Funny Girl after 9/11

1968’s Funny Girl, a restored version of which opens in Canada this weekend, may very well be the last bearable movie musical Hollywood ever made. Refugees from Mariah Carrey’s Glitter who find their way in front of a screen playing Funny Girl may well have some trouble comprehending exactly where they’ve landed. But kids will understand this artifact immediately: it’s just like The Little Mermaid, except that it’s done with real people and there’s a hydrogen bomb disguised as a woman at the center of things.
The movie musical was dying of anachronism right about the time Funny Girl was released---if there had been multiplexes at the time, it might just have shared a roof somewhere with Jean-Luc Goddard’s Week-End. Nominally a musical biography of vaudeville and radio star Fanny Brice, Funny Girl survived because it was Barbara Streisand’s Hollywood coming-out. The film made her a superstar and she returns the favor in kind: she is in virtually every scene and her charisma pours out of every frame.
The result, periodically, is emotionally overpowering. Everything in the film’s structure leads us on to a trio of overwhelming moments; each a musical number, all sung by Streisand alone: People, Don’t Rain on My Parade, and My Man. Nothing else in the movie comes close to matching these set-pieces, and in retrospect the rest of the film sometimes feels like an elaborate set-up.
Dramatically this puts a lot of performers in the shade---whatever isn’t within the emotional arc of Streisand’s character ends up superfluous. There are a couple of musical numbers that cry out to be shortened, and as her ultimately good-for-nothing husband Nick Arnstein, Omar Sharif is often left twisting in the wind. He is well-oiled and efficient as a handsome physical presence for Streisand to make eyes at, but ineffective as an emotional presence for her to react to. Unfortunately, Sharif reminds you that a lot of Funny Girl is A Star is Born without James Mason.
Fortunately, at that stage of her career, all-Barbara, all-the-time was just about enough. Funny Girl is a very simple movie---almost like a Dogme 95 presentation by contrast to some current musical entertainments. William Wyler’s direction is understated and motivated by a simple principle: Put somebody magnetic in front of a camera and let her do her thing.
If Funny Girl has become something of a dinosaur wandering through the theaters, it is of value for more than the cinematic paleontologist or the Streisand cultist. The visual medium in the television age has so compellingly become a vehicle for the delivery of real-world horror, that viewers seem no longer able to make the intellectual and emotional leap required to accept people bursting into song on a screen in front of them. The musical survives in the theater and in the animated cartoon---spaces where you park your visions of the real world at the door. But the movie musical is viable only in that psychic space we leave open for nostalgia.
Funny Girl is solid entertainment which at its most rarefied moments is pin-you-to-your-seat exhilarating. (A 26 year-old Barbra Streisand, lit by a single light and singing My Man on a Panavision screen, is more cinematically potent than Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing a jumbo jet apart with his bare hands.)
But it is the movie of the moment because it delivers you to an era before the World Trade Center even existed; a place where you still believed people would break into song on a movie screen just to get something off their chests. A 33 year-old movie musical like Funny Girl is more than just a nostalgic link to a better time. It offers us a glimpse of a more innocent vision of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001

Kiefer Sutherland in 2002

He’s not the archetypal Canadian actor; but he may well be the archetypal Canadian actor in Hollywood: More competent than many of the performers who surround him, he remains something of an outsider. For reasons obscure to everyone but perhaps himself, real stardom steadfastly refuses to attach itself to Kiefer Sutherland.

By the early 90’s, his brat-pack days over, Sutherland seemed to be inching towards a consistent film persona. Among the Charlie Sheens and Chris O’Donnells crashing in anachronistic flames about him, he alone looked comfortable with a saber in his hand and a horse between his legs in The Three Musketeers. In the otherwise forgettable The Cowboy Way he carved out a respectable portrait of a modern Western Man; a dignified, denim presence next to whom co-star Woody Harrelson seemed a refugee from Hee Haw.

You got the sense that if he had been born 40 years earlier Sutherland might have had a good career as a western star. His most effective character type is reminiscent of a Joel McCrea or a diminutive Gary Cooper---the reluctant, laconic, self-effacing man of action. Taking on that kind of cinematic persona cannot be a calculated act in contemporary Hollywood---in a place where actors prefer to be seen as gods, nobody writes leading characters like that any more. No, he does it because it’s genuine.

Hollywood has thus not been kind to him recently. The quiet, self-effacing leading man has been cast as: a drooling child-killer in Eye For an Eye; a racist cracker and clansman in A Time to Kill; a demented Peter Lorre imitator in Dark City; a snarling, corrupt lawman in Picking up the Pieces; a psychotic child psychiatrist in Freeway; a porn director in The Last Days of Frankie the Fly…. For a long time now there’s been a sense of him punching the clock and producing a body of work designed for the compulsive video renter but not many others.

From there it doesn’t seem a major career jump to a television series, but 24 will likely prove to be the best thing that’s happened to him in years. The show is slick, professional and compulsively presented, but most important, Sutherland plays a character that suits him. His Jack Bauer in 24 is professional and understated; a man in a world of duplicity and espionage struggling to reconcile his job with his desire to be a competent family man.

