vintage

I’ll admit that I’ve never been great at film reviews, but sometimes one comes along that you just have to tell people about, and I watched one of those yesterday. I hope you’ll all forgive me for my clunky attempts at describing it, because in the end it’s really worth watching — I promise.

It’s called The Prestige — based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Priest — and was released in 2006 (and subsequently nominated for two Academy Awards, in art direction and cinematography). It came recommended simply because it has Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale in it, which is a really good way of convincing me to watch a movie. And they are excellent reasons: both of them are perfectly matched to their roles. Respectively, they play Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, two rival magicians in London at the end of the 19th century. That’s right, I said magicians … this is a movie about magic.

And a magical one it is. It’s not, however, a happy rabbits-out-of-hats, disappearing quarters, feel-good sort of film. It is a brow-furrowing affair, with many instances of “What just happened?” or “Did he really just say that?”. As you might expect from a film about illusion, nothing is quite as it seems, and you, the viewer, spend a whole lot of your time trying to work something out only to find your conclusion was exactly the opposite. It is one heck of a plot line.

The premise of the film, in a word, is obsession. Angier is consumed with the idea of destroying Borden to pay him back for the death of his (Angier’s) wife, played by Piper Perabo, in a drowning accident while performing a trick. While it would be difficult for me to discuss the whole plot without revealing details, all you have to know is this: The Prestige is full of duality, smoke and mirrors, and a dark and fascinating vice grip of obsessive determination on the part of both men. Michael Caine, as Angier’s assistant Cutter, is the oft-unheeded voice of reason — to Borden and his adventurous knot-tying, to Angier and his plots to take Borden down.

David Bowie also makes an appearance as the mad scientist Nikola Tesla, and like the others, he is very well cast. His part is small, but essential to the outcome of the story, and he’s done a magnificent job portraying Tesla’s strange experiments. Together, this remarkable cast of characters (also including Rebecca Hall, Andy Serkis, and Scarlett Johansson) creates a web of illusions that keeps you trapped even after the film’s end. I suspect this one might take a few views to completely figure out. Although, if Cutter’s right, “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”

Watch this movie.

The Prestige on imdb

Ladies and gents, it’s here: the new Brent Randall & His Pinecones album. It’s whimsically titled We Were Strangers in Paddington Green, and whimsical is the dish Randall serves best. The songs are titled lovely things like “For in the Rainbow of a Moonbeam” or “The Nightingale and the Rose,” but underneath that layer of fanciful delirium there is a collection of really great pop tunes, just the sort we’ve come to expect from this talented collective of musicians.

The last time we had a real release from Brent was the delicious EP Quite Precisely, which came out in 2003 (!). If you’ve heard that album, be prepared for an experience: Paddington Green sounds infinitely brighter, better produced, and cleaner than the preceding EP. Now, I love that little record quite a bit, but I’m amazed at how much the Pinecones’ sound has been worked on since then. About time, I guess, considering how long the wait has been!

Paddington is fairly sleepy as far as albums go, but in the positive sense: many of the songs are dreamy and lilting, with the right amount of pop piano and Randall’s crooning voice. This one also features some horns (always a welcome addition, says the horn player!) and a delightful re-recording of old favourites “Snowdrops” and “Bluebirds, Flowers and Other Things”, both previously featured on the Just Friends Sampler of Love.

It’s one of those that I’d like you all to hear. “Bluebirds, Flowers and Other Things” has long been a favourite Brent Randall track of mine, since they have had it as a staple live song for quite some time and it’s always gone over very well. This new slightly uptempo version, featuring some excellent horns and a whole lot more energy, encapsulates the Pinecones perfectly. It’s equal parts fresh and retro, and I promise you that you’ll be singing “You are the one that I lo-o-ove” all day afterwards.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Tunesday 11: Bluebirds, Flowers and Other Things

All right, I don’t need to give you the whole Oscar story — by now everybody’s heard everything and we all know what happened. I’d like to weigh in, though …

AWESOME!

Host Hugh Jackman’s opening number. The right amount of cheese, charm, and ridiculous set pieces, the beautiful Anne Hathaway goofily playing Richard Nixon, and “The Reader, I haven’t seen The Reader” — ha ha!

Heath Ledger’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in The Dark Knight. I got a little emotional. I really hope he’s watching from somewhere.

Sean Penn (Best Actor) and Dustin Lance Black (Best Original Screenplay) winning big for Milk and then making rousing, heartfelt, and ass-kicking acceptance speeches.

