Category: Arts

On March 23 at the Bell Centre, three organizations banded together to create a magical evening

A whopping $1,430,000 has flooded into three mental health organizations in Montreal after a wildly successful fundraiser event at the Bell Centre on March 23. This is the second Bal des lumières that the Douglas Mental Health University Institute Foundation, the Fondation de l’institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and the Mental Illness Foundation have put on together, the first having grossed $1.1 million.

“The spirit of cooperation that brought these three major foundations together tonight has resulted in unmatched mobilization, which in turn will lead to innovative treatments, quality care and increased awareness. Montreal is an inclusive city focused on its people. We value warmth, solidarity, openness and tolerance, all of which our citizens take to heart. Mental illness can affect anyone; we must keep fighting prejudice,” said Montreal mayor, Denis Coderre.

According to Suzanne Bélanger, the general director of the Douglas Foundation, each organization brings different things to the table, such as prevention work in high schools, patient care and research. Uniting their efforts, as well as teaming up with Bell and Evenko, allowed these three to put on an extraordinary, elegant event and raise funds that will be helpful, even essential, for the work ahead.

“Funding for mental health is, despite the fact that we talk a lot more about it, [still not] where it is for other important causes such as [the] heart or cancer. It is still a bit underfunded and there’s still stigmatization and therefore it’s a bit more of an effort to do something like [this],” said Bélanger.

Over 850 guests enjoyed the blue-lit ambience and magical atmosphere of the evening. The first part featured cocktails, wine and hors d’oeuvres. A red carpet led into the hallways of the Bell Centre where appetizers swirled as much as hemlines. Guests were able to pose in front of three different photo stations and delight in their fancied glory. A robust and beautiful ice bar supported rows upon rows of glasses of champagne awaiting the hands of guests to pluck them. Behind this, a decorative backdrop, squares of ice strung vertically from which drops of water fell down, glimmering in the lights that soaked the room.

The dinner and entertainment portion of the evening was opened by Geoff Molson, the co-owner, president and CEO of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club, Bell Centre and Evenko, and was then led by the MC of the evening, Isabelle Racicot. And although he expressed his regret at not being able to attend, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote a personal message that was read out to the crowd.

Under the artistic direction of theatre director and actor Denis Bouchard, musicians, dancers, circus performers and magicians lent their talents to the evening. The first performance was from Brigitte M whose operatic voice harnessed a variety of song genres, the second was magician Luc Langevin, the third, the incredibly acrobatic Dominic Lacasse, and finally, Diva5 finished off the evening with an upbeat vocal performance. Along with these performances, three mini documentary portraits were screened for the guests, making their contributions more tangibly worthwhile with the presentation of real people’s experiences.

These artistic aspects of the evening were enjoyed by guests as they worked their way through a staggered three-course meal. The strength of the artistic direction of the entertainment was in its wide variety. By bracketing the evening with musicality and inserting awe-striking slight of hand and acrobatics between the documentary videos and speeches, the guests were consistently engaged. Yet, the blue-lit ambience, misty setting, gorgeous dining sets and all around intricate decoration was enough creativity and passion to satisfy the hunger for art and entertainment in the evening.

These three organizations reaped the benefit of an exquisite, elegant night. For all the pleasure it gave to those it attended, it will do just as much good within the work and development of these foundations.

For more information, visit http://www.baldeslumieres.com/en/, where you can find links to the organizations’ websites and learn how to donate and/or get involved.

BOOM is a visual exploration of the vibrant history and culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s

It’s 1945: the U.S. drops two atomic bombs on Japan, marking the end of World War II. In 1969: the Americans launch Apollo 11, the first spaceflight to land humans on the moon. Those two thundering historical events are the framing of Miller’s one-man show, BOOM. Miller played his 200th performance last Wednesday as part of a 16-month Canadian tour introducing the storytelling of 25 years of history from today’s perspective.

If anything, BOOM is the kind of show that can’t easily fit into a box. It’s not really a play or a documentary, yet it’s a little bit of both. The stories of three baby boomers call the tune in this unique visual exploration of the vibrant history and culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Pop culture music, crooner singing, imitation of legends and shadow plays—Toronto writer, director and performer Rick Miller gives it his all.

The story emerges from three characters’ personal memories of what it was like to be part of the baby boomer generation. The first two are Maddie and Rudi, Miller’s parents, who conceived him on the exact same day Apollo 11 left Earth, an event that marks the end of the play. The third character is Laurence Davis, an African American musician who fled the U.S. draft and immigrated to Canada, and who was once romantically involved with Maddie. By painting these truthful stories—with the exception that Maddie’s story was merged with another woman’s—into the bigger post-war political picture, Miller smartly finds the universal aspects of these personal stories. The performer’s use of multimedia transforms the circular stage into a gigantic vinyl record where Lyndon Johnson’s nuclear “Daisy” ad stands alongside The Beatles’ crowd of groupies. Alone on stage, Miller is all at once changing costumes, putting on wigs and turning his back on the audience to face a camera that is projected as a big T.V. screen on the front stage multimedia platform.

