76 and Still Hip

For someone born in 1935, it’s astounding how long Woody Allen has been on the cutting edge of filmmaking. He even proved that he’s too cool for the Oscars when his 1977 film Annie Hall won best picture and instead of being there to accept, he was off playing his jazz clarinet in a small venue in Manhattan.

The themes in his movies are always reflecting the best of culture, both high and low brow from Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (making blunt jokes about sexuality in the time of the 70’s sexual liberation) to Shadows and Fog (a comedic homage to the Film Noire genre). In the mockumentary, Zelig, he implemented the technique of seamlessly imposing himself and other actors into historic footage (such as 30’s fascist propaganda) before better known movies such as Forest Gump.

So how’s this timely and relevant? Well his most recent film (and possibly my favourite) Midnight In Paris is soon to be released on December 20, 2011 and I highly recommend it to anyone.

I didn’t know what the plot would even be when I first went to see it in theatres. I was walking by the Princess Twin in uptown Waterloo and I noticed a poster of Owen Wilson strolling through a Picasso cityscape with Woody Allen’s name at the top. Adoring Woody Allen and all he does, I went in to see it without any previous knowledge. It was the most pleasantly surprised I have ever been (literally, no exaggeration). I figured it would be Owen Wilson have love life troubles in Paris, accompanied by Allen’s signature witty dialogue. I could barely contain my excitement when he finds himself mysteriously going back in time every night at midnight and spending his evenings with Ernest Hemingway (my favourite writer), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, and many other artists that were famous for expatriating to Paris in the 20’s.

This film is brilliant in so many ways. Allen’s depictions of all the old artists were spot on and priceless but something that I really enjoyed was how multifaceted Wilson’s character was. Gil Pender is a screen writer who feels that all his best accomplishments in the industry are nothing but dreck, written to pander to an audience of lowbrow movie goers looking for the same formulaic dribble they’ve seen a million times. Now he wants to write a serious novel so he can actually be proud of his work. The fight against formulaic screenwriting is something that Allen has fought his whole career. If there’s one thing he hates, it’s pandering to what audiences expect to see in a movie. On another level, Gil Pender greatly reflects Owen Wilson’s career. He became type cast as the lovable buffoon and as such, he’s never really been cast in a reputable role that can be seen as dignified, brilliant acting. This life and work crisis even resulted in a failed suicide attempt last year. So when Gil is talking about becoming a serious writer, you can see Owen’s genuine desire to become a serious actor.

And on top of all that Wilson’s performance should earn him a semi regular position as the lead in Allen’s movies (I say semi because if he got type cast again then that would be counter productive to his goals). Woody Allen used to play his own lead characters because he was the best at delivering his Groucho Marx/Bob Hope inspired one liners in combination with his characteristic nervous/hesitant disposition. Since he’s stopped acting in his movies, he’s been jumping from actor to actor but none have ever actually captured his charisma. This power vacuum has finally been filled by Wilson. He’s got everything down magnificently; the mannerisms, the tone of voice, the dialogue, everything. He’s perfectly reminiscent of Woody Allen in the 70’s.

This film just works beautifully on so many different levels that it could very well be Allen’s best one yet. So all that being said, I strongly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of this when it comes out because you will not regret it.

Written in the Stars

If there’s one thing Kitchener-Waterloo students love more than anything it’s sushi, so naturally there are a million and one places to get it, the most popular of which being Ye’s. But my favourite place to go is actually a lesser known spot a street over from Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute called Sushi Star. Not only is it great all you can eat sushi (and other japanese food) but it also has the proud accomplishment of breaking the curse of the building it’s located in.

That spot started it’s long-standing curse when it was a Coffee Time that was notorious for its persistent clientele of crack using prostitutes. This isn’t an opinion, it was a well-known fact that all the grungy looking women indefinitely stationed out front were crack smokers that solicited people (even Cameron Heights students) for sex. This was why the Coffee Time (or “Crack Time” as it came to be known) was shut down. After that, countless other businesses opened up there and were closed within months. Even though the crack whores were gone, the image and reputation lived on until one unlikely little sushi place opened up. It’s been there for years now.

I went there initially because I had a coupon from the newspaper but now I go there whenever possible because it’s actually a fantastic place. If you like the all you can eat style of Ye’s with the guerilla (as I call it) ordering system, then you’d love Sushi Star because it’s all that with lower prices. And the grungy atmosphere has been completely replaced with a nice dignified decor and attentive service.

Misty Mountain Hop

As an avid caffeine junkie, I know all the best places to get coffee in downtown Kitchener, and trust me, there are a LOT. It’s really an over saturated market. So with Queen Street Commons next door, Coffee Culture across the street, and Pyrus Cafe and A Matter of Taste both a block away, it seemed odd to me for the Misty Mountain Cafe to open up where A Second Look bookstore used to be. However, despite their apparent lack of common business sense, they’ve grown to be my place of choice.

First of all, the service is great. The owner is admirably hands-on and is fantastic at building rapport with his customers. There were a few problems with the other employees (such as incorrect change) when they first opened but that seems to have been smoothed out now.

But what I really like about the place is its atmosphere. Coffee is coffee in my opinion (unless it’s remarkably bad and theirs definitely isn’t) so to me, atmosphere is everything. They’ve decorated the place very well to my tastes. It’s warm and quite dignified with such features and nice leather chairs and a small library.

I think my favourite aspect of it though is the low traffic. I want them to have business and be successful but if as it is, I like that I can go there whenever I want some quiet reading and writing time while I get hopped up on espresso. There are too many people at places like Matter of Taste and Coffee Culture and too many distractions at places like Pyrus. Misty Mountain Cafe is like a calm oasis in the hustle and bustle of downtown Kitchener.

The Stuff That Dreams are Made of

So I’ve told you about the best burger I’ve ever had in Waterloo. Now I feels it’s my duty to tell you about the best burger I’ve ever had in Kitchener. I love this place for two reasons; first and most obvious is their amazing selection of homemade burgers and second is the fact that the place is called Bogey’s, which appeals to me as not only a classic film fan but a huge Humphrey Bogart fan.

Like I said, all the patties are made in the house and they’re spectacular. I had the pleasure of having their “Black and Blue” burger which is filled with Cajun spices and blue cheese. Also the patty was at least two inches thick, if not more.

I did have them but the people I was with ordered the Bogey’s Poutine which is their home cut fries topped with bacon, green onions, feta cheese, cheese curds and homemade gravy. I also noticed that two burgers on their menu were made of world-famous Wagyu Kobe beef, so needless to say, I will definitely be making a trip back just for that.

And for the cost conscious students, they also have six-dollar half pitchers of beer, (which was our main reason for being there).

The Zen of Vegetarian Cuisine

In the heart of Uptown Waterloo is a small oasis of vegetarian cuisine surrounded by an atmosphere of traditional Chinese Zen Buddhism. I’m talking about the Lotus Tea house at 79 Regina St. North. I’ve had the pleasure of dining there on multiple occasions and it is definitely my favourite place to go for vegetarian food.

I’m no vegetarian but I’m acquainted with many so I’ve tried nearly every place in Kitchener-Waterloo. The biggest problem I find with most vegetarian food is the texture (although flavour certainly isn’t to be forgotten about). A lot of tofu and imitation meat usually tastes good as long as you don’t go into it expecting an exact meat substitute. They have flavours all their own which has its own merit. What bothers me most of the time is texture. I don’t like feeling like I’m chewing on rubber which is sadly the case with most types of veggie ground round and if soy based foods aren’t processed properly then they can feel really gritty. I’ve never found this to be the case with the Lotus, however. Everything always seems to be prepared just right.

Now as for flavour, they’ve definitely got that down pat. My favourite dish there is the hot braised eggplant with soy ground beef and rice. I didn’t even know I liked eggplant until I tried that, and now I know I love it. These strips of eggplant taste somewhat like french fries in my opinion but the fact that they’re braised and not fried keeps them nice and juicy.

Their desserts are relatively hit or miss. While they supply soy based non-dairy ice cream, it has the above mentioned problem where the soy isn’t fully processed and it gives the ice cream that gritty texture. On the other hand, they make an absolutely amazing red bean pastry. Fried (I believe) with red bean paste in the middle, which was much sweeter than I had anticipated.

And let’s not forget the teas. They have a fine selection of specialty teas “for looking good and feeling good” including some such delicious ones as almond tea, tangerine tea and honey lemon ginger tea to name a few.

The only thing I think I could say against them is that you should make sure you’ve got plenty of time because the service has been anything but timely. If you’re not seated right in front of the register then I’m pretty sure they’ll forget about you. The time really adds up too; waiting to order, waiting for your food to arrive, waiting for the bill, it all can take forever but I can’t say that it’s not worth it.

You Never Can Tell

So I was bussing up to the University of Waterloo to meet with a friend there when I decided to stop in at a burger joint that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s in that little strip-mall (I guess you could call it) at the corner of King Street and University Avenue. The place is called Frat Burger and I was caught completely off guard when I was blown away by the burger that I had there.

When you first step in, it comes across as your average bar and grill, particularly typical of one you would find across the street from a university like Laurier. It was dark and full of loud and rowdy students. There were no available seats so I got my burger to go. It being my first time there, I just got a standard “Frat Burger” with everything but mustard. They asked me what kind of mayo I wanted and I chose the one they called their “Frat Sauce.”

