Okay, here’s the rest of the good stuff from the Calgary Folk Music Festival, and some little treats for you too.

Best musical discoveries:

Luluc (Australia)
I bought their album on the strength of the first song I heard them play — not a bad first impression! Luluc are a beautifully folky duo with wispy harmonies and a really understated sound; their stage banter at the festival was adorable, slightly self-conscious, and full of that fabulous Aussie accent. Their album, Dear Hamlyn, is very sparse and true to their live sound, and I can’t think of a better piece of it to offer you than the song that first grabbed my attention: One Day Soon

Good Lovelies (Canada)
A more enthusiastic trio of ladies there never was, and the Good Lovelies clearly love performing and being on stage. The three women continue the tradition laid out by the Boswell and Andrews Sisters, harmonizing like you’ve never heard and adding sly winks all over the place; they make it seem like their job is the easiest thing in the world. If you don’t crack a smile within the first thirty seconds of a Good Lovelies concert, you’re probably not listening. Check out their version of the classic folk tune Clementine.

Bellowhead (United Kingdom)
The name “Bellowhead” must be synonymous with the word “party”, given their performances at this year’s festival. I guess I will talk more about them in the next list (sorry for the overlap, but I really couldn’t leave them out!) — but for now I will simply say that nobody has made English folk songs sound quite so appealing as this sprawling 11-piece band has. Just a word of warning, though: their studio albums sound terrific, but they don’t even begin to hint at the energy the band has live. Videos come closer: check out this one of London Town at the Royal Albert Hall.

The Deep Dark Woods (Canada)
I’ve been hearing this name thrown around for ages, and I wish I had been curious enough to check them out earlier. Saskatchewan’s Deep Dark Woods deliver a brand of country/folk that fits their name perfectly: slightly dark and brooding, but also a little gritty. I can’t think of proper adjectives that fit the “woods” part. Pine-scented? Anyway, they really feel like country done the way country should be — there’s a whole post there! Have a listen to All The Money I Had Is Gone (too topical? Sorry).

And of course, no folk festival list would be complete without a rundown of the best mainstage performances of the festival, so without further ado …

The Decemberists
They came out on stage without even an introduction and immediately played their entire new album, The Hazards of Love, with barely a stop. It was dramatic, swashbuckling, theatrical, and absolutely incredible. AND THEN they came out to do a soaring encore of the one song I had been crossing my fingers all night to hear — “Sons and Daughters,” the final track from The Crane Wife — and coaxed the entire audience of 12,000 to sing the chorus with them, until it pulsed in our chests all the way home. There’s not much more I could have asked for.

Mavis Staples
Even though her set list was pretty much the same as when she played Massey Hall, it was no less impressive. I am still flabbergasted that she is seventy years old — she can still outperform nearly anybody. Her version of “The Weight” is still one of the best covers ever, and “Wade in the Water” was delectable when complemented by her backup vocalists. The cherry on top of the whole affair was the last song, the Staple Singers’ famous “I’ll Take You There” — even though it was still the afternoon, people were up, dancing, and singing along like an old style revival. Now that’s a show.

Glen Campbell
Yeah, the Rhinestone Cowboy. That guy. I was shocked when I saw his name on the folk festival lineup, but let’s face it, the prospect of hearing him play “Wichita Lineman” was enough for me to miss the entire Akron/Family set over at the Twilight stage. And wow, was it worth it: Campbell clearly loves performing, and he’s quite obviously grateful to his audience for letting him go on doing it for so long. We were rewarded with the expected hits (“Galveston,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and the aforementioned “Wichita Lineman,” as well as a singalong finale of “Rhinestone Cowboy”), but we also heard some of the covers he did on his latest, including Tom Petty’s “Walls” and U2’s “All I Want Is You”. I have to say that a personal highlight was the blistering rendition of Rossini’s overture to William Tell — Campbell’s guitar work was blistering, and rightly so, for he was once one of the best session guitarists in the world. Live and learn. I’d go see him again in a flash.

