"It's a Wonderful Life" (Frank Capra, 1946)

Every year, around this time, a bunch of friends and I get together and head out for the Bloor Cinema Christmas movie night. It always includes festive snacks and apple cider and door prizes, and in true Bloor fashion the night is free for members, or just $3 for non-members.

We always smuggle in some Bailey’s, or some rum for the eggnog, and it always proves to be great holiday tradition – made especially festive this year, with the massive snowstorm we had to endure to get there.

This year the feature was Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.

This is one of my all time favourite movies, and I was reminded once again this year why I love it.

The film was released in 1946 to critical, though not box-office, acclaim. It was nominated for five Academy Awards but the initial release didn’t bring in the $6.3 million it needed just to break even.

Be that as it may, the film, which is almost poetic in its stark, black and white beauty, has gone on to become an international favourite.

Stewart plays George Bailey, a resident of the small town of Bedford Falls, which serves as a sort of ‘anywhere USA’ kind of place.

George's’s father started the Bailey Building and Loan Company as a means of providing struggling residents with the ability to own their own home, or business. George has run the business since his father passed away.

His story is a litany of failed dreams, mostly due to his propensity for doing the right thing, however unwillingly.

George’s lifelong ambition to travel the world, his goal of going to university to become a civil engineer, even his honeymoon to Paris – all are quashed as the circumstances in his life force him to remain in Bedford Falls.

He seems to handle the heartbreak well at first. After all, the payoff is a beautiful wife who loves him dearly, a family, and fairly high standing in the town as the one man who can stand up to the rich villain, Henry Potter.

But there’s a deep undercurrent of conflict running just under the surface, and you get the feeling that tension is building as George watches his dreams evaporate.

One of the most memorable scenes in the film is shared between George and Mary Hatch (Donna reed). Hatch, who has adored him since childhood, has returned from university.

At his mother’s urging George stops by her house. “She’s the kind of girl who will help you find the answers George…” his mom tells him, with the best of motherly intentions.

While George – frazzled and in a foul mood -- is at her house, Mary takes a call from a suitor and mutual friend of George’s named Sam Wainright. While they’re on the phone, he asks to speak with George as well, to tell him about a business opportunity in plastics.

The two of them put their heads close together to hear his voice over the line, and there’s an intense moment where George's voice trails off, and he just seems to get lost in Mary’s presence though he is visibly resisting it.

“Mary, will you tell that guy I'm giving him the chance of a lifetime? You hear - the chance of a lifetime,” Wainright says.

Mary looks up at George, and with her lips almost touching his, she repeats his words.

“He says it's the chance of a lifetime,” she says, obviously not referring to the business opportunity.

The phone drops to the floor, and George snaps, grabbing Mary by the shoulders in an almost violent grip.

“Now, you listen to me! I don't want any plastics, and I don't want any ground floors, and I don't want to get married -- ever -- to anyone! You understand that? I want to do what I want to do. And you're...and you're...”

And then you watch as George’s walls break down. With Mary in tears, he pulls her close in an almost desperate embrace, and they kiss.

In the next scene they are getting married.

While it’s a happy scene, it also represents another sacrifice for George. Like when his father died and he was forced to take over the business, or when his brother got married and took a job in New York instead of taking over the family business – his life has been a story of conflict between his desire to follow his dreams and “shake the dust” of Bedford Falls off his feet, and the desire to do the right thing.

But this is all background to the main story of IAWL, which is a true Christmas tale. The real crux comes when George’s absentminded and eccentric uncle mistakenly gives the bank deposit -- $8,000 cash – to the evil Potter on the very day the bank inspector is in town to check on the books.

George comes unglued. He gets drunk, shouts violently at his kids, smashes his car on a stormy night, and sinks to the very edge of despair, wishing out loud that he had never been born – and Stewart’s study of this level of emotion is deeply believable.

At his wits end, about to throw himself from a bridge, George meets his guardian angel, Clarence.

The “junior angel” who is attempting to earn his wings by saving George, pre-empts him, throwing himself into the river so that George is forced to jump in and save his life, rather than ending his own.

Though it takes a lot of convincing before George believes Clarence’s story, he tags along as the angel gives him a first-hand view of what his life would have been like if his wish were granted, and he had never been born.

Bedford Falls, in George’s absence, has become “Pottersville” and is run by Potter, with slums, bars and gambling halls transforming the sleepy town into a place of sin.

His wife, Mary, is an old maid who never married. His mother runs a boarding house. People that George has helped, without his assistance, have turned bitter and angry due to the cards life has dealt them. His own brother, whom George saved from drowning when they were children, perished without his older brother to save him.

