Writing movie reviews: Nobody’s Perfect

Oh, the horror!

When I have writer’s block, I pose the psychedelic frog on my desk. (The above picture is of him being dramatic.) Then I read Anthony Lane, the critic for The New Yorker. His writing is essential reading for anyone doing criticism.

His advice on writing reviews: “The primary task of the critic…is the recreation of texture – not telling the movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket.”

He doesn’t just say that people “look like cavemen”; he says that they look like “they only just discovered fire last week.” He doesn’t just say that someone has a hulking brow; he says: “I feel confident that you could strap it to the front of a truck and use it to clear snow.”

Dance life Q&A: What’s there to be nervous about?

Nothing to be nervous about except getting too addicted.

“We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.” 

– Friedrich Nietzsche

I started to salsa after someone told me that I wasn’t particularly a sexy dancer. So when I first began learning, my greatest fear was probably looking like a flailing doofus.

In a new regular Friday feature, we talk to Baila Boogaloo’s dancers about the moves, the beats, the nerves and the fervor. Today, we discuss first-time jitters.

Q What were you most nervous about when you started learning to salsa?

What made me the most nervous when I started dancing was the first nine girls that said no. But there was always the 10th one that said yes. – Joaquin Martinez, artistic director of the Baila Boogaloo Dance Co.

Being the guy with no sense of rhythm. I had heard right from the start that timing was one of the most important things in a dance. – Zubair Towhid, advanced level dancer

I want to be the best at anything I do and I feared being showed up by others. After the music starts, its far too much fun to worry about such petty things. – Shawn Rippa, performance level, pro team understudy

Film Review: The Invisible Eye (2.5 stars)

The year is 1982. The people are rising up against Argentina’s crumbling military regime. But in the hallways of a Buenos Aires school for the elite, dictatorship lives.

This is the setting for Diego Lerman’s allegorical film, La Mirada Invisible or The Invisible Eye, an adaptation of Martin Kohan’s award-winning novel Moral Sciences which looks at the consequences of repression.

At the start of the film, schoolmarm Marita (Julieta Zylberberg) leads two lines of students through the school’s stony hallways which Lerman presents to us in cold, pale blues and greys. Everyone marches at an arms-length distance from one another, eyes forward. Their dead expressions say: “Recess has been canceled forever.”

Dear Diary: Miss the Dear Diaries

The Post used to have a regular feature called Dear Diary every Saturday in which one us would imagine the journal entries of a newsmaker. I loved them. Not sure why we don’t do them anymore. But here are a few by our columnist Scott Stinson, followed by my diary for Madonna (July 2007).

• Uno, ‘Best In Show’ Beagle (Feb. 16, 2008)
• Stephen Harper (Oct. 13 2007)
• Vladimir Putin (April 21, 2007)
• Fidel Castro (March 10, 2007)

DEAR DIARY: MADONNA

Originally published in the National Post Jul 7 2007, As imagined by Melissa Leong

MONDAY

I had an epiphany during yoga today. I was in the middle of a sun salutation pose and Sting was on the mat beside me, screwing with my energy field with his constant humming of Roxanne, and it came to me.

Why the burgers, the porn, the engagement ring? Blame biology.

At least buying an engagement ring is less painful than getting your head bitten off for love.

I interviewed Professor Gad Saad about his new book The Consuming Instinct: What juicy burgers, ferraris, pornography and gift giving reveal about human nature. I consumed the book in a few hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. A shortened version of my Q&A was published in the Post; so here’s a longer version:

Humans are ravenous consumers. We make hundreds of consumption-related decisions a day and for anyone who might pause to wonder why — Why do I love double cheeseburgers? Why do men obsess over Porsches and pornography? — Gad Saad offers a response. It’s biology. The professor of marketing at Montreal’s Concordia University argues that consumer behaviour can be explained by Darwinian pursuits such as survival and reproduction:

Q I enjoyed consuming your book. Can that be explained through evolution?

We’ve evolved big brains that need constant nourishment.

Q Why do men constitute the majority of car collectors and 99% of Ferrarri owners in North America?

Dress Stress: A day at Pam Chorley’s Fashion Crimes

Fashion Crimes on Queen West

Speaking of fashion crimes…Thanks to the ladies at Fashion Crimes on Queen Street for letting me hang around on one of the store’s busiest Saturdays.

