TIFF 2017 - Part 1

Each year for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), my husband Rich and I try to pick mostly smaller movies, often foreign language ones, that would not come to our local theatres.   This year, we are watching 43-45 movies including the 8-10 that we watched in advanced screenings prior to the start of the festival.  During the actual festival, we will average 4 movies per day for the first 8 days of the 11 day event before slowing down in the final 3 days.  My selected movies include 13 from USA, 6 from Canada (almost considered a foreign movie in our US-centric film industry) and 26 from various other countries including China, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia/Malaysia/Thailand, UK, France, Spain, Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Nigeria, Egypt, Serbia and Iraq, with 24 being subtitled foreign language films.  I was surprised how many Nordic countries were represented in my selections this year, with Denmark being the only country missing from my picks.  I tried to choose more “happy” or “whimsical” movies than my husband, since I can only be tense or depressed for so many sittings and still find it enjoyable.  Rich chose more war and horror movies, which I wanted no part of.  So we will watch 31 movies together and 12-14 separately.  It should be another good festival if we can make it through without collapsing from exhaustion.

The Day After was touted as a South Korean comedy of errors involving Bongwan, a manager of a small publishing company, whose scorned and vengeful wife mistakenly assumes that his new employee Areum is the former employee Changsook with whom he was having an affair.  This results in the wife beating up and berating the wrong woman.  The problem is that this movie was not funny and the main error was mine in forgetting that about South Korean “comedies”.  More a melodrama in my  mind, this slow moving, pensive film is beautifully shot in black and white and indiscriminately time jumps from past to present, making it confusing to follow what is going on.  There were drawn-out restaurant dining scenes (apparently a signature feature of director Hong Sangsoo), with philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and about religion.  Typical of Korean comedies, the man cries (actually bawls) repeatedly and there is no kissing allowed on film, so that romantic trysts are reduced to amorous hugs.

Borg/McEnroe is the opening movie for TIFF 2017, with Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason and American enfant terrible Shia La Beouf playing the titular roles.  TIFF has not had good luck picking a prestige movie for its festival opener in the past few years.  Possibly the need for this movie to be a “World Premiere” has hampered this selection, since many of the high profile movies get snapped up by the Venice and Telluride festivals which precede the one in Toronto.  This year’s pick is underwhelming to say the least, getting almost no buzz for the film, as opposed to the other tennis movie playing at TIFF, Battle of the Sexes with Steve Carrell as Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone as Billy Jean King.  The main reaction regarding Borg/McEnroe prior to its screening has been directed at La Beouf, whose outrageous and disruptive antics in his personal life seem to typecast him perfectly for the role of fellow bad boy McEnroe.  The roles were also visually well cast, as each actor physically resembled the player that he portrayed.

The 5-set Wimbledon final played in 1980 and won by Borg, is regarded to be one of the greatest tennis matches ever played, including a 20 minute long fourth set tie-breaker that went 18-16 in McEnroe’s favour.  The movie contrasted the icy calm composure of the experienced four-time Wimbledon champion Borg as opposed to the fiery demeanour of the up-and-coming superstar of the future, McEnroe.  But what was most illuminating was learning about the back stories of each player, with the film concentrating more on Borg since he had the most interesting childhood.  We were surprised to learn that as a young tennis protégé from a poor family, Borg’s temper and antics rivaled if not surpassed McEnroe’s behaviour.   Borg’s tantrums and histrionics, including loud rants and smashing racquets, caused him to be suspended from his local tennis club and declared “not right in the head” (as per the English subtitled translation of the movie).  It was not until his long-suffering coach convinced him that he needed the reign in his emotions and channel that fury into his game that Borg started to have success.

The actual match itself was exciting to watch, with the swelling score pumping up the drama, even for those who already knew the end result.  The crowd initially favoured Borg, giving him huge cheers while booing McEnroe, who had loudly berated the chair umpire during his previous semi-final match against fellow countryman Jimmy Connors. But McEnroe showed surprising restraint during the long final battle and even though he eventually lost, his mastery on the court won over the spectators, who gave him a standing ovation when he accepted his second place prize.  This was an exciting movie to watch, especially for tennis fans, but I wish that they had used more real footage from the actual match in order to show the winning points, as opposed to focusing so much on close-ups of the actors, as they feigned making the shots.  It will be interesting to compare this movie to the other tennis movie that we will watch, Battle of the Sexes.

