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Film Friday: Love Is All You Need, The Hangover Part III, Fast & Furious 6 and more

2013-05-24T13:11:29-05:00

A quick scan of new releases in theatres this week

Bruce Cockburn: Pacing The Cage (Joel Goldberg) offers little evidence of the restless, demanding and angry perfectionist Cockburn is known to be. Instead, there are testimonials to his songwriting ability from musicians including Sarah Harmer and Colin Linden and to his Christian faith and political commitment from others like chaplain Brian J. Walsh. But there’s scant reference to his unhappy relationship with his daughter – Cockburn admits he failed at parenting – and nothing about his passion for guns. He’s made out to be a wholly benign presence and nothing like what the doc’s title suggests. The doc does have spectacular concert footage. Cockburn is considered one of the best guitarists on the planet, and you can see why: intricate fingerings, complex, jazzy riffs, unique chord structures in powerful songs from his superb catalogue. Documentary connoisseurs will see the pic’s essential weakness. Canadian music fans won’t want to miss it. 65 min.

Rating: NNN (SGC)

Opens May 24 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.

Fast & Furious 6 (Justin Lin) proves that the franchise ain’t running out of fuel any time soon, as least as long as the series keeps to its winning formula of muscle cars, muscle men and women who are ready for their Maxim cover shoot. Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, a series original, comes back from the grave to work for an international criminal who steals military components to build a WMD. The Fast crew buckles up to take them down. The ridiculous and illogical plotting, complete with laughable dialogue, operates like a simple road map, getting you from fist fight to car chase. What keeps it revved up is the camaraderie between the characters (particularly the comic repartee between Ludacris, Dwayne Johnson and Tyrese Gibson) and of course the cartoonish but dazzling action, with hand-to-hand combat boasting better moves than the Mitsubishis. 130 min.

Rating: NNN (RS)

Opens May 24 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande - Yonge, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

The Hangover Part III (Todd Phillips) purports to bring the bros-gone-wild trilogy to a close with a riff on Dante’s Inferno. The Wolf Pack – self-absorbed asshole Phil (Bradley Cooper), terminally repressed Stu (Ed Helms) and pure sociopath Alan (Zach Galifianakis) – must go through a series of hellish adventures to find chaos demon Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who’s escaped from a Thai prison and made off with $21 million of a rival mobster’s bullion. It’s the darkest of the series because director/co-writer Phillips is no longer trying to pretend that any of these characters are functional adults. He allows us to see them as they really are and forces them to confront the real-world consequences of their behaviour – up to a point, anyway. It’s the weirdest caper movie since Ocean’s Twelve, and I have no idea what audiences are going to make of it, but I thought it was a pretty ballsy move. 100 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens May 24 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande - Yonge, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.

Love Is All You Need (Susanne Bier) is an attempt by the Oscar-winning director of In A Better World to lighten up. A young couple (Sebastian Jessen and Molly Blixt Egelind) is set to marry in breathtaking Sorrento, Italy. During the festivities, the groom’s father (Pierce Brosnan), a businessman with anger issues, connects with the bride’s mother (Bier regular Trine Dyrholm), who’s battling breast cancer. She’s also coping with the fact that her philandering husband has shown up with his new girlfriend, and it looks like the about-to-marry couple’s relationship is starting to flounder. Bier does occasionally find the fun – especially in the character of the father’s insufferable sister-in-law (a savvy performance by Paprika Steen) – and injects a surprising queer element. As always with a Bier pic, it’s gorgeously shot. But unfortunately, she brings little else to a genre that could really use a shake-up. Some subtitles. 116 min.

Rating: NNN (SGC)

Opens May 24 at Varsity. See here for times.

Picture Day (Kate Melville) stars Tatiana Maslany (Grown Up Movie Star, TV’s Orphan Black) as a troubled high schooler repeating Grade 12 and caught between the adult and teenage worlds. Neglected at home and tagged as the school slut by classmates, she establishes a tentative friendship with a yonger guy (Spencer Van Wyck) whom she used to babysit. She’s also dating a much older rock musician (Steven McCarthy, also excellent). This is writer/director Melville’s debut feature, and it often shows. Though the elements have a rawly realistic feel, there are way too many of them. She’s crammed so much into the narrative, she’s forced to drop plot points. (What happened to that homemade acid?) But you care about the characters, the portrayal of the teens’ friendship is a major asset, expertly anchored by the charismatic Maslany. Call her unstoppable. 93 min.

Rating: NNN (SGC)

Opens May 24 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.

