s poems, and it’s hard not to see that choice of speaker as affected. Personally, I preferred the gentler “Best Attempt” and its quiet near-monochrome.

There’s a considerable amount of craft in don’t get lonely don’t get lost. If sometimes Belliveau seems willfully obscure, there is still a sensuous pleasure in her artwork. And not only the assemblage of materials is fascinating, but also the way they’re deployed against loss; a kind of shoring-up of fragments against ruin. It’s a book that encourages the reader to look for connections: pieces of text from chapters throughout the book return as lines in “Margaret’s Mountain,” so the book becomes a collage of itself. It repays re-reading, and re-examination.

Elisabeth Belliveau will launch don’t get lonely don’t get lost at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore, 211 Bernard W., on Friday Sept. 3 at 7 p.m. With her will be Montrealer and fellow Conundrum author Alisha Piercy, who will be launching her double novel Auricle/Icebreaker.

Matthew Surridge is a Montreal-area writer. His criticism has appeared in The Montreal Gazette and The Comics Journal.

Writer Avi Friedman is an award-winning housing innovator and professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture who, through his many books and lectures, has proved his passionate dedication to the business of roofs-over-heads, both private and public.

In his latest book, A Place in Mind, Mr. Friedman presents a collection of  formulaic essays which are at once subjective and didactic. Each begins with a detailed description of a place with him in it (a courtyard, apartment complex, restaurant, market, etc.). He leads us down laneways and crowded city streets and eventually, to an analysis of whether the place is “successful” and “authentic” or whether it is a blight on the community. This judgment soon gives way to a set of rhetorical questions à la Carrie Bradshaw in which Mr. Friedman stops and wonders, for example, “Have the digital media become the new people’s square?” or “Can we retool or alter existing suburban communities?”

Friedman then offers a brief look at the history of each place or architectural structure. His talents really shine in these passages. The village square, the market, the playground, the office: the back-story of how each evolved is explained with clarity and focus, and is utterly tangent-free. But here the stories often take a grumpy turn and the scholarship gives way to nostalgia as the writer becomes unfairly critical of the new world and romantically reverential of the old. Readers are bound to be disenchanted by the sweeping repudiation of all ways North American (why no recognition of New Yorkers’ revolutionary use of public space?), not to mention the odd hyperbolic statement like “…we do not chat with neighbours in grocery lines because groceries can be ordered online.”

To say that walking is good, too much TV is bad, and they don’t make things like they used to, is simply to state the obvious. And to a certain extent, so is “Zoning bylaws need to be altered.” What most of us do need is instruction on how we can push for better buildings and more forward-thinking human-scapes. How does an empty lot become a park or public square instead of a condo? Why aren’t apartment buildings being built anymore? Isn’t it architects, designers, and planners who decide what gets built and where? How can class—the pink elephant in the room of all city planning problems—be incorporated into solutions that raise up the level of community involvement and ultimately “success”?

That cities are crumbling or morphing into McTowns is not a surprise to many urban and suburban dwellers. A call to action is needed but won’t happen without leaders and visionary guides like Mr. Friedman. And while A Place in Mind proposes an agenda, it falls short on details and specific targets that could call us to action.

Joni Dufour is a freelance editor and writer, and fiction editor for carte blanche.

Emanuela Piovano’s Le Stelle Inquiete is an unconventional romance, rich with ideas and imagery. Based on the life of French philosopher Simone Weil, it focuses on an experience of hers two years before she died at the age of 34. Entirely devoted to her passionate pursuit of knowledge, affairs of the heart hold no interest for her. But in the summer of 1941, fate steps into Simone’s life.

Her hosts are an Italian couple, Gustave and Yvette, who own a vineyard in a bucolic region of Provence, seemingly untouched by the war. Concerned with workers’ rights, Simone’s ideas challenge Gustave’s monarchist ideals. Both he and his wife see nothing wrong with owning land and giving people jobs, as long as they treat everyone fairly. Simone is fascinated by the workers who, unlike those in Paris, appear happy with the inequality inherent between owner and worker. Excitedly, she scribbles a note to herself: When there’s a relationship, there’s acceptance of one’s misfortune and the luck of others. Insights like these intrigue Gustave more and more, but instead of changing his ideas, he becomes enamoured of Simone, wanting to possess her physically. Not an intellectual, Yvette looks helplessly on as the relationship between her husband and the philosopher grows.

Despite the potentially heavy subject that philosophy can be, director Piovano delivers a remarkably airy film. Partly that’s to do with how Simone skirts away from any subject that would tie her to down to matters of the flesh. Like a mystic, she insists on living in a shack without amenities (instead of staying in the main house), eats only enough to subsist, and is unconcerned about her looks. She brooks no distractions from her work, which is to think.

The film’s airiness is also due to director Piovano’s aesthetic approach: “I wanted to make a simple film, light and airy, as Simone would have like it.”

Piovano’s aim is evident from the very first scene. It’s a shot of the woods on Gustave’s property, taken at dusk, that mysterious time of day when things appear as if by fleeting magic. The director invites us to look at this shot for a few, luxuriously long moments, and returns to this same image several times throughout the film, each time adding a plant faintly stirred by wind or footfall, or the ghostly image of Simone flitting between the trees. The ephemeral beauty of this moment in Simone’s life is powerfully conveyed.

Another arresting scene in the film is when Yvette comes upon her husband sleeping at the kitchen table, his hand on Simone’s notebooks. Gently, Yvette touches the books and her husband’s hand at the same time. She closes her eyes, and, as if she can divine through touch, she sees him leaning towards Simone, drawing closer to her in a tender kiss. She doesn’t know whether or not Simone and Gustave have actually kissed, but what is far more important in this moment is that Yvette realizes they have kissed in a figurative sense.