Creativity has become second nature to Miller, whose degrees in architecture influences his will to see how small histories connect to all of history. “I decided that creativity needs constraints of some kind. I didn’t decide to do a hundred voices and a hundred minutes, that’s sort of how it shaped out, that four minutes per year could get some information across, but we could still cover the whole thing in one show,” said Miller. Astonishingly, Winston Churchill, president John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones are only a sample of the one hundred famous figures impersonated by Rick Miller. In order for the audience to not feel lost when so many characters are played by a single actor, Miller’s technique in BOOM consists of exaggerating the details.

Previously the host of the T.V. show Just for Laughs, Miller is well known for MacHomer, his recreation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where the playwright used voices from The Simpsons. Miller is also known for his original performance of Bohemian Rhapsody:  “Twenty five of the most annoying voices in the music industry.”

By putting Kennedy’s hopeful first years into perspective by comparing them with Obama’s election, and equating Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights to the Indigenous cause in Canada, Miller adds an interesting element to the informative aspect of the play. “Zooming in, zooming out” comes as Miller’s philosophy as explained by the writer in an interview. Even though BOOM accurately depicts the period of consumerism and rebellion, one could wonder whether it is Miller that serves history, or the other way around. The actor’s incarnation of that era suits the comical tone of the play while slightly neglecting the emotional part. Behind BOOM lies a primarily educational purpose. By addressing his show to a diversified audience, Miller expects people to learn from the past. “I want people to feel connected to not only history but to their own personal history. We try to create different experiences so that audiences feel it was worth it leaving Netflix!” said the Dora and Gemini award-winning writer. After the result of a three years project, the storyteller stays on stage to open the discussion and carry on with his collection of stories.

“It’s almost like I was a curator more than a writer, and my exhibit is this time capsule,” said Miller.

Copa de Oro presents BOOM at Segal Centre for Performing Arts from March 20 until April 10. Tickets are $32 for students and start at $50 for adults.

Knight of Cups is another one of Terrence Malick’s cinematic reveries

In his last few films, Terrence Malick has come close to fulfilling the whole potential of cinema as the sum of all previously existing art forms. His films are carried by music, and indeed they flow along with it. The camera waltzes through space, images flash by as though notes in a symphony. Editing is Malick’s paintbrush—over the years, the American director has collected a massive repertoire of cinematic visions, and he has worked patiently to assemble them into feature-length works of modern impressionism.

The theme of Knight of Cups is set in its opening lines, which tell the story of a young prince who is sent by his father to look for a pearl, but loses his way and drinks himself into a deep sleep. Rick (Christian Bale) is, in a sense, this prince—a Los Angeles screenwriter who wanders through the city and various love relationships like a lost soul, always searching, always trying to understand what he’s after. He rarely speaks, and the conversations of others are usually muted or half-heard. The lines that matter are read as voice-over—everything else is dust, to be washed away by time.

Unlike To the Wonder, Malick’s previous film, which was distinct for its apparent attempt to reconstruct memories, Knight of Cups is more clearly set in the present. Shot partially on GoPro cameras, it is more intrusive, sometimes close to 3-D in in the way it invites you into its image, while maintaining the dreamlike tone of its predecessor. Despite its hopeful finale, it is drenched in a sense of loss, as if it had lived through millions of years and gone all the way back to craft this diary of days forgotten.

You cannot watch Knight of Cups as you watch all other films—you will have to surrender yourself to it. Cinema is usually expected, if not required, to entertain, but why must that be the case? You wouldn’t sit down in an art gallery and complain about it having no plot. You wouldn’t complain about a symphony’s lack of discernible purpose. But if a film is made without a script, then there will always be someone to label it as empty.

Complaining that a Malick film has no plot is like saying the Mona Lisa could use some lipstick. Malick stopped using scripts because he had no purpose for them anymore. He relinquished himself from the constraints of storytelling, achieving a liberating sense of freedom and grace through cinematic movement. To see his films is to experience the world anew. Someday they might be studied to understand what it must have meant, beyond all political, social or even openly artistic implications, to simply be alive in our day and age.

There is no doubt that Malick has alienated many viewers with his approach. Some say his films are not made for everyone, but I truly believe that they are—it just turns out not everyone is made for them. There couldn’t have been more than 10 people at the screening I attended, and there was still one who walked out. There will always be some to walk out, in any group. In some groups, it might be the whole group. That’s fine. Knight of Cups, as all Malick films, exists outside of time. It has conquered time and put it in a bottle. It will never get old. It can afford to wait.

 

Release date: March 18, 2016

Directed by: Terrence Malick

Starring: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman

Stars: 4

118 minutes

In Reanimator, playful sculptures explore a future in which nature claims us back

It’s not often that an exhibition compels you to ponder the conflicted relationship between humanity and nature, especially in a space dedicated to collecting some of the richest and most important historical objects of civilization.

But that’s exactly what Jude Griebel accomplished with his whimsical exhibition Reanimator, currently on exhibit at the Redpath Museum. His sculptures evoke the fragile and ephemeral nature of humanity, coyly reminding us that society toes a very fine line between cohabitation with, and surrender to, nature. Griebel achieves this dichotomy through incredibly political and poignant sculptures.

It’s no coincidence that Griebel’s work is being displayed in a museum which celebrates natural history. The setting offers the perfect arena to embrace and digest the message he is trying to convey. His works are scattered throughout the natural history collection. As you walk around in search of his next sculpture, you get to observe pieces from the permanent collection: dinosaur bones, animals frozen in time, a dried and stretched polar bear skin. In this setting, each sculpture could easily be interpreted as being native to the museum.

The exhibition also serves as a reflective exercise. Will our time one day be reduced to simply another epoch in the great history of the world, with the only traces remaining in museums?

Griebel purposefully and meticulously arranged his works this way in order to reverse the typical power roles of humans over the environment.

He uses the very aesthetic employed in museums to get his point across, saying: “We often take the institutional display of nature for granted, as a formal understanding, when it is quite unnatural. By subverting this type of display through my fictional narratives, I am questioning what we often consider to be fact, as well as our attitudes towards other species.”

Reanimator reflects Griebel’s interest in testing what models and dioramas portray as the truth. His work is instead imbued with alternative psychological perceptions of the body and nature.

“These works explore the dichotomous tendencies of human desire to romanticize and meld with, yet remain autonomous from the natural world,” said Griebel.

A Concordia alumnus, Griebel graduated with a MFA in sculpture and ceramics in 2014.

His work addresses these very heavy themes of human demise in a playful fashion. His intricate and detailed sculptures include hands extending out of the Earth, cradling grasshoppers and butterflies, snails and mice coupling. The hands symbolize humanity, in the face of a nature that is sincerely believed to be tameable. The copulating animals are a symbol of the natural world proliferating over humanity.

“The works all have human anatomical elements present. I am interested in how, as a species, we often see ourselves as independent from the natural world. Collectively, the works represent a sort of metaphorical graveyard where bodies have been reconnected to the ground,” said Griebel.

Two of Reanimator’s strongest pieces are in the lobby of the Redpath, right as you walk in. In “Boneyard,” two jackrabbits couple over a grave. In “Stumped,” a log is stuffed in a pair of jeans stands with two branches as legs, connecting it to the ground. An axe is firmly embedded in the top of the log while a bird rests on the handle.

On the second floor of the museum, “Fertile” and Griebel’s other pieces featuring hands and insects are peppered among the permanent collection. “Fertile” in particular presents a very political statement for such a playfully constructed sculpture. A robin picks at worms coming out from a small, human-like creature constructed of mud and clay, with flowers for eyes. Worms are exiting from the creature’s body, providing the robin with food. In this work, not only has nature claimed us back, but we have become its lunch.

The overall significance for the exhibition is clear: nature will assert its dominance over civilization and right the wrongs humanity committed by taking advantage of the natural world around us. In Reanimator, the tables have turned, and the dominant relationship humanity has had over nature is no longer true.

Griebel’s work demonstrates an incredible amount of meticulous detail, from whiskers on rabbits, tufts of grass, realistic shading of mushrooms, insects, rocks and tree bark. Analyzing his work makes the viewer contemplate their current role in the world while whimsically mulling over the possibility of nature claiming us back, where humans are no longer the apex predator, and where wildlife is dancing over our graves.
Reanimator will be on display at the Redpath Museum until May 26. The museum is open from Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The suggested amount to donate to the museum for adults is $10.

Tuesday Night Café Theatre is now showing an adaptation of Sarah Berthiaume’s Quebecois script

The sound of excited theatre warm-ups and the smell of popcorn wafting in the air isn’t what you’d expect to find in the depths of the Islamic Studies building at McGill, but Tuesday Night Café Theatre is inviting you into this campus corner surprise for their latest production.

TNC is a student-run theatre company based out of McGill that provides shows both directed and performed by McGill students. According to Nathaniel Hanula-James, the publicity director of TNC, “what we’re interested in is theatre that is small, that is less well-known but still extremely valuable and that deserves to be heard.”

Their most recent production, The Flood Thereafter, is a Quebecois play written by Sarah Berthiaume and translated by Nadine Desrochers. Their adaptation is directed by both McGill student Daphné Morin and recent Concordia graduate Cleo da Fonseca.