Quality Balls – The David Steinberg Story (Barry Avrich) is a portrait of stand-up comic, actor and director Steinberg. It’s all a bit of a love-in, but then Steinberg, now 70, is immensely likeable, a trait he exuded as a nice Jewish boy growing up in Winnipeg with his rabbi father. While in Chicago at yeshiva and university, he discovered Second City (or rather, they discovered him), which launched his career, sharpened his improv chops and helped him hone his infamous sermon bit. That irreverent take on religion would help him rise to fame in New York. It also got him into hot water when, as a regular on the Smothers Brothers TV show, CBS yanked not just his bit but the entire show. You didn’t make fun of religion back then – or politics. He was followed by the FBI for a while because of his anti-Nixon material. There’s not much tension or emotional resonance here, but comics like Larry David, Dave Foley and (in a bizarre red hoodie) Jeff Garlin help put his career in perspective. 80 min.

Rating: NNN (GS)

Opens May 24 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.

The ABCs of Death (various directors) is an extremely ambitious anthology that lines up 26 short horror films – one for each letter of the alphabet – by an international coterie of up-and-coming directors. It’s basically a collection of three-minute sketches, with barely enough time to establish a premise and deliver the payoff, and some filmmakers are better suited to the format than others. Ben Wheatley’s contribution is appropriately jangled and freakish; Ti West’s is subtle and disturbing, and Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett have some fun with the project’s limitations. But you have to endure an awful lot of misfires – including a badly miscalculated revenge story from Hobo With A Shotgun director Jason Eisener – to get to the good bits. Some subtitles. 123 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens May 23 at Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

Epic (Chris Wedge) is a wobbly eco-adventure from the Blue Sky animation shop – makers of the Ice Age series – about a human girl (voiced by Amanda Seyfried) who’s magically miniaturized to help a race of tiny forest warriors save their habitat from an invasion of rot-spreading Boggans. It’s basically Ferngully and Avatar reimagined as a series of elaborate chase sequences, with one-dimensional characters occasionally spiked to life by the voice cast: Colin Farrell and Josh Hutcherson are fine as quippy Leaf Men, and Jason Sudeikis stammers endlessly as Seyfried’s wacky-scientist dad. Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari put some serious English on their comic sidekick roles, and Christoph Waltz seems to be enjoying himself as the sneering villain, but mostly everybody just runs around shouting a lot. 102 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens May 24 at Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande - Yonge, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas) is a semi-autobiographical look at a handful of French schoolmates in the early 70s who do their best to live revolutionary lives, only to watch the great socialist movement fragment into a dozen different – and equally impotent – factions. The director’s surrogate is Gilles (Clément Métayer), a watchful lad with dreams of communicating revolutionary ideas to the bourgeoisie through film. When a security guard is injured during an act of politically motivated vandalism, our hero and his friends flee to Italy, where they hang out with American hippies and Gilles gets close to true believer Christine (Lola Créton of Goodbye First Love). Assayas effectively recreates the banality of youthful politicking – there is nothing so irritating as a passionate young person who’s only read one book – but like the supposedly revolutionary short films Gilles’s friends make in Kabul, it’s meandering and unfocused, and at two hours feels crushingly long. Maybe he should have called it You Had To Be There. Subtitled. 117 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens May 24 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.

Exhibition: Manet -- Portraying Life takes you behind the scenes of the Royal Academy of Arts’s eagerly awaited exhibition of the French painter’s portraits, featuring host Tim Marlow and expert guests. 100 min.

Opens May 25 at Coliseum Mississauga, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

Judas Priest: Epitaph is a high def broadcast of the metal band’s (possible) final live show, recorded in May 2012 at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. 140 min.

Opens May 24 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

Tickets! Who needs tickets?

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

Concerts and pro sports games sell out in seconds. Online ticket brokers offer an alternative, but they can leave you feeling like you just got robbed. And they may be ruining the fun for the rest of us.

Everyone at the edges talks really fast. Like they’re in a hurry. Like with each wasted second they’re missing out on another piece of business they could be transacting. Guys (and they are overwhelmingly guys) in Toronto Maple Leafs caps bark out, “Tickets. Buying. Selling. Who needs tickets? LEAFS TICK-ETS!”

I’m outside the Air Canada Centre’s Bay Street Galleria entrance at 6:30-ish pm on May 8, before the 7 pm puck-drop kicking off game four of the Leafs vs Bruins Stanley Cup playoff series.

Ontario law prohibits selling and buying tickets for more than the advertised price, as well as purchasing tickets “with the intention of reselling them at a profit.” So technically, these guys – the sellers, the buyers – are criminals.