The Square is a hilarious Swedish satire that mercilessly mocks the contemporary art world.  It focuses on Christian, the curator of the X-Royal Gallery, as he deals with various issues and situations that arise in the museum.  The movie starts off with Christian being interviewed by American reporter Anne, played by Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men and Hand Maid’s Tale fame.  As Anne probes the meaning and purpose of a Contemporary Art Gallery, Christian spouts artsy-sounding clichés that sound ridiculous if you stop to think about what he is actually saying (or not saying).  Christian’s subsequent hookup with Anne takes a bizarre turn and drifts almost into absurdist comedy when it is revealed that her roommate is a gorilla.
The featured exhibit inside the museum consists of multiple mounds of gravel on the floor.  A running joke involves people walking up and looking perplexed at the work and then walking away.  When a Zamboni-like floor cleaner tries to navigate around the mounds, you know that this is not going to end well.  Another exhibit features a large-screened video of a grunting, menacing “ape-man”, again with no real explanation as to context or meaning.  At a charity donors dinner, this work turns into performance art when the ape-man makes an appearance, antagonizing and attacking the guests.

The titular “Square” is a newly commissioned conceptual art piece consisting of a white square demarcated on the courtyard in front of the museum.  According to the artist, the square  represents a sanctuary where all people should be treated as equals and must care and provide aid for each other.  To promote this exhibit, the museum hires an ad agency who comes up with a wacky promotional video meant to attract interest through “shock and awe” tactics but ends up offending and infuriating the public.  Several of the scenes depict the plight of the homeless, making me wonder if this is a Swedish social issue that the director wants to draw focus to, or is the message a more general plea for compassion and tolerance.  This was my first movie of the festival so far that was just pure fun.  After watching a slew of serious movies with deep or depressing topics, I needed and totally enjoyed this.

The intriguingly titled Marlina, the Murderer in Four Acts is a very unique Indonesia/Malaysia/Thai/French collaboration that is paradoxically a low-key feminist Western set in the outbacks of one of these Asian countries.  The four acts are titled “The Robbery”, “The Journey”, “The Confession” and “The Birth”.  The quietly methodical but spunky heroine Marlina lives alone on her farm with her livestock in the yard and her dead mother-in-law plopped eerily in the back of the living room.  In act one, a lone bandit arrives on motorcycle and coldly informs Marlina that six more men are coming and that she will be robbed and gang-raped by them.  He demands that she make them all dinner first.  When the men arrive, two of them are sent to take away the livestock while the remaining five wait for their feast and night of debauchery.  With an amazing display of calm and intelligence, Marlina finds a way of dispatching the five men, but not before she is raped by the gang leader.  In midst of that act, Marlina is able to turn the tables on him and severs his head.  It is admirable that this stylish movie does not amp up the blood and swelling music, keeping both to a minimum.  The music is a delightful mix of an upbeat conventional score found in the typical Western, mixed in with melancholy Asian-sounding verses.

In Act 2, Marlina tries to get to the police station to search for justice, carrying the severed head in a sling as evidence of her attack (and partly as a trophy?).  She starts off on a bus headed for town, accompanied by her very pregnant friend who is about to give birth any time, as well as a bossy woman who is trying to get her nephew to his wedding along with two horses that are part of his dowry.  Eventually Marlina ends up on a horse, still slinging the severed head by her side, providing the iconic image of the lone Western hero riding into town. All the while, she is trying to avoid the inevitable standoff with the remaining two bandits.  I usually don’t like the Western genre but I was enchanted by this very stylish take on one, that celebrated kick-ass girl power.

TIFF 2017 - Advanced Screenings

This will be our most ambitious year yet in terms of total number of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) movies that we plan to watch during the annual festival. Because of the level of TIFF membership that we purchased this year, my husband Rich and I are entitled to attend Press and Industry screenings of movies including advanced screenings that started a couple of weeks prior to the official start of the festival.  Taking full advantage of this, we plan to watch only press screenings for the most part, rather than buy tickets for public screenings like we used to do in previous years.

Other than the monetary savings of not buying tickets, the main advantage of this is time savings.  All the movies play at one venue (Scotiabank Theatre), the movies play without the 10+ minutes of the same ads shown at each public screening, and other than for the most popular movies, there will be no lineup to attend a press screening.  Unlike public screenings that often become delayed in start time due to waiting for special guests to arrive, or finish late due to an unusually long Q&A session, unless there is a technical issue, the press screenings always start and end precisely according to schedule.  Because of all this, we are able to pack movies more tightly into a schedule, being able to leave less than 15 minutes between movies as opposed to the 90+ minutes that we used to leave between each of our public screenings, to account for traveling between theatres and lining up early so that we were not stuck sitting in the front row.  It was a new experience trying to schedule press screenings instead of public screenings.  Where we usually would watch 2-3 movies a day, this year we will attempt to watch 4 (and once even 5) in one day!  Including 10 advanced screenings that we watched for 1.5 weeks prior to the start of the festival, our goal is to watch between 43-46 movies in 3 weeks.  Whether we actually succeed, or collapse in exhaustion and are forced to scale back, still remains to be seen.  The nice thing is that since we did not pay to watch any specific movie, we could cancel or switch to another movie at the last minute, or even walk out of movies that we do not enjoy, without feeling pressured to stay to make the cost of the ticket worthwhile.