“Something that TNC is working towards in the McGill community … is putting on theatre that doesn’t reinstate … the ivory tower picture of McGill as this anglophone university in Montreal. So it was a really important choice for us to be able to put on this Quebecois play,” said Shanti Gonzales, the front of house director for TNC.

The Flood Thereafter is set in a small town on the banks of the St. Lawrence river—a town plagued by cursed forces that leave the men of the community without work. These men spend their nights at a town bar called Emotions where a young, beautiful girl named June repeatedly makes them weep with her bewitching naked body. June is the daughter of Grace, the once village floozy, and her mother’s promiscuity leaves June without the knowledge of who her father is and if he lingers in that same bar. Dennis, a truck driver passing through, stops in this town and soon catches June’s eye and becomes entangled in the community, its members and the issues within it. Greek mythology is incorporated throughout Berthiaume’s script, allowing the piece to emanate a sense of magic while being grounded in a gritty reality.

This theatre crew has only been working on this production for the short span of two months and has managed to utilize the small space of TNC effectively by squeezing in three settings in their limited stage space. Additionally, Morin and da Fonseca were able to consult both Berthiaume and Desrochers throughout their process, and, according to Gonzales, the author and translator plan to attend one of the upcoming shows. As a whole, to da Fonseca, this piece is worth your time because of its evident magic realism, moving, comedic tragedy and its invitation of escape into a new world.

However, it’s a production that can be appreciated within a smaller community but fails to reach past its small-scale limitations. The acting did not escape the prevalent mediocrity in amateur theatre with work that was littered with over-acting and meditated sentences. Yet, the piece was somewhat carried by the performances of Amalea Ruffett (Penelope) and, most notably, Daphné Morin (Grace). Despite its low production value and run-of-the-mill student theatre qualities, its modest features can be overlooked for the sake of its intention.

Morin discovered this play in one of her academic courses, and by approaching TNC to put on this production she also fulfilled what Hanula-James described as TNC’s desire to put on “plays which represent a specifically Canadian and/or Quebecois voice.” This allows for a creative output that can inspire thought on what dominates the theatre-scape and allows students to express themselves artistically in the process. “It’s amazing to see McGill theatre start to work more and integrate itself more into the Montreal scene, because I think that will give it strength,” said Gonzales.

 

The Flood Thereafter is showing from March 16 to 19 and 23 to 25 at Tuesday Night Café Theatre (3485 Rue McTavish) in the basement of the Islamic Studies building. Tickets at $6 for students/seniors and $10 for adults.

When book-to-film adaptations go too far into the realm of fan fiction

About a year ago, the world first saw the release of the trailer to a new adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. When it was greeted by exalted posts and shares on my Facebook newsfeed, I decided to set my reservations aside and take a look. Immediately, I sensed something was not right. The screenshots promised an interesting stop-motion rendition of Saint-Exupéry’s famous illustrations, but a Pixar-esque computer-generated face was screaming at me from the thumbnail. Increasingly worried, I watched the trailer and was left in anger and sadness.

Now that the movie—which I have no interest in seeing—is out in theatres and getting mostly admirative reviews, I am brought back to that state of mind. I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but there is a fine line between reinterpretation and fan fiction, and movies have frequently and unceremoniously crossed it. For instance, you don’t go around pretending that the author’s original work was in any way incomplete and “only the beginning,” as many a trailer would claim, especially when the author is no longer there to defend themselves. You don’t repurpose a story to be about different characters in a different setting.

And, look, I’m not a snob. There are many things I can understand. I can understand that books and films are very different mediums. I can understand that, as with any form of translation, book-to-film adaptation means ideas, subtexts or entire passages may be transformed or lost. I can understand parody, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I can understand modernization, like Romeo+Juliet. I can understand Disneyfication, like The Little Mermaid. I can even, maybe, understand musicalization, like Les Misérables.

What I can’t understand, is that filmmakers who have the skill, talent, money and opportunity to make an even approximately accurate adaptation of a literary classic, would instead attempt to involve the original characters in a contrived resolution or update to the original text. There’s nothing inherently wrong with fan fiction—but it must be identified as such. To make a film titled Alice in Wonderland or The Little Prince while entirely modifying its storyline is not adaptation, it’s deceit. And by going through excerpts from positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll notice something that many reviewers think but won’t outright say—that The Little Prince is a betrayal of its source material.

I’m sure the filmmakers meant no harm, and envisioned the project as more of a tribute. Yet, this notion that everything must be updated and followed up on is a worrying trend in today’s cinema. It is true that there always comes a point where a classic story must be modernized, which is a healthy cultural phenomenon in an incessantly changing world. Updating, however, is not the same as modernizing—it’s putting words in an author’s mouth that were never there.

What brings screenwriters to update texts that need no updating? An inflated sense of ego, perhaps, that tells them they can do just as well as the original authors? Well, no, they can’t. They should leave The Little Prince to Saint-Exupéry, Alice in Wonderland to Lewis Carroll, and go write a masterpiece of their own.

