Frédérik Sisa

I’ll be upfront. I am not a native son of California, and my arrival here was not the result of me waking up one morning, stuffed with visions of sun, surf and bikinis, and saying, “I’m packin’ up and movin’ to California, eh.” Nope; while I obviously made a conscious decision to move here, my coming to the Golden State, instead of another state, was largely the product of circumstance.

The setting is extraordinary. An underground city a flicker away from total darkness, kept alight through thousands of streetlamps and suspended lights powered by a hydroelectric generator. Director Gil Kenan’s vision could be described, to coin a term, as grimepunk – steampunk’s proletarian sibling. Post-apocalyptic, decrepit, stylish in its lack of style, a focus on utility rather than prettiness, a patchwork aesthetic of grimy, rusty machinery barely maintained by a peasantry who know what the machines are for but not how they work. The city that gives the film, and the book on which it’s based, its name is like a low-tech, rudimentary analogue to Alex Proyas’ “Dark City.” Kenan gives Ember a claustrophobic, stagnant atmosphere, which is appropriate given that, as the prologue tells us, the confines of the city are all that generations of people have known throughout 200 years of isolation from an undescribed global disaster.

The first time I was mortally offended while going out, I was 10 (give or take). It was an upscale restaurant in Old Montreal, an establishment called Chez Queue that is amazingly still there, and I had ordered a dessert of strawberries and vanilla ice cream. Only, I didn’t like vanilla at the time. So I asked for chocolate ice cream instead. The waiter pulled a face, a disgusted face, as if I had ordered the strawberries with relish and hot sauce or something equally weird. I was outraged. My parents were far from impressed, and we never went back. Oh, I look back and laugh now. But the incident, and the sheer absurd insult of it all, is the defining memory I have of that place. And that is pretty much how I feel about a recent experience at the Edison bar.

Stories about infidelity come with a certain amount of risk. It’s easy to get caught up in the melodrama of a person cheating on another, to dwell on the sexual and/or emotional betrayal in a way that renders the characters as caricatures drawn in black and white. Hard is resisting the impulse to moralize. Harder is presenting a nuanced psychology. Harder still is examining infidelity as it occurs in multiple sets of interconnected characters. Yet, writer/director Kate Gorman pulls it off. “Five Moments of Infidelity” is the “Crash” of frail human relationships, although where “Crash” gets it wrong and ends up a blunt, brutish thing that leaves one sullied and bruised, “Five Moments” is perceptive, humane, and fully capable of handling the synchronicity of its ensemble cast. It is remarkably organic, a quality manifested as much in script’s meticulous construction as in the liquid, almost dance-like camerawork that elevates “Five Moments” above similarly-budgeted indie films – although flat, characterless cinematography does the film no favours.

The first question that came to mind when watching the trailer for “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” was: why Nick and Norah? What possible relationship could the film – based on the book by Rachel Cohn – have to the classic “The Thin Man” book and six popular movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy? After watching the movie, I still don’t know. Maybe it’s a reference to the pajama collection. Or maybe the book’s authors just liked the alliteration and the reference to those classic films is purely a pop-cultural by-product.

Suppose a politician proposed the following:

Provide economics education to children in the K-12 grades, using age-appropriate and fiscally accurate information, including information on how to stop the transmission of Ponzi schemes, prevent fraud and detect con artists.

Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris didn’t share nearly enough screen time in David Cronenberg’s comic book treatise “A History of Violence.” But along comes “Appaloosa,” a classical Western rooted in a mature formulation of the buddy movie, to show just how comfortably these two pros fit together. As two friends and partners in the peacekeeping-for-hire business, Mortensen and Harris (who co-wrote the screenplay and directed) bring a wordless chemistry into the surgically-precise dialogue.

...I lumped faith and ignorance together. Without all the necessary philosophical and theological qualifications that would normally accompany that kind of statement, this particular lumping could come across as insulting. That’s how atheists feel when people like Danny Bental presumes to tell them they can’t really find meaning in their lives without God, beauty, or anything worthwhile... ...The disconnect I illustrated above arises from a simple letter to the editor, yet it hints at a greater disconnect like the one that exists between Evangelical Christianity and not only atheism, but other religions as well. This Beautiful City, based on actual interviews conducted by theatrical production group The Civilians, looks at the Evangelical movement through an exploration of Colorado Springs prior to the 2006 mid-term elections...It is arguably the best production put on by the Kirk Douglas in recent memory.

Moving on with other election-season peeves, next on the list is the tendency to genuflect at a candidate’s feet — and Obama isn’t the only one to receive this treatment. Hillary Clinton got it, and Sarah Palin did before her interviews with the press showed even the faithful that is she is woefully unprepared and unqualified to run her own state let alone the country. McCain? Maybe not so much – it took Palin to fire up the base – although he does have his own herd of worshipful lemmings cheered on by Sen. Joe Lieberman. The point is that people – voters, reporters, Big Talking Heads – treat politicians, our fearless “leaders,” like messiahs instead of, well, politicians.

The railroad bridge in New York called Hell’s Gate got its name, we’re told, on account of lurking above the shipwrecking intersection of two waterways. It’s an ideal place to dispose of inconvenient corpses – divers never find anything dumped there – and a good title for the familiar morality play of a down-on-his-luck felon forced to make difficult choices in a situation that spirals far outside his control.