The sense you get looking at Kiefer Sutherland as he makes his actor’s way through the world feels awfully similar. When script and role allow, he too is very good at the charade that is his profession. But most of all, he simply seems to be someone trying to lead a normal life. As both actor and man he seems to echo Joel McCrea’s words in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country: “I just want to be able to enter my house justified.”

-Published in Flare, 2002

Obituary: Arnold Schwarzenegger 1984---2001

It is with deep regret that we announce the passing of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as a major movie star. He succumbed after a lengthy and apparently congenital illness that also killed many close relatives. Schwarzenegger was predeceased by his fraternal twin Sylvester Stallone, cousin Chuck Norris and nephew Jean-Claude Van Damme. (His cousin Steven Seagal is still in a coma but apparently reviving.)
Arnold will be sadly missed and lovingly remembered by his agent.
The most immediate symptom of his impending career-failure was the decision of Warner Bros. to release Collateral Damage in October, thus abandoning any pretense of it being a potential big-money earner for them. At the peak of his health, Schwarzenegger dominated the traditional blockbuster month of June like a colossus, when often no rival studio would dare release a movie against him. Observers have since noted ominously that he hasn’t had a lead role in a summer blockbuster since 1996.
Long-term cause of death was likely Hollywood’s tendency of late to star real actors in big-ticket action movies (see: Face Off, The Matrix, Mission Impossible et al); the passing from fashion of the Mr. Olympia physique and the emergence of the Brad Pitt look; and viewers noticing that as a 50+ survivor of bypass surgery Schwarzenegger lacked credibility as an action hero. Some journals have floated the unkind theory that later in his career people were finally able to understand his dialogue, which hastened his decline. (This has yet to be confirmed in a peer-reviewed publication.)
A consensus appears to be emerging that it was simply bound to happen sooner or later: The birth of his career as a superstar was largely a biological accident; a tendency at beginning of the 80’s for filmmakers to cast kickboxers and athletes as action stars. Being an abnormality, this cinematic plague tends to be self-limiting: it comes in cycles, builds momentum and then kills off its food supply---in this case audiences composed of cement-headed grunts and people losing date-movie coin-tosses.
Beginning in 1970’s Hercules Goes Bananas (as ‘Arnold Strong’), Schwarzenegger’s career moved in fits and false starts until career physician James Cameron’s epochal decision to cast him as a machine in 1984’s The Terminator. Finding the persona most within his reach launched him into superstardom, where for many years he was Hollywood’s highest-paid performer, whose movie budgets regularly set records.
Yet, rumors of cinematic ill-health had been spreading for several years and the broadening of his taste in roles has hurt his appeal, once stated succinctly by the late Jay Scott: “He can do nothing. Therefore he can do anything.” Cinematic infibrilation is planned to attempt a career restart (Terminator 3) but the absence of Dr. Cameron from the project will limit its effectiveness. Resuscitation seems unlikely.
Funeral arrangements are by Planet Hollywood. Pallbearers will be Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Chow Yun-Fat, Sigourney Weaver, Keanau Reeves and Nicolas Cage. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the 2002 Governor’s Campaign of the Republican Party of California.

-Published in Flare, 2001

The Weekly Scoop 2005 year-end quiz!

In 2005:
1. Paris Hilton was attacked and clawed by her pet monkey while shopping for
a) A Diane Medak Silk Detail Halter
b) Pet food
c) A Mercedes 450SE
d) A bullwhip

2. David and Victoria Beckham
a) Erased David’s face from the official Real Madrid Soccer team photo
b) Erased Victoria’s face from the Wikipedia photograph of the Spice Girls
c) Erased son Brooklyn’s face from all copies of his school album
d) Erased Victoria’s boob job from the public record with a lawsuit

3. Scientists discovered that beer might prevent
a) Heart attacks
b) Cancer
c) Depression
d) Erections

4. Tennis Bunny Anna Kournikova had a computer virus named after her, called
a) The 30-Love Virus
b) The I Love You Virus
c) The Anna Kournikova Virus
d) The No-Talent Big Hooters Virus

5. At The Cannes Film Festival, Britney Spears announced that
a) She was going to star in a sequel to Crossroads
b) She was suing Indiana singer Steve Wallace for copyright infringement
c) She was set to produce a movie about car racing
d) She was set to throw up from morning sickness

6. Shipping Magnate Paris Latsis said he’d jilted Paris Hilton because
a) He wanted kids; Hilton didn’t
b) He saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off
c) His Mom saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off
d) The whole world saw the Paris Hilton sex tape and called it off

7. Lucie Cave’s World's Stupidest Celebrities quoted Christina Aguilera as saying
a) “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”
b) “I owe a lot to my parents—especially my mother and father”
c) “Weasels ripped my flesh”
d) “So, where's the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”

