Paul Isaacs

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
Starring Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr. Written by Paul WS Anderson. Directed by Alexander Witt. (14A) 95 min.

The interlinked relationship between the Resident Evil movies and the original videogames is almost Borgesian in its complexity. The film being released now, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, is the first sequel to the original Resident Evil movie, which was itself partly based on the sequel to the first Resident Evil videogame, Resident Evil 2. Resident Evil: Apocalypse, therefore, is actually based on the third game in the series, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis — except unfortunately, by the time filming started, the name "Nemesis" had already been taken as the post-colon addendum to the 10th Star Trek (or fourth Star Trek: The Next Generation) movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. Which of course tanked. What all this means, then, is that Resident Evil: Apocalypse, while being an adaptation of Resident Evil 3 (the game), is actually Resident Evil 2 (the movie), and even though it's called Apocalypse, it's actually Nemesis. You got that? Live long and prosper.

Still, all you really need to know about Resident Evil: Apocalypse is this: Toronto gets nuked. Quite spectacularly, in fact. The film begins where the first left off, with wonky-featured supermodel and Mr. Potato Head stand-in Milla Jovovich roaming the zombie-fied environs of Raccoon City, a.k.a. our very own GTA. This time 'round she's set up against the non-eponymous Nemesis, a giant evil cyborg designed by the even gianter and eviller Umbrella Corporation, whose zombie-virus almost wiped out the city in the first film. Jovovich, along with her trusty band of human targets, must escape Raccoon City before sunrise, when for reasons too facile to explain, Umbrella plans to drop a nuclear bomb on top of it. Aside from a window-shattering abseil down City Hall, there's precious little to recommend here, and the movie doesn't even replicate the guilty fun of the original — admittedly very poor — film.

On the positive side, at least they can't come back here to shoot the sequel.




Q&A: TOMMY STINSON
Eye Weekly music section, Sep 9/04

Bassist Tommy Stinson was 14 when his former band, The Replacements, recorded their 1981 slacker-punk classic, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash — and he was still only 24 when the Mats broke up in 1991, with their swansong slacker-MOR classic, All Shook Down. Since then, Stinson's fronted the underachieving Bash & Pop, the non-achieving Perfect (whose long-shelved debut, Once, Twice, Three Times a Maybe, is out Sept. 14, a mere seven years after it was recorded) and has recently released his first, excellent, solo album, Village Gorilla Head. From 1997, he's also played bass for the petrifying behemoth that is Chinese Democracy-era Guns N' Roses. We caught up with Stinson on the tour bus with his backup band, Alien Crime Syndicate, somewhere the hell in America.

This is your first solo tour — how's life on the road treating you?
I'm totally fucked. We're travelling from Phoenix to Denver, and it's been a straight, 14-hour drive. Every tour there's one of these bad routing things — you just have to suck up and suck dick. I don't even drive, and the guys up front are fuckin' dying. I just sit at the back and loiter. [The noise of an engine cutting out is heard.] I think we hit a dead end.

It's been 11 years since you last released a full-length album (Bash & Pop's Friday Night is Killing Me). What took you?
I couldn't find the right guitar chords. I've been working on demos, but I only thought about putting a record together last March. The lyrics on a couple songs, like "Someday," date back from when I moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago. It just took me a decade to get the chords right.

The lyrics on Village Gorilla Head are pretty downbeat. They're very reflective of the trials and tribulations of a young postmodern poet. [Laughs uncontrollably for about 20 seconds.] Or maybe just an old man.

The Perfect record is finally coming out, but does Axl Rose plan to release Chinese Democracy in his lifetime?
We don't have a release date right now, but I'm out of the loop. I'll probably hear about it on CNN. That's also where I'll hear about the next tour.

Who's a better boss, Paul Westerberg or Axl Rose?
Axl, definitely. It's more of a collaborative effort with him. Paul would come into the studio and say, "This is the how the song goes, and this is how you play it," end of story. But I actually helped write some stuff on the Guns N' Roses record... or at least it was there last time I listened.