Yet all of this goes on within spitting distance of ACC security in their billowy yellow windbreakers. They do nothing.

A guy in glasses and a leather coat, Leafs cap sliding down his brow, seems to be the centre of gravity for the whole operation. Holding a stack of tickets thick as a pack of smokes, he feeds the others circling in and out of his orbit, restocking their inventory. “Gimme those Reds.” “I need a single.”

He’s asking $400 for a single seat in the Golds, face value $315. I hem. $350. I haw. He can tell I’m wasting his time. “I gotta make money,” he tells me. “I don’t work for free.” No sale.

The hawkers’ pitches swell under the general din, like they’re mixed low in the soundtrack. This barely clandestine market is defined not by its strangeness or seediness, but by its normalcy. It’s part of the fabric of attending a pro sports event.

And it’s all rather quaint. These hustling scalpers with their hangdog faces seem like relics. Sure, they’re criminals. But it feels like the sun is setting on their empire, as sure as it sinks behind the ACC at 7 pm on a Wednesday night in the middle of May.

The rising forces in ticket inflation are all online. Like dating, book-buying, insurance estimation and pretty much everything else, scalping has migrated to the digital sphere over the past decade. There, it’s more commonly referred to as ticket “reselling” or ticket “brokering,” the practice of scalping loosed of its violent frontier connotations and given the sheen of respectability.

Online, ticket reselling takes all kinds of forms. Some people use Craigslist forums. One person I reach there exchanges a few emails with me before I tell him I cannot promise ad space for a condo development in the Grand Caymans in exchange for an interview.

Others use semi-legitimate sites like StubHub (“Where fans buy & sell tickets”). There, centre-ice seats to Leafs-Bruins game four run you $1,200. Others use eBay to peddle futures on prospective games, with refund guarantees. There, two 100-level seats to a hypothetical round 4, game 7 Leafs playoff ticket would have set you back $13,323.22. You could buy a Nissan Versa for that.

There’s a certain “so what?” factor at work in the public mind.

So what if some investment banker drops 13 large for Leafs playoff tickets? For the most part, scalping is viewed as a victimless crime.

But when considered in the context of our city’s cultural industry, the answers to these “so what?”s tend to clarify themselves.

Toronto seems like a city perched perpetually on the edge of greatness. We make deliberate, flashy efforts to develop sports teams, to bait big-ticket concerts, touring theatre productions and film festivals. It’s a city striving desperately to be as entertaining as other places. We call our entertainment district the Entertainment District, as if it were just a bunch of SimCity placeholder tiles. Against this backdrop, reselling can be seen to make it more difficult – and considerably more expensive – to have fun in Toronto.

***

Online ticket brokers trade in open duplicity. Some recycle graphics and web layouts from major ticketing sites to pass themselves off as the real deal. Others can’t be bothered. TicketCentre.com – “Your Ticket Connection in TORONTO and Beyond!” – has a small picture of a blond woman wearing a headset offering customer service from an 800 number. To anyone raised online, it’s as fake as a $3 bill.

“It’s the Wild, Wild West,” says Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster representative Jacqueline Peterson. And she’d know.

Ticketmaster has struggled to keep pace with the ballooning resale market. They’ve even entered it themselves. In February 2008, Ticketmaster acquired secondary ticketing giant TicketsNow, effectively vesting it with control over the primary and secondary resale of its own products.

In 2009, tickets to a Springsteen concert appeared simultaneously on Ticketmaster and TicketsNow, leading many to believe that Ticketmaster was intentionally diverting tickets into the resale market, where they could be sold at a premium.

In 2012, a Canadian court ordered Ticketmaster to pay out an $850,000 class action settlement to ticket buyers in Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec. This suit also claimed that Ticketmaster was funnelling product to TicketsNow. Cheques were mailed out late last year, about $36 per customer, less some deductions for legal fees.

Despite these much-publicized scandals – and the longer history of anti-trust accusations against Ticketmaster – Peterson is adamant. “We don’t own or control the inventory,” she says. “Nor do we divert the inventory to be sold anywhere other than Ticketmaster.” (She should have added “anymore.”)

Peterson says Ticketmaster’s move into resale, where resale is legal, is designed to protect not its monopoly, but the fans. “Fans can be duped,” she says, “tricked into paying too much money, not sold legitimate tickets. That’s not good. That’s not good for the fans, for people who work in the industry, for anyone. Having a poorly run secondary market doesn’t protect fans.”

