SOURCE CODE & THE ESCAPIST: TWO MOVIES, MULTIPLE REALITIES, NO WAITING

This post was to be a review of the movie Source Code, currently in theatres, perhaps you have seen the ads on TV or read about it. Source Code is a science fiction popcorn movie, heavy on concept, but starring Jake Gyllenhal, an actor know for more "serious" work so I was intrigued.

But a funny happened on my way to the movie review.

Well, it was more like a movie happened on my way to the movie review. That movie was The Escapist, a decidely non science fiction British film starring Brian Cox and available on DVD.

On the surface, these are two very different movies. As stated, Source Code is a popcorn movie and a pretty good one, a high concept science fiction movie in the guise of an action thriller. There are many explosions (or one explosion repeated over and over) fist fights, chases etc. There is terrorist to catch, time running out and thousands of lives on the line.

The Escapist is a jail break movie. A very good jail break movie. It is a film filled with tension and action but it is not an action movie. It is a movie about desperate men doing desperate things, it is a movie about redemption hand difficult to achieve that that may be.

What these two disparate movies have in common are structure and pacing.

Source Code is very much about structure, to the point that it plays a huge role in the plot. It is a movie who's premise is that when a person dies, they maintain 8 minutes of awareness even after death; a super secret military project has learned how to exploit that 8 minutes, by inserting the hero (who's name is Colter Stevens, which couldn't be more "comic book") into a dead person's source code so he can catch a terrorist who has planted a bomb on a commuter train. The train has already blown up, but they need to find the bad guy before he plants another bomb, a dirty bomb. Colter has that 8 minutes to do the job but here's the catch: If superhero Colter doesn't find the bomb before it explodes again, no worries .. they will just restart the source code and he goes back to the beginning of the 8 minutes to try again. Thusly he relives that time frame over and over again, he can fail, because he will never actually die.

It's like the movie Groundhog Day ... but with explosions.

The story of Source Code is inherantly non linear. The story of The Escapist is quite linear. Man is in prison for a long time. He has a daughter on the outside who he has not seen since she was a little girl. Now she is an adult and a junkie and her health is in peril. Man decides he needs to escape to rescue his little girl. Man recruits fellow prisoners and hatches a plot.

But this story is told in anything but a linear fashion. There is ample use of flashbacks, or perhaps flash forwards, oblique cuts etc. We are experiencing the escape at the same time we are experiencing the events leading up to it

It's all about structure. Director Rupert Wyatt uses story structure to tell the story as much as he uses script. Source Code's story is all about temporal structure; our characters live their life in an 8 minute loop while they also live a life outside that loop .. or do they. We are told that the source code creates an alternate reality and in Phillip K Dick fashion we begin to question which reality is which. Source Code does this in a sci fi premise but The Escapist uses editing to create a sense of variable realities. There is no dubious science behind it, we are just given the opportunity to question what we are seeing.

This is even more Phillip K Dick

In the end, it comes down to two films, in albeit very different ways, that want us to question the reality of what we are seeing. Source Code is no Inception, it is clearly more intended to be popcorn fare but good acting and tight editing help us leap over some of the obvious plot faults to be able to appreciate the original premise

The Escapist is something different. There are things here to think about; men in custody create alternate realities as a way of staying sane and it redemption possible for someone, just because they really really want it ..

There have been quite a few movies recently that challenge our concept reality. Of course, the viewing of a film in itself is an exercise in an alternate reality. There is no bomb on the train, there is no train, there are no men wandering the sewers of London trying to escaped their own personal Hell.

Yet, if it's all done properly, for a couple of hours, we think that indeed there is.

SOMETIMES ....

Sometimes you call your dogs girls, who more specifically, The Girls

Sometimes, when it's almost April and you get fresh snow, girls like to go out to play

Yes, sometimes girls want to have fun

And sometimes you need really don't need to have a real reason to create a video or post it online

Sometimes I just want to have fun, watching my girls have fun

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Snow Dogs 2 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

THEATRE REVIEW: MORE FINE GIRLS

This weekend Collette and I attended a performance of the play More Fine Girls at the Tarragon Theatre.

