Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in "Blue Valentine"

You know it's going to be depressing as hell. And the acting will be amazing.
See you there.



Thank you Tammy for the heads up!

Also, for proof of Ryan Gosling's astonishing acting ability see Half Nelson.

Jonny's Journal Sunday Entry #1

We ask of life to run smoothly, that things be easy, but when it's easy we become bored. To escape boredom we fall into addictions or we create troubles or problems for ourselves so as to compensate for or rather to eradicate the boredom. Then we complain about our addictions, troubles and problems.

When life is no longer easy, we are no longer bored; but nor is it easy to say we are happy.

Peace of mind: why are you so difficult to achieve?

New Harry Potter Movie is Bad, Really Bad. Sorry, but someone had to say it.

[Warning: If you love Harry Potter movies, you're about to hate me.]

Harry Potter movie number 7a. No idea. Not even a hint of a clue what it is captivating people by this flick. Been holding back on this (saw the movie last Thursday night, a pre-screening; it was free) because:

1.  A friend got me the free tickets so thought this might offend;
2. Other  friends that came with to watch thoroughly enjoyed so didn't want to rain on their parade;
3. I prefer recommending movies to ragging on them.

But.

I'll make an exception. Cause when a movie makes this much money and garners 79% positive reviews from the aggregators over at rottentomatoes.com, I have to put up my hand and interrupt the class and say, Sorry sensei but,

What the hell?

The kid who plays Ron Weasley is the only remotely decent actor of the three leads. The girl who plays Hermoine may be pretty enough to sell purses and rain coats, but a great actress she ain't. And Harry. Sorry buddy but you neither. Cause when you don't have a line to deliver you're like some amateur actor (takes one to know...) who doesn't know what to do with his hands let alone the rest of his self.

How? How with a budget that big and British character actors (the adults in the movie) that good could you make such a boring flick? David Yates. The movie's director. Heard of him? Me neither. Know why? All's he ever did before making the last few Harry Potter movies was make TV movies no one's ever heard of.

Sorry but with a budget this big, and a built-in audience this fierce, how do you choose such a hack to helm the thing?  The movie's one long string of gorgeous locations smooshed one on top of the other with nothing to connect them or have us feel them as real in any way.

Bad acting, worse directing and sorry JK, but the storytelling - there are more coincidences in this story than a b-grade Van Damme picture (was there any other kind?). 'Oh, Harry, you need a wand. I just happen to have one in my racksack.' I'm not even making that up. It's that bad. That bad! All that was missing was a, You killed my brother! line.

Tell me I'm not the only one. Tell me, if you had to endure the hours of boredom that were Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, you saw how lame it was.

My pic for worst movie of the year.

Ouch! Or ouchie, as they say in Australia.

Falling (not so slowly) for "Once" - A Movie Smart With Heart

["Falling Slowly" is the Oscar Winning Song from Once now on the jukebox on your left.] 

This is the story of how my then girlfriend (not yet wife) and I came to watch a movie set in Dublin, in the city of Osaka, and then after, how we came out the theatre and into what should have been the Japanese winter's night and instead walked into an impromptu German Oktoberfest festival, sausages, milled wine and all. (Actually, I don't remember if they had milled wine. They had regular wine, I know that. It's just, milled wine sounded better. For the cold winter's night. You know?)

Actually, that's not really what this post is about at all. That story is really just an entry (and exit) point in how to recommend a lovely little movie. 

Once is a low budget film set in Dublin. The cameras are often hand-held, it seems many of the scenes in public are for real (not closed-off sets) and there are, to be honest, a number of slightly less than aimed for amateurish aspects to the film as well. There are holes in the plot and the acting has moments of slipping. Yet somehow in lieu of the film's tone the whole thing works, and works beautifully. A film about imperfect people in an imperfect world gets away with not itself being crafted perfectly.

Basically it's a love story. It's also the story of an artist. Two artists, in fact. Talk about preaching to the converted. You had me at love. You had me gaga at artist.

The main Guy (so named in the credits) is played by Glen Hansard, a musician. An actor too. He had a small part as a member of the band in the now legendary (Irish) movie about musicians, The Commitments. The other Irish movie about musicians, Once, opens with Hansard strumming his guitar and belting his sorry heart out on some cobblestone downtown Dublin street. He's busking. He doesn't make much money.

She (Girl) is from the Czech Republic. Come to Ireland for reasons not known, but come downtown, to this street to watch Guy play his guitar, and sing his passionate tunes.We don't yet know how well she (Marketa Irglova) can play a piano or sing a sad song.