So private corporations like Ticketmaster are now self-regulating this freest of free markets, where the high end of pricing reaches the outer limit of what the market will bear.

In Ontario, enforcing laws – even newly amended laws – designed to stymie ticket resales seems of little concern. Brendan Crawley, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, admits via email that the “Ticket Speculation Act has a limited scope.”

Violations carry fines capped at $5,000 “if the person is an individual” and $50,000 “if the person is a corporation.” Mike Chilelli, who runs Toronto online broker Kangaroo Tickets, says such penalties are no deterrent. “It’s like a parking ticket.”

A Toronto police officer stationed at the ACC the night of game four, who all but openly laughs at a question about how they’re patrolling brazen game-night scalping, confirms as much. Street scalpers aren’t bothered by the penalties. “They don’t care. It’s just a fine. They’ll pay it.”

The trail of e-breadcrumbs that online ticket brokering leaves makes enforcement even trickier, were anyone to bother.

Take Chilelli’s Kangaroo Tickets. Though promising the “best tickets for all your Toronto events,” Kangaroo’s web domain is registered in Phoenix, Arizona, where ticket reselling is perfectly legal (provided you’re conducting business more than 60 metres from the venue).

Given the atrophy and indifference that seem to mark enforcement efforts, it’s little surprise that it has fallen to ticketing agents, promoters and even producers to try and weed out the illegal resellers themselves.

***

John Karastamatis is officially Mirvish Productions’ director of communications. But lately he’s been occupied part-time as an in-house private investigator, working with fellow Mirvish staffers – including senior marketing manager Chris Dorscht and Alan Forsyth, phone operations manager for TicketKing, who handles in-house sales – to smoke out scalpers, hucksters and other unsavouries looking to flip their tickets on the grey market.

“Reselling was a fairly innocuous activity before the web,” says Karastamatis. “The markups were never that outrageous. Since the web, which allows for a sense of anonymity, people are doing all kinds of stuff.”

Karastamatis estimates that 60 per cent of tickets to major events – concerts, basketball games, and so on – enter the resale market. So when Mirvish was preparing to bring the touring production of blockbuster Broadway musical The Book Of Mormon to Toronto, it took steps to ensure that the tickets went directly into the hands of fans, not the grubby mitts of the brokers.

For the original Book Of Mormon on-sale, held February 19, Mirvish limited ticket sales to eight per customer. It also wouldn’t sell to anyone who didn’t have a Canadian mailing address (to cut out resellers working out of the U.S. or offshore) and printed only physical tickets, no electronic tickets. “Otherwise,” says Karastamatis, “Someone could write software that goes into our website and gets all these e-tickets in minutes.”

The rush of traffic clogged Mirvish’s site and the King Street box office (where in-person sales were given a two-hour head start), but all in all, Karastamatis considers it a success. There were loopholes, of course. The software algorithm that verified Canadian mailing addresses only looked for a province code, meaning some unscrupulous brokers listed an American address with a Canadian province (one block of tickets was mailed to “Denver, ON”), counting on the postal service to correct the error.

***

A few days after visiting Mirvish and TicketKing’s offices, I speak with Forsyth over the phone. He boasts about having cancelled six tickets that were purchased and resold through California-based All Access Tickets. Forsyth says representatives at All Access offered to pay him off to not cancel the seats.

Darren Greenly of All Access wouldn’t comment on his back-and-forth with Forsyth and TicketKing except to say he’s “providing a service to his clients.” Then he passed the phone to “James” – who agreed to be quoted only under this name, likely not his real one. He was all too eager to talk about his run-in with Mirvish’s ticketing service.

Smugly matter-of-fact, James noted that the six tickets Forsyth cancelled are a minor inconvenience. “He’s spending hours and hours and hours on this,” James says of Forsyth’s efforts. “Out of about 500 tickets [we purchased], he caught, like, six.”

Forsyth nailed All Access when the company purchased a block of seats under its own name, which seems like a bit of rookie manoeuvre for a company that employs 82 people and (re)sold, by James’s estimate, a million tickets last year. But six tickets is nothing to All Access, which acquires seats through “many avenues” (including season ticket holders) and will pay to replace voided tickets for their clients.

All Access deals in such high volumes that it can easily eat the cost of upgrading tickets, with no real dip to the bottom line. If James’s figures are to be believed, All Access netted close to $75,000 U.S. on Toronto Book Of Mormon tickets alone, given his estimate that 500 procured tickets were resold at an average $150 markup. With margins like that, what’s $900 in lost revenue?

“The broker world isn’t going away,” James says. “There’s no way to stop it.”