I stepped outside, sat at the bus stop, and if I hadn’t been chewing then my jaw would have dropped. It was outstanding. Better than any burger I’d had in Waterloo (Kitchener is another story I’ll soon tell you about). There was so much you wouldn’t expect going on in that burger. Either the Frat Sauce or something they put right into the patty had an ingenious blend of spices that included a hint of something sweet like nutmeg or cloves. It was something that I had never considered would mix well but, upon discovering it, was a pleasant surprise.

I have yet to go back but certainly have full intention to. The extra toppings one can get (such as Monterey jalapeno cheese or a fried egg) are too tempting to resist for long.

It’s Time To Meet The Muppets… Again!

Last weekend it was time play the music. It was time to light the lights. It was time to meet the muppets in their latest theatrical movie release!

While the title was a bit uninspired, being quite simply “The Muppets”, the movie itself was fantastic. How I Met Your Mother star, Jason Segel, not only starred in it but was also one of two writers. It was plain to see in the enthusiastic manner with which he interacted with the Muppets that he is a life long Muppet fan and that this was a dream come true for him. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Amy Adams, the female lead, gave what felt like a strained, lack-luster performance. With such a powerful abundance of celebrity cameos (Jack Black, Mickey Rooney, Leslie Feist, Neil Patrick Harris, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, etc.), each of which showing the same enthusiasm as Segel, Adams’ performance stuck out like a cow in a chicken coop. I may be speaking a bit strongly since, truth be told, she wasn’t that bad. I guess it was just the stark contrast of her attitude right beside Segel’s.

One aspect of the movie that really appealed to me was the fact that it centred around the revival of the original Muppet Show that I grew up watching. As good as the previous movies were, they kind of started to digress into weirder and weirder plots (i.e. Muppets in Space). This got them back to where they started in a heart-warmingly nostalgic way. Perhaps they were trying to reflect this basic simplicity in the title. They were brought back to their roots as a variety/stage show with “live” musical numbers and “cultured” performances of all kinds. They even brought back some classic numbers like “Rainbow Connection” and “Mahna Mahna.”

So with the exception of Amy Adams, everything about the movie was spectacular and I would highly recommend it to an audience of all ages.

Murder at the Registry Theatre

Well not exactly. The Registry Theatre at 122 Frederick St. held another night of silent films accompanied by the live orchestra, the VOC Silent Film Harmonic. The Film they played was Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac, starring Conrad Veidt.

A pianist, played by Veidt, loses his hands in a train wreck and the doctor replaces them with the hands of a recently executed murderer. Now Orlac is convinced that they’re possessing his mind and will force him make them kill again. This is a story that’s been retold many different ways like in the movie Idle Hand or in the Simpsons episode where Homer gets the recently executed Snake’s hair transplanted onto his head.

The film itself was brilliant. I’ve always been a fan of German expressionism in silent films so I thought the acting and the writing and subtle symbolism that laced everything was just marvellous. Conrad Veidt gave an outstanding performance that even rivalled his role as the Nazi, Major Strasser, in Casablanca.

However, I’m not sure what I found more frustrating, the orchestra or the audience. This is the fourth season of this type of event and The Hands of Orlac was the fourth showing that I’ve been to. But I’m no stranger to the budding art that was silent film. I get that since they couldn’t speak, to convey emotions they had to act with very emphatic body language and the more powerful the emotion, the louder their movements became. This may look a little silly at first but it doesn’t take very long to get used to it. This being said, it’s not hard to recognize that this movie wasn’t a comedy. It’s insulting to giggle at times like when Orlac’s wife is desperately imploring the doctor to do everything possible to save Orlac’s hands. I hate to sounds stuck up but the level of persistent immaturity that the audience displayed was downright obnoxious. If you can’t handle drama or horror without sound then you shouldn’t be going to see these movies in public.

As for the orchestra itself, they were somewhat hit or miss. The first film I saw them play for was Battleship Potemkin, an early communist propaganda film, and their style of dark, abstract jazz worked very well with it. The next film I saw was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger. This was about a mysterious stranger, staying at a hostel, who goes out every night for mysterious reasons during the time of Jack The Ripper. Again, the brooding, disjointed style of the orchestra’s jazz worked with the movie but I noticed it sounded pretty similar to the first one. The next was the original version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Here I again noticed how similar the music sounded to the first two and in many scenes it was significantly less fitting. Their tone doesn’t change accordingly from scene to scene. Finally it was the same story for the Hands of Orlac. I feel that they need to learn a new style that’s discernibly different from their usual one. Music has great sway on the mood of a silent film and they’re making every film feel exactly the same despite how greatly different they all are. Sure the orchestra plays quite well at face value but skill means very little when it doesn’t really seem that their hearts are in it.

There may be hope though. In March, the Registry will be playing a Buster Keaton marathon. Buster Keaton, in my opinion, is the absolute best comedian/film maker to come out of the silent era and I would hope that the VOC Silent Film Harmonic can see how flat-out wrong it would be to keep the slow, dark, foreboding tone over top of Keaton’s light-hearted antics.