What works is how much you like the two of them. The Czech Girl who has that eastern European zero-tolerance-for-bullshit thing. She says what she means. (She'd have a hard time doing business in Canada.) But there is an innocence to her. She's not all harshness and ex-Communist bitter. She has hope; the romantic in her is available all the time - you see it in her big brown eyes. The Guy is good, he's honest, you know it 'the way you know a good melon' (can you reference that movie quote?). The Irish guy with the reddish hair who seems so gentle and sweet until you give him a guitar and a voice, and then it's fierce, nearly angry the way he belts out heartbreak and yearning like the greats of old. Something that he wants so badly, that he gives so largely. Yearning. I'm not going thesaurus hunting to put it another way. That's the only word for it.Yearning

When I was young I had no interest in writing. I wanted to be rich. I wanted pots of money. How could I not? I went to a private school where every kid in my grade (save three or four) were richer than me, than my family. They had massive houses and fancy cars. That's what I wanted. Big house, fancy car, vacations that involved airplanes and not your family's crappy station wagon. (Oh the cars my father chose to drive!) Things old and small depressed me. Even my movies had to be glossy, shiny, rich and pretty back then. Luckily I grew up in the 80s. Ie. There was no shortage of gloss, shine or the ever light and wonderful Michael J. Fox. Then I grew up and decided I didn't like the bubble I'd been in. I got over Michael J. Fox, started to wonder if and why the guy had no dark side and began to see the world differently.

Now I like the old and the small. Like a 28 year-old South American student I was tutoring last year told me, 'When I was a teenager I used to look down on the people who clean bathrooms and do the simple work. Now I admire them.' But exactly. I admire the hard workers, the get down on their knees and scrub the floor do-gooders. I like that I live in a small apartment. Big suburban houses no longer mesmerize me. Even more so in movies do things simple, quaint, cheap, difficult, small, dingy appeal to something starving artist in me.

In Once I love how sparse the main characters lives are. I don't mean to romanticize poverty (besides, this is developed world poor: no one's going hungry), but there simply seems a more solid honesty to the struggling artist who works in his dad's humble hoover fixing shop, or the Czech girl who is excited - excited! - at finally landing a job cleaning people's houses.

These people in this story, they struggle. They strive. They won't necessarily succeed. There is unknown. There is hardship. But then, of course there is beauty. There is love. And the truest kinds of love, the truest happinesses come only from the toughest of strivings. It's the old Dickensian trope. From humble beginnings and all that.... None of us is much interested in the story of the billionaire's son going off to make another billion.

With a joke for a budget, and Ireland as backdrop Once has got none of your Hollywoody ra ra, Tom Cruise conquers all, drum-beating nonsense. Triumph is not certain, life is not glossy, the sky is rarely blue. But when the Girl plays the piano in that music shop and learns the song to sing so harmonious gorgeous alongside the Guy, it's just perfect. It's not chance the song won the Oscar.

Take me into a world so rich and I'll come out a better man, I'll come out with that fuzzy confusion I love so much, the film trailing on in my mind, clouding my eyes. Have this happen after I leave a crappy art-house movie theatre (what's so weird is how very phenomenal the Japanese can be at presentation (think food) and how remarkably lousy they can be at other kinds of aesthetic (think: the Detroit-esque drab ugly of the city of Osaka (that I so dearly love); think: housing a cinemateque type movie theatre in a businessman's high rise), and exit the film to return to what I thought was the Japan I was just getting used to, and it turns out that night, when Ai and I left the theatre, they were holding a German Oktoberfest celebration at the base of these skyscrapers (it's actually one skyscraper, The Sky Building in Umeda, the single architectural marvel in downtown Osaka) where we'd seen the movie. It was cold, winter, we could see our breaths. The film's music, it's tone was still very much with us and we weren't ready to go home. And the Germans who'd come to Osaka to sell their wares, their beers, wine and sausage one some weeknight at the base of these towering buildings, they managed to create a mood that was enchanting.

With Once in our hearts and in our brains Ai and I walked round this little circus of German fun eating overpriced, but worth it they were so delicious, candied cashews until we finally gave in to splurge on Japanese price-inflated German red wine and Japanese price-inflated German sausage to eat with mustard we'd squirted on paper plates (the mustard was free). There were picnic benches they'd set up on this freezing winter's night and there we sat and ate our sausage and toasted our wine and felt the right joy of being young and uncertain and not wealthy, neither owning anything more expensive than a plane ticket. But just that sausage, just that wine.

As Ethan Hawke so perfectly told Winona Ryder as the two unemployed twenty-somethings walked around a downtown scene smoking and sharing a coffee and realizing they were in love in Reality Bites: "You and me and five bucks."

