Toronto Hulk

The Incredible Hulk wreaking havoc on Yonge Street, beating tanks up in front of The Big Slice and swatting shoulder-fired missiles down on the U of T campus promises to be one of the highlights of a long hot Toronto summer. My friend Dov and I thought long and hard about other amazing Toronto-centric sequences that no doubt will await us in the multiplex...

The Hulk having dinner at Cafe Diplomatico and then going to Soundscapes

The Hulk walking everywhere or on his bike wearing a helmet with wings on it

The Hulk riding a paddle boat at Ontario Place

The Hulk at H&M trying on low-waist jeans

The Hulk at the Brass Rail

The Hulk in K-Town ordering another garbage can full of kimchi

The Hulk turning Play De Record into Break De Record

The Hulk getting rejected by the NFB

The Hulk in Yorkville tickling young ladies passing by with tree branches

The Hulk ordering a triple-triple at Timmy's and rolling up the rim of the actual store

The Hulk getting in on that 2 day rebate on his April Metropass because of the TTC strike

The Hulk hanging around the Central Reference Library waiting to check his hotmail on the free computers

The Hulk starting a facebook group to promote his DJ night in Kensington Market

The Hulk renting an apartment on Roncesvalles, inspiring a hulkaccino drink at his local fair trade coffee spot

The Hulk producing an award-winning season at Soulpepper after being named the new Artistic Director

I Will Never Stop Loving You, Quebec.

Salute To Ontario

Canadian Ad Agencies On The Rampage

Some of these ads make that Lee Majors/Mitchum Canuxplotation classic Agency look like a documentary.

Eastern Provinces

My friend Gordon informed me that Juno has just opened in South Korea, and is the first Canadian film that he can remember playing there since The Red Violin (didn't you guys get A History of Violence or The Barbarian Invasions? What about Les Boys?)

The Genies, the Canadian Oscars, are on next week, and Juno, despite being shot in Vancouver with a Canadian director, star and crew, is ineligible for any awards as the financing was American, whereas Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with American and Australian leads, a London backdrop and an British crew, was partly financed by Canadians and therefore enjoys 12 nominations.

This nationalistic dilemma could have been addressed by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences if they had deigned to nominate the soundtrack to Juno for a Juno award this spring...could this be a job for a write-in ballot campaign?

I took the photo to your upper right outside a video store in Buenos Aires - it was prominently displayed on the racks in most of the rental shops I checked out...

Canadians Being Sleazy

Breakfast at TIFF

I have been busy of late with my responsibilities for the Toronto International Film Festival but now it's underway and I can start making plans for seeing some films.

I tend to see niche films during the Festival - for instance last year I barely saw anything except for Zizek's three-parter The Pervert's Guide To Cinema and the Open Vault restoration of Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero from 1973. I have a slightly longer "to do" list this year.

Tonight it's Peter Bogdanovich introducing La Grande Illusion by Renoir, which I've never seen. (I will have a drink out of a flask everytime Bogdanovich says "Orson" in his opening remarks.) Next will be Ken Loach introducing the Czech New Wave film Closely Watched Trains - another hole in my education filled. I'm hoping The Diving Bell and The Butterfly will be as good as I would expect from a Julian Schnabel film starring Mathieu Amalric... I don't think I've ever been inside Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, certainly not to watch a film (though I did go to the Elgin in the seventies when it was a double-bill house!) so what better way to christen the place in my brain than with the latest Johnnie To action film from Hong Kong, Mad Detective? And then of course Donnie Yen in Flash Point at Midnight Madness the next evening... and I'm very much looking forward to seeing Redacted - a lot of people forget that De Palma was a bit Godard-y when he started out and this film looks to reconcile his political engagement with his technical mastery...as long as it's not Natural Born Killers 2.

Still have to pick a documentary, though it won't be Nathan Barley in Baghdad.