***

Brokers argue that they’re just responding to demand. If Ticketmaster sells out of Rolling Stones floor seats priced at $624.50, a reseller may deem it totally principled to charge a considerable markup on that. The demand has exceeded the supply, driving up the price. Econ 101-type stuff.

If some sufficiently monied superfan wants to spend $2,530 on StubHub for a general admission ticket to the Tongue Pit at the Stones’ upcoming ACC show so he can watch irrelevant rock royalty work through a catalogue of standards, then that’s his prerogative. Call it a tax on poor taste. Or call it the collapse of ethics in the marketplace.

It’s tricky to talk about ethics and morals without hectoring. It’s perhaps even trickier when the subject is something as seemingly benign as a ticket to a pro hockey game or a touring production of an off-Broadway play.

For Karastamatis, reselling is anything but a victimless crime. While solid stats on the effects of ticket brokering and regulation are tricky to come by (given the region-by-region legality of the practice), one study shows that theatre attendance increases in regions where reselling is regulated by law enforcement. As producer, promoter and ticket agent, Mirvish is in more than just the business of moving tickets. Yes, it benefits from seeing that the money made from its productions is kept in-house. But it also benefits from keeping ticket prices reasonable so as not to “alienate” (Karastamatis’s word) anyone who may leave The Book Of Mormon having become lifelong theatregoing converts.

Shows like The Book Of Mormon, teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and acts like the Rolling Stones have an inflated value in certain customers’ minds – what economists would call “perceived value.” Like other brands (Sony, Chanel, Stella Artois, whatever), their aura of quality is determined not by factors that belong purely to the market, but to social and cultural connotations: status, distinction, refinement or, when it comes to concerts or sporting events, the fear of missing out. When these associations get wrapped up in a product, its market value increases disproportionately.

So where Mirvish sells orchestra row U Book Of Mormon seats for a Friday, May 10, show at $107, Kangaroo Tickets brokers tickets listed at $384, the perceived value inflating the market value by, like, 300 per cent. And when customers begin paying perceived-value prices – or not paying them, because they’re simply cost-prohibitive – places like Mirvish can suffer. Theatre, concerts, sporting events, things long considered cultural levellers, become as rarefied as the opera or a yacht christening.

Even in places where ticket resales are legal, the practice embodies a conflict as old as capital itself. Should social behaviour and standards of acceptability in the market be determined by the (supposed) non-coercive openness of the market itself? Or by some other, maybe higher, social norm? The scalping industry illustrates, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky, the gulf between “their morals and ours.”

***

Scalpers may not be as unscrupulous as predatory sub-prime lenders or multinational bankers paying out hundreds of millions in bonuses with taxpayer bailout cash, but they belong to same genus. They’re all points on a model of unchecked profitability that stretches out toward infinity, testing the capacity of the market to bend and, eventually, break, like a curious kid poking a hornet’s nest just to see what’ll happen.

These aren’t the practices that tank whole economies. But they’re the things that pollute any pretense of fairness, of freedom, in the free market. Because although some people certainly will, nobody should have to pay a 300 per cent markup on theatre tickets.

At the end of the day, the need to see the Rolling Stones stadium jukebox show circa 2013 is no real need at all.

Scalping.

It doesn’t mean what you think.

Granted, “scalping” has certain unseemly, violent frontier connotations – especially if you’ve ever read Blood Meridian. But its usage in the context of ticket reselling dates back to the mid-19th century, when hucksters would sell off unused portions of railway tickets across the continent. Because railways offered discounts for longer voyages, a scalper could hop on in New York, disembark in Cincinnati, then sell the rest of his ticket to San Francisco for a tidy profit.

news@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000

In which we draw an intriguing parallel

2013-05-24T13:46:20-05:00

This may actually be the best weekend to discover The Room

I have a bad habit of putting this column off until the last possible second. This week, of course, I had a pretty good excuse – I’ve been online with everyone else, watching Rob Ford’s mayoralty melt down in the most spectacular fashion.

It’s like we’re living in an alternate universe where Toronto is ruled by the Mad King whispered about on Game Of Thrones, and nobody’s willing to admit it. Black is white; up is down; drunk (or worse) is sober as a judge, and so on. Every time I go into a screening, I half-expect to emerge into Thunderdome.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to figure out if it’s the world that’s gone mad, or us. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is back in town, celebrating its 10^th anniversary with screenings tonight, Saturday and Sunday at the Royal.