Cause that's all you need.

The quote is also an expression my wife and I use with each other to this day.

Sitting on my couch tonight reading, no, thoroughly enjoying Jonathan Franzen's Freedom I got to thinking what makes for a good book. It's simple, really: it just can't be boring.

Now how difficult is that?

It's Official - My Social Network Post has made it to the Final Round! Now I need YOUR VOTE

My post To Friend or Not to Friend Mark Zuckerburg has made it to the final five round of nominations at The Movie411 Blog Awards. Thank you to all who helped get me nominated. You rock!

Voting is now happening here. Please click. Please vote for Probably Because I Have To. You are awesome. Thank you.

Letter to the Barenaked Ladies of Yore

Dear Barenaked Ladies,
What were you guys thinking, breaking up? Personal crap aside, don't you get it? Steven (Page - the chubby bespectacled singer with the distinctive voice) needs Ed, Ed (Robertson - the other singer-songwriter; he wrote "One Week") needs Steven. This is Lennon/McCartney shit, boys. You really wanted to mess with that?

Back in the Beatle heyday you know what Lennon loved to sing most? The rockiest of rock tunes. McCartney was the balladeer.  And yet put those two blokes together and something magical happened, not only because McCartney's "Hey Jude" works so pretty against Lennon's harder edged stuff, his "Hard Day's Night" or "Back in the USSR" but because the guys obviously had impact on each other. It was John who wrote some of the Beatles greatest sad songs; think: "Day in the Life," think: "Across the Universe." Conversely, one of the rockiest Beatles tunes of them all is McCartney's throaty "Drive My Car." In other words, the balladeer brought the sad out of the rebel and the rebel brought out the rock from the sap.

Ying and yang boys. It's the Thai food secret. Bad pad thai is bad cause it's all sweet and no spice. if you're gonna use palm sugar you gotta squeeze a lot of lime in there, know what I'm saying? (Crushed peanuts and chili flakes, also key.)

Now I'm not gonna suggest that you barenaked lovelies quite reached Beatle height, but man, when you guys got it, you got it good, and the goods were that blend, that blend you had so right on album one (the genius that is Gordon) and that you showed so much of again in Stunt - namely funny, whimsy balanced with serious-sad. Too much of the former and you've got a kids album. Too much of the latter and, well, we're just sad and that never did well for record sales unless you're Nina Simone, and all the record sales in the world didn't seem to help her much, in terms of personal happiness, mental stability. Oye. Shame!

But here's my point. Steven Page's voice and his sadness and his self-seriousness are balanced by Ed Roberton's earnest voice and his whimsical nature. One without the other runs the great risk of writing terribly cheesy duets, and that's only if you're still a big enough name to get a washed-up Stevie Wonder type to sing with you. What would the Canadian equivalent of a washed up Stevie Wonder be? (Not a clue.)

If it's not too late, boys, to get it back together (or, actually, it probably is). But trust me. It's the right thing to do.

Yours,
Jon M

By the way, who was the Yoko Ono that caused the break-up anyway?

The Long-Ass Story of How I Came to (Find it Hard to) Recommend Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses"

Referred to in this post: William Shatner, All the Pretty Horses, Harry Potter, Ernest Hemingway, The Road, Keanu Reeves, Shopaholic, Ken Follett, The Social Network, Matt Damon, Vietnamese noodles, Woody Allen, Cormac McCarthy and and and...

You're either into Star Wars or you're not. There's little in between. It takes movies of that scope, movies that remarkably well made to truly break the sci barrier and reach the wider audience. As is of course the case for all great movies, books, music. The way Miles' trumpet can reach well beyond the usual jazzophile's oh so well trained ears and why a half-Jewish short story writer for the New Yorker stunned everyone and himself in 1951 by publishing what turned out to be an international phenomenon. (Clue: It's written by the other writer I never stop talking about. Ie. Not Haruki Murakami.)

Still. Even a movie as good as The Matrix on re-viewing can be hard to swallow (red pill, blue pill, who gives a crap pill?), or so is the case for those of us not sworn allegiance to all things star war/trek involved. For only in the genres we love are we blind to their tropes (eg. Keanu Reeves/William Shatner's acting). But in those genres that don't grab us instant and automatic, we stand outside their bounds and see their structure, their limitations (eg. Keanu Reeves/William Shatner's acting).

