Oddest Double Bill EVER!

It's official - if Mayfair Theatre was a dude, I would be totally gay for it. 100%. Without fail. Fo' sho'. But someone let the ball drop this week with a double bill featuring One Week with Joshua Jackson followed by Kung Fu Hustle. I spoke with a Mayfair staffer after the shows were out, and even she was left asking waada g'wan was up with the choice in features. So it wasn't just me.

One Week - I'll be brief. While definitely not as bad as I was expecting for a movie that uses Roll Up The Rim To Win as a plot device (thank you, Court), the movie relied much too heavily upon factors external to the actual writing of the movie. For instance, too much was invested in the Canadian landscape, the talent of Canadian musicians (not only for their music, but for their willingness to give cameo's in the movie, including Gord Downie smoking the sticky green and Joel Plaskett busking in T.O.'s financial district), and the knowledge that ladies would swoon at Jackson again, and again, and again as he stared off into the distant sunset pondering his fate. Without the music (which never stopped) and the beautiful Canadian panorama, there was a moderately interesting story behind driven by the scenery. Looks good on Canada, but not so good on the movie. 

Being away from home, the shots of Toronto and the fact that the movie was unashamedly Canadian did score points with me, in addition to the fact that it didn't give you everything that your sappy heart wanted that your logical mind was calling shenanigans on. 

Kung Fu Hustle was Kung Fu Hustle. What can I say? Ridiculous, amazing, funny, impressive: if I would recommend you see One Week on TV if its On Demand, Kung Fu Hustle would be worth paying for. Many times. It was my pleasure to see on the big screen for $5. An older man in his 60's was making his way out of Kung Fu Hustle and he turned to me smiling, and said: "What a great way to end the day!"

Needless to say, I agreed.

Unrelated but funny P.S.: I was stuck waiting in line today at LAC for an archivist to be available, and I was in line behind this Rastafarian guy with the big hat and the long beard. We must have waited in line, just the two of us, for about 15-20 minutes while these two douchebags in the office just kept blathering away. We were both getting really tired of waiting, and without thinking, in my post-Grand Theft Auto IV days, I muttered "waada g'wan" without thinking that I was waiting behind an honest-to-God Rastfarian. He kinda looked back, but didn't say anything. Dodged that one...

 

The Killing & Paths of Glory Double Bill

First off, and I wont say much - lotta dudes at a Stanley Kubrick double bill of The Killing and Paths of Glory on a Sunday afternoon; whole lotta dudes. I wont say it was a single guy sausage-fest, but I will say this: 17 people in the audience for The Killing - - zero chicks. You do the math.

Second, double bills are tiring, but the movies were good. I hadn't seen The Killing, but as far as late-in-life film noir goes, it was pretty good. Wouldn't write home about it, but I would kill time between movies and dinner writing on my blog about it. But that's different.

I saw Paths of Glory when I was 15 I think, and while I would say that I got it, as a movie message, it was great seeing it on the big screen. And Kirk Douglas is Kirk Douglas: amazing, but always in a hokey kinda way. Like he's trying too hard, all the time, to be Kirk Douglas, actor.

Still - two movies for $5 aint bad. And I might be wrong, but one scene in the movie with Kirk Douglas and George Mcready as Gen. Mireau looked familiar, like it was shown as the memorial image at the Oscars after the actor died and they wanted to commemorate them. BUT - after having looking it up on imdb.com, Geogre Mcready died in July 1973, largely on account of having been born in 1899. So the odds of me seeing his Oscar tribute montage a few months ago are pretty slim. And since Kirk Douglas is still alive and kicking, it wasn't him. 

Huh... That's gonna bug me...

24 City @ Mayfair Theatre

I'll admit - I've been really bored and trapped inside for most of the day due to rain, and now that it has stopped, I'm looking for something - ANYTHING - to get me out of the house. Since my attempt at interaction with Star/Wendy today failed horribly, I'm getting out.  I told her that her brownies were burning in the oven and then tried to make joke with her when she wanted to throw the whole pan out. Strangest thing was that  she never said a word to me throughout the entire interaction, even when I asked her a question: "Do you think any of them can be saved?" She just made a small noise and awkwardly walked away. So that happened...

