THE GREY MOVIE REVIEW: THE WOLVES OUTSIDE, THE WOLVES INSIDE

The Grey is a movie opening around the country this weekend. Perhaps you've seen the trailers: It is presented as a survival thriller about a group of men stranded in the Alaskan wilderness doing battle with a pack of deadly wolves. That it is, but it is more than that as well.

The Grey stars Liam Neeson, an actor who, after the last few years, finds himself in a rather unique position, career wise. With movies like Schindler's List, Kinsey, Chloe and Michael Collins, he established himself as a "serious" actor who's name on an Oscar nomination list would not be surprising. But he is also a bona fide action star with movies like Taken, Batman Begins and the A Team. As a matter of fact, The Grey is directed by Joe Carnahan, who also helmed The A Team. With that pedigree one would certainly expect a lot of action from The Grey.

The Grey certainly has some thrills to deliver. A group of oil workers and their security chief (Neeson) whose main job seems to be protecting them from on site wolves, crash in the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of the winter. Seven men survive and it is Neeson's task to lead them to safety as a pack of huge aggressive wolves hunts them.

There are thrills in the movie, one in particular involving a cliff and some trees that challenge credibility, and there are also some moments of true creepiness. I've been in the bush  when you could hear wolves howling in the distance and then, later you could hear them, almost feel them, very close to you, moving in the trees. I was never in any peril from wolves but some scenes in the movie definitely got the hair moving on the back of my neck.

Those seeking a fast paced thrill ride will be disapointed by The Grey.  Director Carnahan (he also co-wrote the script) is after something more than visceral thrills. This is a movie about death, about examining death, not how it affects our bodies but how it affects our minds while we are still alive. Neeson and his companions are placed in a situation where death comes at them over and again: From the plane crash, from the elements, from the wolves

Neeson's character is obsessed with death. His job is to kill wolves. He has lost his wife and he considers his own desire to keep living. As the men move across the frozen landscape with the wolves on their trail, each of them is forced to think about death, about what it means to them, and how they should face it

There is a great deal of contemplation in the movie, presented in the form of almost wordless flashbacks for Neeson and in long monologues for the other characters. These monologues are eloquently written and beautifully delivered. The director wants these quiet moments to contrast with the thrills and the suspense. It doesn't always work. Sometimes the transitions are jarring and sometimes they just seem awkward.

What does work, is the film's smallness. It is a low budget picture which mostly succeeds: The plane crash, shot entirely in the interior and from extreme close ups is shockingly effective as is a scene where characters are swept away in a fast moving river; the shots are close and tight, saving budget on long shots and props and large setups but they are all the more visceral for it. Sometimes the budget works against the movie. Shot on video, some of the wide shots have grain so large you could serve it as a breakfast cereal

The acting is very fine in the movie. Neeson is extremely effective, his face held in incredibly tight close up, every line on his face evident, his eyes filled with emotion. Frank Grillo who plays Diaz, a tough ex con who hides his fear with bravado, is also quite moving.

The Grey is not perfect. Sometimes the movie is a bit of a war between plot and introspection. There is a need to move the story along to the next scene of character revelation but for that, the plot can suffer. There was a point in the movie where I found myself thinking "Come on, not one more thing" The behaviour of the wolves struck me as rather suspect but their realism is not a matter of great import; it's not a movie about the wolves outside of us but of the wolves inside of us, the animal deep inside that knows what death is, that knows death is coming for us, and has to decide if shall flee from it, or stand and fight.

THE BLUE DRAGON AND SUZIE VINNICK: THE ART OF LESS

Less is more. Function over style. Say a little by saying a lot. A whisper is louder than a shout.

No, I am not collecting platitudes. A couple of recent pieces of entertainment have me thinking about how you can often say a lot by saying very little.

THE BLUE DRAGON is a  production of a Robert LePage play currently showing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre here in Toronto

LePage is known for his innovative staging and use of multi media and that was all on display here. LePage uses lighting, moving stages, projections etc. to not only establish location and to advance plot points, but to illustrate the emotion and mental state of the characters.

But for all its spectacle, Blue Dragon is very much about characters. It is, in actuality, a small play. There only three characters in the play. Pierre (played by Henri Chase) is a Montreal artist who has left behind his family and his status and his art to move to China to become an art dealer. Claire (Marie Michaud) is an old friend and lover who gave up her career as an artist to work in advertising; she comes to China to adopt a baby. Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo) is a young Chinese artist and, as the play opens, Claude's lover

The play is about changes and relationships and how until we deal with our pasts, we can't effectively move forward in the future. It is in a way a classic triangle; Claude and Marie have never really dealt with their past and the validity of Claude and Xiao Ling's relationship is called into question. It is a small play, dealing with the lives of these three people but it is also larger than that. The play addresses issues with Communist China, it examines loss and commitment, it concerns itself with a person's individual right to grow and how systems both free and close market validate those rights.

These are big issues, but dance (performed and choreographed by the incredibly multi talented Foo) and staging aside, we are presented these issues in the context of these three characters and their interactions. In a small way, that has far more impact than any prosthelytizing ever could. Such issues may make for interesting conversation but when they become part of human being with whom we identify, they become impactful.

Less is more also became an effective strategy in a musical forum.

ME N MABEL  is the new recording my Suzie Vinnick. Suzie is a local musician of whom Collette and I are quite fond. We have seen her perform as part of the Women's Blues Review and I have a couple of her CD's but this new one presented to her in a whole new light

Suzie is a full time Canadian musician and that means she has always found a variety of ways to make a living through her art. She is an established studio musician (she plays several instruments) works in a couple of different live bands, sings and writes jingles and has collaborated and recorded with Rick Fines.

Suzie is a great singer and I have loved when she sings the blues; her own recordings are a mix of blues, country, light pop and some  jazzie influences. I have always known that she is a talented guitarist. When I first saw her perform some 10 years ago her featured instrument was the bass but I know she also can play pretty much any kind of guitar. But Mabel N Me is a different enterprise. Mabel is her six string acoustic guitar and it is the only instrument she plays on the majority of the songs

The entire album is bluesy in nature and I looked forward to this but it is Suzie's guitar playing that is the revelation here. All alone, just that wonderful smokey voice and with Mabel I realized that Suzie Vinnick is not a good guitarist, she is a remarkable guitarist. The word virtuoso comes to mind but she is more soulful than that term implies. The record is aptly named; this is Suzie and Mabel, both at the top of their games.

By doing less, Ms Vinnick gave me more. And it's the kind of "more" that is all that I could want.

IS WHAT YOU ARE WORTH WHO YOU ARE

Recently I've been thinking about worth. Not an object's worth, a person's worth

What is a person's worth? What is their value? At first blush it doesn't seem like something you can qualify monetarily. When I think of the people for whom I care I don't think of their worth but I suppose I assign to them some form of value.

What value do you give to the people with whom you are intimate, or familiar. I love this person because they support me, they nurture me, they inspire me, they love me back. I like this person because they are funny, they have skills that they share, we have mutual experiences, they think I'm funny.

How do I value those people with whom I come into contact but with whom I don't share any intimacies. This becomes a somewhat more a more practical exercise, or quantifiable. From casual aquaintances who make me laugh or with whom I share a common interest to professional people, for whom expertise I pay ..

So we come to it. Worth is one thing, value is often equated with money. In terms of money, what is a person worth?

These musings were triggered by some recent events in both the sports and entertainment fields. Areas where we have to match a talent to a monetary value.

Collette and I used to be fans of professional basketball, the NBA that is. Basketball is a team sport but because of the relatively intimate confines of a court and the fact that the athletes are not wrapped in pads to the point of anonymity, you can really appreciate the individual athlete. Watching a Kareem Jabar or a Magic Johnson or a Larry Bird or a Michael Jordan you saw human bodies and human spirit taken to a level that, for us mere mortals, is difficult to understand.

The game still have some awe inspiring individual players, like Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant but the lustre came off the sport, for me, some time ago. Expansion had a lot to do with it, too few talented players spread over too many teams. But there is an intangible also at play here: Greed. I don't know if NBA players are the highest paid athletes, and perhaps it was because I followed that sport more than others, but when I saw the overall quality of the playing going down and the salaries raising to incomprehensible levels, I began to question what the fuck was going on.

Yes, even the average athlete in the NBA can perform physical feats, can maintain a competitive mind set during adversity that I find difficult to understand, but is that talent/ability worth tens of millions of dollars a year ... you see where this is going.

A contemporary military sniper has trained his body to be able to do things that also baffle me; he can control his heart rate, his breathing, he can withstand extremes of heat and cold, he can actually fire his shot not only between breaths, but between heart beats ... You know he ain't making no 15 million dollars a year

Which is worth more?

Collette and I tend to be more fans of the UFC than the NBA these days (we are not fans of the FBI or the CIA or the CRTC but appreciate the efforts of the SPCA and the BBC; I'm digressing but you knew that I would). At this point in time, over all, mma fighters make nothing close to the salary of NBA players .. or NFL or Major League baseball. MMA is an individual sport, yet all of these team sports boast much higher individual salaries.

There has been a recent debate around the salaries of UFC fighters; this is a multi hundreds of million of dollars sport and with few exceptions, none of the fighters would average a million dollars a year. There have been accusations that the UFC is "holding back" on or underpaying its fighters; UFC fires back that on average, their lower tier fighters make more money than equivalent boxer, a comparable individual combat sport.

I admire the skill of mma fighters, their courage and determination baffles me, their discipline is probably comparable to a special forces soldier, though one has a much higher possibility of getting killed on the job .. and that one makes far less.

An argument is often posed that in the field of professional sports the salaries are what, we the audience, permit them to be. If we didn't buy the tickets the tee shirts the posters etc, they wouldn't make that kind of money. Only partially correct. These days I think a lot of sports earn more money from television contracts than from ticket sales. Again, you can say "If you don't watch they don't get paid" That is certainly correct in theory but it still doesn't explain to me why we place such a value on these activities.

Last month Collette and I attended a performance of Cirque de Soleil and we left quite literally in awe. What we saw redefined, in my mind, what the human body and the human heart and the human spirit is capable of doing. The performers were a rare combination of athlete and artists and I can't keep track of the number of times I gasped. I highly doubt any of these extraordinary performers make anything close to what an NBA or even UFC athlete makes.

Who decides this? Who decides that a slam dunk is worth more than a backflip or an arm bar less valuable than a touch down ...

This past week Etta James passed away. I have spent may hours listening to Ms James sing in my headphones, her voice and her spirit have often transported me out of my everyday life, just as NBA once did, just as MMA can do and just as Cirque de Soleil did

That is worth. Worth to me. Is it value?

Somewhere out there soldiers are torturing their bodies, someone is toiling away in a lab, an artisan is shaping a piece of brick, a man in a van is serving hot soup to someone alone on the street at night ...

Is that worth?

Is that value.

STONES OF OTHERS IN THE POOLS OF INSPIRATION

I thought I would start off the new year by returning to a topic that I've examined several times before: Inspiration. Perhaps returning to the same topic over and over is indicative of a lack of inspiration or it could be that inspiration is an ongoing theme in my life or perhaps I just enjoy thinking in circles because once you start thinking in a straight line you actually have to have a destination ...

Ahem

What inspired this topic, this time around, was one of the gifts Collette got me for Christmas. The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick is a non fiction book by .. well .. Phillip K Dick.

Phillip K Dick was a writer, when I was a fan of his through the 70's and early 80's, he was known as a science fiction writer. Since his death in the mid 80's he has become known as something more; he's become famous for the number of movies based (and I would say very loosely based) on his work, such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau and others. He's also become well known for some of the themes that run through his novels, such as questioning reality and logic, that have brought him recognition outside of the science fiction world

The Exegesis is not a novel, it is a collection of Dick's writings concerning a revelation, an ephiphany you could say, that he experienced in the 70's and caused him to reconsider his fiction in a whole new light. Did I mention he was a serial drug abuser and probably suffered from mental illness?

Anyway, this is not a review of the Exegesis, I have yet to crack the spine. As I stated, it's a post about inspiration. Phillip Dick was an inspiration to me. I devoured most of his novels when I was a teenager. Like all of his fans, I was attracted to his themes of reality or unreality or the sense that there is always something behind whatever we see. I also appreciated his humour and his spare efficiant writing style.

Having this new book and digging out some of those old novels as reference material got to me thinking about the sources of art that were inspirations to me when I was younger, that shaped me as a writing and video creator for better or worse.

Here's a few of them, far from a complete list, but probably some of the most significant works of art in my life, perhaps they will get you thinking about inspired you, what gave you that spark that "aha" moment, that opened your mind and inspired you to do whatever you do, better

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeline L'Engle. This was the first novel I ever read.

I think I was in Grade Five at the time. My teachers considered me literate because I had a vocabulary that was a little more advanced than my classmates but that came from comic books. All I read at that time was comic books. I never had an interest in anything else, fiction wise, they gave me to read in school.