All this because I don't know how to recommend Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses to you. Before telling you why, I should stop here to note that Cormac McCarthy's books have about as much in common with the Star Wars movies as Woody Allen does to Harry Potter. But there I go mixing genres again. (If I had an editor he'd have nixed my opening long ago for its terrible misdirection. This post has nothing to do with Star Wars really. Ah, but the pleasures of not working volunteering for the man person.) McCarthy is neither funny nor fantasy. Neither Jew(ish) nor Eng(lish). He's an American and All the Pretty Horses is a western, if we've gotta label it. It is also the first of what's known as "The Border Trilogy," three novels that came almost a decade before they rightly awarded McCarthy the Pulitzer for his masterpiece, The Road.

My confusion and inability to just write a straight recommendation comes in response to an incident that happened to me a few weeks back. I was reading the novel, loving it, lusting after it, getting intimate, not able to stay away, feeling the required need to share it with others, as is my way. An older woman (no need to mention names), lover of books, teacher of youngsters, and clearly a highly intelligent personage all around, she was sitting across from me at a restaurant on Bloor Street, two enormous bowls of Vietnamese noodles between us- there was in fact a whole group of us, but by chance or fate we two were sat across from one another at the one end of the long table. She was so book-lovish and so novel-smartish that I, unable to help myself, had to pull McCarthy's book from my knapsack and share it with her.

"Just read the first page," I said. I was, clearly, very excited.

Which reminds me of my brother-in-law who reads more than God. He knows more than most internet search engines and he is a true book-lover, knowledge-accumulator. He also has a gift for remembering all he reads that is far beyond the average, and well ahead of my less than average and rather crap memory, really.

What I can remember, on first getting to know said brother-in-law and trying to bond, was my bringing up one of my favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway (a big influence on McCarthy, I'm pretty sure, so this story is related - bear with me). Hemingway! my brother-in-law said, all but curling up the one side of his smirk. He then, in bold and hilarious fashion did his impression of a typical Hemingway novel. It went something like this:

I woke up. I went downstairs. I had a drink. The drink was good. Then I went outside. After I had some more to drink. Then I went and slept. In the morning I drank again and it was good.

The point was clear. The Hem(ingway) was lame, was simpleton, was ridiculous. And from outside I can totally see it. And yet I am a fan, a lover, and a sucker most of all to Hemingway's astoundingly simple(-seeming!) style.

But back to that older woman.

I gave her my copy of All the Pretty Horses, the one I went out my way to get because it didn't have Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz smooching on the cover (tie-in to the movie, no thank you, especially when said movie is said to be crap!).After reading for a couple expectant (on my part) minutes, she looked up, and was laughing. If you know The Road never mind Blood Meridian or anything else by Cormac McCarthy you know that laughter ain't a common reaction to the never less than brutally intense writer.

What? I said.

This is a joke, right? She genuinely thought I was pulling her leg she found the writing so cliche, so bad. Like a bad western, she said.

What's so interesting to me is how clear and right both her opinion and my brother-in-law's opinion were. Like an old friend who recently status updated on facebook:  

The Social Network = made-for-TV movie. 

I hated the comment at first, disappointed that such a smart friend would disagree so vehemently with my taste in a movie. Because when it comes to taste it's always personal, isn't it? Then I actually thought about it and thought, He's right. The Social Network does have something of the TV movie to it. The dialogue especially, but even the movie's arc. It was, in fact, a brilliant insight, especially as Sorkin, who wrote it, was the guy who wrote and created TV's The West Wing. Yet after taking that in, after being willing to accept it - to even appreciate it - the movie remains my favourite flick of the year. (We now have a bet going, that friend and I, both of us sure that in two years the other one will have totally changed his mind and adore/despise the flick. Time will tell.)

This week I started working part-time at a big book store. This snobby, nerdy, bloggy, writerly guy now gets to meet the women that come in looking for the latest Shopaholic. He chats with the men who want - perhaps need - the new Ken Follett.

Good to know there're different opinions in this world.

Here, to conclude, that opening to All the Pretty Horses, a book I strongly recommend and that I liked so very much I had to go online and buy the second and third books in the trilogy. When the writing is as good as this I am a sucker.

You decide:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutlgass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping. 

Can't scrape together quite enough
to ride the bus to the outskirts
of the fact that I need love.

-Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone" (ie. song 4).

Extraordinary Women: This Week's Music

There are men that don't listen to music by women, men that won't read a book if a woman wrote it or if the narrator is female. These men make no sense to me, as men without women are nothing but the title of a Hemingway novel hardly anyone reads anymore.

I got to thinking of some of my favourite female musicians. That would be this week's theme, I decided. It wasn't a remotely geographical exercise (hated geography in high school; my wife is the map reader in our family). It was, rather, pure pleasure, pure inspiration, a pure and simple run down my iTunes list to see which females stood out. It was chance then, I think, that though you probably associate most of them with the US, only two were born there, and of those the one actually made her name in Vancouver.