There's a song on Chinese Democracy called "TWAT."
Actually, it's called "There Was a Time." But we shortened the title to fit on the setlist.

Since the Pixies reunion has been a sell-out success, have there been moves to get The Replacements back together?
I've heard some talk about that, but I hope I squashed the rumours adequately. I don't want to close off the idea, but for the next few years I'm busy doing my own thing. If there's a need to do it, or a want to do it, it might make sense. But certainly not now.




EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
Starring Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco. Written by Alexi Hawley. Directed by Renny Harlin. (18A) 112 min. Opens Aug 20.

Never trust a film whose production history sounds more interesting than the movie itself. According to reports, Exorcist: The Beginning’s original director, Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader, was fired by the studio because his movie wasn’t gory enough and dwelt too heavily on Catholic religious themes — which is a bit like firing Woody Allen for being too Jewish, or complaining that Oklahoma! is too heavy on the singy-dancey.

Exorcist: The Beginning was already in the can when the studio told Schrader to shove his crucifix where Linda Blair didn't. His replacement, however — action hack Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea) — didn’t just re-edit and re-shoot extra scenes, but made the entire picture all over again. (Schrader’s version may yet be released on DVD.)

Schrader says his Exorcist was a “character-driven period drama”; the producers, on the other hand, wanted Event Horizon in a desert — a maggot-infested-baby-driven period drama, if you will. Stellan Skarsgård plays Father Merrin — a younger take on Max von Sydow’s famous role — who’s sent to a Kenyan archaeological dig where a church lays buried under the sand. The excavation unearths more than just buried statues, though: the whole town seems haunted, and the dig’s leader, Father Gionetti (David Bradley) exhibits decidedly un-Catholic behaviour: carving a swastika into his chest with a penknife, for example.

I initially thought the swastika scene was supposed to be a satirical comment on the Vatican’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis, but it quickly becomes apparent that Harlin only included the image because, y’know — stuff with blood on looks cool. The first Exorcist relied on psychological as much as visual horrors, but The Beginning is zaftig with such oogum-boogum ghost train clichés: CGI bats, severed heads, children’s nursery rhymes, and scenes that begin quietly and SUDDENLY GETS VERY LOUD! And then quiet again. AND THEN LOUD! And so forth. The studio has got their wish: this is a very gory film. But it’s also a total bastardization of the original — wait for the Schrader DVD.




WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
Starring Naomi Watts, Mark Ruffalo. Written by Larry Gross. Directed by John Curran. (14A) 99 min. Opens Aug 20.

We Don't Live Here Anymore is a small, drab, often excruciating movie — and thank the Lord for that. Based on two Andre Dubus short stories, it's a startlingly plain and intelligent picture: no special effects, no stunt casting, no edgy hip-hop soundtrack — just a whip-smart script and a bunch of great actors doing that weird thing actors are supposed to do but never quite manage. What's it called? Oh yeah, acting.

Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern play Jack and Terry Linden, two bored, thirty-something middle-class marrieds. Jack's an English professor at the local university, where he works with his best friend, Hank (Peter Krause), whose wife Edith (Naomi Watts) he's secretly schtupping between classes. Hank, meanwhile, reacts to his cuckolding only with amused indifference, more traumatized by his writer's block than anything: at one point, he grills his unpublished manuscript on the backyard barbecue, then sells a poem about the incident to The New Yorker.

The New Yorker namedrop seems apt here: we've seen this sort of adulterous academics escapade countless times before — and we've certainly read it before, in Updike, in Bellow and in the magazine itself. What distinguishes We Don't Live Here Anymore is the craft and sensitivity with which director John Curran approaches these well-worn clichés. His direction is almost touchingly boring in its realism, single-mindedly focusing on the mood swings and cover-ups of his central four characters at the expense of any grandstanding gimmickry.

In the hands of a Bob Rafelson or Alan Ball, this would have been a misogynist bluster, or just another predictable jibe at suburban mores, but Curran gives each of his characters the benefit of the doubt, which pays dividends during the movie's emotionally messy conclusion. The cast is also excellent: Dern gets her best role since 1996's Citizen Ruth, while Ruffalo, Watts and Krause give fully rounded performances.