The moral of this story, Clarence explains, is that George’s life has made a tremendous difference to countless people around him, and all is not lost.

Not surprisingly, George gets a new lease on life. One of the most famous scenes in the film is when George return to his life, and pure joy fills his heart as he runs through the town, naming all the places he has known since childhood – seeing them with new eyes and a new sense of appreciation.

In a tear-jerker ending to the film, Mary – the girl his mother promised “will help you find the answers George”, calls on the townspeople to help out her husband, who has done so much for them.

Surprise, surprise, they come through, in a heartwarming finish that cements the message that it’s better to give to receive, and that love, friendship and generosity are the things that matter in this life.

My heart is warming up now just thinking of this story and its moral about community and the importance of looking out for one’s neighbour. It’s a classic. If you haven’t seen it, don’t wait for next year. See it now! Merry Christmas…

"The Ordinary Radicals" directed by Jamie Moffett

I watched a film last night and I’m struggling with how to write about it. I really wanted to like it, but I walked out feeling frustrated and confused and somewhat alienated.

It was called "The Ordinary Radicals" and it examines what the director calls a movement of “revolutionary Christianity. One with a quiet disposition that seeks to do small things with great love.”

Sounds intriguing right? I had read and enjoyed “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne, co-founder with Jamie Moffett of the “Simple Way” community in Philadelphia, and one of the main characters in the film.

I loved the “simple” approach to living out his faith and making a difference, that Claiborne describes, from making his own clothes and reducing his environmental footprint, to coming alongside a group of homeless people about to be evicted from an abandoned church they have turned into their home.

Claiborne lives his life in a radical way on the front lines, in community with a group of like-minded people.

So TOR is basically a documentary following Claiborne and the film’s director Moffett and some of their other friends (there are a lot of players and most aren’t properly introduced) as they tour around the U.S. with the new book “Jesus for President.”

The film’s Toronto premiere was at the Bloor Cinema, and the place was packed.

So the film follows the group as they travel across the U.S. – in a cooking-oil-fuelled bus -- on their tour. They visit churches, community groups, a music festival, promoting their message that living like Christ goes beyond political affiliation or your stance on abortion, but really means living for others, in love.

On their road trip they highlight people who are doing that, from an advocate and activist who lives in an old bus to be close to the homeless, to some guy who won two cars on The Price is Right but sold them to go to Uganda, to a soldier who left the army because God told him to.

Some of these people are really inspiring, but there are so many, and there’s so little depth to each story, that my friends and I found it hard to really connect.

Claiborne and Moffett have been living this way for a long time, and at parts I felt like they felt obligated to tell the story of everyone they had ever met who is making a difference. In short, there was way too much information and it was way to scattered. And it was too long.

It seemed like there was no real narrative that wove through the film – and as a result the many anecdotes felt disconnected and disparate.

I would have preferred if they had focused in greater depth on a few stories. The Amish group that offered real forgiveness to a murderer who devastated their community – sharing that they were ready, in advance, to offer forgiveness, intrigued me and I wanted to know more.

I was fascinated by their explanation that “forgiveness means being willing to give up your right to revenge.”

Another paradox of this film is this: Though the group seems focused on building bridges between Christians and non-church people, it seems as my friend Jared said, to alienate almost everyone. The Christian Right, especially, seems to be the big bad guy and there seems to be an assumption that everyone would agree with that.

I didn’t like that perspective and it seemed to run contrary to their message of building bridges and promoting love.

Weird.

I also can’t imagine a non-religious person connecting to the film, which also seems to go against their goal of breaking down barriers. I mean really, there’s so much Christian-ese in the film, I think anyone without that context would walk out going ‘what the…???’

But I will say this – my friends and I spent more than an hour discussing the film afterwards in a pub over beer. At times we were ranting, and we all found things we disagreed with.

But somehow we were all inspired by parts too. Not by the film in general, I would say, but by a few of those stories about real people making a difference in their world.

I was going to end the blog there, but I just remembered one other thing that annoyed me. The very last line of the movie is from this woman, who like many people in the film just seems to appear out of nowhere, says: “We are the change we have been waiting for!”

That’s an Obama campaign slogan, and I thought it really discredited their non-political message to that point.

Argh! So brutal.

The Farley fallout

Hey,
The Farley interview went great! If you want to read about, you can do so, by clicking here.
Peace...