Night Walk

Back in the eighties, the Global Television Network had an ingenious idea to run 24 hour programming that wasn't an all-night Christian call-in show or a series of infomercials (that would come later), while also saving money on syndication acquisitions. They ran a three hour block of programs called Night Walk, Night Ride and Night Moves - super smooth Clint Eastwood-end-credits jazz (but Canadian! Featuring Guido Basso!) playing over steadicam footage of the empty Toronto streets. When we all saw it for the first time we were at a party - we were convinced it was airing live and were trying to pinpoint their coordinates and general direction so as to jump in a cab and intercept the broadcast.

Night Moves was by my recall the more experimental of the three but only visually; sometimes there they would show the footage in slow motion or backwards. Either that or I was hammered every time I came home and flipped it on.

There was only one episode of each and Global ran them all night every night well into the nineties. To see it again now is to get even more bitter about the continuing Fifth-Elementization of downtown. We had it good....

This clip contains primo footage of record store row on Yonge Street.

Back When Canada Was Cool

Dear Montreal:

Why didn't you keep the Expo 67 site going as it was? It would have been like Disneyland for the international Wallpaper* /Sharper Image demographic. A place for Daniel Liebskind to take the kids. Imagine all the lofty condo spaces the city could have developed around this vacation spot, on the waterfront. What's Moshe Safdie up to these days? You should give him a call.

Your friend,
Jesse

Botch Job

So I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is Lions Gate is putting out one of the cornerstones of the Canadian tax-shelter wave of the late seventies on DVD: Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner. Elliott Gould as an opportunistic bank teller taking advantage of a botched heist at work! Christopher Plummer as the sleazy (and incredibly violent) con man he fucks with! Santa Claus shooting people in the Eaton Centre! With an early screenplay by Curtis Hanson (now rumoured to be planning a remake), The Silent Partner worked well enough as a thriller back then, but works even better now as a time capsule of late seventies Toronto - lots of location photography.

All right, that's the good news. Here's the bad news. This is the cover art they went with.

New Obsession: Canadian Wonderbra Jingles

La Fievre Du Samedi Soir

Worked out pretty well for Stephané Dion, but the Quebecois icon I would have encouraged to run for the Liberal Party leadership would have been Guy LaFleur. For some reason he chose not to; was he afraid the disco album would come back to haunt him?


(Thanks for the headz, Tim!)

Gagnez Un Rendez-Vous Avec Tad Hamilton

I'm not one to complain about the french on the Corn Flakes box, but sometimes there are disappointing things about living in a country that enforces bilingualism on packaging. Most DVDs that are released in Canada that have a french language audio track now sport bilingual packaging, so you look at the cover and it says Batman Begins on the top and then in smaller text underneath, Batman: Le Commencement. That touch takes away from the grandeur, I think. Sometimes they have to distort the original studio artwork to impose these french graphics. And then they also print both the english and french title of the film on the spine of the case. So now when I go to inspect my collection I see on the shelf such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers/L'Invasion des Profanateurs or The Warriors/Les Guerriers de la Nuit. Casino is titled Casino/Casino on the spine. Why? I would hate to meet the bureaucrat who could answer this question for me.

I can't see the french consumer being thrilled to have this bilingual packaging anyway - the use of French is usually crudely photoshopped into the original cover art, like an afterthought or an obligation. I don't know why they don't offer consumers either reversible packaging (english and french on either side of the cover insert) or use alternate french language artwork on 25% of the print run. I was thrilled to come across a used Quebecois copy of Femme Fatale ("de Brian De Palma, Le Maitre Du Suspense Erotique"). The french packaging is the cherry on that particular cake.

Anyway I find this enforced and bland bilingualism on domestic videos irritating for the most part. But there are exceptions. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls came out on DVD last Tuesday. I was considering ordering a copy from the states just so I would have a pristine english only package of a very eagerly anticipated release. Until I found out the french title of BVD is Orgissimo.