One mother called it “the mecca for prom dresses.”

The girls come to Pam Chorley’s Fashion Crimes, looking to outfit their dreams, looking for the one that is just right. They’ve journeyed from the suburbs, from Port Hope, from Milton, and arrived on Queen West in front of wood castle doors with wrought iron designs and door handles shaped like scissors.

Inside, it appears to rain dresses. They fill every space in every colour. They’re covered with rosettes or ruffles or feathers and fattened with crinoline or tulle.
There’s a Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland feel to the place, with its towering black-and-white-striped dressing room curtains and its glittery, fringed or foxtail-strung chandeliers. Even the staff are dressed for a Mad Hatter tea party in frilled frocks and fascinators that look as if UFOs have landed precariously on the sides of their heads.

It’s a perfect fit, really — customers are searching for what will make their fairy tale a reality; unlike the fairy tale wedding, which requires a prince, the ideal prom is about the dress. Today, moms and dads are on the “daylong adventure,” which can involve everything from draining frustration to dizzying euphoria among countless racks of clothing and long lineups for change rooms.

“I can see that you’re having a little bit of anxiety,” one of the store’s stylists tells a girl.

Lara Bourne, 17, is looking at the dresses as if she is choosing which kind of braces to wear on her teeth.

Read the rest in the Post.

Prom pro-prom prom…

Me in my purple fairy pyjamas and my best friend in a white fur-trimmed gown, like Mrs. Claus on her wedding day.

After 10 years, you really can’t be embarrassed anymore. What better way to prove it than to run photos of your fashion crimes in a national newspaper.

My blurb accompanying the photo in today’s Post: “The dress had to be lilac. Or lavender. “Like the colour of the sky sometimes at dusk.” (I actually wrote that in my diary -clearly an indication of why I went to prom as a third wheel with my best friend and her boyfriend.) And I wore matching purple lipstick for that Prom of the Living Dead look. All that aside, when I look at this dress I imagine my mother hunched over the bodice, hand-beading the fabric -and cursing. Now that is love.

Would Harry Potter be as popular if it were Harriet Potter?

Originally published in the National Post, May 11.

Janice McCabe wants parents to notice that the duck wearing the sweater in their children’s books is likely male. So is the hungry caterpillar and the caring elephant.

“Gender equality is not on most people’s mind when they select books for their children. But I think it would be great if it could be something parents could be aware of,” she says.

McCabe and fellow researchers at Florida State University have spent more than a decade studying 5,618 children’s books published from 1900 to 2000 and recording the disparity between male and female characters. Her findings show that males were represented twice as often in titles and 1.6 times more often as central characters. When characters were animals, they tended overwhelmingly to be male.

Short and sweet: Packaged Goods

Upon seeing a Nike commercial featuring a rapping Charles Barkley or a music video with a voguing Madonna, how many people would pause to recognize the talent of the director?

David Fincher (The Social Network) shot commercials and music videos before being handed his first film, Alien 3, at the age of 27.

Packaged Goods at TIFF Bell Lightbox May 11 invites viewers to try to spot the next Fincher or Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) in its collection of shorts by international indie filmmakers.

So You Think You Can Host a Tea Party?

A very merry unbirthday to us all

It all started with this: “Hey, I’m just going to host a little luncheon.”

Suddenly, my living room was like the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, filled with giant dahlia-like pom poms made out of tissue paper.

Flashback to a month ago. When I innocently decided to throw a little tea party, I asked my friend Maria, who is an event-planning phenom (Pink Peach Events), what I needed for such an occasion.

Here’s part of our exchange:

Maria: The thing with tea parties is that the food and desserts are miniature and require a lot of detail on the presentation. That being said, the success of a tea party is the food/drink. You will need to put a menu together – tea sandwiches, light foods such as salads, light finger foods, scones and pastries, mini muffins…

Me: Uh, I have some questions that are going to make me sound like I should be having a hog wrestling party in a trailer park instead. But what exactly is a tea sandwich? Are those the dinky sandwiches with the crusts cut off? If so, maybe I shouldn’t be having a tea party because those sandwiches deserve to get beaten up in the school yard by hot dogs and real food. Just joking. But not really.

In any case, here’s how it went down, how to do it, what didn’t work and where to get the goods: