We Love the City

Author: Ryan

  • Singing Other People’s Songs

    As a general rule, I don’t like covers. Too often, it’s just lazy musicians trying to get attention by playing songs people already know. But sometimes, it’s just really great to hear a familiar song played by someone who was pretty awesome anyway.

    St. Vincent is generally pretty awesome. Her albums are very good, and her live show is superb. And while she’s great at big, loud, artsy numbers, she’s also pretty darn fantastic when playing a single guitar. This cover earns bonus points because the original, by Nico, was used prominently in The Royal Tenenbaums, one of my favourite movies.

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  • Fair Game review

    At this point, there’s  no way to put a positive spin on the American invasion of Iraq. Even the spectre of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities can’t overcome the lies told to justify the war and the utter disaster it has become. Fair Game, in its dramatized fashion, tries to look at how the White House manipulated facts, flat-out lied, and then tried to punish those who disagreed.

    The short version: When the Bush administration was looking for reasons to invade Iraq, the CIA sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger to investigate the possibility Iraq buying uranium. He concluded there was no evidence of such a purchase, but the US invaded Iraq anyway. When Bush claimed to have evidence of the sale of uranium, Wilson wrote an article for the New York Times telling his side of the story. Soon after, a newspaper article was published that revealed Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative, effectively ending her career.
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  • Fear of a Bike Planet

    Are you afraid of bicycles? Scott Latimer is.He’s afraid he’ll hit one. He’s afraid someone else will hit one. He’s afraid that one might hit him. Me, I’m afraid of cars:

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  • The Folly of Rocco Rossi

    Rocco Rossi seems to be a pretty smart guy. When you see him in debates, interviews, and speeches, he’s articulate, intelligent, and passionate. So it’s hard to understand why he’s running the most ridiculous mayoral campaign in a race that already has Rob Ford being Rob Ford.

    When Rossi declared he was running for mayor, no one knew who he was. But he’d worked with successful businesses,  the Liberal party and several charities, which might lead one to believe he’d be a qualified, possibly left-of-centre candidate for mayor.

    But one of Rossi’s first announcements was condemning the Jarvis Bike Lanes, which certainly put him on my bad side. Not merely the opposition to the Jarvis lanes in particular, but the idea that bike lanes should be banned from all major streets, because they add to congestion of real traffic – that is to say, automobiles. Despite regularly proclaiming himself a cyclist, Rossi couldn’t grasp the idea that cyclists like arterials for the same reason drivers do: Roads like Jarvis get you where you want to go quickly and efficiently, unlike winding, stopping-and-starting side streets.

    Rossi nonetheless called the plan sheer madness, predicting biblically chaotic congestion and gridlock that has yet to appear. But Rossi’s opposition to bike lanes wasn’t just about traffic congestion. No, the Jarvis bicycle lanes are an affront to democracy itself. He never explained exactly why the decision of an elected council a year and a half before an election is “undemocratic”, but redefining the nature of democracy turned out to be a big plank in his platform.

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  • TIFF2010: I Saw The Devil review

    I Saw the Devil posterI Saw the Devil is a pretty dumb movie. It’s also insanely compelling, and one of the most intense films you’re likely to experience.

    The plot is simple and relatively unoriginal: A brutal serial killer, played by Oldboy’s Min-sik Choi, is killing and dismembering young women. But his latest victim was a poor choice: She’s engaged to a Joo-yeong (Byung-hun Lee), a secret agent who reacts poorly when her body turns up. He takes two weeks off work to hunt down the man who killed his beloved.

    Whether it’s because he’s awesome or the police are utterly incompetent is unclear, but he quickly uncovers the identity of the killer and tracks him down. But instead of the quick and brutal vengeance one might expect, Joo-yeong merely lays a beating on the killer before setting him free, only to track him down again.
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  • I’m not bad, I’m just written that way

    When it’s good, Mad Men is very, very good. Though season four started slowly, it’s begun to hit its stride, and The Suitcase ranked among the very best of the entire show. But the followup, The Summer Man, brought back one of the series’ recurring flaws: The one-note character.

    A ruckus at the vending machine leads sexy senior secretary Joan Holloway to chastise copywriter Joey. Joey doesn’t respond well to this and turns the scolding around, telling Joan she dresses like a prostitute who’s trying to get raped. Things degenerate from there.
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  • Inception: A Smart Movie for Dumb People

    Like most of the rest of the planet, I enjoyed The Dark Knight. It was slick, had some great action sequences, a splendid cast, a story with some nice twists and turns, and a slight hint of moral ambiguity. It wasn’t a perfect film, and I’m not among those who thought it was snubbed at the Oscars, but as far as big-budget superhero spectacles go, it stood tall above its competition.

    And yet, as the film went on, one got a nagging sense that Christopher Nolan felt he was getting too subtle. By the final act, every other line of dialogue was about what a hero should be, how to fight evil without becoming evil, and how even the most noble soul is only a bad day away from becoming a raving lunatic.

    It was relatively easy to look past the clumsy commentary, since a movie about Batman fighting the Joker didn’t call for a whole lot of subtlety in the first place. But it was a worrying sign from Nolan, who got everyone’s attention with Memento, a challenging film that didn’t hold the audience’s hand through its twists and turns.

    Unfortunately, Nolan’s magnum opus, the film he’d been wanting to make for several years, brings out all his worst qualities as a writer and director. Inception wants so badly to be an elegant, intelligent, and emotional film, but Nolan buried it under crushingly clumsy exposition, meaningless big-budget action sequences, and an egomaniacal desire to make sure everyone understands how elegant, intelligent, and emotional his film is.

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  • Big Dumb Action: Salt & Predators

    predators.jpgBig dumb action movies get a bad rap. You’ll have to pry my Wes Anderson DVDs out of my cold, dead hands, but there is a time and a place for blowing shit up and kicking people in the face while jumping out of burning buildings. There’s an art to action that can easily be forgotten when you’re subjected to endless slow-motion sequences and rapidfire jump cuts, but when you see a really good action movie – James Cameron or Steven Spielberg in their prime, for example – you realize how great it can be.

    The rules are simple: Do lots of cool stuff. Do it fast. Make sure the audience knows what’s happening and they know it’s cool, but don’t show off or dumb it down – slow motion is not a subsitute for coherent camerawork and editing. Try to come up with an interesting character or two, and throw in a few cool one-liners. And most important of all: If you have a lousy script, try to keep the audience from noticing.

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  • The Girl Who was More Interesting than Anyone Else in the Story

    Early in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander is introduced as a brilliant investigator. A consultant at a prestigious security firm, she turns routine background checks into exposes of corruption and depravity. She may be seriously anti-social, but she’s a whiz with a computer and fiercely tenacious when she finds a subject that interests her. Throw in her mysterious past and take-no-shit attitude, and the reader (or viewer) is quickly faced with a troubling question: Why should anyone care about Mikael Blomkvist?

    (Amusing anecdote: I had to look up what his name was to write that sentence.)

    Blomkvist, of course, is a crusading left-wing journalist in a book written by a crusading left-wing journalist, so that at least explains his presence in the story. But he only ever seems to serve two purposes in the book:

    1. He reminds the audience it’s important to be ethical;
    2. Women want to have sex with him. (more…)

  • Kick-Ass review

    poster_kickass-final.jpgI was probably destined to either love or hate Kick-Ass.

    On the one hand, I have a great fondness for superheroes.

    On the other, I have a great annoyance with the oversaturation of superheroes.

    On the one hand, I have absolutely no interest in anything Mark Millar writes. (Exception: I’ve heard his Swamp Thing was pretty good.) Nothing I read about the Kick-Ass comic persuaded me to even look at it.

    On the other, I absolutely adore Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust.

    Clearly, there is no room for middle ground here, unless it all came together in a hideous mess of mediocrity. But while I suspect most people will fall into the love/hate dichotomy, I must declare that I absolutely fucking love Kick-Ass.

    Kick-Ass is no one’s idea of a realistic movie, but it starts from a fairly grounded premise: What if a regular guy decided to become a superhero? The answer quickly presents itself: He would get his ass kicked. (more…)