The play was written by Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Alisa Palmer, Martha Ross and Ann-Marie MacDonald, with the latter two also appearing on stage. This play is a sequel of sorts to the play The Attic, The Pearls & Three Fine Girls first performed some 20 years ago. We've never seen the earlier show but I don't think that was totally necessary.
The story follows the Fine girls, three sisters, two of whom are approaching middle age and their much younger sister. It is a comedy, with one liners flying fast and furious, a story that is rather Guingol in its grandest, veering towards absurdity and poking fun at everything from sex to art to professions.

There are secrets, there are half truths, there is a character who may or may not be off her rocker, there is an analysis of art, there is the question of what binds what person to another .. in other words, its a story about family. Now, we all know how funny and absurd that is

While the play happily, you could say giddily, bandies about some very huge concepts, it is a small play, with a small intimate staging, which is something you get at Tarragon. It is very classic theatre, with the words and the actors relying upon themselves to convey location and time and concepts.

The acting overall was excellent. This is a comedy and none of the performers was afraid to go big or go home as it were. Ms MacDonald, a highly celebrated author, who's book Fall Down On Your Knees I admired very much, displayed a penchant for physical comedy that took me totally by surprise. She plays the eldest of the three sisters and has an encounter with an excercise ball that pretty much brought tears to my eyes

Martha Ross was equally hilarious. As middle sister Jojo, she used her facial expressions to great affect; Tarragon's main space is so intimate we were able to observe every exaggerated grimace and wink.

Severn Thompson played Jelly, the much much younger sister, an artist, who's upcoming show and daughter's birthday provides the play with its central plot pivot. Her performance was a bit more subdued than the other two actors but she was able to hilariously portray the "spacey" (in a sometimes literal sense) artist without ever losing the core of her character, and that character's importance in the family
I'm not going on a great deal about the actual story mostly because the way it unfolds and the surprises that it hold and how they are conveyed are very much a part of the play's charms. The story has a great many twists and turns and the subject matter covered is incredibly varied: Universtity tenure, lesbianism, motherhood, art, theatre, menopause, what sort of wine to order at a lunch for three sisters who have not met for two years ...

As I said, the play is about family. Buckle your seat belts. Anything can happen. It always does

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER 100 PEOPLE WITH RAY GUNS

This weekend I went back through the rabbit hole to attend a comic convention here in Toronto. This was the Wizard World Comic Convention, my first time at this particular con, normally I attend the Fan Expo which occurs in August.

This is a smaller convention, which has advantages and disadvantages. There were not as many people, which meant few cute girls in costumes but I was not entirely disapointed

This particular con seemed to have a rather military feel to it, costume wise, expressed in ways one could only find at a comic convention. Look at these costumes, should I be nervous?

But there were advantages to attending a smaller con. You could actually talk to people for one thing. I go to buy as much as I go to oggle ... er I mean appreciate the costumes ... and while this convention had the usual large booksellers it also had people who were passionate about their particular fantasy and were selling books that actually interested them. It was nice to chat with them and get their opinion on certain titles and to listen to their reccomendations knowing they were not just trying to make a sale, they were trying to share.

I always enjoying wandering around Artist Alley, where the actual creators of the work you see are sitting right there; at this convention, I was actually able to converse with them. That led to my favorite encounter of the convention.

The above illustration is an example of the work of an artist named Da Xiong. He hails from China but now lives in New York City. His reason for emigating to the US was not purely commercial, he was forced to leave his homeland. Western governments seemed enarmoured of the idea of China and its potential of 1 billion consumers; they sometimes forget that it is a country where people live with the threat of being imprisoned for simply believing idealologies in opposition of the government.

All that aside I enjoyed Xiong's artwork and decided to purchase one of his books. When he asked if I would like it to be signed I was just expecting his signature. But that is the wonderful thing about true artists. They constantly surprise you. Instead of a mere signature in my book, I got this ...
For those readers fortunate enough not to recognize that sketch, well it has a resemblance to a certain erstwhile video and comic obsessed blogger. I mean, how cool is that? That is what I call a personalized book

I made my usual checklist of purchases including books, video games and DVDs, the latter being Samurai 7, an anime series based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, only this time in a futurized Japan. There are so many versions of future Japan out there I wonder if they get to pick and choose which one will come true.

