"Makers" by Cory Doctorow (2009)

I like what Cory Doctorow is all about. He’s an advocate for file sharing and fewer and less stringent copyright laws. He is a prolific and acclaimed science fiction writer, a diplomacy expert and intellectual who never graduated university, a generally creative person and someone who seems to fight for what he believes in.

I like the fact that he (according to Wikipedia and based on the tone of his new book “Makers”) believes companies should own the rights to sell their products, but that anyone who wants to share them after purchase should be able to do so.

And I like that he seems to live this out, essentially giving “Makers” away as a serial.

I also like that he wrote a book ("Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town") that is set in Toronto’s Kensington Market and whose main character is the son of mixed parents – a washing machine and a mountain.

And he's Canadian too.

But I wasn’t crazy about his latest book – which is also the only one I’ve read. I was excited about the concept, though. It's set in the near future and focuses on two indie-minded inventor geniuses (Perry and Lester). They take the discarded tech junk the world has tossed out and turn it into cool, useful stuff.

I myself have a sometimes-bad habit of scavenging old junk from the ends of people’s driveways in order to turn it into other cool stuff, which I think might be partly why the concept resonated with me.

Their world, it seems, is a nightmare vision of what ours probably will become. Mass-produced consumer Wal-Mart culture has gone too far, and the thousands of ubiquitous strip malls, big box stores and fast food restaurants -- the byproduct of that consumerism -- have essentially imploded. By sheer volume, it seems, they have been devalued to the point where almost nothing is worth anything.

So Perry and Lester take the worthless junk, which is available by the truckload (Tickle-Me-Elmo’s are one such item) and hack it. They start a movement, inadvertently, that becomes known as New Work, and is documented by Suzanne Church, a tech reporter who joins their little rebellion.

Eventually, their movement morphs into something else. Now jaded, the two inventors create an interactive, almost amusement park-style "ride," where riders can add, change or remove features based on what they like and don't like. The more people that take part, the deeper the becomes, and a story begins to emerge in the ride that begins to develop a following all its own – and Lester and Perry once again become the unlikely, unwitting fathers of a massive, worldwide movement.

They also help give heart and vibrancy to a shantytown of castoffs from the soulless culture they live in.

And of course along the way they make enemies -- the main one being the Walt Disney Corporation.

Like I said, I really appreciate the concept here: A futuristic society that’s close enough that we can easily identify with it, a believable mixture of products, technology and terminology we know, and a selection of other stuff invented and imagined by Doctorow, most of which is both fantastical and believable all at once.

I also liked the clever inventions Perry and Lester create, and their organic style of inventing.

But I didn’t like everything. For one thing the book felt way too long. I really had to fight to get through the last third. It got to the point where I felt he had made his point, but just kept belabouring it, on and on and on until I found it hard to care.

Oddly, Goth culture plays into this story too. And I found his descriptions and understanding of that sub-culture group a little awkward.

For one thing, in the book Disney has dedicated an entire section of Disney World to all things Goth. And they come in droves to explore it and experience it. They love it. That just doesn’t sound realistic to me, but then I don’t know that much about the culture to say for sure.

Also, it can be argued that the heroes of the book sell out, big time, along the way, something that just didn’t seem to fit with the way their character had been portrayed for most of the book.

In the end this book is a great concept with smart ideas and pretty decorations, but with so-so writing and humdrum storytelling.

"Invisible City" (2009 directed by Hubert Davis)

This week I went to see “Invisible City,” a documentary about Toronto’s Regent Park.

While we were there, my friend Jed told me that he had heard others who had seen the film say they couldn’t believe this place was in downtown Toronto. It wasn't that they were shocked by the poverty or the quality of the housing or anything like that, but just that it looked so unfamiliar.

And it’s true, Regent Park is one of those places that people in this city drive through all the time, but that few people ever have reason to explore. And for that reason, it really is an “Invisible City” – everyone knows it’s there, everyone knows its reputation, but to the vast majority of Torontonians, it doesn’t really exist.