The disadvantage of a press screening is the lack of any actors or directors appearing after the movie to hold a Q&A session.   Since this is part of the fun of watching movies at TIFF, we decided that we would buy tickets for one movie that featured big-named stars so that we could still have that celebrity experience.  Besides, it is fun to watch the new "Thank the Volunteers" ad once since it is usually very creative.  It just gets old when you have to watch it again and again through 30+ movies like we did in previous years.  I also want to see if festival sponsor RBC finally updates the ad that it has played 3 years in a row and caused derisive jeers whenever it aired last year.

For the actual dates of the festival, we picked and scheduled the movies that we wanted to watch, using our usual strategy of reading the synopsis, making a long list of potentials, then narrowing the list down depending on what fit in a schedule.  But for the advanced screenings, the movies are chosen by the festival organizers and you can decide to view them or not.  Rich watched 10 and I watched 8 advanced screenings and we have enjoyed most of them. And the nice thing is that we have been watching movies that we would not have picked ourselves based on the description, theme or subject matter.  Yet we ended up being very glad that we experienced films outside of our usual comfort zone.

The first two movies that we watched were foreign films that involved child actors who each gave stellar performances.  The French film Custody (Jusqu'à La Garde) deals with a bitter custody battle that pits an aggressive, jealous and possibly abusive father against his ex-wife over visitation rights of their son Julien.  The tension felt throughout the movie is made all the more intense due to the realistic and all-too-common occurrences that are depicted in this family drama.  The boy who plays Julien is able to convey so much emotion, including worry, dread and fear, just through the expressions on his face.

Three Peaks is an interesting German-Italian co-production that takes place mostly in the Italian Dolomites, giving the film its title.  Lea, her young son Tristan and her boyfriend Aaron take a vacation in a remote cabin up in mountains.  At the start of the movie, the boy seems to like Aaron, but as time goes by, Tristan’s progressively escalating passive-aggressive behaviour reveals a deep-seeded resentment and wish that his mother would get back together with his father.  The three central characters converse alternately in English, French and German with the latter two languages being subtitled.  But the dialogue flows so quickly between the languages that you become dependent on reading subtitles and sometimes miss listening to the un-subtitled English.  The gorgeous scenery plays a major role in what turns out to be another tense family drama.

Although it is one of the first films that we have watched this year, the Chinese film Dragonfly Eyes will undoubtedly be one of the most conceptually unique movies of the festival.  China is renowned for its extensive use of surveillance cameras and according to director Xu Bing, footage has recently been uploaded to the Cloud and is available for viewing by the general public.  Xu scoured through 10,000 hours of surveillance footage, picking out and stringing together various scenes which he incorporated into a story about a plain-looking girl named Qing Ting who leaves her peaceful existence in a remote Buddhist temple to experience life in a big city.  While there, Ting meets Ke Fan, who develops an obsessive romantic interest in her.  Ting tries her hand at various jobs including milking cows on a farm, working in a laundry mat and a restaurant.  Director Xu uses surveillance clips of various women to represent Qing Ting and different men to represent Ke Fan, using voice-over dialogues to narrate the story.  It is fascinating that a (sort-of) cohesive story can be pieced together using only surveillance footage and horrifying to realize the extent that the people of China are being monitored and recorded.  Much of the video footage is labelled with date/and running time stamps, constantly reminding you of the gimmick used to create the movie.  Amusingly, using many different Asians to represent the same character rather perpetuates the Western stereotype that “all Asians look the same”.

Euthanizer is a Finnish psychological thriller/drama with humorous undertones about a grumpy mechanic and animal lover named Veijo, who provides affordable and humane euthanasia services for unwanted pets, but not before first providing stern lectures about possible mistreatment of those animals.  He even stops and buries any roadkill that he finds while he is driving around.  Veijo is an interesting anti-hero with a staunch yet questionable moral code and a warped sense of justice, which he doles out in vigilante style against anyone who he perceives to be an animal abuser.  He has an ambiguous relationship with his elderly father who lives in a nursing home, which becomes clearer towards the end of the movie and provides clarity on Veijo’s actions.  Veijo also develops a romantic relationship with his father’s nurse, which leads to one of the few humorous moments that break the tension of this slow-burning movie.  It is the image of Veijo and the nurse giddily skipping through a field of wild flowers en route to their first sexual encounter.  The eccentric yet fascinating characters in this movie keep you captivated throughout.