SAMSARA
Starring Shawn Ku, Christy Chung. Written by Nalin Pan, Tim Baker. Directed by Nalin Pan. (14A) 145 min. Opens Aug 13.

This tale of high Buddhism and low sexual indiscretion is the first film to be shot in the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh, a barren, isolated region of India populated solely by farmers, monks and the odd goat. Though it's an ultimately sterile picture, that Samsara was made at all is an achievement: during principle photography, three Ladakh monks and a German tourist were shot by Kashmiri militants, the entire film set was flooded, the whole subcontinent almost plunged into nuclear war, and director Nalin Pan lost his dog.

Considering Pan's crew might have been reduced to radioactive ash at a moment's notice, it's a wonder so little of that behind-camera tension is worked into the foreground. This is a basic bildung, Eastern-style: the four boundless states of mind meet Five Easy Pieces. Shawn Ku plays a terminally unsatisfied, sexually curious monk named Tashi — a kind of Buddhist George Constanza — who starts to question the value of his monastic solitude after an encounter with a beautiful farmhand, Pema (Christy Chung).

Even the Buddha, Tashi reasons, was allowed to experience worldly pleasures before renouncing them forever. So when the local Lama, Apo (Sherab Sangey), catches Tashi indulging in some one-handed clapping underneath his monastery bedsheets, the monk decides to escape and settle down with Pema, with whom he raises a son. It's not long, though, before Tashi begins to also tire of his new life, starting a trade war with a local grain bandit (Lhakpa Tsering) and fawning over one of Pema's migrant workers, Sujata (Neelesha Bavora).

Although the performances excel, and the Himalayan photography is as intoxicating as you might expect, Samsara is little more than an Indian counterpart to one of those interminable (though crowd-pleasing) Giuseppe Tornatore coming-of-age pictures. The Miramax-loving foreign-film punters should go home happy; the rest of us will feel only a Zen-like indifference.




LITTLE BLACK BOOK
Starring Brittany Murphy, Holly Hunter. Written by Melissa Carter, Elisa Bell. Directed by Nick Hurran. (PG) 105 min. Opens Aug 11.

That Little Black Book is irritatingly acted, boorishly scripted and directed with all the panache of an Abdominizer infomercial, should not, on first accounts, distinguish it from any other number of dull, hyperbolic Hollywood movies currently doing the rounds. At the 75-minute mark however, this superficial Brittany Murphy rom-com steps over the line of being merely frightful to become what can only be described, in George W. Bush-style language, as a work of actual and terrifying evil.

Murphy plays Stacy Holt, assistant producer on a trashy, Springer-like daytime show, hosted by the non-amusingly named Kippie Kann (Kathy Bates), sorry victim of several hundred tiresome alliteration-related puns throughout. All is peachy with Stacy's life until she's told to prep a story about a bulimic supermodel, Lulu (Josie Maran), and discovers the model used to date her current boyfriend, Derek (Office Space's Ron Livingston), a shifty sports agent.

This chance encounter sets off alarm bells in Stacy, and, suspecting the worst about Derek, she steals his Palm Pilot and arranges to meet several of his old girlfriends, on the pretext of interviewing them for segments on Kann's show. Stacy starts to question the morality of her plan, though, when she develops an unexpected kinship with one of the exes, Joyce (Julianne Nicholson), and aches to reveal her true identity.

Little Black Book is so anodyne that viewers can gloss over the fact that Stacy would, in real life, be an unconscionable hatemonger. What's so vile about the movie isn't just Stacy's character, however, or the trashing of a talented cast, or the knuckle-skinning dialogue, or even Murphy's nails-on-a-blackboard, neo-Tracy Ullman performance in the lead — but the film's climax, an orgiastically misanthropic scene that simultaneously lets Stacy off the moral hook and lectures the audience for ever cheering her on (as if we ever would).

If Little Black Book were a dog, we'd shoot it. The evildoers must be punished.