Fate, chance, dumb luck, the Gods of Music, whatever it was, it turned out my ladies were pretty far-flung born, internationally speaking. I am willing, though, to bet dollars to donuts (I'm aiming to bring that expression back into popular parlance) that at least four of the five have lived for some time in The Big Apple. Who wouldn't, if they had the balls that are big (ovaries that are large?), the cash that is much, and/or the card that is green.

This Week's 'Music to Read By' By Birthplace:
1. New York, U.S.A
2. Moscow, Russia
3. Ibadan, Nigeria
4. Alexandria (Virginia), U.S.A
5. Reykjavik, Iceland

Tonight I'm Not Texting, Chatting, Clicking, Flipping, Typing, Watching or Screen-touching

5* Reasons I'm Gonna Read a Good Book Tonight**

1. It Doesn't Involve Social Media (basically)

--Nuff said.

2. If You're Only Watching What Everyone Else is Watching ...

--Original thought requires original activity. Which is related to;

3.  Inspiration

When you're re-reading a passage cause you can't concentrate and your mind keeps wandering - that wandering is often the very source of inspiration and creativity.

4. That Kid Thing
--To go back to that place when mum or dad read to you in bed. (Or, if they didn't, here's your chance to get under the covers and go someplace else in your mind.) Cause for every The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Choose Your Own Adventure or Anne of Green Gables of your youth there is an adult equivalent. Trust me. I just started working in a bookstore. I'm supposed to know.

5. Yoga is to Your Butt as Book is to Your Brain
--Ever get up after watching three hours of youtube, stretch your arms out and say, 'Ahhh, I feel so much better?' Me neither. Like working out, it's often rough going those first pages but you feel soooo good after.


* It turns out there may in fact be more than five reasons to read a good book. Care to share one?

** In which Mendelsohn admits to watching 6 of 10 youtube parts of a documentary last night before finally getting in bed to read his book. (The doc was very inspiring if you must know.)

>>This didactic bit of soap box preaching was brought to you by the one day hopeful makers of the very things I am today starting to purvey. 

Wistful Thinking: Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go"

"That rare find, a fragile little four-leaf clover of a movie that's emotionally devastating, yet all too easily trampled by cynics. " - Peter Debruge, Variety.

Never Let Me Go is a tone poem.

If I were a  painter I'd paint you grey English skies over cold English seas to give you a sense of the beauty of this movie.

If I could play music it would be the piano, slow, tinkling delicate sadness so you could know how this movie effected me. Better yet I'd be a symphony, a famous one, Dvorak's "New World," his ninth symphony, but then only the most heart-shuddering moments from the second movement.

If my favourite books really do break my heart as they heal my soul, or vice versa, it goes that way for movies too. I can't explain it. I'm glad I can't. But this movie has a bit of what Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood has, or what so many great Beatles ballads had (speaking of).Fragility is the perfect word, and probably so much of what made John Lennon's voice so beautiful.

If I'd read Kazuo Ishiguro's book that the movie was based on first, this post might have been quite different. I'm glad I didn't, so I could instead luxuriate in the sense-based wonder that took this compelling story from page to screen and did it with three wonderful performances.

If Carey Mulligan was a revelation in An Education, she is just plain brilliant in this.

If Andrew Garfield stars in this movie as well as The Social Network and has already been cast as Peter Parker in the next Spiderman movie, it's for good reason.

If I couldn't have cared less about Keira Knightley after she kept making pirate movies ... well, all that's changed now.

If I hadn't had to wait to leave the theatre, embarrassed that I'd cried and needed to clean up as I did, maybe I wouldn't be recommending this movie.

Never Let Me Go is a tone poem.

And if that kind of elegiac beauty speaks to you I say go. 

New Music

The theme is Canadiana. God knows about our politics, but at least the music's good.

Now's a good time to press  play on jukebox on left side of screen (scroll down till you're under the chair).

"The West Wind" by Tom Thompson (1917)

Gave Neil Young pride of position for obvious reasons and cause of this new diner theme I've been thinking of for the site. (The music video to "Harvest Moon" is set in a diner.)

A little old, a little new. Mostly obvious, all true.

I apologize for some obvious omissions but Playlist.com doesn't have The Hip's "Wheat Kings" and it doesn't have Blue Rodeo's "Hasn't Hit Me Yet" either. Also, "Bobcaygeon" just wouldn't fit with the other four songs I chose (but I slipped it in at the very bottom of the list).