Based on a 1971 French novel called Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres by Jean-Patrick Machete and Jean-Pierre Bastid, Let the Corpses Tan has all the tropes of an old fashioned spaghetti western with enough over-the-top shoot-em-up carnage to match a Quentin Tarrantino movie, but with too many ultra-stylized gimmicks for its own good (or at least, for my taste).  Set in a remote, rocky, arid hamlet along the Mediterranean coast, a trio of robbers hijack a shipment of 250kg of gold bars, brutally dispatching the driver and guards.  They hide out in a cavernous island resort as guests of the eccentric Madame Luce, her former lover Bernier who is an artist, and her current lover, a shady lawyer who is actually in cahoots with the robbers.  When two police officers arrive on motorcycles looking for the bandits, a lengthy cat-and-mouse standoff and shootout of epic proportions ensues.  The team of husband and wife directors, Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet provide plenty of action, blood and gore.  They ratchet up the tension via an exciting musical score, intense sound effects including the wind blowing, chafing of leather and the cocking and spinning of a gun barrel, and extreme closeups of piercing, suspicious eyes.  Had the directors been satisfied with making a straight-forward but stylish shoot-em-up Western, this would have resulted in an extremely entertaining albeit conventional movie.  Instead the action is interspersed with perplexing scenes of a younger long-haired Luce being erotically tortured by various men including Bernier.  Is this a memory? A flashback? A fantasy?  And what does it have to do with the story?  I never figured this out and it was just distracting for me.  My other issue was with the constant use of extreme closeups in quick cuts, to the point where I could not tell whose eye or mouth or chin I was looking at and had a difficult time discerning who just shot whom?

The Journey is an extremely tense Iraqi-Dutch movie about a female suicide bomber named Sara, who enters a busy train station in Baghdad with the intent of blowing up herself and as many people as she can take with her.  As she surveys her surroundings and potential victims, the intensity in her eyes is chilling.  Sara’s mission is complicated by a smooth-talking hustler named Salem, who gets too close to her and detects her intentions, forcing her to take him hostage.  Her resolve is weakened when circumstances place a baby in their path and is further tested as she starts to interact with some of the people in the train station, including a runaway bride, an old man waiting for the coffin of his deceased son to arrive, and a pair of young orphaned siblings who sell flowers and shine shoes in order to survive.  Pulsating music accompanied with eerie Muslim/Arabic chanting adds to the non-stop pressure felt throughout this movie.   This was a very exciting film with an unexpected ending that left us discussing and debating long after it was over.

In the Norwegian/German movie What Will People Say, Nishi is a teenager from a traditional Pakistani family living in Norway.  At home, she dresses and acts conservatively as dictated by her family’s culture.  But when out with her friends, she leads the life of a typical Western teenager, wearing makeup, dressing more provocatively or grunge-like, dabbling in smoking and drinking, going to parties and flirting with boys.  These two worlds collide when a boy she likes sneaks up to her bedroom one night and Nisha’s father catches them kissing.  Horrified and humiliated, her parents will not believe that she has not had sex and brought shame to the family.  As punishment and to remove her “bad influence” from rubbing off on her young sister, the family forcibly relocates her to Pakistan to live with her aunt’s family.  There she experiences culture-shock, poverty, and corruption as she tries to adapt while still looking for opportunities to escape.  While you try to respect different traditions and cultures, it was very difficult to empathize when the parents seem more concerned about their social standing and “What people will say” than with their daughter’s happiness and welfare.  I felt quite depressed after watching this movie and actually cancelled my plans to watch Ava, another movie with a very similar theme. I could not bear to watch another movie about an oppressed child so soon after this one.

Theatre: Beautiful - The Carole King Story

As I have stated before, I usually don't like biographical jukebox "musicals", which for me are actually dramas interspersed with the songs made popular by the subjects of the biographies.  I consider them to be sub-standard to what I consider "real musicals" where original songs are written that convey or advance the plot.  I brought this bias with me when I watched Beautiful - the Carole King Story but surprisingly ended up being totally charmed by the performance.  It helped that I was familiar with and liked most of the songs, which are considered to be standards or classics today.