JIM MUNROE'S PERPETUAL MOTION ROADSHOW
Sep 1, 8pm. PWYC. Gladstone Ballroom, 1124 Queen W. 416-531-4635.

Jim Munroe knows how to take his show on the road.

Jim Munroe is a little bit yuck. The self-proclaimed gutter-culture novelist, professional computer nerd, sometime corporate media scourge and biweekly eye columnist was feeling somewhat off his game last Friday. The day before, when he left his first message on my voicemail, Munroe spoke with a high, excitable drawl. The small press reading tour he organizes, the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, was loping into town that evening for a performance at Holy Joe's on Queen.

The next day, however, when I met Munroe at the Green Room over coffee and avocado sandwiches — they have to be vegan — his eyes were watery, the nose sniffley, the thick brown hair somewhat lank, and his previous chipperness had been absorbed into a thick, throaty baritone. "I've got this summer cold, so it was difficult to enjoy the show," he says. "I hope I didn't offend anyone."

That seems unlikely. The Roadshow, which Munroe describes as the "bastard child of a vaudeville show and a punk rock tour," brought in about 30 attentive punters to Holy Joe's tiki-themed, fairy-lit lounge — not bad for such a small venue with a line-up of as-yet-unfamous underground poets and cartoonists. "If there's only 20 people who are interested and engaged, that's fine," says Munroe. "You don't need a stadium or anything."

The whole atmosphere seemed pretty mellow and informal. As local artist Willow Dawson concluded her "improv drawing" recital — pencilling a live comic strip onstage to audience suggestions — one of the other speakers, San Franciscan poet Bucky Sinister, took a quiet yawn-and-stretch on a sofa at the back. Sinister's fellow performers have given him the touring nickname Roadkill. "This has been a lot of fun," Sinister says. "It's like the cheapest road trip ever."

Munroe came up with the concept for Perpetual Motion while promoting his third novel, Everyone in Silico. (Like all but the first of his novels, EIS was self-published by his own imprint, No Media Kings.) That tour, spent gigging at bars and crashing on friendly floors across the US, made life on the road pretty sweet. So from April last year, Munroe decided to use his expertise and cross-country contacts to organize the Roadshow, a tour circuit and PR vehicle for up-and-coming or otherwise ignored indie artists.

The idea is simple: shove three or four performers, Monkees-style, into a car together and shuttle 'em across a half-dozen venues around the northeastern US and Canada. The crew have to live, drive, perform and piss together for a week; money for gas and grub comes from pass-the-bucket audience collections.

"There's a quintessential complaint of the Midwestern author who works for a large publishing company: 'No one's paying attention to me.'" says Munroe. "It's because they don't make enough money to justify the infrastructure that could send them on a 20-city book tour. You have to book an Indigo or Chapters, pay for hotels, for food, for a publicist in each town — it's very costly. I'd be lucky to get a launch in my own town."

Perpetual Motion, then, is an organic, web-led antidote to the corporate, Chapters-in-every-city sort of book tour. As the tour's Svengali/promoter, Munroe helps to arrange venues and find sleeping-spots for the artists. Most of this is done via internet contacts and his website, www.nomediakings.org. The site, which features a blog, a resource guide for wannabe self-publishers and an Adbusters-style parody (Munroe used to be the magazine's managing editor) called Monopoly: The Media Edition, has built a large and profitable net community for the author. When he announced the publication of his latest novel, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, to his email list of 1,800, Munroe made nearly $1,000 in online sales within a day.

Munroe's beef with major publishers is longstanding: his first novel, the anti-corporate superhero fantasy, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, was published in 1999 by HarperCollins; subsequently Munroe has remained independent, and bought back the rights for Flyboy.

"Publishing isn't rocket science," Munroe says, "I'd been doing zines since I was 17, and I didn't see why I couldn't try books either."

The HarperCollins problem started with stickers. "It was more than just Murdoch himself, although there was that," Munroe says. "I had to bully the staff into helping me — and it wasn't like I had these outrageous requests. For example, I wanted to do a promotion for Flyboy, like giving out stickers or something. I knew that people who liked the novel would like stickers, but what to do about it, you know? I didn't like being stuck in a power dynamic where I had to force people to do what I could do fine on my own. Without any support, I was like, 'Why am I here?'"