8. Renee Zellweger’s May-September husband Kenny Chesney claimed that the split from her
a) Was like being hit by a truck
b) Was like kidney stones
c) Was like losing his TV set
d) Was like having to listen to a stack of Clint Black CD’s

9. Russell Crowe was arrested for throwing a telephone at
a) A waitress at New York’s Bar 89
b) His ex-agent Jennings Lang
c) A clerk at New York’s Mercer Hotel
d) “…that skinny fag Keanu Reeves”

10. Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria asked Jennifer Aniston to forgive her for wearing a t-shirt that read
a) “Team Angelina”
b) “I’ll have your baby, Brad”
c) “I never liked Friends, either”
d) “I fucked Brad Pitt and all he gave me was this lousy t-shirt”

11. Which of the following is not a line from Madonna’s Confessions on a Dancefloor
a) “Sticks and stones will break my bones”
b) “Life's gonna drop you down like a limb from a tree”
c) “I like New York/ Other places make me feel like a dork”
d) “I’m their savior/ That’s what they call me/ So Lauren Bacall me”

12. In his infamous Today Show appearance, Tom Cruise told host Matt Lauer
a) “I see dead people”
b) “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”
c) “Billions of neutrinos are passing through your body right now”
d) “Why do you think they call it dope?”

13. Who said “sleeping with Angelina Jolie is like fucking the couch”
a) Val Kilmer
b) Billy Bob Thornton
c) Jon Voight
d) Jennifer Anniston

14. Winner of the 2005 Razzie award for worst screen actor was:
a) Ben Afflick
b) Ben Stiller
c) Ben Gazzara
d) George W. Bush

15. The infamous Colin Farrell sex tape is alleged to show
a) Farrell having his way with model Nicole Narain
b) Farrell having his way with model Carolyn Murphy
c) Farrell having his way with Paris Hilton
d) Oliver Stone having his way with Farrell’s performance on the set of Alexander

15. Jude Law publicly apologized to girlfriend Sienna Miller for
a) Having an affair with one of his costars from Alfie
b) Having an affair with one of his children’s nannies
c) Forgetting their anniversary
d) His performance as Errol Flynn in The Aviator

16. Mel Gibson announced he was writing and directing a new film entitled
a) Passion 2: Electric Boogaloo
b) The Ten Commandments
c) Appocalypto
d) Mad Max: End Times

17. When a groupie complained publicly about the quality of Owen Wilson’s
performance in bed, Wilson replied
a) “that’s what I get for buying my prescriptions over the internet”
b) “It was even worse from my end”
c) “There are lots of paths to the waterfall”
d) “Sic transit gloria mundi”

18. British tabloid The Sun was successfully sued by Cameron Diaz for falsely claiming that
a) She was snorting coke with both hands and a dory bailer on the set of In Her Shoes
b) She was carrying on an affair with a television producer
c) She’d had a botched breast augmentation
d) She’s been so whacked out on pills shooting Gangs of New York that they’d had to dub her voice

19. Commenting on Tom Cruise’s 2005 misadventures, screen legend Lauren Bacall said
a) “I wish he’s grow up”
b) “Bogie could have mopped the floor with him”
c) “What else would you expect from somebody from that lunatic religion?”
d) “When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise”

20. Jennifer Connelly told Esquire magazine that during sex she also likes to
a) Talk on the telephone
b) Read a book
c) Shop online
d) All of the above


Correct Answers: 1a; 2c; 3b; 4c; 5c; 6c; 7d; 8c; 9c; 10b; 11d; 12b; 13b; 14d; 15a 16c; 17c; 18b; 19d; 20d.