The show follows the life and career of singer/songwriter Carole King from age 16 when she sells her first song "It Might As Well Rain Until September" until age 29 when she plays Carnegie Hall after winning multiple Grammy awards for her hit album Tapestry.  At 17, King becomes pregnant by and marries her writing partner Gerry Goffin, and for the next decade they produced hit after hit including "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?", "Take Good Care of My Baby", "Up On the Roof" and "Locomotion", which was sung by their babysitter who took the stage name Little Eva.  Working at Dimension Records for Don Kirshner, King and Goffin became best friends with and competitors of fellow song writing duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.  Equally prolific, Mann and Weil wrote such gems as "On Broadway", "Walking in the Rain", "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place".

Reprising her role from Broadway, Canadian actress Chilina Kennedy gives a great performance as Carole King, singing gloriously, playing the piano with vigour and displaying a wide range of emotions.  She makes you chuckle as an insecure yet spunky teenager who can't believe that her secret crush is actually interested in her, then breaks your heart as she reacts to the disintegration of her marriage due to Goffin's infidelities.  The hypochondriac Mann and sassy Weil provide further comic relief with their competitive banter.  In the end, I found myself caring about all these characters, which is a necessary requirement for me to enjoy a show.

It was interesting watching as songs like "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and "Some Kind of Wonderful" are sung twice.  Initially while the composers are working on the music and lyrics, the songs sound fresh and raw.  By the time the tunes are sung by artists like the Shirelles or the Drifters, the songs are slick, polished, and orchestrated, and the performances are professionally choreographed.  This was explicitly referred to when Barry Mann first sings "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" in a much higher key and a faster tempo that sounded just strange and foreign compared to how the song eventually ended up.  Cynthia Weil notes that "the problem is the key .. it needs to be lower".  We then hear the version made famous by the Righteous Brothers that we know and love, or at least that was what was supposed to happen.

Unfortunately, at our performance there seemed to be something wrong with the sound system.  Every time one of the singers tried to belt part of a song, the sound came across as harsh and squeaky and even slightly out of tune.  This was especially pronounced when the two actors playing the Righteous Brothers came out to sing.  Instead of the deep, velvety tones expected for the beginning of this classic hit, the notes sung by the actor playing Bill Medley actually made me wince.  All I could think was that "they've ruined my favourite song!".  This must have been a one-time issue since it has not been mentioned in any of the other reviews that I've read about the show. 

Although most of the songs in Beautiful are sung as "stage performances" or as examples of works composed by one of the two writing pairs, the lyrics of a couple of the songs were actually integrated into the plot and because of that, they carried larger emotional impacts.  After singer Janelle Woods performs their song One Fine Day in an upbeat, peppy manner, Gerry Goffin informs Carole King that he is having an ongoing affair with Woods and does not intend to stop.  Devastated, King sings the refrain to One Fine Day in a heart-wrenching manner that seems so much more appropriate for the lyrics being sung than the way Woods sang it--"One fine day, we'll meet once more, and then you'll want the love you threw away before...One fine day, you're gonna want me for your girl".  When King finally decides to divorce Goffin and move to Los Angeles, she comforts her friends who she is leaving behind with the song "You've Got a Friend".  Although from a chronological perspective of the biography, King did not write this song until a couple of years later, it was the perfect song to advance the plot at this point of the show.

Watching this musical gave me new appreciation of the writing genius of Carole King.  I had not realized the wealth of hits that she has writing credits on until I heard one famous standard after another being performed throughout the evening.

Fringe 2017

This year for the Toronto Fringe Festival, my husband Rich and I planned to watch 10 shows together.  We each bought a 10-show pass for $85, which provides significant savings from the single advanced ticket price of $12 per show.  The only issue with the pass is that there is a chance that a popular show will sell out via advanced ticket sales before we have a chance to redeem tickets using our passes at the venue.  It used to be that Fringe would reserve a portion (up to 50%) of the tickets for walk-up ticket sales, which become available 1 hour prior to the start of the show.  But in recent years, the Fringe Festival decided that if they could sell out a show in advance, they should take the sure thing.  You can hardly blame them.

We ran into an issue on our very first show, a dystopian comedy called Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons (henceforth referred to as merely "Lemons" for brevity).  We arrived a few minutes before the start of the sales window to find that all advanced tickets had been sold, but that we could go on a wait list for unclaimed "comp" tickets that would become available 10 minutes prior to the start of the show.  These tickets are reserved for friends and family of the cast, crew and reviewers related to the show, but often they go unused.  Our names were added to a written wait list which was good since it meant that we did not have to stand in line to keep our positions (#7 and #8) on the wait list, unlike rush lines at the Toronto International Film Festival.  We went across the street to grab a quick snack and returned in time to secure our tickets from the list.  We were lucky this time, but thought that if this continued to happen to us, we may have to reconsider buying the volume passes in the future and just purchase advanced tickets to the shows that we want to see.  As it turned out, this was the only time that the show we chose was sold out, so by the time it came to our final shows, we stopped arriving so early to try to buy tickets.