The Sky is the Limit

November 11 marked the release of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Naturally, I was there for the midnight release at EB  Games for my pre-ordered copy. Staying up til the wee hours of the night, I was nothing short of completely in love with this game. It surpassed my expectations by light-years, which says a lot because I already had high expectations.

I played and adored Elder Scrolls III and IV: Morrowind and Oblivion so when I read up on the changes they were going to make in Skyrim, I had my concerns. Many and game series has been ruined in the past by the makers trying to reinvent the wheel and only succeeding at alienating its fan base. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that they made their changes very well. They kept the game fresh without losing the flavor and addictive gameplay that defined the series.

The Elder Scrolls games, in my opinion, have always been the epitome of what fantasy RPGs (role-playing game) should be. They created an entire world, called Tamriel, and divided into separate provinces (e.g. Morrowind, Skyrim, Cyrodil, Hammerfell), created races and cultures and laws and politics for each province.In game, you can find a great number of books that, if you choose to read them, detail the legends, philosophies, histories and scholarly studies of this vast world.

This world is so vastly in-depth that one game has hundreds of hours of gameplay, from the main quest line, to the faction quest lines (like the mage’s guild or the Dark Brotherhood), to random quests found by talking to the thousands of unique non player characters throughout the game. The gameplay is all about complete immersion. You create your own character, choosing race, class, and astronomical sign, then customize their appearance to the most minute detail (including facial structure). Then upon entering the game and finishing the tutorial, you find yourself, in a first person view, in the middle of an almost intimidatingly large map (the entire province featured in the game) and you can free roam where ever you like. You can choose to follow the main quest marker on your compass or you can just bugger off in the opposite direction and look for randomly occurring adventures.

The series has always taken open-ended gameplay to a whole new level and Skyrim is no different. They took out the “class” option, which in the past, outlined which were your main skills that you had to improve to level your character up, and instead allowed the improvement of any and every skill to contribute to your character’s growth and development.

Beyond the technical stuff, Skyrim’s storyline holds true to the Elder Scrolls’ usual standard of imagination and engrossing adventure. It seems that dragons, long thought extinct, have returned from the unknown to wreak havoc across the nordic province. You start off the game on your way to your execution for an undisclosed crime (that’s up to your imagination) but just as the axe is about to fall, the first of many dragons swoops in and lays waste to the whole scene. You’re the only survivor and your story can go in any direction you choose from there.

Overall, this had Game of the Year written all over it and I can confidently say that it will consume almost all my free time from now til kingdom come… or until they release the currently unfathomable Elder Scrolls VI.

The Golden Era of the Silver Screen

TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has just finished their Month of Buster Keaton what a fulfilling month that was (no sarcasm!). Buster Keaton, for those that don’t know, was a silent film comedian and arguably the best one of his era. He achieved a noticeable level of immortality but I don’t feel like it’s enough. He truly was a cinematic genius on a level way above that of more publicly recognizable silent stars such as Charlie Chaplin. Not only was his comedy bold, creative and still funny to this day but he personally wrote, directed and coordinated all the stunts and special effects, some of which are still baffling displays of movie magic.

TCM has a star of the month every month and I’m so glad that they chose Buster Keaton for one of them. He really was a pioneer, testing the limits of what was possible with stunts and special effects. This is particularly remarkable considering the era, the budget and the fact that he starred in all his own films and that he was his own stunt man. This has led to his facing possible death time after time, from the famous scene where the front of the house falls down on him and he’s only saved by the fact that he’s standing where the window is, to the scene in Sherlock Jr. where he’s whizzing down the street on a rolling chair and just barely misses being creamed by a moving train. In one case, he wasn’t quite so lucky. During another stunt in Sherlock Jr. he’s running in place on top of a train as it rolls by underneath him so when he runs out of cars, he falls off the end, landing on his head on the train tracks, then gets up and comically staggers off camera. Well, after that scene, he complained about a severe headache and a disoriented feeling but since there were absolutely no safety standards for actors back then, he just had to walk it off and get back to shooting. Some decades later when he was getting a check-up, the doctor took some x-rays and asked “When did you break your neck?” to which Keaton responded, “I’ve never broken my neck” but of course his x-ray said otherwise as some plates in his spine showed having been broken and not set properly.

This was a man who suffered time and time again for his art, facing many trials and hard times but he always managed to keep the laughter going. One particular style of comedy he pioneered was stone face comedy. He even became known as The Great Stone Face. Stone face comedy is when no matter what happens, the main character never loses his flat, dim-witted expression. He can be running down a hill from an avalanche and have the same look on his face as when he’s going to work in the morning.

In my opinion, Buster Keaton was the hardest working man in show business and he deserves way more credit and recognition than he receives nowadays.