The filmmaker’s contributions to society will be recognized by Cinema Politica

“I actually do believe documentary can make concrete social change. And the reason I am so committed to working in documentary is because I think that on many levels, documentaries can impact real social change,” said activist and documentary filmmaker Min Sook Lee in a talk with Cinema Politica in October of 2015 in Toronto. “They’re really strong bridges and storytelling vehicles, but I also believe documentaries can provide some opportunities for inspiring other people.”

Lee has tackled an array of social issues through her groundbreaking and critically acclaimed films. In the course of her career, Lee has given voice to immigrant and migrant farm workers in Canada, citizens of both South and North Korea, as well as homosexual police officers in Toronto, among others.

Her films traveled to festivals across North America, Europe and Asia and have been broadcast nationally on stations such as CBC, Global, TVO and History Television.

Lee’s efforts to give voice to the voiceless have been rewarded by Cinema Politica, a nonprofit based at Concordia committed to supporting political films that explore issues and stories of oppression excluded from the mainstream media.

On March 30, at Concordia, Lee will be awarded the second Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance.

According to Ezra Winton, co-founder and director of programming at Cinema Politica, it is Lee’s long-term commitment to the communities featured in her documentaries that made her application stand out from the rest.

Specifically, said Winton, it’s “the ways in which [Lee’s] films privilege the voices of those communities instead of privileging the voices of so-called experts, bureaucrats, academics. She really facilitates a platform for the voices and perspectives of those who are actually disenfranchized and marginalized by way of their status.”

Legendary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin will be at the ceremony herself and will present Lee with the award. Obomsawin has directed documentaries for the National Film Board for nearly four decades. Over the course of her own career, she has made more than 30 documentaries on issues affecting Indigenous peoples of Canada. Her most successful feature-length film, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), documented the Mohawk uprising in Oka and Kanehsatake and won 18 international awards.

“I think having these two powerhouse Canadian filmmakers and activists in one room is a rare opportunity for Montrealers and Concordia students and I hope they seize [the opportunity],” said Winton.

Several segments of Lee’s documentaries will be screened, such as Tiger Spirit, Hogtown and Badge of Pride. Segments from her newest film, Migrant Dreams, will be screened as well.

Migrant Dreams explores the hardships and opportunities migrant women from Mexico, Thailand and Jamaica face when they come to Canada in search of work to support their families back home. The documentary looks at these women from all around the world and their common work environments, which demand incredible amounts of effort for very little reward.

 

The award presentation and screening will take place in the Hall building, room H-110 at 8 p.m. on March 30. The event is by donation. Amounts of $5 or $10 are suggested.

Here are three of Lee’s films which can be viewed online:

Documentary title: Tiger Spirit

Year: 2008

Length: 73 minutes

Synopsis: Along the border separating communist North Korea from capitalist South Korea, Lee, who is South Korean herself, tells the story of a nation torn apart by war through the voices of those divided by it. Weaving in longing, hope and heartbreak, Tiger Spirit paints a broader picture of a divided nation.

This film can be watched at www.nfb.ca.

 

Documentary title: El Contrato

Year: 2003

Lenght: 51 minutes

Synopsis: For eight months a year in Ontario, 4,000 migrant workers pick tomatoes, toiling for compensation that no local would deem acceptable, under conditions which no local would agree to. Through the eyes of a poverty-stricken father from central Mexico, Lee explores how and why they make this annual migration up north.

This film can be watched at www.nfb.ca.

 

Documentary title: Hogtown

Year: 2005

Length: 96 minutes

Synopsis: It started with the police wanting more money. Then it became the story of sweeping gun crime, a dysfunctional board and media storm as a series of corruption scandals made headlines. This six-month exposé of the politics, dirty tactics and bad behaviour of police in Toronto in February 2004 shows how things quickly spiraled out of control when the police attempt to police themselves.

This film can be watched at hotdocslibrary.ca.

Duncan Macmillan’s play Lungs has been translated into French under the title Des arbres

A nameless couple fights while waiting in line at IKEA: so far, it’s all fairly routine. The argument started with the man asking the woman if she wanted a baby.

British playwright Duncan Macmillan knows how to handle ordinary moments and turn them into a gut-wrenching journey through a modern romantic relationship. His latest play, a mind-blowing face-to-face titled Lungs, has now been translated into French by Benjamin Pradet as Des arbres.

Is having a baby a responsible thing to do in a world where the rate of CO2 emissions has never been higher and where the future of coming generations has never been more uncertain?

This question will lead the main characters, a mid-30s couple, to question all they believe in. If they’ve paid their taxes, done the recycling and gotten socially involved, should they now consider themselves justified in perpetuating the human race? But isn’t it selfish to have children if you don’t consider yourself a good person?