The premise of "Lemons" could have been a script for the dark and intellectual near-future science fiction drama series "Black Mirror", since it takes a seemingly innocuous technology-related aspect of our present, and takes that concept to its disturbing extremes.  Using the absurdly random restriction of Twitter's 140 character limit for tweets, "Lemons" examines a world where a law is about to be enacted that restricts each person to saying only 140 words per day.  Political activist Oliver and his divorce lawyer girlfriend Bernadette deal with this impending reality, with small vignettes that shift the action back and forth in time to periods before and after the law has come into existence.  Their conversations are a bit obscure and confusing at first as you try to understand why they keep throwing out numbers (42, 5, 138, ...) and the significance of the loud "ping" sound that signals the end of each vignette.  By the end, all becomes clear as the play reflects on issues such as freedom of speech, the art of communication, and the importance of not wasting time or words by saying what really matters to you.  I thought the performances and timing of the two actors were excellent and the premise to be relevant and intriguing.

I love musicals, but I was a bit hesitant to select "Seeking Refuge" since the plot of this musical tragedy sounded so dark and sad.  But since the play won the prize for Fringe 2017 best script of a new musical, I had to give it a chance.  Two sisters attempt to flee from civil war after their house is bombed and the rest of their family is killed.  All they have in their possession are a few family jewels, enough to pay for just one of them to board a boat that will smuggle refugees to the safety of a neighbouring country.  The story follows the trials and tribulations of both the sister fleeing towards freedom, and the one left behind.  This play should be appreciated for its ambitions but lacks depth in character development as conveyed through snippets of singing that were so short and ended so abruptly that initially the audience was slow to clap because they did not realize the "songs" were over.  I also found the music too operatic for my tastes, but the show has potential if it could be further developed.

After two heavy, dramatic plays dealing with relatively depressing topics, it was time for some lighter fare.  We struck comedic gold with Hands Down, about an endurance contest where contestants have to keep in physical contact with an automobile and the last person would win that car.  Contestants must be 18 or over and are not allowed to eat, sleep or use their cell phones.  The wheeling and dealing, negotiations and plots hatched by the remaining 5 contestants lead to a very entertaining plot, as you learn more about the backstory of each person and his/her motivation for winning the contest.  In addition to a clever script and crisp dialogue, the most impressive part of the play was the stagecraft involved in creating and manipulating the car, which consisted of four sections that could be separated, rotated and put back together to form a very realistic looking vehicle that even includes real seats.  As the car is spun around, the conversations between various groups of contestants are featured.  This was my favourite show of all the ones we watched this year.

Our next couple of shows highlight the fact that humour is very subjective and a matter of taste.  We had high hopes for the comedy Special Constables about a TTC police task force trying to crack a Metropass theft ring, since it received rave reviews across the board.  For some reason, even though the audience roared with laughter throughout the show, we did not find any of the jokes to be even remotely funny.  It did not help that I could not hear some of the lines due to soft voices or poor enunciation.  Watching the show at 10pm after a long day probably dulled my sense of humour and concentration skills as well.

I typically don't like sketch comedy, preferring a play with one overarching story line, but we agreed to watch Sketch Betch at the urging of our friend.  As expected, the sketches were hit and miss for us as we found some to be very funny but other ones just didn't appeal to us.  Considering that the laughter in the audience never rose above a mild chuckle, I'm assuming that others agreed with us. My favourite sketches included monks having difficulty maintaining their vows of silence, and a Monty Python-esque bit involving a waiter who offered innumerable choices for each part of an order.  

Having never watched Twin Peaks, I was not prepared for the weird characters and events portrayed in Murder in the Cottonwoods, which is heavily inspired by the strange and campy TV series that featured elements of horror and the supernatural.  Like Twin Peaks, the plot revolves around a murder of a popular prom queen in a small town.  Following a strange dance intro in the opening scene (apparently referencing an equally strange dance scene in the TV show), the murderer is revealed covered in blood, but all is not as it seems.  The dialogue and interactions become more and more bizarre as no one in the town seems to want to investigate the murder or accept the confession of the would-be killer.  The sheriff in the play has a fondness for eating pretzels, whereas in Twin Peaks it is cherry pie that is constantly consumed.  Instead of the iconic catchphrase "The owls are not what they seem", Murder in the Cottonwoods uses two phrases—"The Cottonwoods are whispering" and "Do Not Disturb".  Not having any knowledge about the Twin Peaks references, this play completely bewildered me and I had no clue what was going on.  Subsequently learning more about the source material, I can now appreciate what the play was attempting to do, but I can't say that I enjoyed it.  I doubt I would have enjoyed Twin Peaks either.