We saw the film at The Royal, where a three-day run was extended by two nights due to the huge response and large crowds that attended.

The film, directed by Academy Award-nominee Hubert Davis in 2009, follows the lives of two young men, Mikey and Kendell, over the course of several years as they come of age in Regent Park.

As their lives are changing, so is their community. Canada’s oldest housing project is in the midst of a major “Revitalization” that is meant to transform it from a planned ghetto community to a so-called mixed housing community.

Phase One of the development is underway at the beginning of the film, with some of the buildings being torn town and a massive hole excavated for the condo-style buildings that are meant to replace them.

The boys are finishing up their time at Nelson Mandela Park Public School and getting ready for high school. Since Regent doesn’t have it’s own high school, the boys get sent to schools outside of their community.

Mikey and Kendell face challenges both in their community and outside, at high school. Mikey attends a wealthy high school in Midtown Toronto where he seems alienated and out of place. Kendell struggles with the discipline required by the basketball team he joins at his new school, where the coach says they bring in players from Regent to add toughness and edge to their team.

Both of the boys live with their mothers, their fathers largely or entirely absent from their lives. Both struggle with making the right choices, dealing with anger and pressure from friends and tension with police. Their mothers struggle with trying to connect with their boys, protect and encourage them, while also being tough when they need to.

One constant for both is Ainsworth, a former CFL player who is their teacher at Nelson Mandela. He seems to understand the boys and their need for positive role models, and sticks with them over the years, staying in their lives, checking in and dispensing wisdom and friendship when he can.

"Someone once said everyone needs someone in their life that they don’t want to disappoint,” he says at one point -- not grandstanding, just being honest about his motivation.

There is a little bit of hope in this film and quite a lot of heartbreak as the camera sensitively follows the boys’ struggles and challenges as they work out the kind of lives they want to live, the kind of men they want to be. Both are handled sensitively and without judgment.

It’s obvious that Davis earned their trust – something that takes time and commitment in Regent Park. The boys speak to him honestly and openly about their struggles, mistakes and the forces at work in their lives, opening up a window into their hearts.

The film is also just beautiful to watch, accurately and artistically rendering the unique community that is Regent Park, a separate, and invisible, city within the city.

"One Week" reminds me of epic road trips and the Terry Fox memorial (2008 starring Joshua Jackson, director Michael McGowan)

For anyone who has ever road-tripped the Trans Canada from Toronto to B.C., “One Week” evokes a feeling of familiarity and nostalgia through its blatant, unapologetic use of the tacky, cheesy, awesome landmarks that serve as milestones along the way.

In the movie, Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson) visits various over-sized items during a cross-country motorcycle journey, including a giant Muskoka chair, the big nickel in Sudbury, Kenora’s giant musky, the world’s largest teepee and a giant T-rex, to name a few.

If you’ve ever travelled that amazing stretch of road, you’ll know those memorable spots that make up our collective Canadian roadmap. Like the Inukshuk of the Arctic, they are used by travellers as waypoints that help break up that long journey into manageable sections.

And if you’re anything like me, you can’t watch this movie without remembering the time and place in your life when you were at one or two of those landmarks.

In “One Week” Tyler has it all together. He’s engaged to a beautiful girl (Liane Balaban of “New Waterford Girl”), has a good job as a teacher and has a great family. When he learns suddenly and unexpectedly that he has a bad case of cancer, that world comes crashing down around him and he decides he needs to just get away.

Not run away, so much as spend some time on his own, on the open road, figuring things out the way everyone should, on a vintage Norton motorcycle. It’s something he just has to do before beginning an intense course of chemotherapy that’s going to sideline him for possibly years.

What was planned to be a journey of only a couple of days becomes an epic trek as he finds himself unable to turn around.

I was skeptical about this movie. It just seemed like such a blatant, cheesy appeal to Canadian national pride and the premise was just too cliché and obvious.