Des arbres arises from a pessimistic viewpoint, yet the play gives way to comical and ridiculous verbal exchanges where extreme honesty prevails. Anyone could relate to this young and excessively rational couple trying to get it right in a world where nothing is. “That’s the goal of drama … to put a mirror in front of people’s faces,” lead actor Maxime Denommée said. “It’s as if we were able to relax people through humour … and touch them on an emotional level.” In proposing his own translation, Pradet stayed true to the tone of the text and to what Denommée refers to as British black comedy.

It’s interesting to note that the literal translation of Lungs’s French title is “Trees.” Probably not chosen at random, since forests are the lungs of the Earth, as the saying goes. Planting trees to do their share is part of the couple’s plan. Denommée described the couple as both strong and fragile. By swaying from one side to another in one of the last scenes, the couple embodies the paradox of nature and the feeling of impermanence conveyed by the play.

The dynamic performances of Sophie Cadieux and Maxime Denommée, previously partners in Radio Canada’s T.V. show Rumeurs, are filled with striking and realistic dialogue. A special mention is in order for Sophie Cadieux, deeply touching in the role of an anxious doctoral student who is half-insane and half incredibly sensitive to the world’s torments. It’s impossible not to shiver when she sarcastically reacts to one of the worst things that could happen in a woman’s life.

Des arbres’ existentialism is reminiscent of Simon Boudreault’s play D pour Dieu, where a baby playing God joyfully wonders about the meaning of life. Both dramas introduce a purgatory-like place, in which it’s about letting it all out. The set of Des arbres is empty, except for two bottles of water. Director Benoît Vermeulen choose simplicity for a reason—more elaborate set pieces or stage directions would have distracted the spectator away from the intense interpretations of such witty writing. Take two charismatic actors, a text that is as sharp as it is refreshing, and you’ll be left with a delicious taste of what can be done in the name of love… and fear.

Théâtre de la Manufacture and artistic director Jean-Denis Leduc present Des arbres at La Licorne Theatre from March 7 until April 15, with additional shows between March 20 and May 2. Tickets are sold out for all performances, but keep an eye out for updates through theatrelalicorne.com.

The mysterious follow-up to 2008’s Cloverfield is edge-of-your-seat material

A good marketing campaign can take a movie a long way. Too often, a blockbuster gets announced years in advance, trailers become unreasonably long and ubiquitous as the campaign goes on, and by the time the movie comes out, you feel like you’ve seen it already. Good marketing doesn’t mean you should know exactly what you’re getting, down to the little details. Quite the contrary—you should be made to feel that some major secret is being withheld from you.

The original Cloverfield is a textbook example of movie marketing done right—mystery is what made it so massively popular when it was released, even though the film itself came as a disappointment to some. Seven years later comes another, equally mysterious project, very loosely connected to the earlier monster movie and a massive improvement on it in every regard.

10 Cloverfield Lane is one of the most tense and exciting films in recent memory. Its immediate success couldn’t have been foreseen, for the simple reason that the film, directed by newcomer Dan Trachtenberg, was never even announced. In January 2016, there was suddenly a trailer for it, and now, two months later, it’s out in theatres.

Its story is still well guarded. The trailer won’t tell you more than you need to know, and, frankly, neither should this review. The film’s secrecy is part of its magic—looking at a roller-coaster before you take it will not diminish its effect, but 10 Cloverfield Lane, a roller-coaster in movie form, is best experienced if you walk into it in a blindfold. That’s just friendly advice, but if you’re not convinced, read on for its central mystery.

Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is knocked out in a car crash, and when she wakes up, she’s handcuffed to the wall in an underground bunker. The large and domineering Howard (John Goodman), who built the place under his home as a shelter from nuclear warfare, tells her it’s for her own good—there’s just been an attack, he says, that killed most living creatures on Earth, so by bringing her to his bunker, he actually saved her life. Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), an agreeable young man who helped build the bunker and has taken refuge in it, confirms the story—the outside air has been poisoned, and so they have no choice but to remain locked inside. Is Howard a kidnaper or a saviour? What can be believed?

Like last year’s Room, to which it deserves comparison, 10 Cloverfield Lane toys with its characters’ perception of reality, and the outside world, from within an enclosed space. The constant ambiguities and tonal changes that arise from every plot turn make the movie a strangely unpredictable experience, and a stunning mind game—depending on your perception of what’s happening, you may be watching a psychological thriller or a minimalistic disaster film. Or perhaps it is, like its predecessor, a monster movie? Right from the get-go, Goodman is effortlessly terrifying. Before you first see him, you hear the deafening stamp of his heavy footsteps, and when he appears, he is possibly more massive than you’ve ever seen him before. His behaviour is unreadable, his motives always under question. The clenching and unclenching of his fist is a more arresting image than any fantastic creature a computer could conjure.

 

Release date: March 11, 2016

Directed by: Dan Trachtenberg

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.