It’s with masterfully gossamer touches like these that Piovano allows us entry into Simone’s summer of love. Le Stelle Inquiete is a magical interlude that shines a brief light on a woman whom T.S. Eliot considered a “genius akin to saints.”

Writer Elizabeth Johnston teaches at Concordia University.

LE STELLE INQUIETE, 2010 / Colour / 87 min, Dir. Emanuela Piovano, Italy – France.

Schedule :
August 28, 2010 • 21:40 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 10 • L10.28.6
August 29, 2010 • 17:10 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 10 • L10.29.4

For more information, go to the World Film Festival site.

Amore Liquido (Liquid Love), Italian director Marco Luca Cattaneo’s first feature-length film, is a difficult movie to watch. It’s the story of 40-year-old Mario, a pudgy man who divides his time between looking after his mother, a stroke-victim, and cleaning the streets of Bologna during the night. To fill the lonely gaps in his life, he masturbates to online pornography. But something is about to change for Mario this August as the temperature rises to its zenith.

As usual, Mario’s sister will go to the country to escape the summer heat with her two young children, and as usual, she will take their ailing mother with her. It’s the one time during the year that Mario is relieved of his caretaking duties, but it doesn’t look like anything else is in store of him until one night when he is cleaning the streets. A young woman in a tank top and shorts drags a heavy box across the cobblestones and leaves it beside the dumpster. From across the square, Mario watches her, and then he takes her box home with him. In it are ratty stuffed animals and several DVDs of her vacationing with a man and young girl. There’s also one video taken with a cellphone camera – images of her and this man making love in the barely lit dark.

When Mario realizes that this woman, Agatha, has broken up with her husband, his summer vacation suddenly looks a whole lot different than merely work punctuated by bursts of online release.

At this point in the film, Mario drives down the street from Agatha’s apartment. Everything is dark except for one blazingly lit hotel sign: Hotel Diana. Cattaneo’s mise-en-scene is prescient. Diana is a goddess associated with chastity and one who looks after virgins and children, protector of those who are wild and free. Adding another layer of interest is the fact that the company Mario works for is called Hera. She was another goddess associated with virginity. The battle for purity is defined.

Now the question hangs in the air: Can a man who has immersed himself so fully in pornography transition to a normal, healthy relationship with a living, breathing woman? Can such a man have a healthy relationship with a young child? These concerns drive the rest of the film, and the answers are as ambiguous as they are hard to face. But it is with an unflinching gaze that Cattaneo addresses this modern malaise.

Influenced by the sociologist Zymunt Bauman, the director wanted to open a critical dialogue about the negative effects of pornography on society, a subject he considers taboo. Rather than point the finger at individual deviants, Bauman places the blame squarely on the shoulders of modern society: “At the root of this phenomenon is the prevailing narcissism of a society that increases and encourages compulsions and addictions.”

Whether this film conveys Bauman’s philosophy is open to debate. The images in Liquid Love are disturbing. So, too, are the images we are forced to imagine from the offscreen soundtrack. But they are generated by the perversions of one man who chooses to live an isolated life.

Amore Liquido is a thought-provoking film, yet requires caution. To paraphrase a former professor of mine: Be careful of what you let in, because you don’t know what the long range effects might be.

First Films World Competition

Amore Liquido, 2010 / Colour / 100 min, Dir. Marco Luca Cattaneo, Italy.

Schedule :

August 30 • 12:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.30.2
August 30 • 19:20 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.30.5
August 31 • 17:10 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.31.4
September 01 • 10:00 • CINÉMA QUARTIER LATIN 17 • L17.01.1

Writer Elizabeth Johnston teaches at Concordia University.

Montreal fanboys and girls will be beaming themselves over to Toronto en masse this weekend for Fan Expo, Canada’s largest annual comic book/sci-fi/horror/gaming convention. How could they not, with guests like Montreal native-turned-legend William Shatner, Spider-Man/X-men creator Stan Lee and 60s icons Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar on the bill? Before you pack up your entire comic collection and drive westward, though, a quick crash course in convention etiquette is called for: Captain’s orders!

Rule One, Schedule Smartly: It’s a rookie mistake to think that just because you’re attending a three-day convention, you’ll have plenty of time to dig through back issue bins and have a geek-tastic photo-op with Captain Kirk. Check the online schedule of events and plan your days accordingly. You may find yourself having to choose between the aforementioned Batman cast reunion, and a Q&A with Buffy and Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog star Felicia Day, both Saturday at 2! Holy time conflict, Batman!

Rule Two, Be Friendly: Over the course of the weekend, some sixty thousand fans will be roaming the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Some will be wearing costumes, others will simply go the logo t-shirt route… but all are there to celebrate and share their love of some genre of entertainment. So go ahead and start up a conversation – we’re pretty sure most of the folks in the Horror section of the hall aren’t really out to harvest your organs.

Rule Three, Just Breathe: Yes, Stan Lee is a God who changed your life and you’ve named your first child after him and you believe you might have been related in a prior life… but he’s also eighty-eight. Let’s not give the poor man a heart attack, shall we? As overwhelming as it can be to meet a person whose work has inspired and entertained you, it’s just as overwhelming for them to be watching a stranger wet themselves and blather on for ten minutes. Choose one comic book or poster for them to autograph, ask politely for a photo and leave it at that. They’ll be grateful for your brevity, as will the people waiting patiently behind you in line. Plus, all that stuff you want to get autographed really isn’t worth nearly as much on eBay as you think it is.

Rule Three, Bring Chips: Okay, this one might sound a little odd, but the request comes directly from DC Senior Story Editor Ian Sattler, via his blog: “I once mentioned (DC Senior VP) Dan DiDio’s love of the strangely flavored potato chips that are available in Canada. The DC Nation fans responded by bringing Dan a TON of chips to the show. So get ready and let’s try to top last year’s haul by bringing an obscene amount of chips to the show. I’m not kidding, people – let’s make this dream a reality. Only you can make this happen!” While we’re talking food, pack bottled water and a granola bar. You don’t want to get stuck paying almost ten dollars for a fruit smoothie because you didn’t think you’d get hungry.