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, 2006

The Passion of the Peckinpah

No director made movies more passionately than Sam Peckinpah, and aside from Orson Welles, no great filmmaker suffered more at the hands of the studios for whom he plied his trade. Between 1961 and 1983 he made 14 feature films, many of which didn’t make it intact to their first release. He’s usually thought of as a ‘lost’ artist; robbed of half his career by alcohol, personal demons and studio hacks. Yet as Cinematheque Ontario’s retrospective Bring me the Films of Sam Peckinpah makes clear, he gave us everything he had, and everything he had was enough.
The zeitgeist has been much kinder to Peckinpah recently than he ever was to himself: In the last few years, the studios have re-released virtually all of his movies to the DVD catalog; more importantly, they’ve repaired most of the damage they’d done to them as well. With the upcoming release of a restored Cross of Iron, every one of Peckinpah’s most important movies will be available to the viewing public, more or less the way he’d intended us to see them.
At his peak, he was generous with his genius: Between 1969 and 1973 Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Let’s put that in perspective: in the same amount of time it will have taken the producers of the James Bond franchise to bring Casino Royale to market this fall, Sam Peckinpah made six extraordinary films. How could we have been that lucky without noticing it at the time?
Watching them as a group today is an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience: The passion Peckinpah had for both the western and the idea of the west leaps through the screen from his heart directly to yours. You’re emotionally held hostage with no hope of being ransomed, because you’re being kidnapped by a kind of filmmaking that’s gone forever. So it’s very easy to develop a tendency to look back at Peckinpah’s westerns the way Peckinpah looked back at the fin-de-siecle west. When you contemplate the Jerry Bruckheimers and the Michael Bays currently cranking out films in the action-adventure genre, you may find yourself suddenly identifying with Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch: Surveying the motley posse he’s been saddled with to bring the Bunch in, he spits out: “We’re after men—and by God, I wish I was with them!”
For better or (occasionally) worse, seeking out some men is Peckinpah’s blood-and-butter. And unlike, say, Howard Hawks, he’s not concerned so much with what a man does when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but rather where a man can go if he simply wants to be a man. For Peckinpah, manliness is more of a place on a map than a state of mind. If, like Joel McCrae in Ride the High Country, all you want is to enter your house justified, where do you build your home?
The answer to most Peckinpah men is somewhere within hailing distance of Mexico: All of Peckinpah’s most effective films feature Mexico as a background motif; a source of inspiration and moral compass. Peckinpah’s men are outsiders; refugees from authority and compromise; gun-toting Holden Caulfields laid low by middle age; and they’re people for whom Mexico represents the only remaining frontier worthy of the name; the only place that’s both untrammeled and has in it the kind of people with whom you’d want to share a bottle of whiskey. It’s where the Wild Bunch finds both paradise and death, and it’s where Billy the Kid refuses to run and is killed for it. Major Dundee’s Major Dundee goes there and nearly becomes Heart of Darkness’s Colonel Kurtz; and it’s the place Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are getting away to in The Getaway. (Virtually every movie of Peckinpah’s could probably be called The Getaway.)
When escape to Mexico is not an option, you get something like Straw Dogs. Infamously described by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as “the first American film that’s a fascist work of art,” 35 years later Straw Dogs looks more like the Paul Verhoeven version of Home Alone—a potentially defensible thesis about a reasonable man’s capacity for violence, done in by screenwriting straight out of Basic Instinct.
In the context of the films he surrounded it with (the gentle Ballad of Cable Hogue on one side; the genial Junior Bonner on the other), Straw Dogs is a bizarre artifact; Peckinpah besieged by his own demons with no frontier to escape to. It also marked an intrusion of the modern into his work—as if he’d finally looked around and noticed Nixon and Vietnam—and he was never entirely able to shake it off.
Thus, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is as much about America in 1973 as it is about New Mexico in 1881. Mutilated beyond credibility in its first release, the 2005 restoration allows it re-entry into the pantheon of Peckinpah’s’s greatest achievements; as the valedictory to the western he was never allowed to deliver in person. An even better and less sentimental distillation of all of Peckinpah’s themes than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is a melancholy farewell to the west and the western, both for the director and for cinema itself. Nobody makes westerns any more at least partly because in 1973 Peckinpah saw to it that there’d be nothing left for them to say.
But where is a director to build his home when he’s just made the last western that would ever need to be made? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the sight of a filmmaker tearing his guts out coming to grips with the answer. Apocalyptic, obnoxious, and sometimes downright campy, Alfredo Garcia is the great Peckinpah Burnout Movie. In it he pushes every cinematic thesis he’s ever developed past the point of credulity—seemingly over the edge of the earth. Goddard tacked the words “Fin du Film; Fin du Cinema” to the end of his Weekend in 1967, and they’re words that surely could have closed Alfredo Garcia as well—in blood-red letters.
No other substantial filmmaker—except perhaps fellow cinematic wild-man Samuel Fuller—ever wore his guts so unashamedly on his sleeve or made so career-destroying a movie. It’s hard to tell at that stage whether it was a matter of spiritual authenticity or temporary insanity. One thing is certain: For Peckinpah, getting his vision onscreen didn’t just matter, it was a matter of life and death. And ultimately, with a few more indifferent movies—and a lot of help from whiskey—the struggle killed him.
But we should resist the urge to see Sam Peckinpah as a martyr. Film critic David Thompson saw Peckinpah’s screen work as a metaphor for its author’s sufferings in Hollywood, but the truth is exactly the other way around: The studios did him in just as surely as the ranchers did in Pat Garrett, but Peckinpah used his suffering at their hands to perfect the myth he put on screen.
He wouldn’t have had it any other way: For us his life represents the last of a line of men stretching from Ride the High Country’s Steve Judd through Pat Garrett to The Wild Bunch’s Deke Thornton. Sam Peckinpah was our last Western hero.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2005

Solaris

If you’ve seen one of the commercials for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, you’ll notice that it’s being pushed as a date movie; a romance. It’s a bit of a risky strategy for 20th Century Fox, because, while it is a movie about love, it may tell some happy couples a lot more than they really want to know. Solaris is both science-fiction and love story: It’s about strange places in outer space, but mostly it’s about the strange space that love occupies in human lives.