I remember that the school librarian came into the class and it immediately got my attention: A scientist father who goes missing, mysterious beings who may be witches or ETs, the tesseract, which was basically a wormhole before anyone ever used the term wormhole ... I was intrigued and probably for the first time actually put up my hand. I got the book and devoured it. It started me on a science fiction journey that last a few decades and an interest in other worlds, other realities, other experiences that not only led me to Phillip Dick but that led me to the real life stories of adventuerers and explorers that I follow to this day.

And yes, it had an influence on my writing. I don't think I wrote much before I read this novel. While the greatest influences and motivations on my writing always came from people, like my family members and certain teachers, this was probably the source that ignited my  imagination and made me say "I want to so that"

THE CIRCLE GAME by Margaret Atwood. If A Wrinkle In Time got me interested in writing prose, this was the book that got me interested in poetry.

I discovered this book in my first year of high school and up to that point I had never been much exposed to poetry that was structured and lyrical. None of that worked for me. While I would later grow to appreciate Tennyson and such, it was this book that really inspired me to write poetry of my own. It wasn't just the contemporary structure of the poetry it was the subject matter: Atwood didn't write about ancient kings or dead civillizations, she wrote about people trapped in their apartments or lost in a relationship. I related to everything about this poetry

In terms of influences on my poetry or perhaps impetus to write it, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Canadian poet bill bissett. bissett was a radical poet for his time, he took the non rhyming paradigm to a whole new level, using lines and words on the page to create a kind of visual structure for his poems. This was probably my first experience with the concept of negative space. bissett's influence on me continues to this day: He never capitalized his name and when I sign creative works, neither do I.

THE SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN by Leonard Cohen (duh) I don't write music but of course I gravitated towards this album written and sang by a poet

I have a confession to make: I've never been overly fond of Cohen's written poetry but his lyrics are among my favourite poetic compositions. I always had an appreciation for lyrics from the Beetles to Paul Simon but this album, with its fluent language and exotic realities, opened me up to a whole new form of expression. I think this works better for me than Cohen's written words because his somber world-weary voice shades the language here with tones I never gleaned from the page

THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION by Samuel Delany. Another science fiction novel but like Dick, Delany is an author whose concepts and vision exceeds that of most SF fiction while having to rely upon that form in which to be expressed.

This was a novel that pretty much blew me away when I read it as a teenager. I had a read a ton of science fiction at this point and had read a great deal of mythology, mostly Greek and Norse (thank you Thor, Mighty God of Thunder by Stan Lee). But I had never read anything like this. On the surface, this novel (original title A Fabulous Formless Darkness) is like a post apocalyptic retelling of the Orpheus myth but there is much more to it than that. Delany heads each chapter with a lot of quotes, many taken from his journals as he travelled and lived in Turkey and Asia in the early 60's. Through these passages and characters such as the red headed, gilled Kid Death, Delany weaves a more contemporary (to the writing of the story not its futuristic setting) mythology that includes film and literary references into the story

More than Dick, I can point to Delany as a major influence on my own writing. His entire sf/fantasy collection taught me a lot about depth of character, about permitting your characters to have flaws, to not to be afraid to introduce elements of chaos into your plots and how to use themes like colour or repeated language to express ideals. This book in particular opened me up to introducing elements of my own life into fiction

THE SEVEN SAMURAI by Akira Kurosawa. This movie has influenced a great deal of my story telling.

If I was ever to make a full length, full fledged movie, it would likely NOT be an historical samurai movie. Nor do I ever envision writing such a novel. But this movie showed me a lot of things that I had never really understood before: That an adventure story can be a vehicle for examining interpersonal relationships, that action elements can be used as catalyst for character growth, that indeed if your characters don't evolve or change or progress or fail, no matter how great your plot, your story will fail.

Kurosawa was also a master of pacing, a master of building characters and situations so that they naturally built to a climax. One of my favorite themes, as either author or reader, is that of redemption and that is one of the major themes in this story. It is romantic, heroic, tragic, funny, inevitable, surprising. I can't really think of a more satisfying work of art.


These are just a few examples of works of art that influenced me, that inspired me. There is of course a long list that includes Poe, Bradbury, Burroughs, John Ford, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen ... it goes on.

But still, as much as I have always been inspired by artists, it's been the people in my life who have had the greatest influences on whatever creative endeavours I've indugled. But I'll leave that for some future post