"Otherwise" by Farley Mowat, 2008

I get to sit down with Farley Mowat on Monday for an interview. The writer and activist's new memoir “Otherwise” – described as the last book he will write -- is just hitting shelves, and he's on a book tour.

It will be the third time I’ve interviewed Farley, and I’m pretty excited. In one way or another, this giant of Canadian literature has played a pretty important role in my life.

When I was pretty young – maybe 12 or so – my uncle Dave gave me a couple of books by him, including “Lost in the Barrens” and “The Curse of the Viking Grave”, that my older cousin Scott had outgrown.

I devoured those books and started dreaming of a career in anthropology or trapping or canoe-guiding – anything that would allow me to explore the Barrens in Canada’s north and live out the kind of adventures I was reading about.

I moved on to "People of the Deer", "Never Cry Wolf", "The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be" – anything the public library had on hand.

A couple of years later my family moved to a small town in a remote part of Northwestern Ontario, and those stories suddenly took on new meaning as I met real-life people who hunted wolves and bears and trapped otters and beavers for their pelts.


But my most personal encounters with Farley Mowat occurred after I graduated from journalism school and moved to Port Hope, Ontario to work as a reporter at the Port Hope Evening Guide.

Though Farley and his wife spend the summers in Cape Breton, they spend the rest of the year in Port Hope. I lived in a cottage right on Lake Ontario, and he lived around the corner on King Street, and would walk his dogs on the path that ran right in front of my place.

I had the chance to interview him a couple of times. The first was when his name was included on a list the RCMP released of suspected Communist sympathizers that had been under surveillance during the Cold War.

He told me a hilarious story about visiting the Russian consulate in Ottawa with his father Angus, getting drunk on Vodka and standing on the roof of the building in their Scottish kilts, mooning the CSIS agents they knew were holed-up in the building across the road.

The second time was when one of his short stories was turned into a film called The Snow Walker. The film is about a brash bush pilot in northern Canada who has no regard for his surroundings. All he needs to survive, he thinks, is his plane and his own wits.

That outlook caves in pretty quickly when he crashes in the Barrens and is forced to rely on his young aboriginal passenger to survive.

After we had discussed – over cranberry juice and whisky -- the adaptation and how Farley felt about it, he said “now what about you? What’s new in your life?”

It’s not a question a reporter expects to hear very often, so I was taken aback. But after a moment I managed to tell him I was actually getting ready to go to Morocco in a couple of weeks, to spend a year doing volunteer work with a Christian organization – and I was pretty excited about it.

Farley’s eyes lit up and he moved to the edge of his seat.

“You need to listen to the lesson in The Snow Walker!” he told me. “You can’t be like the bush pilot who thought there was nothing to learn. You can’t go over there thinking you’re going to help and teach people, but you need to be the student and learn from them!”

It was powerful, insightful advice, and I never forgot it. I was often reminded, during my time there, of those words and how true they were.

So I’m excited to meet Farley again, and to thank him for his advice. I hope he remembers me. I think he will. At 87 years old he’s still sharp and insightful, and is probably still walking his dog along the waterfront trail in Port Hope and sipping cranberry and whisky in the afternoons.

"The Lost Salt Gift of Blood", Alistair MacLeod, 1976

A while back a friend gave me a collection of short stories by Alistair MacLeod, a Canadian writer whose stories are mostly set on Cape Breton and the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.
I read a couple of the stories and really enjoyed them. But then the book was put aside and got buried under a giant pile of things waiting to be read and I never had the chance to finish it.
But a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a trip to the Eastern Shore to visit my friends DeeDee and Jeremy.
I spotted “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” on my bookshelf just moments before we departed, and almost as an afterthought I stuffed it into my backpack.
It was a good decision. There’s something about reading literature while visiting the very place that it captured.
TLSGOB enhanced my experience in Nova Scotia and really made the place come alive. The lonely, socked-in coves and beaches, the rugged, harsh headlands – even the hardy, colourful people we met took on new meaning when seen through MacLeod’s lens.
There are seven stories in this collection, and it took MacLeod seven years to write.
It’s not surprising that years of labour went into this project. Stories about miners, fishermen, Cape Bretoners returning home after years away, only to feel like the had never left, the desperate struggle to hang onto a way of life that is steadily eroding into the Atlantic – you feel as though MacLeod has lived each of these lives and he’s speaking from inside the heart of his characters and from the very soil where his ancestors are buried.
The Road to Rankin’s Point, in particular, I found, to be a haunting, heartbreaking story that seems to represent a microcosm for a disappearing way of life.
“But for me, in this my 26th years, it is not into the larger world that I go today. And the road that I follow feeds into no other that will take the traveler to the great adventures of the wild unknown. Instead, at the village’s end it veers sharply to the right, leaves the pavement behind and almost immediately begins to climb along the rocky cliffs that hang high above the sea. It winds its torturous, clinging way for some eight miles before it ends quite abruptly and permanently in my grandmother’s yard…Above this last small cultivated outpost and jutting beyond it out to sea is the rocky promontory of Rankin’s Point. As one cannot drive beyond it, neither can one see beyond it farther up the coast. It is an end in every way and it is to the beginning of this conclusion that my car now begins its long ascent.”