A downsizing of the mammoth 1972 Russian film classic, Solaris features a narrative that would look at home on an episode of Star Trek: a troubled psychiatrist whose wife committed suicide years before is sent to investigate the strange goings-on on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. When he arrives he finds the crew either dead, or apparently crazy. When he awakes after his first night’s sleep there, he discovers the source of the troubles: the planet itself appears to have the power to conjure up the object of your dreams and obsessions, or at least a seemingly perfect copy of it. And since he’s been obsessed with his dead wife, guess who he wakes up beside?

What follows is light on narrative and heavy on implication. The main issue we are forced to come to grips with is, how much of our love for another is based on the reality that is that person, and how much is based on our imagination of what that other person is? And if the greater part of that person who we love is really our own artifice, what does that mean for that other person? Solaris pushes that issue by giving us a conscious, self-identified woman who has been created entirely from the memories of her husband, a person who has to construct herself as she goes along out of fragments of unfamiliar memories. Her struggle is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s as profound a character as Hollywood has given us in decades.

Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, Solaris feels a bit like what 2001 A Space Odyssey might have felt like if Brian Eno had been in charge of the music. It doesn’t give us everything; we have to fill in a good deal of the picture ourselves, which is just one of the complements Soderbergh pays his audience. But like our psychiatrist orbiting that planet, what we emerge from the theater with will depend a lot on what we bring in ourselves.

If Solaris is going to be tricky sell to some audiences, it’s still a triumph for its creator. What Ron Howard is to studio executives, Steven Soderbergh is to us: he’s the closest thing we’ve got to lead-pipe reliable. Soderbergh is America’s most consistently interesting working director: In 13 years he’s produced 10 first-rate movies, which is a feat most directors won’t achieve in a lifetime. (And he doesn’t turn 40 for another year.) If he keeps it up, there’s no way he’s not one of the greatest filmmakers in history. D’you always wish you’d been there when Howard Hawks was at his peak in the 1930’s and 40’s? Well, we’re there right now.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, 2002

Six Degrees of Detoxification

Kate Moss’s recent coke-fueled misadventures remind us of the truth that lies in the drug-addiction model of fame. All celebrities should be treated as addicts: The more celebrated they are, the more acute their addiction is; the less they actually do to earn their status, the more addictive their behaviour.

So it should be no surprise that the rehab clinic is almost a vacation destination for the high-visibility luminary, or that there are far more drug- and alcohol-recovery clinics in North America than there are Wal-Marts. So, together with some of the big names in rehab, here are a few of the big names who’ve been in rehab.

Clinic The Meadows
Where? Wickenburg, Az.
Alumni Elle MacPherson, Kate Moss
Claim to Fame Recent admission of Kate Moss has set the bar for costly celeb treatment; reported cost to Moss of $4000/day is more than 10 times the price at the Betty Ford


Clinic Promises
Where? Malibu, Ca.
Alumni Charlie Sheen, Christian Slater, Diana Ross, Winona Rider, Ben Affleck, Matthew Perry, Kelly Osbourne, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Very high-end; younger Hollywood clientele; half of Mötley Crüe has passed through its doors


Clinic Impact Treatment Center
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Heidi Fleiss, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Has reputation for taking on Promises Clinic’s underachievers


Clinic Wavelengths International
Where? Malibu Ca.
Alumni Courtney Love, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame A mere step along the road for its two most famous patients


Clinic Betty Ford Center
Where? Rancho Mirage, Ca.
Alumni Elizabeth Taylor, Bobby Brown, Stevie Nicks, Mary Tyler Moore, Anna Nicole Smith, Ozzy Osbourne, Lisa Minnelli, Johnny Cash, Kelsey Grammer, many, many others
Claim to Fame Mother of all celebrity detox centers; name provides cachet that you’re serious about treatment; if you’re a star, you’ll likely run into a lot of your friends


Clinic Exodus
Where? Marina del Ray, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Kurt Cobain, Robert Downey Jr., Courtney Love
Claim to Fame Name ominously appropriate for Robert Downey Jr., who escaped four days into his stint there in July 1996


Clinic Hazelden
Where? Minnesota, plus three other states
Alumni Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithful, Chris Farley, Liza Minnelli, Melanie Griffith, Matthew Perry, Bobby Brown, Nathalie Cole, Calvin Klein
Claim to Fame Has the forthrightness to claim a success rate of only 54%; that is, almost half of their patients are re-toxed within a year.


Clinic Las Encinas Hospital
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni Kelly Osbourne, Jack Osbourne
Claim to Fame See Alumni, above


Clinic Silver Hill Hospital
Where? New Canaan, Ct.
Alumni Liza Minnelli, Nick Nolte, Mariah Carey, Greg Allman, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Diana Ross
Claim to Fame Musician’s addiction center of choice, although perhaps the only detox center in America not visited by Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil


Clinic “Unknown Detox Facility”
Where? Pick your state or country
Alumni Vince Neil, Drew Barrymore, David Bowie, Courtney Love, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Moss, Betty Ford, Eminem, Domino Harvey, many, many others
Claim to Fame Hey, it might have been one of us

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, November 2005

Revenge of the Lucas

Context is everything. So into what kind of space are we going to situate Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith? Well, how about personal space: The last time I really enjoyed myself at a Star Wars movie---the last time I knew I was seeing something really special... was 28 years ago. And my girlfriend of the time now has children considerably older than we were when we saw the original together.