Stars: 4

103 minutes

SubZeroArt presents “Transmissions,” a new installation that reflects on sound art

Every year since 2009, Art Souterrain has aimed at making visual art more accessible to the public by bringing it out of its traditional places of exhibition. The festival puts the spotlight on international contemporary art as well as the architectural and cultural heritage of downtown Montreal’s underground city.

Annoying sizzling sounds, metallic bars and black bases—not your average conception of traditional artwork. Yet “Transmissions” falls perfectly into the theme of this year’s eighth edition of Art Souterrain, “Must Art be Appealing?”

Transmissions presents itself as a combination of installation and human interaction. The exhibit lingers over the relationship between noise and art by trying to redefine the artistic definition of noise. Four sets of antennae-like metallic spires take up the space of this underground hallway by drawing a horizontal line that is either disruptive or intriguing to bystanders. The closer you get to this weird futuristic installation, the clearer is the whistle of this ultrasound version of 1984’s Big Brother—it’s as if those tubes were dissecting your every move.

Behind the installation is SubZeroArts, a group founded in 2009 by a collective of visualists, sound artists, technologists, fabricators and software engineers who share a common interest in contemporary art and science. No wonder the main material used by the artists—naturally occurring white noise—is derived from physics. White noise includes all of the frequencies of sound someone can hear but chooses to shut down when there is just too much of it. White noise can be, say, the sum of every little sound bugging you  when you are trying to finish a paper at the library. The intensity of the sounds has to be uniform though. Surprisingly, white noise is also used to mask other annoying sounds.

SubZeroArts uses the metallic antennae to capture this white noise and sounds hidden within silence and lost radio signals to create a new public playground.

“In making Transmissions, we wanted the audience to have an aurally based experience using sounds that exist around us but remain naturally filtered by our senses, so they normally go unnoticed,” SubZeroArts founder Dean Hughes said in an email interview. “By immersing the audience in these unheard sounds, we’re inviting them to explore a more amplified, more unfiltered aural environment that they wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to take part in.”

Speaking of senses, you might find it challenging to witness yours awakened by the inconsistent rhythm of those sounds whose epicenter seemed impossible to find. It is nonetheless likely that adepts of Luigi Russolo’s pioneer work on making art from city noises would relate to this exhibition, which could certainly be a nod to the futurist painter’s The Art of Noises manifesto. Transmissions is not the group’s first experiment which uses technology to innovate and involve the public into an art installation, as the interactive Touchcubes installation was part of Art Souterrain’s 2015 edition. Among other pieces, SubZeroArts also produced a large-format multimedia piece at Montreal’s Muteck Electronic Festival and all-headphones concert series at Gallery 1313 in Toronto.

Curator, artistic and general director of Art Souterrain Frédéric Loury felt that Transmissions perfectly summed up the four subtopics related to the theme of the festival, which are aesthetic language, sarcasm, conceptual art and subversive art. “The neutral approach of the artists is what drew our attention to this installation. Using this white noise meant people would not be able to fully relate to it as they would to any sound installation. That is what interested us, that people would be taken aback,” Loury said. “SubZeroArts uses tubes almost like a pipe organ. When you get closer, the sound might fade out. You may feel drawn to it, then frustrated, which would leave you especially cautious.”

Sound art is known as an artistic and hybrid discipline where sound is used as a medium. One of the specific features of sound art is the relation between space and time, which is prevalent in the installation. Since the artists’ source material is traditionally considered an unpleasant noise rather than an actual sound, Maclean and Hughes thought Art Souterrain would be the perfect venue to present Transmissions.

Besides asking the audience to reconsider the space that they exist in, SubZeroArts is also asking them to reflect on the appeal of both the installation and the aural reality surrounding them, as explained by artist Rik Maclean.

One of the frustrating drawbacks of such a neutral approach is that it leaves little room for creativity and artistic implication. It seems that every uncluttered piece that falls into the category of contemporary art likes to hide behind minimalism and active audience participation. Transmissions ends up revealing itself as a scientific experiment rather than an artistic work. Questioning seduction and its criteria within art and our society is a fascinating topic, yet the lack of additional elements to SubZeroArts’s stretching of the limits of sound didn’t come off entirely convincing.

Transmissions might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it definitely questions the definition of artwork while successfully transposing the festival’s theme—“Must Art be Appealing?”—into an installation.

“Transmissions” will be on display at the Place de la Cité Internationale until March 20 as part of Art Souterrain, the contemporary art festival.

It’s never too late to see it, even if it’s past October 3

Apparently, I’ve been living under a rock. I have a confession to make: up until recently, I’d never seen Mean Girls. As a film buff, I was well aware of it, and could tell you it was shot in 2004 by Mark Waters (who also made Freaky Friday) and starred Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. I was also aware of its cultural impact and could guess it was set in a high school and featured girls being mean to each other in some way. But the appeal of Mean Girls was still shrouded in mystery for me.