The Room is the work of a madman – an inexplicable, unpackable drama about a few days in the life of Johnny a San Francisco ladies’ man whose glad-handing ways mask a terror of abandonment. I think Johnny’s supposed to be a hopeless romantic, but Wiseau plays him as a dangerously unbalanced individual who intimidates everyone around him with the threat of humiliation or worse.

It’s like a nightmare version of that Twilight Zone episode about the omnipotent little boy who terrorizes his small town into saying every awful thing he does is wonderful. And that mindset extends beyond the world of The Room; Wiseau somehow forced his collaborators to shoot The Room simultaneously in both HD and 35mm, with two cameras locked together on a platform so neither shot is ever properly centred, creating a genuinely disorienting aesthetic that makes the whole thing feel like it’s just seconds from slipping into total chaos.

If you can watch The Room and think it makes sense – or if Wiseau seems like a genius auteur rather than a raving loon at the Q&As scheduled to follow every screening – then maybe the world really has gone crazy. Or maybe it’s just us, and Rob Ford’s been the sanest man in Toronto all along.

But I kinda doubt it. We’re talking about The Room, after all.

EcoholicTV's big body detox

2013-05-23T16:35:00-05:00

How to Spring Clean your insides with a toxic flush

Ecoholic Adria Vasil spends a lot of time talking about the hidden toxins we take in everyday and how to avoid them - but how do you purge this stuff from your insides once they're already in us? Adria stops by her naturopath Alex Triendl's for some advice on giving your liver and, er, bowels a helping hand - plus tips on making sure you're not loading up on lead and pesticides in the process.

American late-night TV yuks it up at mayor's expense... and ours

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

The uncomfortable antics of madcap Toronto mayor Rob Ford inevitably made late-night American TV Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning.

On The Daily Show in front of a pixelated picture of the mayor with NBFs and a header that read “Canada High,” Jon Stewart mused about how the mayor could have been caught in such a compromising position.

“Maybe he was trying to clean up the city by smoking all the crack? You’re next prostitution rings.”

The Stewart clip was set up by a series of Ford’s “greatest hits,” including the GIF of him falling while snapping a football during Grey Cup festivities, walking into a CTV news camera and telling city council that Orientals “work like dogs.” The late-night host was literally giddy, especially with the camera collision clip.

Canadian cast members Samantha Bee and Jason Jones then appeared to explain that crack-smoking is a national pastime, right up there with being polite.

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live opened with the Ford story, this time with an actor Jim O’Heir purporting to be the embattled mayor speaking live. An increasingly distressed – and sweaty – mayor grew more agitated as Kimmel showed clips from a video, each more incriminating than the last, until one actually featured the words “crack party” on the wall behind the partying mayor. Speaking with something like a New England accent and peppering each statement with “eh”s, the “live” mayor finally coughed up crack smoke on camera.

The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno pretended to defend the free-falling mayor claiming Toronto is so boring you have to smoke crack. A proud day for this world-class city as a world-class punch line.

Viva Valentina

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

Kensington eatery wants to revolutionize Mexican cuisine

Named for the inspirational Yaqui general who fought alongside Pancho Villa in the Mexican revolutionary war – and not the first woman in space – Valentina is only one of two new insurrectionist cantinas to open in Kensington Market of late. The second – Pancho y Emiliano – is facing our firing squad (see page 29).

You’ll likely remember Valentina as the Bellevue, the spatially challenged boîte that ran out of steam last winter. It comes with one of the sunniest patios in the nabe.

Current owner/chef Amaranta “Amy” Enriquez came to Toronto from Mexico City, where she taught a university course in the history of Mexican cuisine, only to end up running the line at Squirly’s. She launched her long-planned Valentina just three weeks ago. It’s been a zoo ever since.

Take last Saturday, for example. Snagging the last table on the asphalt out front, we’re soon sipping house Caesars ($7.50) made with jalapeño-infused vodka while laying waste to a bowl of La Tortilleria corn chips sided with two high-octane salsas, one milder and green, the other incendiary and fire-engine red. A first-rate cactus salad follows, rife with black beans, fresh corn and diced nopalitos in a vibrant lime ’n’ chili vinaigrette ($8.50).

Valentina’s signature tostada finds a deep-fried corn tortilla piled with shredded salt cod laden with chilies and garnished with terrific house-pickled jalapeños ($7.50). I’ve always wondered how to correctly attack a tostada. Knife and fork?

“Just pick it up and eat it,” says the expert.

The kitchen’s ketchupy Shrimp Diabla ($12.50) with delish deep-fried potato wedges is also strangely addictive, though the shrimp aren’t as fresh as they could be given that we’re two blocks from the nearest fishmonger. Same with the battered cod tacos ($8.50), despite their kick-ass mango slaw and chipotle mayo drizzle.