I should really call them up and see what they think. Because I have a feeling that when you were born is going to have a lot to do with how you feel about Episode 3. If you are a child of the age of Nintendo, ‘special edition’ DVD’s and the Sony Playstation, you’ll probably feel somewhere close to home. If you’re a child of the Age of Movies, well, you’ll probably be relieved that the whole panjandrum is finally coming to an end.

The Playstation connection is the defining one. All three movies in the second series of Star Wars have felt like video games that played themselves. There were points in Episode 2 and about a half-an-hour here in Episode 3 where the script shakes itself awake, you get some genuine emotion, and you feel like you’re watching a real movie. But for the most part these episodes are inhuman---their real home is to machines bouncing off other machines. Personality is virtually nonexistent. Now, personality is something you bring to a video game, but it’s something you hope a movie will bring to you. Personality in script and character is what brings excitement to your big---and here generic---special-effects events, but the feeling you get here is that all the clutter and big effects are there to keep the actors from drowning.

Over the three decades he’s been tinkering with his cinematic toys at the Skywalker Ranch, writer-director George Lucas has lost the ability to credibly put human beings onscreen. His direction of actors here, to say nothing of the lines he gives them, is as futile as directing tombstones in a cemetery. How can you botch a scene where a girl tells a boy she’s pregnant? They do.

So there are no thrills. There’s lots of business; there’s lots of actor boilerplate, but there’s no excitement. This was supposed to be the big climactic movie in this series; the one where all the dots are finally connected. And they are. But mostly it’s connect-the-dots.

There’s a movie coming out later in the season called Stealth, and it’s about a computerized military fighter-plane that starts to think that’s its an genuine warrior. Analogously, I think George Lucas is actually a spaceship that has convinced itself that it’s a movie writer-director. Star Wars has been around for almost three decades and it’s changed Hollywood. If you go and see this movie, you’ll see a half-a-dozen trailers for similarly mechanical blockbusters that will rule theaters this summer. I think what’s happened is that the success of Star Wars has purged most of the humans from the industry. The clones have won.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, June 2005

The Tom Cruise Movie Prediction Engine

Chris Rock put his finger on something at last spring’s Oscars: “You want a successful movie?” he asked. “Get yourself some stars.” But he’s only half right—star power means more to movie producers than movie fans these days: A star guarantees that a film will find an audience, but not that the audience will find a good film.
Take the biggest star of ‘em all—Tom Cruise. His work’s been up and down more than Jenna Jameson on a stripper’s pole. But be of good cheer: the following little survey will help you predict whether Tom’s next movie will be an act of genius, or a gobbler. Add up the numbers and see!

• Does this movie co-star Cruise’s current spouse/girlfriend? [-1]
• Does he get physically or emotionally abused? [+2]
• Does he deliver more than 1/4 of his dialog in a foreign language? [+1]
• Does he put on a foreign accent while speaking English? [-1]
• Is he cast against any obviously superior actors? [-2]
• Was his part offered to anyone else first? [+1]
• Can this movie be interpreted as having Scientological themes? [-1]
• Does he play a merely supporting role? [+1]
• Is it a supporting role in the Friends movie? [-1]
• Is the director more respected or influential than he is? [+1]
• Does he wear that silly grin of his on the poster? [-1]
• Does he play the bad guy? [+1]
• Did he produce the movie? [-2]
• Is he 21 years old or younger? [Trick question]
• Has the director slagged him as being impossible to work with? [-1]
• Has the director praised him for being a treat to work with? [-1]
• Does he take his shirt off? [-1]
• Does he have sex with a woman? [+1]
• Does he have sex with a man? [+2]
• Does he have sex with Jake Gyllenhall while Katie Holmes watches? [+4]
• Is this movie directed by any of the following: Rob Reiner, Ron Howard, Cameron Crowe, Kevin Smith, Tony Scott? [-1]
• Is this movie directed by any of the following: Paul Verhoeven, Lars Von Trier, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polansky, David Cronenberg? [+1]

Scores:
+7 or above Either a great movie or great guilty pleasure; either way you win
+3 — +6 Pleasant surprise; will possibly bring Oscar nomination
0 — +2 Iffy, but possibly watchable depending on director
-1 — -2 Typical, but fans my tolerate; still better than driving home
-3 — -6 Even fans better advised to choose a Mickey Rourke film instead
-7 or below Battlefield Earth territory; wear impermeable garments to screening