And the only place close by is Mayfair Theatre, so I'm going to check out 24 City by Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke. It's 8:29 - the movie starts in 31 minutes, and I'll let you know how it when when I get home! To tide you over until I return, here is a link to the trailer on YouTube. 

- - - - - - - 

And I'm back. It's 11:19, and I just got in. First and foremost, the Mayfair Theatre is beautiful for an old theatre from the 1930's - as I said to Court, it makes the Bloor Cinema in T.O. look like a pile of dilapidated puke in comparison. So that's a good start. 

24 City was very enjoyable, even though three people right in front of me walked out about 25 minutes into it. It was very slow and methodical in its telling of a very sad daily history of Chinese workers of various generations and the experiences they had when their aeronautical factory known as '420' moves to a city in the south-west of China called Chengdu in 1958. Recently, the factory is torn down to make way for a condo community known as '24 City' - kind of like that condo development near the SkyDome and Front Street which will have its own schools, parks, and grocery stores by the time its completed - and they interview/film people with connections to '420' and the city to better understand the impact that the factory had on their lives, their parents lives, and their children's lives. 

There are - very - rare moments of humour, but overall it's filled with very sad stories of loss and missed opportunities, harsh realities and often harsher self-realizations. I was left with a feeling at the end of every scene that something was about to happen, as if the movie was about set-ups without conclusions. And while this could have been very frustrating and unsatisfying, strangely it wasn't. The set-ups were so well done and beautifully shot, that this was often enough, even without clear or well-stated resolutions. 

Director Jia Zhang-Ke is quoted as likening the movie to the history of Chinese human and social development in the past 50 years. It's a good way of putting it. And 24 City, however slow and occasionally plodding it comes across to viewers - including those who walked out tonight - is well worth seeing. 

Paris 1919 @ LAC

So first off - it was a bit strange to have a mixture between original documentary footage spliced with century old photos, and then throw in paid actors playing Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George, and the Italian PM who did dick, in addition to a smattering of other Europeans, Arabs, Jews, civil servants, and mapmakers who round off the cast. The director did as good a job with it as he could, but I always felt as if George Clemenceau's larger-than-life 'stache (see below) was always about to fall off his face because they didn't have it in the budget for the good facial hair adhesive.

Second of all, not only would it be near impossible to convey something of this scope and significance in any medium (save an HBO mini-series with $9 million an episode behind it), but Margaret MacMillan's book was already so near perfection that anything they did with it under her title would seem, somehow, less than what the book as able to accomplish. In addition, the director (who also wrote and produced it, I think) outlines for himself in a Globe and Mail article all the aspects of the film that he wanted to explore more of, but based on serious limitations (only 10 days shooting in Paris, the limited budget of an NFB co-production, etc) he achieved whatever he could with this movie that, apparently, has been in the works for nearly a decade.

Keeping that all in mind, what about the actual movie? I liked it, but it might have been because its about an era I find very fascinating, and because it was based on a fabulous book about a truly remarkable screw-up in human history, though there are, arguably, many to choose from. This one, unlike many of its competitors, still manages to have wide-reaching ramifications that we, in the 21st Century, still cannot shake ourselves of. This is our shame now as it was the post-war leaders' shame then. 

It all comes down to scale (spoken like a true geographer!), and the movie was not up to the task of representing something of this magnitude in such a small scale fashion. It was as if the film was conscious of its small size from the beginning: a boy in his father's clothes, convincing others that he can pull it off. And at moment's Paris: 1919 could, but it fell short of its overall objective of conveying the total magnitude of the events in question. Yet to be fair to the director, Paul Cohen, I dont know if he could have.

I could have stayed for the Q & A after the movie ended and asked him that myself, but as anyone who has been to a conference with me knows: I hate Q & A's. They are masturbatory circle-jerks, typically moreso for the audience participants than the director, and I have nothing to do with them. Call me rude, I dont care: point out that if I was the one at the podium I would feel a little differently, and I would tell you you're probably right - - but that at my core I know that if I was in the crowd, I'd be thinking about getting the hell out of Dodge myself. If I wanted to hear old people bleed on about how they feel and try and pose it like a question, I would visit old folk's homes and convince them I'm their lost grandchild, or attend City Council meetings.

But I dont - so I dont...

So on a scale of 1 (I Love You, Man) to 10 (Chinatown), Paris: 1919 gets a 6, unlike Courtney who is a 'solid 7!'