Best to stick with the pulled pork tacos laced with smoky achiote oil and dressed with fiery pickled onions (Cochinita, $7) and the cumin-kissed mixed pork and veal tacos finished with mild morita chili salsa (Los Arabes, $8). And no visit to Valentina’s is complete without an order of the braised rabbit in Aztec mole tacos ($8.50, all for two) and a slice of first-time pastry chef Ashleigh-Marissa Reid’s beautifully plated dulce de leche cheesecake ($4).

Those who automatically reach for the Tabasco bottle will have to ask for the house’s hellaciously hot habanero sauce, since Enriquez and Victoria don’t believe in the stuff. But where are the quesadilla combos with refried beans and rice we’ve all come to expect?

“It might sound ambitious, but we’re trying to start a Mexican food revolution,” laughs Enriquez. “There’s a lot more to what we do than nachos and burritos.”

stevend@nowtoronto.com | @stevendaveynow

Body artist

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

Choreographer wrestles with Rodin

Sculpture might not seem the most obvious art form to inspire choreography, but Boris Eifman is proving that notion wrong. His ballet about the life and work of French sculptor Auguste Rodin has been getting raves since it debuted in late 2011.

“Choreographers and sculptors both dedicate their lives to the human body,” says Eifman on the phone from Chicago, where the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg is in the midst of a North American tour that arrives at the Sony Centre this weekend.

“The human body is a unique instrument to express emotions. Artists like Rodin were interested in a specific moment in the body’s movement. For me, it’s important to show the dynamic of the human body leading up to that moment.”

One remarkable still from the production shows Rodin (Oleg Gabyshev, who recently won the Golden Mask Russian National Theatre Award for his performance) and his apprentice/mistress/muse, Camille Claudel (Lyubov Andreeva), manipulating bodies around iron bars to create a sculptural work. Limbs appear contorted, twisted and splayed.

“Every image in my productions has to have a concept and focus, so of course my dancers must have not only technical skills but the ability to act and express emotion,” he says. “They have to get at the emotional and psychological aspect of each role.”

The ballet focuses on the tumultuous affair between Rodin and Claudel. It also touches on Rose Beuret, the seamstress and model Rodin lived with for nearly half a century before finally marrying her near the end of his life.

“Beuret was unique,” says Eifman. “It was like she existed in a waiting room for the big artist, anticipating that moment when he’d turn to her and no one else.”

Eifman puts a lot of himself into his works. Besides choreographing Rodin, he’s contributed to the lighting design and the soundtrack, which draws on the music of French composers like Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Massenet.

“From the very first moment I started the work, I was involved in every aspect of it,” he says. “I’m the creator and the artist behind Rodin. It’s not a one-man show, but there’s got to be someone responsible for the thing.”

Eifman comes from a country rich in ballet tradition. But he doesn’t feel the weight of that dance history on his shoulders.

“I don’t worry about my colleagues or my predecessors, because my theatre is unique – it’s a theatre of one choreographer: me,” he says boldly.

“Of course, to keep the company alive I need to work hard to create the next ballet. Each one has to be better than the previous one. And I want my company of dancers to develop in all aspects. You could say I’m not competing with my colleagues, but with myself.”

glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi

HR2

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

What exactly is HR2? The question has been asked often in Toronto fashion circles since Holt Renfrew announced its new retail concept last fall. Now that it’s open at Vaughan Mills, we know.

The 25,000-square-foot store in the old Last Call space mixes mid-priced labels (think Diane Von Furstenberg and Michael Kors) with discounted, in-season designer merchandise like the sweet suede Prada platform pumps I spotted on a preview visit last week. Product turns over often, so regular shoppers always have fresh options.

HR2 sets itself apart from other off-price stores with its neat merchandising and clean design. That means the sales floor doesn’t look like a tornado with a platinum card has spun through the space leaving abandoned shoe boxes and heaps of discarded frocks in its wake.

HR2 picks: Pack a geometric print Pendleton knapsack for summer weekend getaways, $79; those Prada heels also come in beige, for $329; an L Space striped bikini top features gold accents on its straps, $35.

Look for: A menswear section stocked with sharp suiting.

Hours: Monday to Saturday 10 am to 9 pm, Sunday 11 am to 7 pm.

Ken Jeong

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

Ken Jeong loves letting it all hang out in the series’ third pic

Ken Jeong puts it out there. Whether he’s playing the unhinged Spanish teacher Señor Chang on Community or the deranged gangster Mr. Chow in three Hangover movies, the comic actor plunges into roles with gusto. He will do just about anything to sell a laugh.