And it is all of those things, definitely. I mean, seriously, he kisses the Stanley Cup, smokes a joint with a wisdom-dispensing Gord Downie, and rolls-up-the-rim on his Timmies.

But it’s still a great movie.

The story is well told, the dialogue is believable and compelling, and the narration (which I normally find is used to fill in the holes the director left behind) in this case helps add detail and depth to the story and never feels contrived.


And the footage shot along the way tells the story of Canada, from Toronto to Lake Superior and Northwestern Ontario, the Prairies, to the Rockies and West Coast. The crew, which travelled cross-Canada in a giant bus and shot guerrilla-style, must have had to make constant stops to shoot all the cool things along the way.

The director, first-timer Michael McGowan, said he wanted to shoot the obvious icons of that journey but also the lesser known ones, like the world’s largest photo mosaic in Muskoka and a giant pipe somewhere else.

He accomplishes this, painting a portrait of Canada that is both familiar and sentimental, but also new and inspiring.

He also seems to have an honest insight into how it might feel to receive the kind of news that Ben got. On one hand, he’s a broken man, unsure of what to do or how to live his suddenly shortened life.

On the other, he experiences a weird sense of relief. He admits the first thought that went through his head when he got the news was that he had an excuse to call off the wedding. And there’s a freedom to suddenly do what he wants and be the person he feels he might have been if he could live his life over again.

I liked this movie, but I couldn’t help wondering, would anyone outside of Canada ever watch it, or ‘get’ it? I know Joshua Jackson has a pretty big following largely due to his “Might Ducks” and “Dawson’s Creek” roles, but I couldn’t imagine many people outside of our borders wanting to see it besides the die-hard Pacey freaks.

But we were watching the special features (yup, embarrassing I know) and there was a Q and A with Jackson and McGowan from a Toronto showing, and that question came up. Someone wanted to know how they thought it would be received elsewhere.

Jackson has a really good answer. He challenged the question, suggesting only Canadians would ever worry if a film was ‘too Canadian.’ He said a U.S. or British filmmaker would never ask that question.

"It’s not too Canadian, it’s just Canadian,” Jackson said.

I like that. And I like this movie. If you’re a proud Canadian, a die-hard Pacey or knuckle puck fan, or if you just like a good road-trip movie, I recommend this one.

**There were some funny references to Jackson’s past work. He meets an NHL hockey player wearing a “Ducks” jersey, and at another point he’s asked where “Dawson” street is. I liked the fact they were willing to have fun with this story and didn’t take it too seriously.

***When Jackson, a hardcore Canucks fan, kisses the Stanley Cup, he kisses the 1966-67 engraving – the last time the Maple Leafs won the cup. Nice touch.

**** ALSO, and this is the last thing I’ll say, Joel Plaskett makes an awesome cameo as a Toronto busker.

Still loving Tintin after all these years

I’ve been reading a lot of Tintin books lately. Katie bought me four or five a couple of months ago and I got four more for Christmas.

I finished reading the last one, Tintin and The Seven Crystal Balls, today. It was a rare to-be-continued ending. Annoying, but at least it gives me a good reason to go buy The Prisoners of the Sun to find out what happens next.

I'm planning to collect the entire series, but here is a list of the ones I now own:


- Cigars of the Pharaoh
- The Blue Lotus
- The Broken Ear
- The Crab with the Golden Claws
- The Secret of the Unicorn
- The Castafiore Emerald
- Tintin in Tibet
- Destination Moon

My aunt Sandy and uncle Dave, whose son Scott, my cousin, is about 10 years older than me, used to pass on a lot of his old books to me when I was a kid. Among them were classics like “Lost in the Barrens” and “Curse of the Viking Grave” – which I’ve mentioned in past blogs -- and a bunch of Asterix and Tintin books.

Not quite graphic novels, not quite comic books, the Tintin installments are more like short adventure novels with illustrations. Both Asterix and Tintin fit that rare genre of books that are meant primarily for kids, but are accessible to adults on a whole different level.