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, Oct. 2005

Current Vegas Lines on the 2007 Oscars

• Odds that the broadcast will wrap up on schedule (150-1)
• Odds that Ellen DeGeneres will make a sly reference to the fact that she’s the first openly gay personality to host the Oscars: Right off the top (2-1); Never (3-1); During a commercial break (8-5); The first time the cameras start to linger on Tom Cruise (5-1)
• Deceased star likely to get most applause when the obituary reel is shown: Robert Altman (3-1); Peter Boyle (5-1); Jack Warden (10-1); Glenn Ford (15-1); Jack Palance (2-1); Don Knotts (30-1)
• Odds that the Best Foreign Film winner will say something critical about US foreign policy (3-1)
• Odds that the Best Foreign Film winner will say something complimentary about Hollywood movies (50-1)
• Odds the most long-winded speech will come from: Eddie Murphy (20-1); Martin Scorsese (10-1); Peter O’Toole (6-1); Jennifer Hudson (20-1); Academy President Sid Ganis (Even)
• Most likely political statement made by a winner from the stage: Global warming is an issue that the world must address (3-1); The post-colonial exploitation of Africa by the rich must cease (5-1); I don’t know how I’m going to link my movie to the slaughter in Iraq, but I’m gonna do it anyway (8-5); We should stop insulting the public’s intelligence with this crass promotional gimmick disguised as an awards show (75-1)
• Most likely embarrassing unscripted moment: An inebriated Nick Nolte will lose his place in his teleprompted remarks and fail to extricate himself (6-1); A flop-sweating Billy Bob Thornton will remind the audience that it still isn’t too late to catch The Astronaut Farmer at the multiplex next door (10-1); Ryan O’Neil will rush the stage with a fireplace poker (4-1)
• Most likely embarrassing scripted moment: Host Ellen DeGeneres will jump up and down and claim to be in love with Katie Holmes (9-1); Jennifer Aniston will attempt to kiss Cate Blanchett to publicize her upcoming appearance on Dirt (6-5); Special guest presenter Al Gore will attempt to read his lines (7-2)
• Most unlikely nominated winner: Will Smith (25-1); Rinko Kikuchi (20-1); Judi Dench (15-1); Mark Wahlberg (40-1)
• The elephant in the room that a minor presenter will finally mention: Dreamgirls, a universally well-received but largely black project, wasn’t nominated for Best Picture (2-1) Isn’t it time we stopped awarding an Oscar for “best animated feature”? (15-1) We should have given Scorsese his Director Oscar for Goodfellas so we wouldn’t have to pretend a dog like The Departed is pure gold (3-2); This is the lamest bunch of nominees since The Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture in 1952 (10-1)
• Odds that Liza Minnelli, freshly divorced from David Gest, will now try and punch out Russell Crowe when ushers attempt to move him into her seat: (20-1)
• Odds that Academy voters will be able to tell Dreamgirls’ three nominated songs apart (7-2)
• Most likely sentimental winner: Eddie Murphy (8-1); Alan Arkin (5-1) Martin Scorsese (2-1) Peter O’Toole (Even)
• Actor least likely to be trusted to present an award: Rip Torn (10-1) Mel Gibson (15-1) Mickey Rourke (35-1) Lindsay Lohan (50-1) Courtney Love (85-1)
• Sascha Baron Cohen is most likely to show up in character as: Borat (8-5) Ali G. (5-1) Gay race-car driver Jean Girard (9-4) Peter O’Toole (8-1)
• Odds that Xenu will arise through a volcano in the Kodak Theater parking lot, spirit Tom Cruise and John Travolta away in a DC-8-shaped rocket ship, and bring history as we know it to an end (14-1)

-Published in the Globe and Mail, March 2007

The Kitchen Fraternity

Having played the singles scene for a few years now, I like to think I’ve got my priorities down pretty solidly. So when a matchmaking friend wants to introduce me to somebody, before we even get to the usual suspects---personality, intelligence, politics, looks and stuff like that---I’ve really got only one question: Does she like to cook?

Is her vision of the ideal interior design a kitchen that’s twice the size of the living room? Does she browse through kitchen-supply stores and impulse-buy sauté pans? Does she think a Nobel Prize for Julia Child isn’t a dumb idea? Does she look forward to early retirement so she can spend more time hanging around the stove? These are all things I can identify with.

In fact, if I ever took out a personal ad, my description of myself would probably read: “I like to hang around the kitchen.” A kitchen is the most civil place to start a relationship: an unpretentious, low-pressure space devoted to mutual tasks and common ambitions. Leave the living room to the poseurs---virtually all of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had have taken place within 5 feet of a working stove. (Besides, I always figured that if you both know your way around a kitchen, all that multiple orgasm stuff would take care of itself.)

Strangely, some callous and unthinking living-room types find this attitude bewildering. I can sympathize: People with a pathological distaste for a stove might be rubbed the wrong way by a person who thinks that everything should be in the same room as it. My ideal living space would be a 900 sq. ft high-ceilinged studio where you can see the stove from anywhere in the place. Except maybe the bathroom---I don’t want to be a fanatic about this.