Ben Stiller making fun of Joaquin Phoenix during his presentation with Natalie Portman. Hi-larious. “I just want to retire from being the funny guy,” he said — to which Portman replied, “You look like you work at a Hasidic meth lab.”

Kunio Kato’s acceptance speech after winning the award for Animated Feature (La Maison en petits cubes): he ended with “Domo arigato, Mr Roboto”. Way to perpetuate stereotypes, I guess … but it was mightily funny.

Viola Davis. She was absolutely gorgeous.

Hugh Jackman, again: classic tuxedo, charming host, damn is he handsome.

NOT AWESOME!

Sophia Loren looking rather unfortunate and making an incredibly awkward presentation speech to Best Supporting Actress nominee Meryl Streep. Yikes. That makeup … a little too zombie for my tastes.

The man-sized bow spilling off of Jessica Biel’s dress. Honestly, I don’t understand high fashion at the best of times, but I can’t figure out why that would ever be a good idea.

Beyoncé lip-synching during her performance with Jackman during the musical medley. What’s up, Miss Knowles? That was disappointing, especially since Hugh was singing superbly well while doing his rather strenuous dance moves.

Speaking of which, that whole musical medley was just not good. Thanks, Baz Luhrmann — you managed to make that thing interminable and full of really awkward “transitions”, which were really just abrupt cuts between songs. That could’ve been better.

Jennifer Aniston’s really awkward presentation speech … made even more awkward for us, the TV-watching audience, when the camera cut to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the middle of it.

The technical flubs: the voice of the stage director hissing “open the curtain!” at one point when the video started playing behind it, or the crew starting the Best Director clip too early and surprising presenter Reese Witherspoon. I guess it can’t be a live broadcast without a few muck-ups here and there.

—-

How long until next year’s?

Whoa guys, I’m going to promise that next week’s stuff will be on time. Relying on the internet is becoming increasingly difficult these days. I’ll write a bunch in advance so you actually see them when they’re supposed to be posted!

Anyway, here we are at the double Tunesday post. In case you haven’t noticed yet, I love country and country-laced music, but we’re not talking Keith Urban or Garth Brooks here. I’m talking real country, that folky stuff with banjos and good bass lines and a little twang. In other words, the good stuff. It goes by any name: alt-country, Americana, bluegrass, folk, nu-grass, country-rock, or perhaps even psychedelic cow-punk (sorry).

The first track I want to share is by a fairly legendary Canadian outfit by the name of Blue Rodeo. I’m sure the name itself gives you some hints about its country leanings, but they are by and large a rock band (with a healthy amount of hoedown). Blue Rodeo have been around for 25 years and 11 studio albums, and they’re still doing pretty much the same thing they’ve always been doing. I mean this in the best possible way: they’ve found a working formula and made an incredible amount of great music using it. It’s bands like these that Canada should always be known for.

This song is from their incredibly popular 1993 record Five Days in July, which went 6x platinum … not bad for a bunch of guys from the Great White North. Here y’are.

Tunesday 10-1: Cynthia

The other track is by “nu-grass” favourites of mine, The Be Good Tanyas. I keep recommending this song to everybody I know, and then they’re always disappointed when their other songs aren’t quite like this one. Regardless, it was responsible for me collecting all of their albums and seeing them live, and it is still among my favourites. There’s something about it that just feels like sunshine — or as my friend Alex so eloquently said, “It makes me want to cook breakfast for someone in my underwear”.

Tunesday 10-2: The Littlest Birds

Enjoy! Sorry again about the incredible delays. Technology … not always a solution.

Also, I recently found out that Phoenix’s new album is going to be called Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. I love it already.

Hello, blogosphere.

I’m sure at least one of you have noticed the lack of Tunesday post this week. Sorry about that — our internet went down for a few days and the stolen wireless was barely enough to load a page, let alone upload a track, so I decided to forego it until next week. Fortunately, the upcoming post will feature two tracks to make up for it … stay tuned!

We’re back in school at York and it seems to be leaving little time for blogging lately. Imagine that, I know. I hope posts will be appearing regularly in a week or so, once the giant paper has been written and the myriad of assignments are handed in. Sorry for the general silence!

In other news, though, Jim Cuddy played at Massey Hall last night and was terrific as usual. I only got to see about 2/3 of the show, so I’m not sure how much Blue Rodeo material he pulled out this time around, but I did witness a particularly excellent rendition of “5 Days in May” featuring a serious violin solo by Anne Lindsay. Cuddy can always be counted on for a great performance, solo or with Blue Rodeo, and he always looks like he’s having the time of his life on stage. To top it off, his voice has never been better. Highly recommended!