Or maybe I’m trying to be way too deep or sentimental here, and the simple fact is that I love adventure stories and comic books and Tintin combines both. The writing is smart and clever and you can read them over and over again. They’re the kind of books you want to keep in your collection forever, so that your own kids can one day appreciate how awesome they are.

Tintin, the central character, is a young Belgian reporter who finds himself embroiled in all kinds of sleuthing adventures, travelling around the world to unravel mysteries of science, history and politics.

His fox terrier Snowy and a cast of characters that includes, off and on, the loyal but troublesome Captain Haddock, the bumbling detectives Thompson and Thomson, and the hard-of-hearing Professor Calculus, always accompany him.


The books were written by Georges Rémi Under the pen name Herge. Apparently he became famous for his trademark simplistic, minimalist style of illustration. That makes sense. Reading his books you appreciate how much he can convey with simple, uncluttered illustrations.

Wikipedia says the series first appeared in a Belgian newspaper as a comic strip in 1929, but became so popular it was soon released in book form, and a movie and theatre show were also created.

And I’m excited that Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, is slated for release in 2010, with Jamie Bell playing Tintin alongside Daniel Craig as Red Rackham and Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock. Steven Spielberg is directing. The movie is probably the reason why Tintin books are once again back on the shelves and easy to find. I’m happy about that.

Anyone out there a Tintin fan? Any ideas why these books are so popular?

“The Warriors” can’t sleep ‘til Coney Island (1979, directed by Walter Hill)

“The Outsiders” – first the book and then the movie – made me and pretty much every other adolescent boy want to be in a gang. It just seemed so cool to be a member of a tight-knit group of hoods with hearts who always had each other’s back.

As you grow up it steadily gets drilled into your head that gangs are bad and any decent human being wants nothing to do with them – but still I think most guys, deep down, like the idea of being associated with a group of dangerous people who look out for each other.

The opening scenes of “The Warriors,” which was playing at the Bloor Cinema this week, evoked that same feeling. The Warriors, a gang of seven or eight guys from Coney Island, have travelled across the city to Prospect Park in the Bronx for a gathering of all the city’s syndicates.

Cyrus, the “one and only” leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the city’s largest and most powerful gang, wants to unite them all under one banner, saying they would outnumber the police three to one and could have the run of the city.

The first five minutes of the movie is a massive montage of gangs wearing their ‘colours’ and making their way to the meet. Some of them, like the Warriors, wear leather vests embossed with their emblem. Others are a little more creative, like the Furies, who paint their faces in garish colours, wear baseball uniforms and carry bats, and another group that wears hillbilly outfits.

Shortly after the gangs gather, the plot is laid out. A crazy gang member named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) shoots Cyrus in the middle of his speech, then blames the Warriors.

The Riffs – a scary gang of martial-arts trained black dudes (I kept waiting for Kareem Abdul Jabar to come out) -- put a bounty on the Warriors and the members spend the rest of the movie desperately trying to get home under the leadership of Swan (Michael Beck), their “war chief.”

One thing my friend Phil and I both said was that we expected to laugh more. Not that we thought it would be funny, but we did think it would be slightly ridiculous. But that wasn’t really the case. The director and the actors – none of whom I could name and only one or two I recognized – treated this film really seriously. Sometimes that can look really cheesy and dated 30 years on, but in this case it didn’t.

First of all, the suspense works. For about the first third of the film there’s a palpable sense of tension as the Warriors try to survive, deciding when to run and when to stay and fight, racing or “bopping” (fighting) through subway stations, on platforms and through tunnels.

Other times they’re roaming through eerily silent parks, cemeteries or empty, creepy strange neighbourhoods, always on the lookout for the next gang trying to take them out.

You get the feeling this is the New York that exists for strangers at night who have no place to go home to. It’s cold and harsh and you have to watch out.

I love this vision of the city. It’s so different from the usual images of New York – Times Square, Ground Zero, Central Park. This is the non-touristy NYC , and the camera’s explore gritty neighbourhoods and cityscapes in a really refreshing way.

Coney Island, with its ramshackle houses and broken down amusement park – with its awesome Wonder Wheel -- is one of the most compelling canvases in the film.

"Is this what we fought all night to get back to?” one of the Warriors asks as they ramble through their own turf at dawn, finally home, to safety – they think.
This film could have just petered out, but it ends strongly with the kind of justice you hope to see in a movie where the “good” guys have spent most of their screen time running away.

All in all, this movie works really well. The acting, by a huge cast of virtual nobodies, is strong, the dialogue is really interesting and almost poetic at times (these gang members are almost artsy) but not cheesy.

I just went to New York, but this movie makes me want to go back and see a little different side this time around. Maybe there’s a Warriors” subway tour I could take. Hmm, or maybe I could make one!

If you can find this film, it’s definitely worth watching. The print we saw was scratchy and the sound was a little fuzzy, and you could almost feel the ghosts of the thousands of people that have probably sat in theatres just like the Bloor and watched that very copy of the movie. That made the experience even cooler.

**A quick IMDB search seems to say there’s a remake of this in pre-production for 2010. That would be cool, or terrible, depending.

"Moon" is awesome but Kevin Spacey still sucks ("Moon," 2009, directed by Duncan Jones)

Kevin Spacey sucks. Lets just get that out of the way right off the bat. In my opinion he hasn’t done a good movie since “American Beauty.”

He was my least favourite part of “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and he was also my least favourite part of “Moon” starring him and Sam Rockwell, which I watched last night. But I’m happy to say his role was minor enough that he didn’t have too detrimental an effect and the movie was still pretty amazing.

But wait a minute, why am I starting a blog about a movie I loved with the one part I didn’t? Let me start over:

"Moon" stars Sam Rockwell as astronaut Sam Bell, and Kevin Spacey as Gerty, the Hal-like (Think “2001: A Space Odyssey”) computer/robot assistant who keeps him company on the moon.

Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract running a fuel-mining station on the far side of the moon, and is looking forward to going home to see his wife and young daughter.

The film is set in the future (though it’s not clear how far) and is entirely set on the moon. The inside of the station is mostly cold and industrial. Sam’s messy quarters, a room where he prunes and talks to his plant collection, and a makeshift table where he is carving a miniature town -- though he only remembers making a few of the buildings -- are the main personal touches.

When Sam leaves the station to repair the Helium-3 harvesters when they go offline, the moonscape is silent, eerie and monochromatic, pretty much how you’d expect it to look and feel.

In the scenes where Sam’s little moon-rover is seen trekking across the surface, the moonscape almost looks like it was shot in miniature using a paper mache model and a toy moon-mobile -- and it works. The scenes look fantastic, especially when the Earth is visible hanging over the horizon, a beautiful, far-away world.

It all helps add to the mystery of why Sam is there, what’s really going on with his wife – from whom he receives cryptic, puzzling video messages – and how he’s going to survive until it’s time to go home.

Rockwell is fantastic in this role, changing his stripes like a chameleon several times during the film, convincingly every time. One moment he’s the grungy, worn out astronaut, the next he’s the guilt-plagued absentee father, then the slick clean-cut keener or the suspicious outsider.

And in some cases he’s seamlessly carrying out conversations between those characters, dialogue that is also somehow believable. Nancy, my slightly crazy video store lady, told me today: "You would never think for a SECOND that it was one actor!", even though the evidence is staring you in the face.

My friend Tyrone says this is one of those movies you shouldn’t spend too much time trying to figure out, or you’ll ruin the ending. I mostly disagree. It’s not a big surprise finish, it’s more of a steady burn that builds and builds, the story getting better as the truth is revealed.