In this story Calum, a young man returns to Cape Breton from Toronto to visit his grandmother, part of an annual family reunion that he says could better be titled “What to do about Grandma.”

And as he travels the tangled, overgrown road to her home on Rankin’s Point he recounts the beautiful tragedy of his family history.

“The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us 'The Little Turn of Sadness' because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now, as I feel my own blood diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leapt and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon.”

And every inch of the journey described the unique scenery and way of life that only exists there – bringing the reader along until his – my – heart swells with the beauty of the scenery and the loss this young man and his family has endured.

In another story, the one for which the book is titled, the main character describes driving across the country to revisit the fishing village that was once his home. Like all small towns, his return is somehow expected, though he gave no word of his plans.
Long-lost relatives open their home to him and in a pattern that seems timelessly ingrained in these people there is supper, followed by weather reports on the shortwave radio, and then music as a young boy plays harmonica and the old couple sings.

“Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They’re like the stars on a summer’s morning
First they’ll appear and then they’re gone.

I wish I were a tiny sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I’d fly away to my own true loves
And all he’d ask I would deny

Alas I’m not a tiny sparrow
I have not wings nor can fly
And on this earth in grief and sorrow
I am bound until I die.

Like their way of life, the words of their song seem to take on an agelessness that could characterize centuries of Cape Bretoners or their Irish or Scottish forefathers.

The narrator says:
“Stranded here, alien of my middle-generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously upon the linoleum. The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like the snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!”

The power, the strength of the stories contained in this book is proven by this: As I sit in this trendy, downtown Toronto coffee shop, surrounded by busy successful, up and coming city-types, I’m still able to disappear completely into these pages and tune out the conversations and the pretension and the smell of money that permeates everything here, and allow myself to be tugged irresistible by the heartstrings back to the Eastern Shore.

"The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie, 2008

So, I had the honour of sitting down with Salman Rushdie yesterday for an entire hour!

Author of nine novels, Booker prize winner, British knight, the man who infuriated much of the Muslim world and prompted Iran's supreme leader to put a price on his head, forcing him to go into hiding for a decade...

Yeah, I was nervous, but it actually went really, really well. We were only scheduled for 45 minutes, and I planned to only use 30, but we had such a great conversation and the interview went in so many different directions, that we stretched it out for a whole hour.

At the end we both said 'wow, that flew by!'. So fascinating to speak with him.

He has a new book out called "The Enchantress of Florence" which I really enjoyed.

I've written a story about the book and the interview. If you want to, you can read it here

Also, he asked for my blog address, so he might be reading this right now.

Just kidding about that last part.

Thanks for checking in! I promise to write more soon...

Up the Yangtze (2007, Yung Chang)

Andy Johnson, CTV.ca News Staff

Up the Yangtze follows one peasant family as their home and way of life is swept up in the rising tide of China's march towards progress.

The epic documentary by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang captures some of the final moments before the Three Gorges Dam chokes off the river and the rising waters displace two million people.

* Read the complete story here

"There Will Be Blood" (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Daniel Day Lewis)

“There Will Be Blood” is essentially about greed and the downfall of a capitalistic society where individual empire building is encouraged and even lifted up as a hallmark of the society’s success.

Starring Daniel Day Lewis and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s a grim, dark tale about the life of Daniel Plainfield, a stubborn, determined, self-serving oil prospector who finds the precious substance in the late 1890s as America is just beginning to develop a dependency.

Plainfield goes on to build a successful oil business, through sheer grit and greed and a willingness to push anyone out of his way to accomplish his own ends.

Though it’s not black and white, there’s almost no colour in this film. Long, still images of bleak, rocky hills are accompanied by spine-chilling, drawn out, single notes played on violin that adds to the constant tension through the film.

Most of the characters seem purposefully non-descript compared to Plainfield. Their stark black clothes and hard-working faces provide some contrast to the frames but little more. This film is clearly about Plainfield – his greed, selfishness and ultimate descent into a dark mine shaft of his own creation.