Bellowhead
I’ve probably already said enough about these guys, but here I go again. First of all, there’s eleven of them. Second of all, their instruments range from fiddle and guitar to Sousaphone, oboe and accordion. Third, many of them are acclaimed, even award-winning, step dancers. And fourth, they play almost exclusively English folk songs (albeit with the odd disco beat). When you put all of this together and throw them on stage on a Saturday evening, you get what was undoubtedly the biggest party of the weekend. They could have played for three hours and nobody would have complained, except for potential exhaustion — it’s not often you get 12,000 people trying to imitate dancing like that. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I’ll take it!

Gomez
My dad confessed that he was expecting a Latin American band, judging by the name. This is the first clue that Gomez aren’t entirely what you expect them to be. They’re a bunch of white dudes from England, first of all — not quite what their moniker might suggest — and they fuse a surprisingly folky element into their songs, which are the perfect soundtrack for summer. They have a lot of pop sensibilities and some of the usual indie rock sounds, but they also just want to have a really good time on stage, and that translates into a fabulous time for the audience too. The general sentiment around was that we’d all have been singing along to every song if we’d just known the words. Next time they’ll have a few thousand more people to prompt them.

Honourable mentions to Alejandro Escovedo, Arrested Development, Iron & Wine, The Sojourners and Umalali. So, really, everybody.

I’d also like to mention that if anyone is in New York City this fall, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig are starring in a Broadway production of Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain. It’s not a musical (those scared off by The Boy From Oz can tiptoe back now), but rather a play — one which has already made a pretty good name for itself, selling out two different engagements in Chicago and garnering all sorts of critical attention. Although it’s Craig’s first time on Broadway, I’m sure it will be a blistering performance on the part of both men — the story is pretty fascinating and, you know, they’ve both had a bit of experience acting here and there. No big deal.

And, in other news, the Toronto garbage strike is over! YEAHHHHH

Robin Williams – Bush & Obama is a hilarious video from just after the American election. He did some comedy in England for Charles & Camilla, or as he calls them, “Chuck and Cam”. It is stupid how many times I’ve watched this, but it’s amazing.

Paul McCartney making mashed potatoes. I never thought I would enjoy watching an old rock star talk to his oven mitts and slice onions.

Bob & Doug MacKenzie’s 24 Anniversary — self-explanatory. Hosers represent.

Star Wars retold by someone who hasn’t seen it is probably funniest for people who have seen the movies — sextilogy? Is there a word for a series of six? — but either way, someone trying to inform us about the finer points of a series they’ve never seen is already comedy gold.

How to write a fugue, on a theme by Britney Spears. This is especially great for musicians, but I think that anyone can appreciate the hilarity of a remarkably adept treatment of “Oops, I Did It Again” in fugal style (and the excellent editing).

Bach a cappella features one guy singing all four parts of a Bach piece — soprano too — and comically straining his voice to both extremes. His theatrically exaggerated facial expressions make this one of the funniest performances of ol’ Johann Sebastian on the internet. (He has more Bach, as well as Mahler, Puccini, and Gounod on his channel page … I recommend them all.)

Sloan loses a guitarist on tour … Jay gets lost in the woods and the rest of the band go to find him. A ridiculous video featuring such quotes as “It’s getting dark, it must be like, five-thirty or something!” or “It’s a leg. A human leg” (identified by Chris Murphy after a smell test).

And of course, Hugh Jackman on Japanese television (just after the Oscars). This is the biggest trip ever — I don’t even know what’s going on most of the time, but the exchange about balls is HILARIOUS. More clips here, if you’re still interested after that.

Real posts on their way!

If you’re interested enough to read about what went down in previous posts, here they are: 1-7 and 8-10. Here’s the last two … I’ll try to be nice.

Someone Like You (Tony Goldwyn, 2001)

Don’t watch this movie.

Van H — Oh all right, here’s the long version. Ashley Judd can’t act, Greg Kinnear can’t really act, and even Hugh Jackman isn’t exactly at his best. His character starts out promisingly, with a gleeful amount of sarcasm and innuendo, but by halfway he’s suddenly lost his entire persona and is just another washed-up and predictable character. Judd, for her part, is as full of expression as a block of granite; her narration at the beginning sounds like a bad lecture, and her most emotive gesture is opening her eyes wide as saucers. Kinnear delivers his lines like he’s in uncomfortable pain.

The title card gimmick gets tossed by the wayside part of the way through — not that it was funny in the first place — and most of the film is an excuse to man-bash, something I hate. That pastime gets partially redeemed in the end, but the happy ending is so badly set up that it’s not even worth it. They just had to get a kiss in before it ended, and Hugh Jackman was just there … ugh ugh ugh this is terrible. Just don’t bother.

Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, 2004)

Oh yeah, this one sucks too. Ridiculously and unequivocally. A fabulous redeeming factor, however, is David Wenham — you might remember him as Faramir in Lord of the Rings, or the fabulously slimy Neil Fletcher in Australia — he’s super funny in this one, and provides at least a bit of relief from the ludicrous happenings on screen. Jackman is not that exciting (and that hair should be outlawed) and the CGI looks extra artificial, surprising considering it came out in 2004, and the dramatic lines are so overdone it hurts.

Also: does everything have to have an obvious love story? Is there one film like this that can have male and female leads without them having an angsty kissing scene in the middle somewhere? I’d really like that.

The bit at the end where the claws come out (sorry, I’m trying not to spoil this in case there are people left on this planet who somehow want to see this movie) is so Wolverine, though, that I had to laugh out loud. Seriously, I can’t imagine how that would have been overlooked … but this entire movie is a walking disaster, so maybe it was.

Final words

Man, I am tired of writing reviews of bad movies.

In all seriousness, though, this has made me realise a few things. One of them, and perhaps the most glaring, is that Hugh Jackman never gets to be Australian. He uses his native accent in exactly one of these films — Australia! — and otherwise is either English (Kate & Leopold, The Prestige, Scoop, Van Helsing) or American (X-Men, Someone Like You, Swordfish, The Fountain, Deception).

Not that this is a totally new problem. Other Australian actors seem to face the same thing: Nicole Kidman, Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett. Kidman, for her part, is one of Hollywood’s best-known Australians — though she was born in Hawaii, she grew up in Sydney — but in Luhrmann’s Australia, she played an Englishwoman. This is extra confusing.

Heath Ledger’s best known roles, arguably, are the Joker (American), Ennis del Mar (American — southern drawl), and his characters in A Knight’s Tale (English). Geoffrey Rush has a list of films in which he is English. When was the last time you saw an Australian character in a film? Australia doesn’t count. It’s probably been a while.

I guess the first thing that this says is that Australian actors are versatile — perhaps by necessity. They all have at least two accents on command, because Hollywood (being in the United States) seems to be of the mind that American accents are normal and the English have accents, and everybody else just sounds weird.

Looking back at Jackman’s list of films, some of the characters obviously required a different nationality (Leopold, for example, being an English duke); others, like Stanley in Swordfish, or Eddie of Someone Like You, could easily have been Australian without changing the story a whit. It sure would have made things more interesting. I find this phenomenon extra strange, and I hope that it changes — I am unable to explain it, but I don’t like it very much. I mean, it’s absolutely commendable that these actors can convincingly switch between three different nationalities, but sometimes they shouldn’t have to, you know?

Side note to Hugh Jackman: please, please stop making bad films. I love you, I really do, but that was a long two weeks. I suppose it’s a credit to your acting, though, that you were frequently the best part of a failing film — but not even you could save Swordfish. And you didn’t even try to save Van Helsing. (It’s okay, I wouldn’t have either.)

The good ones were really good, though. I mean, The Prestige. X-Men. Scoop. Please keep making decisions like those. I know, I know, you’re the Sexiest Man Alive (another side note: damn, I can’t believe how dumb the interview questions are for these things) and people will come see your movies anyway, but couldn’t you just keep making good ones? It’s really a win-win situation.

It’s been fun, though. Occasionally fun in the manner of throwing things at the television screen, but mostly real fun. I’m going to avoid your face for the next two months — it’s nothing personal, really — but you know as well as anyone that I’ll see you in May.

Ruhee out!

Kate & Leopold (James Mangold, 2001)

I wrote this really long review about how irritated this movie made me, and then I realised I was saying the same thing over and over. So here’s the short version: this film is a giant cliché. Meg Ryan plays the same character she plays in at least half her movies (think Kathleen Kelly), Hugh Jackman plays the gorgeous charming man, blah, blah, blah.

Breckin Meyer is really, really funny as Meg Ryan’s little brother, though, and is one of the film’s redeeming qualities. I mean, Jackman being charming and making breakfast and coordinating romantic dinners is nice — nevermind that he just dropped in from 1876 and can’t even work a toaster, let alone hire a violinist! — but there’s nothing that sets this movie apart from any other. It’s another chick flick, with more of the same plodding “conflict” (guy & girl who just can’t be together fall in love; career woman looks forward to promotion which is threatened by bumbling brother and aforementioned guy), and more predictable storyline.

Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006)

Refreshingly hilarious. Woody Allen’s style of comedy is crisp and offbeat, and I was laughing out loud many a time throughout Scoop’s 96 minutes. Scarlett Johansson plays an awkward and eager young journalism student, and Woody Allen her unlikely sidekick — an elderly and half-crazy stage magician nicknamed “The Great Splendini” — and together they race around London on a wild goose chase trying to bag the rich Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), suspected killer. This leads, as expected, to chaos. Woody Allen has about a million quotable lines and Johansson’s performance is so genuine it’s hard to believe they didn’t just pull some unsuspecting college student to stand in her place.

I could have used some more nastiness from Jackman when the time came, but he’s already overshadowed by the excellent performances from his investigators, since his character isn’t in the forefront as often. I highly recommend this one for a lot of laughs: its humour is totally different from the prevailing Hollywood funnies these days, and that is one of the many things that makes it stand out so much. Loved it.

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

This film is exceptionally ambitious, but falls flat on its face, especially in the final third. It’s only an hour and a half long, which is a pretty short period of time to tell three different stories and establish how they are related, apart from the obvious fact that Jackman plays multiple characters. It deals with some pretty serious subject matter, too — death, the human desire to conquer it, and the legend of the Tree of Life — and has some admittedly breathtaking special effects, but by the time the tree grew out of the conquistador I was rolling my eyes.

Special mention has to be made, though, for Hugh Jackman’s gut-wrenching performance. He plays three characters: a present-day doctor, whose wife is dying of a brain tumour; a Spanish conquistador from the 1500s who is charged with the task of finding the Tree of Life by Queen Isabel; and a weird looking bald guy whose role is never fully explained. The latter is pretty cheesy and a little too mystical to make any sense, and the conquistador is hit or miss, but Jackman’s performance as Dr. Creo, devoted to his wife and obsessed with the idea of conquering death in order to save her from a brain tumour, is just heartbreaking. He wears Creo’s heart on his sleeve every second of the way, and you, the viewer, unravel slowly with him until the bitter end. His inner conflict is visible with every action: it’s painful to watch, but amazing.

Unfortunately, the film itself tries way too hard. It needs something to hold it together and provide you with an idea of what’s happening, but doesn’t give you anything to hold onto. The relationship between all the stories is fragile at best; it’s hard to know what’s going on unless you’ve been informed beforehand, and that’s a major storytelling failure. On top of that, Rachel Weisz’s performance doesn’t even come close to Jackman’s, and she ends up sounding cliché. I really wanted this movie to be great, but it just didn’t make it.

Upcoming: reviews of the final two. Woooo! Sorry this blog has been all about movies lately — I’ve got a few musical and literary things on the way, though, so stick around.

It’s not the soundest of logic, but those with such logic probably would never have embarked on such a quest in the first place. My list consists of 14 films: I’m not counting voice acting, shorts, or Oklahoma!. There’s enough as it is. Here’s my impressions of the first batch … I’ll try not to be too long-winded.