Here are a few realisations I had after watching it:

–       All these jokes, memes and endless references to the movie I’d been seeing for years all across the Internet are finally funny.

–       Lindsay Lohan was actually probably never a good actress. This may not be a popular opinion, but I found she just never looked the part of a homeschooled math geek. On the other hand, the film gave me a newfound appreciation for Rachel McAdams. I guess you can see another actress as Cady Heron, but you sure can’t see anyone else as Regina George.

–       The Tina Fey/Amy Poehler collaboration has been going on for longer than I realized. Fey is also one mighty screenwriter. How did she never write another movie after this?

–       My high-school experience was drastically different from most people if they can actually relate to everything that happens in Mean Girls. I should feel lucky. Also, it’s one of those films where everyone looks like they’re in their mid-20s but you just kind of go with it.

Mean Girls has definitely aged well, and in fact it’s refreshing, not to mention a bit surreal, to see a film about teenagers that barely features modern technology—I suppose if it was still possible to make a film with no computers or social media in it in 2004, that might not be possible anymore. And by not over-relying on existing pop culture, instead making her own contribution to it, Fey made Mean Girls something of a modern classic.

So why is this film so important to so many people? Why did people gasp upon learning that I’d never seen it, and insist that I needed to? As film critic Roger Ebert once wrote in a 1992 essay, “Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may seem.” Silly would be a good word to describe Mean Girls, which, for all its immortal lines about making “fetch” happen and asking people why they’re white, makes no pretense to profundity—some will say it’s about being proud of who you are, which is as good a moral as a story can get.

Even as a watered-down version of something like Welcome to the Dollhouse (seriously, check that one out), it addresses peer pressure and different forms of bullying in an unhealthy high school environment with sincerity, but also undying humour and everlasting quotability. So, yes, I do feel a bit richer for having seen Mean Girls, and if it ever becomes obsolete, it’s probably still a good many generations from happening. It’s never too late to see it for the first time and start wearing pink on Wednesdays.

Zootopia is another success from the animation studio, a familiar but thematically rich delight

The Walt Disney Animation Studios may have done it again, but no, they’re still not Pixar. Yet, it’s hard not to give them credit for the way they’ve reinvented themselves in the 10 years or so since they embraced computer animation. While Zootopia does follow familiar narrative tropes, it may be the most thematically bold and accomplished film of the studio’s new era. When you think of Disney, you expect princesses and cute animals, not a fine parable on multiculturalism and race relations, which their new film surprisingly delivers—even if it does focus on cute animals, such as Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), the first rabbit police officer in an entirely animal-populated Zootopia.

Although you may have to think twice about calling her “cute”—rabbits can call each other that, but other animals shouldn’t. You get the idea—with so many species living side by side, most of them carrying some form of prejudice, things are bound to get ugly. Not ugly enough for them to eat each other—predators and prey seem to have achieved some sort of harmony in that regard—but an elephant might refuse to serve a fox in an ice cream store, because everyone knows foxes are up to no good.

Case in point: Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a smart-mouthed but utterly charming con artist fox who Hopps will have to team up with to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances across the city. Having two seemingly incompatible beings—rabbits and foxes are natural enemies—work together to solve a crime despite their differences, predictably becoming the best of friends in the process, makes Zootopia a model buddy cop comedy. The plot is straight out of the ‘80s—it’s hard not to think of 48 Hrs.—but its timely social commentary makes it unfit for any other decade than our own.

You may choose to read very closely into the film’s allusions and metaphors, in which case you might be disappointed to find some questions are left unaddressed—namely, what do predators have for lunch, and why are there no interspecies couples?—or you may enjoy the film for its wonderful comedy timing and engrossing world. If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that for the many wonderful touches that make Zootopia so pleasurable, screenwriters have also recycled a device that has grown increasingly tiresome. Has Disney retired its career baddies? Sorry for the spoiler, but this is the studio’s fourth animated film in a row to use a plot twist in which a positive character is unmasked as the main villain, and by now all it deserves is an eye roll.

For the most part, the film truly works by presenting you with an unusual world you’d actually want to explore. There have been many other fictional metropolises in animated films, many variations of that archetypal “big city”—Monstropolis in Monsters, Inc., Robot City in Robots or an unnamed insect-populated town in A Bug’s Life—but none as cleverly detailed as Zootopia, which lends its name to the film mostly because the city itself often outshines the characters. Which isn’t to say anything bad about the characters—they’re the ones that make it all come alive, and through them, the film achieves a delicate balance between stereotype and self-determination. Are you ever justified in expecting a rabbit or a fox to behave as such? Films aimed at children typically offer easy answers to complicated questions, but this one is so contagiously optimistic it might just get a pass.

 

Release date: March 4, 2016

Directed by: Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Bonnie Hunt

Stars: 4

109 minutes