Other than that, just enjoy the geeky chaos and stay relaxed. If hoofing around gets you down, check out the Tron: Legacy preview screening… and brag to your friends that you’ve got a glimpse at the anticipated sequel a good four months before its release date. There’s plenty to take in… and unlike in San Diego, about a hundred thousand fewer people trying to check it out there along with you.

For full details and ticket information, visit www.fanexpocanada.com.

At the fundraiser for Several Scenes Involving a Decomposing Corpse at Café Cleopatre, I found myself seated next to a decrepit, decaying mannequin in pearls, as disturbingly pornographic renditions of the Golden Girls played on a projector. The actual play, showing at the self-same venue through this week, delivered on my expectations as a bizarre blend of camp, sex, and dark humour.

Full disclosure: my roommate stars in this play. All the better, to watch her practice the lines of her climactic sex scene over breakfast, and regale me with titillating snippets in the nights leading up to the show (there is necrophilia, but could one expect any less?). Plus, the intermission features a corpulent man nailing an enthusiastic young woman to clown music. It’s an easy sell.

As the title would suggest, the play is a montage of scenes involving a corpse in advanced stages of decomposition. Said corpse delivers an impressive theatrical range, pulling off family pet, decaying grandparent or charismatic love interest – the dark, brooding, silent Jacob – with equal ease (“He sorta looks like Heath Ledger… post-humously, I mean,” love interest Tammy comments). In spite of the stubborn reticence of the corpse, characters approach the mannequin as a conscious entity, addressing it (him?) as a character in its (his?) own right.

“You know, there’s more to theatre than a bunch of loosely strung together jokes pertaining to fornication,” a despondent actor interjects towards the end. Fair enough. The vignettes and storylines of Several Scenes are unceasingly obscene. But while the elements are disconnected and often sexual, they are pretty consistently amusing.

In fact (and perhaps this reviewer’s own sick bent towards dark humour betrays her), there are seemingly infinite one-liners and shticks to make a decomposing corpse really quite hilarious. Writer and director Chris Wilding effectively conflates ironic, over-the-top campiness and black comedy, with barely-registered traces of angst bubbling to the surface.

There is the mandatory love story, of course. Born-again Christian Tammy and corpse Jacob experience the ups and downs of a burgeoning romance. In one scene she falls to her knees in anguish, weeping noisily. “Don’t you have anything to say to me?!” she screams at the prostrate Jacob on her bed. This goes on for some time, to great effect. (My friend later confided that her own romances strangely resonate with the girl’s hysterical retributions to a dead body. But I digress).

There are a couple of weak spots, as well. The lengthy Weekend at Bernie’s sketch in the second act wears thin, and Nurse Busty Stevens also drags on after the spell of her breasts dissipates. But if you’ve kept up with the drinking game plastered on the bar table, the last half hour will fly by, and the grand finale makes up for a slow second act (it certainly explained why the roommate’s parents weren’t invited). The second act also features perhaps one of the more amusing theatrical scenes I have witnessed, and not a single (live) actor onstage.

Several Scenes Involving a Decomposing Corpse is round 2 of a similar production from Wilding last year. Go to sit back, relax, and soak in the gratuitous sex and violence. And hey, so long as you’re at Café Cleopatre – stick around for the drag show after.

Several Scenes Involving a Decomposing Corpse continues August 25, 26, 28 at Café Cleopatre, 1230 St. Laurent. Doors open at 8 pm, shows start at 9 pm. For tickets call 1-888-688-4459.

Some novelists amaze and astound us with literary pyrotechnics. Some challenge us with narrative contortions and send us scurrying to the nearest dictionary in hopes of untangling their hyper-intellectualized prose. But Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel, is not at all interested in impressing or confusing her readers. From the first page onwards it is clear that Winter is above all else a novelist with a generous heart.

What Winter gives us in Annabel is entry into regions most of us will never know. These uncharted territories are by turn geographical, emotional, metaphysical and physiological. Annabel tells the story of Wayne Blake, a true hermaphrodite (a person with both male and female sexual organs) born in Croyden Harbour, Labrador in 1968. Wayne’s father Treadway is a trapper who is only at home in the bush far from the clatter and artificial light of town. He is a man skilled at survival, able to kill and skin anything from a caribou to a lynx, a man who can talk to birds and hear the moaning song of the northern lights. There is predictability in his world, in the turn of the seasons, in the tasks he performs while he is in town and the way he lives when he is on the trap line. Wayne’s ambiguous sexuality unnerves and unsettles Treadway and he decides that he will do anything necessary to make sure that his infant will be unequivocally a male child. Wayne’s mother Jacinta, a sensitive, educated woman from St. John’s who wandered into Croyden Harbour and never found her way out, is less sure of who her child should be. Jacinta tries in subtle ways to nurture her child’s hidden feminine side, singing lullabies to her little lassie when no one is around, writing the word daughter in mustard on the inside of Wayne’s bologna sandwiches and buying him a coveted orange one-piece bathing suit just like the one worn by a synchronized swimming champion he adores.

The intricate dance performed by Wayne and his parents around the secret that Wayne himself doesn’t know until he is twelve, is at the centre of this novel. And for this reason, the first three quarters of Annabel take place in Labrador. Winter’s richly textured writing style reveals the lushness of a landscape we southerners often think of as stark and unforgiving. The novelist introduces us to a Labrador bush carpeted in green moss, populated by boreal owls, eagles and mythical white caribou, and bursting with berries and wild mushrooms. Croyden Harbour is less appealing, a place where humans attempt to impose their own ideas of civilization and succeed in creating a kind of bungalow-strewn prison.

The last quarter of the novel is set in St. John’s where Winter takes her readers past the brightly coloured houses, through the confounding streets, down to the harbour that is the heart of this city, and deeper into Wayne’s struggle for self determination. And while one might argue that Winter ends Annabel a little too easily, with marital conflicts resolved, sexual ambiguities accepted and long-lost friendships rekindled, this seems like a small price to pay for all that we have been given.

B.A. Markus is a writer and teacher who lives in Montreal but dreams of the great outdoors.

Northrop Frye created something of a revolution in Canadian literature by refusing to play the rating game. He treated fiction as a collective body of work, identified themes, links to the Western canon and what it all had to say about the Canadian psyche.

Under the gaze of an internationally respected critic, an ever-fledgling literature got a much needed break from the debilitating extremes of self-flagellation and puffery. Frye showed how it was possible to find literature interesting without worrying about whether it was great or not. He was, of course, an academic whose reputation was made by what he had to say about William Blake, Shakespeare and the Bible. He didn’t have to answer to newspaper editors, who have to think of readers and consumers.

Most people who review fiction feel obliged to make some kind of judgement about the work under consideration.  To offer anything less than a clear answer to the question ‘how did you like the book?’ is to risk seeming evasive.  Still, when a critic of novels puts out an entire book on the subject, it isn’t the judgements we look for, it’s the collective wisdom of all those solo reviews, the common themes, links, an overall feeling of what contemporary Canadian fiction is all about.

I can easily describe Terrance Rigelhof’s Hooked on Canadian Books as a long-awaited volume, not only because news of its existence has been around for ages, but because the Westmount native and Dawson College teacher has proven himself one of the most consistently fine reviewers of novels over many years. A contributing editor to the Globe and Mail’s book pages, he’s the one who gets first choice of the season’s fiction crop, whose reviews take up the most space. What he writes is always worth reading – a cut above most of the rest. (For the record, he has never reviewed my novels.)

Earlier reviews of Hooked have complained that Rigelhof raves about all of the books discussed, an odd complaint since the subtitle promises “The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984.” The man chose to talk about books he liked. Still, it does come as a surprise to find out how many of the writers he talks about seem to be dear friends. The volume is blessed and cursed with an extreme generosity of spirit. He often quotes from other reviews, sometimes letting others do the dirty work when he wants to complain, other times, bolstering his own positive views of a writer.

And yet, despite the overall very positive tone, as the pages turned, I began to sense another book – or at least another conversation – waiting to be held in which T.F. would let rip on what he really thinks about Canadian fiction. Forget the personalities, the many memories, the painful labour of creation. What does he think about Canadian fiction?

Here’s a hint, gleaned from an aside on page 182, on the possibility of a Great Canadian Novel: “… a decade ago, I asked myself which of the many talented women who write today dreamed of writing “the big one” – a novel that confronts a taboo, looks into the heart of darkness, alters cultural climates as radically and explosively as a hydrogen bomb upsets the environment. And my answer was no one – female or male.”

Or this, on a writer he considers likely to win the Nobel Prize: “Margaret Atwood is one of our strongest novelists, far less inadequate than just about anybody else…” Far less inadequate? I’m not sure I even know what that means, but it sounds like faint praise.

So, how did I like his book? Well. It’s definitely worth dipping into. Juicy, snacky. Generally sweet with the odd thrilling tartness, but hopefully not the last word on what Terrance Rigelhof really thinks about Canadian literature.

Marianne Ackerman has written three novels, including Piers’ Desire, which came out this spring.

If you’ve ever spent an evening being entertained by any of Montreal’s improv gods, you’ve likely asked yourself, “How do they do it?” Rejoice then, mortals, for the gates of Olympus are opening to all those eager to learn the tricks of the comedy trade.

Overlooking Saint-Laurent, the Montreal Improv Theatre is poised to become the city’s new epicenter of all things improv. Last weekend, the grand opening brought together local troupes On The Spot, The Bitter End and Uncalled For for a series of celebratory performances. “We wanted our friends to come,” Kirsten Rasmussen explains of the three-day festivities. “It will be a home for them. Uncalled For does have their monthly show at Mainline but if they want to do anything else, they know there’s a place for them.”

It’s that spirit of community at the heart of the excitement. “I’ve wanted to start my own space for a long time just because I think there’s room for it in the city,” Marc Rowland explains with justifiable pride. He and Rasmussen represent “two quarters” of the brains behind MIT, with Bryan Walsh and François Vincent accounting for the other four eighths. As professors at this Hogwarts of hilarity, each brings considerable experience to the table. Rasmussen was a member of Edmonton’s Rapid Fire Theatre before a visit to the 2008 Montreal Improv Games inspired her to make a move. “I just kinda fell in love with the city,” she recalls. After getting to know the local talent, she had to “come back and try to work with them.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Rowland, of Without Annette and Dance Animal, has spent so much time teaching he might as well grow a long white beard. Having instructed students in the art of Kung Fu, he sees some parallels between the disciplines. “I find there’s a great similarity in that you’re not teaching anyone what to do in any situation. You’re like ‘there are many options and these are the parameters in which I think you should operate.’ You need to be fluid, you can’t be rigid.”

You also need to be willing to make mistakes. “It’s not that I get so much better and I never mess up as an improviser,” laughs Rasmussen, “it’s that I get more charming about it. I’m just like ‘Haha… I swore a bunch!’”

“Sometimes mistakes can make the best offers,” adds Rowland, recalling a recent Bitter End performance. “This Ranger comes in and just starts talking to us, and then walks out… but we were in a bedroom. It made me realize ‘Oh, my character is likely having an affair with that Ranger and he just wandered into the bedroom!’ That gave all of us a great offer for where the story can go. It’ll take you to places your mind didn’t think of because it’s a flub.”

Classes, which have already begun, are divided into three levels, with semesters each lasting six weeks. “People come here to get more social,” Rasmussen says, of her students. “Improv is one of those arts that traverses over the line of drama-therapy almost because people come to get more confident. It does make you think on your feet.”

To test that theory, Rowland was challenged to offer up three words best describing the school: “Fun. It’s going to be fun. You can’t deny! Excitement. Because things are created in the moment. And Community is the last thing; to join in this group of people who are working together. FEC!”

Those preferring to simply observe the chaos from the comfort of their seats are encouraged to attend the weekly Smackdown. As Rasmussen puts it, “it’s every Friday and it features a bunch of other improvisers. It’s going to be one of our staples. It’s our potato.”

You don’t get more FEC-ing funny than that. To sample said potato, head over to 3713 Saint-Laurent. For information regarding classes, visit the Montreal Improv site.

Susan Briscoe’s poetry is one of telling details, subtle hints and indications.  The Crow’s Vow, her first collection, follows the slow breakup of a marriage as it is reflected in the passage of the seasons around the couple’s cabin in the woods.  What most readers in our story-based culture would expect to make up the central plot – the scenes from the marriage – is reduced to a hazy, thinly evoked background, while what normally would comprise the background becomes the poet’s chief focus:  the trees, the garden, the foxes and mice, and hints of happiness, resentment and tensions as projected by her states of mind.

Here Briscoe follows minimalist traditions inherited from such diverse sources as Sappho, Dickinson, H.D., and the Japanese, and is poetically on solid ground.  Perhaps too much of the main story, however, is left untold.

The first two poems set the pattern:  six to eight brief lines describing the natural surroundings, followed by two to four lines of question, commentary, or ironic twist.  The tradition of ten-line poetry – called decastitch in some rulebooks – has had a number of notable practitioners, but most often in the West has taken the form of a shortened sonnet (or “sonnetina”). Briscoe’s form – five brief, unrhymed couplets – is airy, delicate, unique to her, and she handles it well.  In the first poem, she deftly evokes the beauty and impersonality of nature:

An icy mist,
no mountains this morning.

followed by a suggestion of constraint

The world is a smaller circle.

A call to observation

look closer

and a return to the immediate surroundings

ribbons of deer tracks
strung across the snow
and three brown apples
that never fell.

is concluded by a disturbing innuendo regarding the man she is with:

Your traps
all along the edges.

The following poem, which begins as an ode, of sorts, to spring, ends in pure vinegar:

We wake to a field mouse,
soft brown fur and clean white belly.
I could skin the whole family,
stitch pretty mittens.

Clearly, not all is as well as might appear.  What emerges is that the narrator is sharing this idyllic surrounding with a man utterly unsuitable to her.  He is obtuse, self-centred, incompetent – a complainer, insisting on his way.  She has to teach him “to buttress the rows,” while “You/resist, want this to be easier.”    He is compared to the crows: what he brings to the relationship are “shiny bits and baubles/a crow’s cache/of electronics and appliances”  — but “not once have you danced,/and I have yet to hear you sing.”

In this he is redolent of certain stock male characters of Atwood, Laurence or Shields – oafish dullards who go by monosyllabic “grunt” names like Bruce or Jeff.  Here, though, the crow goes unnamed – and he never speaks for himself; we hear her slights and commentary, but we never really hear his vow.  If he spoke, if he entered these poems a little more, it might rattle the controlled cages of these verses, but render something emotionally richer. Instead, he disappears into abstraction, “hard to see … across the hectares of corn.”  To give the poet her due, this leads to self-criticism: “Were I honest, I’d admit to being deaf/as well as blind.”

Despite these astringencies, however, there is a warm rhythm to the collection as it progresses through the seasons of nature and of this failed relationship.  Amid its keen observation, exquisite detail and masterful rendering of the passage of time, the poet’s misgivings – like this critic’s quibble – become like the cawing of crows, disappearing into the distance.

Brian Campbell’s second collection is Passenger Flight.  It is reviewed here in the Rover.

How does a self-described “word-sound systemizer” convey the syncopations of his “bop inflected vox” onto a printed page? Montrealer Kaie Kellough’s second collection, true to its title Maple Leaf Rag after the Scott Joplin composition, does just that and then some. In his preface “readeradar,” Kellough explains that “it fuses jazz music with our national symbology. while the title celebrates the unity of black culture and canadian culture, it also suggests a malaise, a critique.”

One poem which fuses the histories is “X over.” It refers to Count Basie’s visit to Montreal in 1924 via his “as told to” Albert Murray autobiography, Good Morning Blues. All these details are in the poem itself, where line breaks, positioned to privilege the line’s final element, focus vocal stress on indefinite article and word-initial “a”s:

[…], winter hinter

landed: pg X, good morning blues. (autobio told thru a-

frican medium. a-

lbert murray to a-

nonymous reader a

sojourner, dreamer, seeker a-

river at the a-

xis a-

t the x.

Kellough’s poems celebrate many musicians, among whom Fats Domino, “Jelly Roll” Morton, Oliver Jones & Ranee Lee, and David Hinds (in a context unrelated to reggae).

Kellough also drives his rhythms with  rhyme, as in “night gallery/ reggae nights at the night gallery, calgary, circa 1995”—here, the chorus: “no lovers’ rock nor slackness talk/ gunman cock nor backward walk/ alternative nor classic rock/ strictly roots/ rule nonstop[.]”

Yet another technique is alliteration as in “babylon’s b-side,” a poem entirely composed of words beginning with “B” (or rather “b”) which allude to politics and history: “bus back benches/ birminghams// burning building beacons/ boss beelzebubs// boasts big brother[.]” Closer to home with its French title is “p pour profilage/ (a chant)” which begins with the couplet “pro phylogenic profiling police policy/ pro prejudice profiling police praxis” and segues to a naming of neighbourhoods—“piques n.d.g./ peeves côte des neiges/ perturbs burgundy[.]”

The most intriguing poem in this collection is the quiet “glib bilge/ for g.e.c.” which responds directly to George Elliott Clarke’s riff on Kellough’s prosody in “Of Black English, or Pig Iron Latin/ for Kaie Kellough” (in Blues and Bliss: the Poetry of George Elliott Clarke). The near-palindrome of Kellough’s title is from Clarke’s lines, “Zounds! My lyrics was tin-plate/ Not steel-sheet, some gift of gabble/ Une blague, maybe glib bilge.” Kellough’s “glib bilge,” already ironic in its 3-page length, is all the more thought-provoking given the other poems sharing the book. And its very presence attests to a daring publisher as well as a daring poet.

Among the poems sharing the book are several in which Kellough lets his sound schemes flow through longer lines and prose paragraphs. The poet’s diction remains driven by acoustics, but the inclusion of more function words leads to less compressed syntax so the poems become melodic breathers between the faster-paced syncopations. Notable among these is the first poem, “flux/ fleuve st-laurent.” The opening sentences set the tone: “i am the river. my ripples shift shaping glyphs. can you read me? the iroquois could – by the glint the sun shot over my liquid lips.” The poem’s ending echoes this beginning: “i am the river. my lisp fuses english, french, iroquois, kreyol. your grammar is a quick dip, a watery wisp of the babel that cabals in my thrall to the sea.” The poem becomes a credo of Kellough’s poe/li/tics throughout Maple Leaf Rag and is certainly in itself worth the price of admission.

Maxianne Berger is the author of Dismantled Secrets (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008).

Though archivists, writers, libraries, schools, universities, publishers, advertisers, software designers, technologists, biochemists, social justice activists and many more are all directly and forever affected by copyright law, by far the sexiest topic in the copyright world right now is file sharing, particularly music file sharing. Bill C-32, the proposed amendment to the Copyright Act has far-reaching implications for our country. It concerns whether or not you can legally share a track with your roommate or seed to a torrent site or have any right to the technology you purchase. It should be about way more than record labels suing loyal (and profit-making) fans, but we just can’t seem take our focus any further than those sensual, booty-shaking, beat-blasting songs, videos and concert bootlegs.

So here begins a series on the proposed amendment to the Copyright Act. I’ll discuss music (natch) file-sharing technology and my thoughts on the future of the recording industry. It’s definitely the end of a world as we know it, but in my view, this is one of the most constructive, potentially invigorating and positive apocalypses to come about in a very long while.

From Copyright Criminals (PBS), “Sampling law has created two classes; you’re either rich enough to afford the law, or you’re a complete outlaw”

To begin with, let’s look at where we’re at. Music sharing isn’t new and never has been. In fact, to garner an audience, the history of music is such that the more people could hear and engage with music, the better off the composer was. Music at one time was always free and always public. Copyright is new, as is the technology used to share music. These two things are incompatible and seem to be at the heart of the copyright battle, but it’s really about much more than that. Who gets compensated for a work of art and why? And is it all up to the creator, and if not, who else deserves a cut, and how big should it be? It’s never exactly about music and it’s not actually about copyright in many cases. It’s about, value, credit, credibility and of course, money.

The current argument goes like this: our law is way behind our technology. Technically, you’re not allowed to rip a CD you purchased in order to put it on your iPod. So for that and a few other reasons, the Copyright Act should be amended. But, the proposed amendments from round one of this fight, nearly two years ago, were so draconian and unenforceable as to make fair use obsolete and to make Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology the end-all-be-all of copyright management. This was a profoundly unsophisticated view of how to apply appropriate measures to copyright enforcement that a storm of disapproval and public outrage actually stopped the bill from passing, forced the government to hold public consultations and come up with a new draft.

It is the opinion of this Music Editor, that the current draft is just as unworkable as the previous draft, so much so that it makes a mockery of the flood of public opinion made available on the subject.

The reason is that though many changes are actually quite beneficial and workable compromises, the issue remains that DRM software trumps any kind of fair-use provision in the bill. So, if I purchase several songs from iTunes for the sake of creating a seminar (let’s say) on local music in Montreal and I break the digital lock on the song to make an intro-mashup piece, even though the law permits educational use and fair use for YouTube, I’ve still broken the law because I had to circumvent DRM, the trump clause. This is not the right way to bring our laws in line with our technology. Worse, because it’s such a joke and so difficult to pinpoint, the entire law itself becomes irrelevant. Not a good precedent to set for a law and order parliament.
Dialogue around this bill, tabled via both the Industry Minister and the Minister of Heritage, tends to be around whether the public values art. In this case, apparently, if you’re against the bill, it’s because you think artists ought to work for free. One problem with this argument is the wild and reckless cuts to arts funding, particularly arts funding meant to expose Canadian culture abroad, committed by this government. It means that the government tabling the bill also seems to think artists ought to work for free and sets its example by gutting artistic grant programs. Second, record companies have no-one to blame but themselves for devaluing art. When they give creators 10-15% (tops) for making the music we love enough that we want to share, and then mass-distribute it via cheap, plastic discs for ten dollars or less, it can’t come as a huge surprise when the public simply follows their lead and treats it as nothing special.

Finally, the ramifications; making technological locks and monitoring systems the enforcer by proxy sets a standard of unprecedented surveillance and privacy invasion in our legal system. There are other, better ways to get artists paid than by suing fans and spying on how individuals use the products they purchase.

So let’s cut back on the rhetorical farce, shall we? In coming segments, I’ll be discussing hip-hop, jazz, current and past lawsuits, and the potential future of other media companies, specifically record companies. I’ll also be discussing the long-term ramifications of this bill, only a few of which can immediately be seen. Hit me in the comments of this blog, or check out the discussion section on our Facebook page to let us know what you think.
Resources:
http://copyright.michaelgeist.ca/
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/crp-prda.nsf/eng/Home
http://www.cla.ca//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home

As the lights came up in Salle Wilfred-Pelletier at 10 pm on July 28th, the capacity crowd rose to their feet in unanimous approval. Movie lovers of all ages had turned out in droves to take in the final film of this year’s Fantasia festival, and from the five-minute long standing ovation, they clearly felt they’d seen their money’s worth. Which classic picture were they applauding with such gusto? Why, the restored version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis of course!

The simple truth of the matter is this newly restored cut of the film is nothing short of a miracle. After premiering in Germany in 1927, the original, 153-minute long Metropolis underwent drastic re-edits upon the insistence of the distributors, who sought to streamline the plot and shorten the running time. Over the years, several attempts were made to recreate Lang’s original director’s cut, but it wasn’t until July 1st, 2008 that the dream became possible. A nearly complete print of the film was discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires and an extensive restoration process was begun.

The new 2010 cut is four minutes short of the version that debuted in Germany over 80 years ago, and yes, there are quite a few shots marred by scratches and blurriness … but all things concerned, Metropolis has never looked better. It’s the most expensive silent film ever made, costing some five milliion Reichsmark, and all the money is up on the screen. From the cast of 36,000 to the revolutionary film techniques pioneered by Lang’s special effects expert, Eugen Schüfftan, Metropolis is an epic, visual feast that undeniably shaped the course of the history of cinema.

Echoes of the film’s Art Deco stylings can be seen in everything from contemporary architecture and comic books to, of course, movies. Tim Burton’s Batman is similar in scope and story, with its monstrously industrial Gotham City and climactic finale set in a cathedral. A lightning-filled sequence near the end of the first Ghostbusters movie mirrors the explosive destruction of the stylized “Heart Machine” at the hands of Metropolis’ oppressed workers. And if you ever come across something called Star Wars, you’ll get a pretty clear sense of what may have inspired all those futuristic cities, a robot named C-3PO and a villain with a mechanical hand. At the end of the day, whether you’re talking horror (The Bride of Frankenstein), sci-fi (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) or disaster movies (The Day After Tomorrow), you’re sure to find a touch of Metropolis.

For all that can be said about the style of the film and its impact, the underlying message of the story leaves something to be desired. Lang later said, of the tale he’d co-written with then-wife Thea von Harbou (who later joined the Nazi party), “I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale — definitely.”

A DVD/Blu-Ray version of the restored Metropolis will hit stores later this year.

Earlier this year, Criterion released a lavish DVD box set including 25 films by celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to celebrate what would have been his hundredth birthday (he died in 1998). But, as cinephiles know, there’s nothing like seeing these films projected on a big screen. Enter Cinema du Parc, which is hosting a month-long retrospective of the director’s work, providing the rare chance for Kurosawa devotees and neophytes alike to witness almost all of his films in 35mm prints.

If you’ve never ventured beyond Hollywood fare, then Kurosawa is the perfect gateway to the cinema of the East (though if subtitles aren’t your thing, then you simply can’t be helped). Many will be more familiar with the films that have been remade from his work, including A Fistful of Dollars (based on Yojimbo) and The Magnificent Seven (based on Seven Samurai). George Lucas wilfully acknowledges Star Wars‘ debt to The Hidden Fortress: C-3PO and R2-D2 are directly based on Kurosawa’s bumbling thieves. If Shakespeare’s your thing, look no further than Throne of Blood (a jidaigeki, or period drama, based on Macbeth) and Ran (a samurai interpretation of King Lear): these are among the finest Shakespeare adaptations put to film, and both are among Kurosawa’s best.

Kurosawa is best known for his samurai films, especially Rashômon and Seven Samurai (which I will reluctantly admit I’ve never seen: I’ve been waiting for an opportunity such as this to see it on the big screen!). The former film, which shows a terrible crime from the perspective of several witnesses, each of whom offers radically different testimony, is famous for its play with subjectivity and its commentary on the impossibility of truth and history. If you didn’t see it in Film 101, don’t miss the chance at du Parc.

Kurosawa’s bombastic samurai pictures are often opposed to the quiet, domestic dramas of his contemporary Yasujirô Ozu. Many forget that Kurosawa also made his share of gendai-geki (or contemporary dramas) and was a master of the genre in his own right. Cinema du Parc has already screened a 35mm print of Drunken Angel, a beautiful film about a doctor whose concern for the health of his patients is so overwhelming that he can’t help but destroy himself with alcohol. This film is a milestone for the great director: not only is it widely acknowledged as his first great film, but it also marked his first collaboration with actor Toshirô Mifune, who plays a young yakuza dying of tuberculosis under the good doctor’s care.

Other gendai-geki of note in the screening series include Ikiru (also known by its English title, To Live), which paints a damning portrait of Japanese bureaucracy (especially in its hilarious, though depressing, opening scene), and High and Low, a kidnapping plot starring a restrained Mifune. One of Kurosawa’s later films, Dreams, should satisfy anybody who was left cold by the lack of striking dream imagery in Christopher Nolan’s Inception – which also happens to be playing at du Parc and would make for an amazing double-feature!

It should be noted that Kurosawa’s earliest films, which have been scarcely seen in the West until Criterion released them on DVD, are being projected digitally from a DVD source. Having already seen a projection of Scandal, a gendai-geki from 1950, I can assure readers that the quality is perfectly acceptable. Regardless of the format, it’s likely your only chance to see the director’s early work on the big screen. I, for one, can’t wait to see his epic adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot!