It was a small yet very enjoyable con so I will make this a small post .. whether or not it's enjoyable is your call. Just keep it to yourself. I put it out there, I don't care if it comes back. So, before the obligatory video, here are a few final images from the convention

Actually I do need to comment on this final pic. Most of the people attending the convention were in their happy space but arguments do occur and sometimes they get violent; after all, when someone suggests that Green Arrow was only existing in Green Lantern's shadow, what else can one do but go medieval on their ass ...

So here's the video

Toronto Comic Con from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

THE DISTILLERY DISTRICT

On a lovely early spring day during the March Break, Collette and I decided it was a perfect opportunity to take a trip to one of favorite locations in downtown Toronto: The Distillery District.
This is a huge complex of beautiful Victorian industrial buildings that was a distillery opened by Worts and Gooderman in 1859. There are many buildings, cobblestone laneways and a smokestack about 100 feet tall.
The distillery remained in operation, under different owners, right up to 1990. It became very popular as a location for movies. David Crongenburg used it for his version of The Fly among many others. In 2001 it was bought by a real estate development corporation and two years later opened as a tourist attraction, featuring shops, resturaunts and a professional theatre company.
They host a lot of events there but sometimes it's just fun to go down on a nice day and wander around, admiring the architecture and grazing the way too many pastry and ice cream shops, not to mention the Mill Street Brewery, one of my favorite microbreweries in the city.

It was quiet when we went there, which is kind of nice, it gave us time to dally about, taking images of this architecture that was intended as functional but still has a kind of beauty to it

The buildings here are not pretty. At first glance they are big and heavy and perhaps, with their dark brick, even oppressive. But there is a beauty to them, in the arched windows and doors, in the little details in the cornices and the cupolas. And beauty and atmosphere in the brick lanes and gas lamps.
Here's the video of our visit, it doesn't include the lovely lunch we enjoyed, but seriously, who wants to see that

Distillery District Outing from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

CANADIAN AVIATION AND SPACE MUSEUM: IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE, IT'S 3 KELLARS IN OTTAWA

While Collette and I were visiting Kingston, my brother Edward suggested going to Ottawa to visit the Aviation and Space museum. Gosh, a chance to highway drive my new car, the BRB (the Big Red Beast) Um, sure, OK, force me .. please please

I've never been to the museum before but I am a fan of flying and a fan of airplanes and the history of flying. And it was nice to have a particular Canadian bent on that history (bent like a hockey stick blade, get it?)

Among a concentration on Canadian military aircraft the museum had a nice collection of the bush planes that figure so importantly in Canadian culture. I've flown with bush pilots before, in float planes, so it was a pleasant kind of nostalgia to see these homely yet loveable work horses of the North

The breadth of history covered in the exhibits was pretty impressive, from Alexander Graham Bell era airplanes, basically bicycles with wings that only madmen would actually fly, up to Harrier jets.

Shockingly enough, I have a video that illustrates our visit. The music may be a bit too tres obvious but what the hell, this is my blog and I get to make all the artistic decisions, no matter how weak

(By the way, this is the part where I'm sticking out my tongue)

Air Museum Ottawa Ontario from Collette Scale on Vimeo.

LIMESTONE CITY HOUND DOGS, I MEAN, BORDER COLLIES

This is the first blog of our recent trip to my hometown of Kingston, Ontario. This was Terra's first trip there, so Hayley seemed eager to show her some of her famous doggie haunts. OK, to be honest, Hayley was eager to go visit the resovoir and the dog park at the Memorial Centre but she knew that Terra would tag along

It's not like Hayley has any choice in the matter. A border collie choosing. Not something you really want.

It was spring time in Kingston. Mild temps. Melting snow. Mud clinging to fur with the tenacity of a supermodel attacking a high all you can eat buffet ... and the dogs got pretty muddy as well

Hayley & Terra in Kingston from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.