One of the shows that we enjoyed the most and found the most entertaining was A Peter n Chris-tmas Carol, a spoof not only on the classic Dickens Christmas Carol story, but also other Christmas classics including the words to Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman and the movies Home Alone and Die Hard (both set in the Christmas season).  Comics Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson had the audience howling with laughter right from the beginning, and this time, we joined along.  These two lovable goofs were quick with the repartee and adept at physical comedy.  This was Rich's favourite show.

We were a bit ambivalent about our next two shows, neither loving them nor hating them.  We are usually a bit wary about one-woman shows involving journeys to self-discovery which often tend to be either maudlin or narcissistic.  We decided to give Am I Pretty Now? a try since it was advertised as a musical.  This was an autobiographical story about what led an aspiring actress to undergo major plastic surgery, the physical tolls of these surgeries and the end result of better self esteem and more acting roles.  The story was compelling enough and was well delivered but there was not enough singing for my taste.  By contrast, there were plenty of songs in Shirley Gnome: Taking it Up a Notch, the raunchy, over-the-top one woman comedic show where Gnome gleefully and lewdly sings about topics including sex (oral and otherwise), female body parts, and male hygiene and tries very hard to be shocking.  Gnome has a good singing voice and we found many of her songs to be funny, but her spoken patter felt forced.  And there is something off-putting about a comic laughing continuously at her own jokes (whether the audience laughs along or not)

For once, we ended Fringe on a high note with the psychological Sci-Fi thriller Recall.  Set once again in a dystopian future (just like Lemons, our first show), rowdy, misbehaving or aggressive youth are monitored for potentially sociopathic or murderous natures so that they can be either reconditioned or eliminated before any harm is done to society. Two potential subjects for these investigations include the moody Lucy, who seems to be on the run and hiding in a safe house with her flighty but caring mother Justine, and Quinn, the boy Lucy meets at school who has authority and anger issues.  Tension is ratcheted up from the very beginning and the entire cast gives mesmerizing performances with a plot full of twists that touches on some interesting themes.

Ryerson Imaging Centre: Max Dean - As Yet Untitled

Max Dean's robotic exhibit, which he ironically calls "As Yet Untitled", was not functional when we went to the Ryerson Imaging Centre to see the Suzy Lake exhibit last month.  But it sounded so interesting that we made a point to return the next time we were in the area.  The installation works on a motion detector that turns on the lights and starts up the robot once you enter the room.  The robotic arm swivels to the right and selects a 4x6 paper photograph from a box, then turns to the centre and presents it to you.  If you like the photo and want it to be kept, you press one of the metal hands attached to the robot and it will pivot and place the photo into a second "keep" box.

Otherwise if you do not intervene, the arm will push the photo into a shredder, destroying the image.  The shredded paper is moved along a conveyor belt until it falls off the end and adds to a pile accumulating on the ground below.  In addition to being fun manipulating and watching the robot in action, this installation seems to comment on several themes regarding the transient nature of memories as well as the diminishing industry of printing physical paper photographs.  Dean indicates that the viewer bears the responsibility of deciding which memories are preserved and which are lost.  On a previous visit, during a curator's tour of the Suzy Lake exhibit, the curator described the Max Dean exhibit and explained that the artist got permission to print photos that he found on Flicker, so that the robot is not really permanently destroying anyone's real photos.  The Max Dean and Suzy Lake exhibits are on display until August 13.

Ryerson Imaging Centre: Suzy Lake

The Ryerson Imaging Centre (RIC) is an institution for research, teaching and exhibition of photography located in the heart of downtown Toronto that surprisingly few people know about.  Many of the rotating exhibits are sourced from the massive collection of over 80 years of historical photos donated by the Black Star Photo Agency in New York.  Earlier this year, RIC received another donation of 25,000 photos from the Canadian collection of the New York Times, which will make for even better exhibitions in the future.  Admission is free and an excellent curator tour is given daily at 2:30pm.  I find the tours essential to understanding the nature or history behind the photographs on display, the process used to create them and the message that the photographer is trying to convey.

Most recently, we toured the works of Suzy Lake, an American/Canadian photographer, videographer and performance artist, who creates conceptual art focused on female identity and the politics of gender, body image and beauty, usually using herself as the subject in her works.  The exhibition includes over 50 items covering her portfolio between 1976 and 2014.  There is often a physicality in her photos that blends performance art with still photography.  The focus of this exposition is to highlight Lake's methodologies and processes in coming up with the final photo image, by showing all the interim attempts as well.  Not only does Suzy Lake set up the environment for her photos, but she also constructs all the props used in the images, as well as all the frames used to display the pieces.

The Suzy Lake exhibition begins in the lobby of RIC with a video depicting Lake rolling on the floor, wrapping and unwrapping herself with a long sheet with a dotted line up the middle that reminded me of a two-laned road.  Watching this, I wondered if she was portraying herself as road kill?  Entering the main space that presents her works, we see more photos of this 1977 series titled "ImPosition" (a play on the term "imposition"?) depicting a trussed up Suzy Lake bound from her neck down to her feet.  Lake varied the background of the photos, starting with a blank wall before settling on a room with scuffed up walls and wooden floor boards.  She also set some of the negatives of fire, causing a curled up, elongated effect when the subsequent photos were developed.  In her words, "the bound or restrained figure becomes a metaphor to question notions of control".  Lake was perhaps using the physical restraints to symbolize the social, political and economical constraints faced by the female gender.

According to our tour guide, Suzy Lake's series of 1976 "Puppet" studies explored a similar theme—that the traditional roles of a woman (wife, mother, fellow breadwinner) makes her feel like she is being pulled in all different directions.  Lake indicates that the works raise the question of "who pulls the strings?".  She began by posing for photos while simulating the motions of a puppet with her body.  To further clarify her intention, after developing the photos, she added actual lengths of white string to the images to represent the puppet strings.  Taking it one step further, she built an apparatus that allowed her harnessed body to be manipulated like a puppet, engaging two helpers to randomly pull her arms and legs while a third assistant snapped photos of the process.  In 2014, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) held a Suzy Lake exhibition where they actually displayed this contraption.

In the 1978 series called "Are You Talking To Me?", (in reference to Robert Deniro's iconic line in Taxi Driver) Lake took multiple photos of herself as she conversed out loud to herself about an undisclosed subject.  In an exploration of identity, these self-portraits (precursors to the selfie?) convey a myriad of emotions.  Some of the images are distorted by heating and stretching the negatives.  Lake then subtly painted parts of the portraits including the mouth and neck areas to further enhance the photos.  The installation instructions indicated that the set of framed photos had to be hung so all the mouths aligned at the same height.  Lake repeated this experiment dressed in various styles of wardrobe before deciding on the collared shirt featured in the final product.

A set of coloured photos from 1983/84 titled "Pre-Resolution" depicts Suzy Lake using a sledge hammer to demolish a wall that she had previously painted scarlet red.  Dressed in a bright yellow sweater and blue jeans, the photos reflect saturated primary colours.  We are told by our tour guide that these photos were created during a period when Lake was going through a divorce, so creating these works might have been therapeutic for her.  We are told to look carefully at the main photo and note that it is set in a 3-inch deep cedar frame, where the photo is angled so that it leans back at the top.  The surrounding frame is hand-painted so that it appears that the photo extends onto the frame.  A black and white photo from this series is annotated to describe exactly how the main work should be mounted.  Next to the main photo, a pair of photos form a diptych.

In 2014, at the age of 67, Suzy Lake's provocative series called "Beauty at a Proper Distance" takes an unflinching look at aging and the concept of beauty, in a set of closeup shots of her face from her nose down to her neck.  Displaying a total lack of vanity, the photos show every wrinkle, wart or blemish, stained teeth and facial hair.  She even purposely let her hair grow for months in order to capture the photos that she titles "Pluck", which shows her using tweezers to pull out what she calls "post-menopausal facial hair" from her chin.

The series that I found most fascinating from a technical standpoint was Suzy Lake's 2013/2014 set of long-exposure photos that she called "Extended Breathing in Public Places".  To achieve these cool photos with the "ghost-like" images in the background, she used an extremely long exposure and tried to stand as still as possible for up to an hour while people passed by behind her. Her photo in front of Diego Rivera's famous Detroit Industry mural at the Detroit Art Institute features her son-in-law standing to her left.  You have to look closely to see the transparent images accompanying Lake in the black and white photo taken in Trinity Bellwood Park, including a person sitting on the bench and some people sitting on the grass and under a tree.  The longer the people stay in the frame of the camera during its long exposure, the clearer and more defined they become.

When we made our first pass through the Suzy Lake exhibit prior to taking the tour, I found her portfolio interesting, but did not really understand what she was attempting to achieve or convey with each series.  After taking the very informative tour, I now appreciate even more Lake's sense of experimentation and creativity in pushing the boundaries of photography to create her works.