Best of all, Cinema du Parc’s retrospective promises to be nearly comprehensive: only a handful of his films are not included in the line-up. Even Chris Marker’s documentary chronicling the making of Ran will be shown. Kurosawa is widely recognized as one of the master directors for a reason. Head over to Cinema du Parc and find out for yourself.

Cinema du Parc’s Kurosawa retrospective runs through September 2. The full schedule is available at their website, which also indicates which films will be shown from 35mm prints.

He is alone. She is alone. They meet each other. They eat meals together. They are nervous. They laugh. They enjoy romance. They begin to trust. They fall in love… And it usually stops there; the typical two-become-one love story endemic to our popular discourse. In his novel, Isobel and Emile, Alan Reed upends the old narrative to create “a story about what comes after a love story.” His sparse prose tugs the reader into two lives forced apart. It fills the pages with an immediacy and irresistible beauty that never flags. In a relentless rhythm of staccato sentences, Reed’s novel plumbs the depth of malaise that radical self-reinvention may create. At once moving and strange, it presents not the heroes of a love story, but the casualties.

Isobel is a young woman left behind in a small town where she clings to the vestiges of her terminated love affair with Emile, a pseudo-artist who builds puppets and films them. She sleeps above a grocery store in Emile’s old room and struggles to start again: “I spent the night sitting on your bed. Your bed. I spent the night drinking it all in, so that I will remember everything.” Emile moves in with an old friend in an unnamed big city where he struggles to express something with his puppets: “The film ends. The theatre is dark…His hands are trembling slightly. He does not want his hands to be trembling. He tries to hold them still.” Reed leads the reader through the twists and turns of the characters’ reinvention, as they struggle to fill the void once filled by the One’s embrace.

Reed manages to convey all this in short, declarative sentences. There are no grandiose epithets of suffering and remorse. The heartbreak is subtle yet deeply felt. Taken individually, the thousands of minute actions Reed describes may appear mundane, but as they collect and merge, their aggregate effect creates a story with immense emotional depth. The characters’ pain sneaks up on you and gets under your skin.

A style as unapologetically modernist as Reed’s also has its downfalls. For readers accustomed to a more conventional narrative voice, his style might feel pretentious. Meaning is always implied and never concretely defined. Short, paratactic sentences like the ones that comprise this book tend to suggest figurative significance, and after several pages of them, the reader is left grasping for their vague symbolism. Also, without the flourish of traditional characterization, the protagonists feel, well, wooden. But in a novel centered on a puppeteer, woodeness makes a strange sense and begins to take on an importance of its own. The novel is best when the reader lets the prose wash over him. The style takes over, and reading it becomes hugely enjoyable.

Although I wouldn’t recommend it as an easy beach-read, Isobel and Emile is a truly unique, compelling, and engrossing book that lingers in the reader’s mind long after the final pages. Reed brings into glaring focus the implications inherent in the love stories on which we so often rely to give our relationships meaning. In doing so, he helps us understand what “being together” can really mean.

Justin Scherer is a writer, critic, and translator based in Montreal.

Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.

Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.

Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.

Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).

Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf  board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.

Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.

Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5^th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.

The future of boxing is being unveiled on August 14th at the Molson Centre, as Montrealer Jean-Thenistor Pascal is finally set to fight, after a long delay, American-born Chad Dawson, for the World Boxing Council (WBC), International Boxing Organization (IBO), and Ring Magazine light heavyweight championship. This will be the first time that HBO will host a World Championship Boxing (WCB) PPV event in Canada.

“All the ingredients of an amazing event are here,” said Yvon Michel, president and general manager of Groupe Yvon Michel (GYM), one of Canada’s most renowned boxing organizations which co-organized the event with Gary Shaw Productions. “Good crowd, good atmosphere, and good fighters.”

Pascal, a Haitian-born Canadian, has helped mark Montreal as the Mecca of young boxing talent. His dynamic speed, uncanny conditioning, and eccentric movements in the ring that slightly resemble his childhood hero, the legendary Roy Jones Jr., has earned him a laundry list of championship titles, including the WBC Light Heavyweight belt which he will be defending for the third time.

Though Pascal is usually given the upper-hand in the speed department, an equally speedy and unequivocally powerful Dawson is the heavy favourite. Most predict that Dawson will successfully claim the WBC belt, protect his IBO belt for the third time, and knock out Pascal.

Despite the predictions, Dawson does not have the star-power that Pascal has in Montreal. “[Dawson] has been a superstar in the states. He’s a television star, but he has never had a chance to develop a good fan base [because of his travels],” explained Michel. “Most of Pascal’s fights have been here in Montreal, so he has developed a large fan base.

“HBO has been reluctant to come to Canada [in the past]. “When [HBO hosted] the fight with Lucian Bute and Edison Miranda, they realized the quality of the fighters [in Montreal], and the passion of the fans. [HBO WCB] really wanted to come here.”

According to Michel, the HBO network forced Dawson – who is the sixth pound for pound best fighter in the world according to Ring Magazine – to wait until Jean Pascal’s shoulder injury, the cause of the delay, was completely healed in order for the fight to commence. “This showed the will and determination of the network to have the fight [in Montreal],” said Michel.

“Fighters [in Montreal] that we have now are at the level where we need the support of American television networks to pay fighters according to their value. For this fight, Jean Pascal will earn a little over one million dollars. It will be the first million dollar purse ever in Canada for a Canadian [in a boxing event].”

The WCB HBO event on August 14th is considered as a chance for both fighters to make or break their careers. A win for Pascal will rocket him into the ranks of international superstardom, and a win for Dawson – though it still may not be enough for him to earn the pedigree that critics maintain he hasn’t earned – will cement the fact that he is still one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the business.

“The actual picture [of the future of Canadian boxing] is exceptional,” exclaimed Michel. “We are going to make history here.”