The guy’s got range: he’s played smaller, more grounded roles in a dozen other movies, from Katherine Heigl’s obstetrician in Knocked Up to Shia LaBeouf’s cranky co-worker in the third Transformers blowout. But Jeong’s work as Chow and Chang is nothing if not memorable, so I begin our interview by asking him how they place on the crazy-childlike-monster spectrum.

“Chang’s more pathetic than Chow,” he says without a second’s hesitation. “I think Chang’s not as badass as Chow. Chow is honestly my favourite character I’ve ever played in anything.”

Seriously? The role requires full frontal nudity and dangerously skirts racial blasphemy. Chow is beaten, overdosed, shot at, locked inside car trunks and ultimately parasails through Las Vegas in The Hangover Part III. That’s his favourite part?

“Yeah!” he says, bobbing his head up and down. “It’s why I left medicine, to do Chow. He’s full-on, he can say or do anything, and he’s a badass. You can’t ask for a better character than that.

“You know, it wasn’t too long ago when I was [playing] a doctor in Knocked Up, I was just worried about playing scientists all the time. And people were like, ‘You’re typecast as a crazy guy, Ken.’ As an ex-doctor who was worried about not getting any roles [at all], I was like, ‘Great! That’s amazing!’

“Chow embodies everything I wanted to do as an actor. I’m not saying that to promote the movie. I really feel that way.”

He does have a point. Chow has always been a force of pure chaos, turning up to tempt Zach Galifianakis’s unbalanced Alan toward awful acts, but this latest chapter elevates him to something positively diabolical.

“Chow’s the Devil,” Jeong says matter-of-factly. “He’s a metaphor for everybody who’s got personal demons that hold them back in life – and now it’s time for Alan to grow up. But before he can do that, he’s gotta dance with the Devil again – and just when you think the Devil’s out, he comes back in. I never thought in a million years that the third movie would be this kind of almost Shakespearean epic of good versus evil.”

And when you’re playing the Devil, you can never go too big.

“It’s all built in,” Jeong says. “You can go big because that’s what it calls for in a scene. If you’re doing a scene in Knocked Up as Dr. Kuni, for that particular story you can tone it down. Actually, I’m very proud of that role because it kinda shows, in my head, the range of what I’m capable of doing. I had the most dramatic of the comedic parts. And that was great, too; I loved that. That was my first movie role ever. I always say that Knocked Up opened the doors for me, and The Hangover burst the door right open.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

Laura Marling

2013-05-23T00:00:00-05:00

British transplant goes solo, takes creative licence in L.A.

Laura Marling is not an over-sharer. The English folksinger is careful about boundaries, often deflecting personal questions and letting her poetic, imagery-laden lyrics speak for themselves.

That makes her latest artistic decision unexpected: she’s gone solo. Though her first three albums are attributed to her alone, she’s always let her collaborators write their own parts.

But she recorded her fourth album, Once I Was An Eagle (Ribbon), with only the help of her long-time producer, Ethan Johns, and she’s supporting it with an intimate acoustic tour: just her and her guitar.

That might surprise those who’ve caught one of her previous shows. She’s often left the talking to her bandmates, fixing her gaze anywhere but on the audience. So what’s changed?

“I’m that much older now,” she says over the phone from “the trendiest hotel” in Portland. “When I was younger, I was unsure of myself. I wriggled in my skin. Now I’m not so self-aware.”

Marling only just turned 23, but speaks with the ease of a musician who’s given up trying to appease expectations. “I’m not going to push any boundaries I’m uncomfortable with,” she says. “I love playing guitar and I love songwriting, but I don’t love it to the extent that I feel the need to torture myself by it.”

Take her recent decision to pack up and move to Los Angeles full-time, distancing herself from the much-hyped British folk scene that also bred groups like Mumford & Sons (her one-time backing band).

“I enjoy the shamelessness of it,” she says. “There’s a cool hippie art thing where people commit to being musicians or artists for a living, which is hard to do in England because it’s so small. Aside from the Hollywood shit, which happens on the other side of town, they’re all in it for the joy of playing music for the sake of it.”

Her latest album is her most ambitious, laden with references to Greek mythology, existential ruminations and Bob Dylan quotes.

The risks pay off on Once I Was An Eagle. The first four songs, for example, form one ceaseless cycle, all in drop-C tuning. That straying from formula informed her decision to record it alone. “I could only cope with explaining it to one person,” she quips.

music@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto