Camper vans and hitch-hiking...

I’ve been thinking a lot about maps lately. Well, maybe not so much maps, as what they represent – the idea of an adventure, an exploration in a place you don’t know very well.

That’s always been an exciting concept for me. I remember when I was a little kid, too young to go anywhere on my own, I’d read books like “On the Road” and lie awake at night dreaming about hitchhiking out west, travelling to Alaska or living in Banff.

I managed to do two out of three eventually. Then years later, even after I’d had some pretty awesome adventures, I’d listen to the trains rumbling by my little cottage on the Lake Ontario shore in Port Hope, and I’d wish so bad that I was on one, going somewhere, anywhere.

I remember one night a train was stopped on the trestle near my house (the drivers would stop the train and run down the embankment to KFC sometimes late at night) and I saw a half open boxcar and was so close to hopping in.

Part of me has always regretted not doing it. I think I would have ended up in Montreal or maybe Halifax, which would have been cool.

I’m less restless now. That’s a good thing since I’m married and all. And also because staying in one place for more than a year or two has been good for my career.

But sometimes I still get the urge to just go.

Tonight and the last couple of weeks I’ve felt that. Maybe it’s the warm weather or the thought of booking some vacation time.

Or maybe it’s that mention of the Traveling Wilburys in Matt’s blog the other day, which got me thinking about The Highwaymen (both are awesome road-tripping bands, btw).

Or it could be the conversation my friend Chris and I had about Volkswagen Westfalia vans on Monday night. We both love them and our conversations often track in that direction.

We were talking about how much fun it would be to buy a van in California, Oregon, Washington or B.C. maybe, then get acquainted with it on the long trip home to Toronto.

That would be awesome. And guess what? Katie likes the idea too. She's never done the cross-Canada drive and is pretty excited about doing it some day. Maybe it will happen. Of course, that would likely mean I probably can’t get a vintage pickup truck, which is another thing I really want…

Okay I’m just rambling now. I actually sat down to write about “The Lost City of Z,” a book I just finished reading. It’s about an obsessed traveller and explorer named Percy Fawcett. That’s what got me started writing about maps and adventures.

I’ll write a little book review about “Z” soon. It’s a good one.

"Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" (Serge Bromberg, 2009)

"Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" is a film about an unfinished film. And in a way, the project helps serve to complete the original film, which has sat collecting dust for decades.

The first incarnation of “Inferno” was written, produced and directed by legendary French filmmaker Henri Georges Clouzot. It was a dark, experimental project that intended to tell the story of a husband (Serge Reggiani) who becomes obsessively jealous and suspicious that his young, beautiful wife (Romy Schneifer) is having an affair.

Newlyweds, they take over a small lakeside hotel in the country, just net to a massive train trestle that spans the nearby river.

As his paranoia grows, his jealousy becomes linked to the trains that cross the bridge. The rumble from the steel structure, the whistle, the smoke, all seem to trigger his fits of jealous rage.

These moments of insanity are rendered using what was at the time, cutting edge lighting, sound and special effects techniques that Clouzot and his crew essentially invented for the film.

It’s fantastic. His paranoia is illustrated perfectly when certain phrases or bits of conversation -- real or imagined – begin to repeat themselves mercilessly in his head, the tempo speeding up and slowing down like a wind sprint.

In other moments, the camera stays on Romy for long, mesmerizing shots, where she seems to dance for the camera using little more than facial expressions. Tricks of lighting make her face appear as if it is almost changing shape in these moments.



In another long, eerie scene she is pouring sparkling water from a bottle into a glass. As it overflows she laughs and continues to pour. The scene is strange but riveting, even though nothing really happens.

That’s sort of the story of this film about a film. Despite having American backing, in the form of an unlimited budget and timeline from Columbia Pictures, high-ranking French cinema stars and the best crews available, nothing really happened.

Clouzot seemed to get lost in the details, spending endless time, energy and money on mere moments of the film, or on meticulous storyboards and technical specs for every single frame.

In the end he lost track of the story and vision that should have tied the narrative and special effects together. In the end he drove away one of his stars, frustrated the crew and drove himself to a heart attack.

The new film – I hesitate to call it a documentary because so much of it comprises the original footage – pieces together a lot of the mistakes and tracks the lack of direction and communication that seemed to plague the project, mostly through interviews with many involved with the film.

It also explores Clouzot’s brilliance through interviews with those he worked closely with and by showing exhaustively the original footage, test shots, experiments and even out-takes from the five abandoned canisters of film Clouzot left behind.

Bromberg says the inspiration for the film was borne when he was trapped in an elevator with Clouzot’s widow for several hours, by chance, and he was able to question her about the intriguing unfinished project, a sort of “Titanic” of its time.

I hope she considers the new film to be tribute to her husband’s legacy and not a criticism of it. Yes, at times the film seems critical of Clouzot’s almost maniacal directing style, which is almost a mirror image of the film’s obsessed character. But the real service is that Bromberg came as close as anyone could to finishing the film.

He even has actors script read the scenes that were never shot, helping to fill out the missing pieces – a technique that works amazingly well in this film.

This film may not appeal to a wide audience, and it’s definitely targeted at true cinephiles. But as someone who doesn’t know much about French cinema but still likes a good yarn and appreciates innovative film-making, I was pretty riveted and was glad I got to see it – if only for the crazy-weird scenes and fantastic special effects that look like they could have been shot yesterday.

"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.