The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

This is the one I started with, and it is absolutely one of Jackman’s best, if not the number one (I guess it depends on how much you love Wolverine). It currently stands at #83 on the IMDb Top 250 and is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve reviewed it already, so I won’t bore you by repeating everything, but I do want to mention one thing: this film comes between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, both of which were also directed by Christopher Nolan, and both of which feature Christian Bale and Michael Caine, the latter playing nearly the same character. Curious.

Anyway, it’s superb, watch it, etc.

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)

This movie kind of stinks.

There are definitely good bits — Brandon Walters, for example, and Jackman — but Nicole Kidman was just godawful, and the story goes on about an hour too long. Why did they have to get Kidman anyway? She is Australian (born in Hawaii, grew up in Sydney), but she plays an Englishwoman! Get an English actress!

There’s also some really bad gratuitous shot of Jackman soaping his bare chest in front of the fire and then dumping a bucket of water on himself, for the benefit of anybody who likes men. Cringeworthy. However, I have to grudgingly admit that the story sunk its claws into me, and by the end I was rooting for Nullah (Walters), and crossing my fingers when the war arrived, and getting sad when Drover (Jackman) cried in the bar. I guess it wasn’t all terrible. I suggest not watching it unless you have time to kill and the ability not to be embarrassed on Kidman’s behalf.

Deception (Marcel Langenegger, 2006)

I was expecting to hate this more than I did, considering it got a whopping 12% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s absolutely no classic, but I did like the way it was put together: the music was used in a fairly unconventional fashion for deception films, and none of the scenes were played up with the usual adrenaline rush. The film instead happens in a bit of a haze, with desolate music accompanying nearly everything; it works really well.

Unfortunately, the storyline is painfully run-of-the-mill, and so the music and the sometimes-interesting cinematography isn’t enough to save it. Michelle Williams still manages to turn in a good performance, but Ewan McGregor is boring, and Jackman, while occasionally good at being cold and sleazy (seriously, very sleazy), doesn’t always hit the mark. Not a very exciting movie.

Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001)

TERRIBLE. John Travolta might as well have been a wooden puppet, and Halle Berry is ludicrously over-the-top. The plot is dumb, many of the loose ends are left untied, and none of the things that happen at the end are foreshadowed properly, even in the flashbacks. Even the title has only a tenuous link to the story since they develop it so badly.

What’s more, it features one of the worst scenes I’ve ever seen in a film: Stanley Jobson (Jackman), the top hacker in the world, trying to break into the US Department of Defense in 60 seconds while being given a blowjob in Travolta’s private den of sin to keep him from being able to concentrate. I can’t even begin to describe how awful this scene is. Kate hit it right on the head when she commented that it was probably written by some undersexed computer nerd who lives in his parents’ basement, writing code all day and thinking up stupid fantasies like this one. Painful to watch and not worth the time in the least.

X-Men trilogy:
X-Men (2000), X2 (2003) — Bryan Singer
The Last Stand (2006) — Brett Ratner

X-Men made Jackman a star, and with good reason. His performances in these three films are excellent. It’s hard to imagine anyone else ever playing Wolverine, and I think that stands as a perfect testament to how well he fit the character: he is Wolverine, not some guy pretending to be him. I was really impressed.

These movies are great. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching them — they do have a whole lot of special effects and crazy stuff happening, but there’s also a real story behind them, and interesting allegories (the second film draws a parallel between mutants and homosexuals, like Bobby Drake “coming out” to his parents about his mutant abilities and his mother responding “Well, have you tried not being a mutant?”). The story of X-Men has always been interesting, but Singer does a great job of making it work on screen.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand is worth it just for the last 30 seconds of the movie, the scene with Ian McKellen in the park (I won’t describe it too much in case some of you haven’t seen it). I was yelling at the television — a perfect mixture of disbelief, excitement, and “why the hell isn’t there a sequel to this yet”. Fantastic. I highly recommend the whole trilogy, especially all at once; the first film is all about exposition, so there’s not a huge amount of story involved, but if you watch them all in a row they pack a serious punch.

Seven more to go … oh, dear.

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

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?