No Media Kings gave Munroe access to a different sort of community, he says. "As soon as I became independent, I had all these new people that wanted to help. The readership has grown — people are a lot more interested now."

Munroe is marketing Unspeakable Evil with his usual combination of net-savvy and old-fashioned schtick: the author promoted Everything in Silico by namedropping as many corporate brands as possible within the text (Hershey's, Gap), then invoicing each company for a $10 product-placement fee.

The new novel follows the adventures of Kate and Lilith, two artsy Toronto gadflies, the latter of whom may or may not be a demon (its working title was Hipster Hellspawn). The book is written in the form of a blog named www.roommatefromhell.com and Munroe has begun posting one section per day from the book into a real-life blog with the same address. He's also certified the book under a Creative Commons license, which means readers are free to riff off the stories with their own fictional works (so long as they're not-for-profit).

"The same creativity I put into the books, I also try to put into getting the books out into the world," Munroe says. "It's not for everyone. I'm not interested in having employees come to help me out. I don't want No Media Kings to grow. It's a not-for-profit company."

"Actually," he adds, "it's more like an anti-profit company. And I only call it a company for fun."


An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil is available at bookstores now.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep. Written by Daniel Pyne, Dean Georgaris. Directed by Jonathan Demme. (14A) 130 min. Opens July 30.

This "re-imagining" of John Frankenheimer's classic 1962 conspiracy thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, is along practically identical lines to the first film: all it lacks is the original's wit, tension, craft, intelligence, sense of satire, droll dialogue, memorable performances, character motivation, vitality, honesty or ability to entertain and shock simultaneously. Apart from that, you could be watching the same movie.

Denzel Washington takes Ol' Blue Eyes' role, playing Desert Storm veteran Capt. Ben Marco, who returns home from Iraq to suffer recurring nightmares about one of his sergeants, decorated war hero and vice-presidential nominee Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). Shaw was credited with a daring rescue of Marco's troops on the Kuwaiti border during the war; the trouble is, none of Washington's men can remember the rescue. All they're able to recall is the same terrifying dream, of Shaw strangling and killing an infantry soldier.

Is something sinister afoot? You betcha, and it's the line-by-line pillaging of George Axelrod's superb original screenplay. Axelrod's spot-on spoofs of right- and left-wing demagoguery have been excised in this remake in favour of bland, non-partisan sniping. Shaw appears to be running on a left-wing ticket, but his campaign is filled with vaguely fascistic imagery. Is he a hawkish Democrat? A moderate Republican? The High Commissar of the American Marxist-Leninist party? Who's to say? (One may also ask, with the action relocated from Korea to Iraq, why isn't the movie called The Mesopotamian Candidate? Answers on a pipe-bomb to director Jonathan Demme.)

Of the cast, only Schreiber comes away with dignity intact. Washington, however, offers a diffident performance that collapses under a tonnage of actorly tics; and Meryl Streep, given the unenviable task of following Angela Lansbury's iconic role as Shaw's scheming mother, does her best only to be let down by a thin, misogynist script. Do yourself a favour and rent the DVD of the original; this is a travesty




THUNDERBIRDS
Starring Bill Paxton, Ben Kingsley. Written by William Osborne, Michael McCullers. Directed by Jonathan Frakes. (PG) 91 min. Opens July 30.

The only real inevitability after death and taxes is misplaced nostalgia about children's television. A pointless and garish revival of the better-remembered-than-watched 1960s "supermarionation" series Thunderbirds is a mystifying prospect: too square for the hip Nickelodeon kids; too lacking in irony (and mediocre pot jokes) to appeal to Scooby Doo-lovin' high schoolers; and too British to appeal to anyone outside Britain.