The movie was directed by Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones, who now goes by Duncan Jones, and is the son of David Bowie. It’s his directorial debut, and a solid effort.

"Blankets" (2003, Craig Thompson)

Years ago a friend recommended I read “Blankets,” a graphic novel by Craig Thompson. We had both had a very ‘Christian’ upbringing, complete with church camps and Sunday school and a good dose of old-fashioned guilt, and she thought this book would resonate since it deals with a lot of those issues.

I’ve always kept that title in the back of my mind, and whenever I’d end up browsing the graphic novel section of a bookstore, I’d keep an eye out for it.

I’ve never seen it, and had started to doubt it actually existed, when it’s white and blue spine jumped out at me on a shelf a few weeks back. There was just one copy and I snatched it up right away and started reading it that night.

My friend Meghan Sheffield was right when she said that this book is relevant to anyone who grew up the way she and I did. At some points I cringed in embarrassment at the honesty in those pages, other times I laughed, and I even got a little misty at one point.

The writing is powerful and honest, and is a perfect match to the rich black and white drawings that go along with it, illustrating the emotions, feelings and ideas described in the text.

“Blankets” is mostly autobiographical, and traces Thompson’s life, beginning when he is just a young boy growing up in a poor Wisconsin family with his parents and brother, right up to what seems like his present day life.

Along the way he wrestles with faith, fitting in, growing up, falling in love, then struggling as that love falls apart.


I found his experiences at church camp the most relevant to my own experience. The way Thompson describes and draws it, it could almost be one of the camps I went to. The camp he attends is even called 'Sno Camp’ – exactly the same name as one I went to.

He expects camp to be a haven of escape from his hometown school, where his faith has made him an outcast and the mockery of the ‘popular’ kids. But when he arrives, he quickly discovers he doesn’t fit in there either, and feels surrounded by cliques, hypocrites and fakes.

“Something about being rejected at church camp felt so much more awful than being rejected at school,” he writes, suggesting that it felt like God himself was disappointed that he couldn’t fit in.

But as he grows up and starts to figure out who he is, he learns to spot the other outsiders and band together with them. One of those is Raina, a girl from Michigan who is also trying to figure out her faith and her place in the world.

They fall in love and most of the second half of the book describes their relationship, from smitten bliss, to disappointment and depression – basically all the things you feel when you fall in love as a teenager.

There are two especially poignant moments in the book, in my opinion.

The first is a scene where, overcome by the spirit of guilt and old-fashioned Bible-thumping that he has received at church, Craig decides his love of drawing is a sin or an idol in his life.

Acting on it, he fills a bag with all the artwork he has ever done, and burns it in a barrel behind his parents home.

The second, and this is where I got pretty torn up, is when things hit rock bottom in his relationship, and he severs all ties. Once again, he sets out to burn everything related to that part of his life, including a patchwork quilt Raina spent weeks making for him. It’s a terrible moment and I regretted it for him – but at the same time I respected his passion and the courage to do something so final.

Thompson is an expert at matching pictures with words -- or using pictures to illustrate the feeling that one experiences after reading those words. He’s patient and takes his time when he needs to – sometimes using a nearly blank page to illustrate a feeling of emptiness or loneliness, other times cramming images into a panel to show excitement or exuberance or an overwhelming feeling of joy on the part of the characters.

He does what a good graphic novelist should – uses the combination of pictures and words to creat something bigger than the sum of its parts. I like that.

There were many parts of Thompson’s Christian experience that I didn’t go through in my own personal life and couldn’t fully relate to. But they all hit home either through friends’ experiences, time I spent working as a youth leader, or just as a cautionary tale about the power of organized religion and it’s potential negative effect on sincere faith.

A brave and honest memoir, Blankets is recommended reading for anyone who has struggled to fit in, gone to church camp, fallen in love or questioned their faith. Wait, I think that’s pretty much all of us…

Here's an interesting sidebar from Exclaim! magazine about the fallout from Thompson's decision to be so honest and open in the book.