Being taken for a fanatic is a risk you run when you’re passionate about cooking. If you’re a woman, you also risk being confused for someone unhappily obsessed with eating---one of the chocolate-is-better-than-sex types. But let’s keep our heads screwed on here: Food is not more exciting than sex---although good food is definitely more exhilarating than lousy sex. (Or, as a woman friend of mine described a merely fair-to-middlin’ sexual escapade: “it wasn’t food, but it wasn’t bad.”)

I’m sustained by the faith that there is a fraternity of people out there who understand. They are people that know that sometimes, even though you’re worn out from a day’s work, you just have to go to another store because the leeks in this one aren’t perfect. They are people who go to restaurants for the inspiration more than the food---because they can generally do better at home and spend more on the wine. They are people who head straight for the cookbook section in the used bookstore, in hopes that there’s a reasonably priced copy of Escoffier that they can buy and give away because they’ve already got one.

Above all, they know the terrible paradox of eating alone: you always eat well, but you may also be wasting an episode of genius on yourself. To search for someone from this fraternity is not just matching obsessions. Assigning a high priority to making brilliant food is a sign of intelligence, spirit, and civility. It’s also just good sense: how can you crawl into bed with someone you’ve never cooked with?

But I suppose I shouldn’t paint too rosy a picture for myself of what at bottom may be a shared fixation after all. I had a girlfriend once---we made great food together but somehow things didn’t work out. On the other hand, we still eat together regularly, chop vegetables mutually, and get strange looks from friends when we both get excited over the combined flavor of a 1987 BC Muscat and hazelnut ice cream.

We still belong to the fraternity. It’s a relationship that’s worth savoring.

-Published in Flare, 2004

Are they Worth it Part 3: Beppi Crosariol's “Wine Butler” in the Globe and Mail

If, like me, you find the Globe and Mail too depressing a read to buy the newsprint edition, yet you still start your day with the online version, you may have caught a glimpse of a new feature currently being promoted in the left-hand sidebar to the front page. It's called the 'Wine Butler', and it's being pushed as a sort of consumer treasury of Globe wine writer Beppi Crosariol's collected sniffs and gulps from years past, gathered together in a searchable database. As such, it represents the Globe's first tentative foray into the kind of online data treasury currently occupied by heavy enological hitters like Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker, both of whom have pay sites promising unlimited access to their private notes to give you a leg up on fellow wine-fanciers competing for the good stuff at your local wine retailer. Unfortunately, if early shakedown runs are anything to go by, it's pretty clear that if this wine butler actually was a flesh and blood creature at your service, you'd have handed him his walking papers by now.

I suppose we could have seen it coming: such a project must be really attractive to a critic with ten years worth of tasting notes that have been publicly viewed just once, and have since faded from view like the tannins in a big Aussie Cabernet. Here's a chance for the man to turn his knowledge into searchable cyber-wisdom; his life-experience into a database. How could anyone resist?

The trouble is, as a useful consumer tool the Wine Butler's a bust; worse yet, as a means of putting Crosariol's wine-writing on display (a sort of 'Beppi's Greatest Hits') it's so flawed as to prove a mere annoyance to anybody seeking either a glimpse of his personality or a whiff of his intelligence. As a database, it doesn't give you the information you want; and as a sampler of wine writing, it's an exercise in frustration to browse.

Even the most cursory search---either by wine type or by wine name---reveals that the database is woefully short on useful data. To take just one example, Wine Butler lists no Bordeaux between $15 and $25, which is preposterous: Even in B.C. Liquor Stores there are a dozen examples available; at the LCBO even more. Or, a search for a Burgundy priced between $15 and $25 missed several in current release, and instead listed two which were not available any more---one of which was incorrectly priced to boot. And when you do squeeze out a hit searching by type, as often as not you are steered to an older review of a vintage that was never available except at a small circle of LCBO Vintages stores for two days in 2005.

As a guide to wines that actually are out there, Wine Butler falls down even more badly. As a thought experiment, I tried typing in the names of all the bottles in the last couple of cases I hauled home from the LCBO, with nary a hit. (The no-shows included: Domaine de la Solitude; Tommasi anything; Clos du Bois anything; Mouton anything; Kenwood Pinot Noir; Domaine Monoertuis; Chateau Gaillat; Chanson Bourgogne; Chateau Saint Auriol Corbieres; Marchand Fixin; Drouhin Morey St Denis; and Chateau du Pavillon. As far as I know, they're all still out there on LCBO shelves.)

As well, Wine Butler offers up promises to the nose that just aren't followed up on the palate; what on the surface appear to be user-friendly and useful little touches but turn out empty---like the little “match with food” toggle, which requires even more raw data to be effective. (Find me the best $25 Bordeaux to go with a chicken pie? Why not something genuinely useful, like overcooked squash?)

All in all, at this stage of its evolution, Wine Butler is pretty much a corked bottle: There is potential for a site like this---it's always useful to have access to any accumulated wisdom; but the potential it holds out to the reader is as a library. The Globe is courting horselaughs by parading it in front of the public as a tool.

-EAT Wineblog, Sept. 2007