Paul Thomas Anderson is known for dark subject matter. “Magnolia” and “Hard Eight” both looked at human weakness and the dark side of people. But there is usually some redeeming qualities that allow the viewer to connect and relate to the characters, despite – or maybe because of – their flaws and weaknesses.

TWBB is different, though. Maybe Anderson is taking a shot at U.S. oil dependency and greed by looking closely at how that industry began. Or perhaps he’s offering a warning about the dangers if being a slave to the dollar. But there’s little cause for sympathy towards Plainfield – who is played brilliantly by Lewis, by the way.

In the early days of his career his determination and grit are admirable – you can’t help but admire his toughness as he chips away in a lonely mine shaft, drags himself out of a hole with a broken leg, or huddles beside a fire at night, wind-battered on an exposed plain.

Little by little that respect shifts to disgust, as it becomes obvious that the sole motivation for all of his decisions is greed.

What is compelling, is Lewis’ portrayal of Plainfield. It’s breathtaking and absolutely convincing. When he says “I hate most people,” or when he heartlessly dismisses someone whom he is close to, from his life forever, or when he murders in cold blood, you feel it in your bones and you know he was fully immersed -- in typical Lewis style – in the role.

TWBB is also a visual masterpiece. An oil well gushing a black baptism over Plainfield, a derrick fully immersed in flame contrasted with a dusky desert sky, the construction of a church juxtaposed with the erecting of an oil rig.

You should be in the right mood to see this film, but you should see it nonetheless.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Art Spiegelman)

The Holocaust has always had a place in my mind as a tragic, sad, incredibly important moment in human history, but one that has also always been inaccessible and foreign to me.

I guess I studied it in school. I vaguely remember an animated history teacher trying to capture the realities of concentration camp life during a classroom exercise. But I’ve had no real portal or entry point to achieve a personal connection to what took place. After reading “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” by Art Spiegelman, I feel differently.

True, no one in my family lived through that ordeal. None of my relatives ever sheltered Jews or fled the Nazis. But this Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel has given me a new insight and allowed me to connect in a new way to the events that led up to, and occurred during, the Second World War.

Told in two volumes, “Maus” is the story of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s experience living through the Holocaust and struggling to survive, narrowly escaping death numerous times, watching almost all of his family and friends die at the hands of the Nazis. It’s gripping and haunting and all the more touching because it’s based on a true story.

In Spiegelman’s unique treatment of this story, the Jews are portrayed as mice and the Nazis as cats. Done badly, this technique could have come across as tacky or insensitive. But it doesn’t. It only takes a page or two to just accept it. And it really is effective – as seen through Jewish eyes, the Nazis really were ruthless predators with little sympathy for their prey. And the Jews, at least in Vladek’s experience, were the hunted – hiding out, trying desperately to avoid drawing attention to themselves and with little or no resources to protect or defend against the enemy.

The first page of Book 1, titled “My Father Bleeds History,” has a grim image of dozens of Jews staring towards a single point. They’re well-dressed and stoic but there’s a common look of fear and bewilderment in their eyes, as if they know there’s something foreboding on the horizon, but they have no idea what form it will take.

Book 2, “And Here My Troubles Began,” begins with another image of dozens of Jews, all men this time, wearing matching prison stripes. Their eyes are also staring towards a single point but this time their eyes display a glazed-over muted fear and it’s clear they have seen terrible things and have little hope for a happy ending.

And through Vladek’s recounting of the central story of his life, we experience these deeds first hand – murder, extermination, genocide – all the worst things that come to mind when one thinks of the Holocaust, are represented in Vladek’s story.

But "Maus" doesn’t just dwell on the past. It flips between the images of the past and the present as Art and Vladek try to bridge the generational and cultural divide that separates them and causes friction.

“Just thinking about my book – it’s so presumptuous of me,” Spiegelman says to his wife in one of their conversations.

“I mean, I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father. How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz, of the Holocaust?”

But somehow, you see them getting closer through the course of this book. Over the years it took to collect the entire story and set it down. Something does happen. Art does, somehow, make sense out of his relationship with his father and why he is the way he is, by extension, why he has become the man he is.

Through asking and learning and trying, despite the obvious difficulties of doing so, he achieves some sort of understanding, some sort of reconciliation, and that achievement gives this story – which becomes as much his as his father’s – legitimacy and credibility.

And somehow I was taken along for the ride on Spiegelman’s journey and gained my own new connection and understanding of this moment in history and its real impact on real lives.