If you’re interested, the Toronto Star published an interview with him yesterday in anticipation of the show. Aww, Valentine’s Day.

Coming up: the double Tunesday post, Brent Randall & His Pinecones‘ new album, and an interview with yours truly. The fun never stops!

A class-action lawsuit has been launched against Ticketmaster and its subsidiary, TicketsNow, for violating an anti-scalping law. HOW SHOCKING!

On Friday, Springsteen fans hoping to see a show on May 7 at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto called the Star to complain that tickets sold out within minutes of going on sale online, but that more than 800 higher-priced tickets were available shortly afterward on TicketsNow, at prices up to $1,338.

The gist of it is that Ticketmaster is reselling its own tickets at ridiculously inflated prices on TicketsNow, which it happens to own, and so garnering even more profit than those incredibly dumb service charges that it slaps on everything. It’s getting to be like flying somewhere every time you buy a Ticketmaster ticket! What a mess.

Read the full article in the Toronto Star.

I’d like to get some things off my chest here.

The nominees for the 2009 Juno Awards were announced the other day, and with every year, CARAS adds another nail to its own coffin. It’s hard to see why the Junos are still such a big deal in Canada — their relevance seems to slip away more and more every year, and we are left honouring artists who write lyrics like this:

Dirty little lady with the pretty pink thong
Every sugar daddy hitting on her all night long
Doesn’t care about the money, she could be with anybody
Ain’t it funny how the honey wanted you all along!

[...] You’re so much cooler when you never pull it out
‘Cause you look so much cuter with something in your mouth

That’s right. Nickelback, the ones responsible for that atrocity, led the nominations parade with five (single, album, artist and producer of the year, as well as the fan choice award). Somehow, CARAS seem to think that this motley crew is the best thing this country has to offer musically. If this is the case, I’d like to change my citizenship.

I’ll come back to that, but first, there’s another problem we need to pay attention to: the “International Album of the Year” category, this year a contest between AC/DC, Coldplay, Guns ‘N Roses, Jack Johnson, and Metallica. First of all: none of these people give a rat’s behind whether they’re nominated for a Juno Award (an award ostensibly for Canadian content, I might add). Second, why do we even need this category? Obviously, Chris Martin or Axl Rose are not going to show up to the ceremony, so it isn’t even a ploy to boost ratings. This category has been a head-scratcher for me ever since I started watching the Junos and I still haven’t been able to justify it.

If the Juno Awards really do need a category like this, they need to make it relevant to Canada. Albums that sell more than any Canadian record are not a good enough connection. We’ve got categories for best producer and recording engineer, many of whom work on albums by non-Canadian artists; this is the kind of thing that should be getting more attention, not a gratuitous presentation to an artist who will probably forget they got the award at all.

I could get into a lot more (why is there only one Francophone category? How in the hell does a throat singer get nominated for instrumental album of the year?), but I’d like to go back to the Nickelback problem for a moment.

Here it is, plain and simple: Nickelback shouldn’t be on this pedestal. Most of Canada has no idea what’s going on in most of music, and assume that when you turn on the top 40 station, that’s all there is. The only two categories that really honour Canada’s incredible artistic scene are also terribly named, almost cursory ones: Alternative and Adult Alternative albums of the year.

What is “adult alternative”? When I hear that, I think Muzak. According to the Juno nominees sheet, though, it means Hawksley Workman, Serena Ryder, Kathleen Edwards, Ron Sexsmith and Sarah Slean — all incredibly talented musicians, and ones who would probably belong in a category titled “Songwriter of the Year”. Alternative, by contrast, contains Black Mountain, Chad VanGaalen, Fucked Up, Plants and Animals, and The Stills.

I’m sure most of you are thinking the same thing: why are Nickelback, Simple Plan, Hedley, and Celine Dion all over the nominations list, and why are our most talented artists getting the boot?

The answer is, of course, record sales. Nickelback sell more albums than any of these artists, and I suppose they deserve to be rewarded for that. That really doesn’t mean they also wrote the best single that came out this year, nor that they’re the best artist Canada saw in 2008; it does mean, though, that the Juno Awards are clearly not focused enough on artistic merit. Nickelback have a lot of fans, but I find it difficult to believe that Dark Horse would hold up with every judge on the Juno Award panel when put against last year’s records by Sam Roberts, Hawksley, Sloan, Chad VanGaalen … you get my drift.

Many of the artists nominated do deserve it, and I’m glad that they’re getting the recognition. However, I think that the Juno Awards need to take a leaf from the Polaris Music Prize’s book and reward actual artistic merit, not just record sales. The best things coming out of Canada aren’t the ones you’re going to hear on Top 40 radio or the ones necessarily selling the best — because no one is bold enough to play them. Once this country realises how narrow the field they’re working with is, maybe these awards will be relevant again. Until then, we’re stuck with Chad Kroeger: an embarrassment to this country.

Juno Awards home
Complete list of nominees (PDF)
Sloan vs. Nickelback — The Battle of the Bands!

I’ve been meaning to post about this album for a little while now, and so I’m combining an album review with a Tunesday post in an effort to promote a very talented musician. That musician’s name is Dwight Schenk, most recently known as a member of the Basement Arms and his own Slipper Orchestra, although he’s been involved in countless projects over the years. He’s finally released his first official solo record, titled Natural Disasters, and it is terrific.

The album is incredibly varied, all at once loud and heavy (“Ruckus”), campfire-folk (“A Hiccup on the Mountain”) and circusy instrumental (“Squirmy Wormy”). Dwight’s fantastic Tom Waits voice brings out the grit and gristle in the record, and his command of a whole lot of styles makes for a great listening experience. As with any album with such variety, some songs will likely please your ears more than others, but it is still tied together with a reasonable amount of cohesion and the package comes out sounding terrific.

I guess I haven’t got much constructive commentary for the record, but I can tell you that it gets better every time I listen to it — a great growl in one section, a beautiful violin line in another — and I really hope that Dwight gets the recognition he really deserves for making an album like this one. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

This track is perhaps not the most representative of the prevailing styles on the album, but dammit, it’s my favourite, so you get to hear it. For more, check out MySpace. You can hear my flute make a cameo appearance (and if you’re really sharp, some vocals too) on “Squirmy Wormy”!

Tunesday 9: A Hiccup on the Mountain

Or, more appropriately, “sitting on my ass for 84 days” — because that’s how long we were out of school during the mammoth CUPE 3903 strike at York University. The Ontario government passed back-to-work legislation on January 29, ending the strike at twelve weeks; since that day was a Thursday, classes didn’t resume until today, making the total time without class 87 days.

To put it in perspective: the last time I had class, Stéphane Dion was still the leader of the federal Liberals, Barack Obama had been president-elect for a grand total of one day, nobody had heard of the word “prorogue”, and Freddie Hubbard and John Updike were still alive. Your Halloween candy was only a week old, and 2008 still had almost two months to go.

And now here we are.

As a result of the mammoth “academic disruption,” some changes have been made to the calendar; fall semester will end February 19 and winter semester will begin March 4, with the days in between allotted for fall exams (no buffer days). Classes will end May 21 and exams on June 2 (also no buffer days). Considering the year usually ends the first week of April and exams are done before May, this is a serious inconvenience to most, especially those graduating. I’m going to try not to complain too loudly, though — school is back, so the worst is over.

In other news, most of the lineup for Canadian Music Week has been announced. Here are some highlights.

First, the CHART showcases at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern — and believe me, it’s pretty legendary. Thursday night is probably the best lineup, featuring $100, Women, Chad VanGaalen, Gentleman Reg and The Lovely Feathers. Saturday’s is nothing to sneeze at either, with the bill including the Golden Dogs, Hexes and Ohs and Two Hours Traffic. Check out the full showcase details here.

Equally delicious, and arguably the most hard-hitting showcase lineup of the festival, is Saturday night at the also legendary Lee’s Palace. Start to finish, it boasts Jon-Rae Fletcher, Herman Dune, Basia Bulat, Elliott Brood and Cuff the Duke. I know where I’ll be that night!

Other highlights include Friday night’s Eye Weekly showcase at the Gladstone Hotel (Castlemusic, Angela Desveaux & The Mighty Ship, The Week That Was, Slim Twig and the Rural Alberta Advantage); Priestess at Sneaky Dee’s (Friday); Sloan at the Mod Club (Thursday); Malajube at the El Mocambo (Thursday) and, for those who make connections, Laura Borealis at the Central (Saturday).

I’ve applied for a press pass with this blog, but won’t know for another three weeks whether it was deemed worthy or not. Either way, you’ll be seeing some CMW content — there’s no way I can pass up lineups like this! And finally, a chance to see Elliott Brood and Cuff the Duke.

If any of you are headed for the festival as well, let me know what you’re looking forward to and where you’ll be! For the curious, check out the CMW site here.