Even on geeky fanboy terms, Thunderbirds disappoints. In search of the Spy Kids dollar, the filmmakers have shifted the focus from the TV show's main protagonists, the Tracy family -- also known as International Rescue -- to a trio of minor, younger characters: Thunderbird-in-training Alan Tracy (Brady Corbet); Orientalist jailbait Tin-Tin (Vanessa Anne Hudgens); and comic-relief nerdlinger Fermat (Soren Fulton, in a role that didn't even exist in the original program).

What you're essentially getting, then, is a Thunderbirds movie without the Thunderbirds, or Home Alone on Tracy Island, and who wants to see that? Poor old International Rescue (played by a Troy McClure-esque Bill Paxton, and several spiky-haired Pop Idol rejects) spend most of the film stranded in a space station above Earth, trapped there by evil genius and Tracy nemesis The Hood (Ben Kingsley, forsaking Strasberg for an acting style that can only be described as "The Adam West Method").

I kept hoping Alan and his merry crew would be sent somewhere really dangerous to mount a rescue mission -- like, say, Chernobyl -- but instead the tykes spend most of their movie marooned on techno-paradise Tracy Island (available at all good toy stores now).

Matters aren't helped Jonathan Frakes' migraine-coloured direction: his action sequences are so club-footed, Tarkovsky looks like McG in comparison. As one character comments at the beginning, in a line sadly indicative of the script about to unfold: "Thunderbirds? Thunderturds, more like."




FESTIVAL EXPRESS
Featuring Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead. Directed by Bob Smeaton. (PG) 90 min. Opens July 30.

Until now, one of the greatest rave-ups in rock 'n' roll history was also its least remembered. For decades, the film footage from the Festival Express tour in 1970 was left to gather dust in producer Willem Poolman's Rosedale garage.

A legal dispute with the festival's promoter, Ken Walker, had forced Poolman to stash the movie away on indefinite hiatus. No one thought about the film cans in the corner of his house, with their small labels that read JOPLIN, or DEAD, or BAND. If the containers ever saw light of day, it was only because Poolman's son, Gavin, liked to use them as hockey goalposts.

Unlike Woodstock or Monterey Pop, it wasn't the brown acid that made Festival Express forgettable, but the lack of an adequate document. The lineup of the tour -- which travelled on a specially hired train from Toronto to Calgary -- was certainly memorable enough, a genuine million-dollar bash of performers: Janis Joplin, The Band, The Grateful Dead, Traffic and Buddy Guy, among others.

"It's great that the film is finally ready, after so many false starts," says Poolman. "Until Garth Douglas called, we had given up on seeing it again."

That the Festival Express is ready to board at last is mostly thanks to Douglas, a local film researcher, documentarian and music enthusiast. It was he who, after a country-wide search during the 1990s, found the film's long-lost negatives and audio tapes in a National Archives depot in Ottawa.

"The first time I saw the footage with Garth, I couldn't believe how well it held up," says director Bob Smeaton, who previously helmed The Beatles Anthology miniseries. "These guys were all playing at the top of their game."

There are some spectacular performances in Festival Express, to be sure. Although a post-Gram Parsons Flying Burrito Brothers disappoints with a leaden "Lazy Days," and there's far too many meandering Grateful Dead moments (for this reviewer, anyway), the pluses far outweigh the still-entertaining minuses. Buddy Guy hops in with a cosmic, brass-heavy "Money (That's What I Want)"; Janis Joplin sucker-punches the audience not once but twice with "Cry Baby" and "Tell Mama"; and The Band's Richard Manuel offers a reliably petrifying take on Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released."

Festival Express is a surprisingly modest piece of work for the po-faced rockumentary genre. The filmmakers are not above poking fun at the era's lesser lights: there's even a brief appearance, pace Woodstock, from gold-suited doo-wop no-hopers Sha Na Na, singing "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay."

"After looking at the Sha Na Na scene a few times," Smeaton admits gleefully, "I was like, 'For fuck's sake, do I really have to sit through this again?'" The director also owned up to editing a long-winded bass guitar solo from Great Speckled Bird's "CC Rider." ("I hated having to cut that out," he says. "Obviously.")

Yet what's novel about the movie isn't just the new footage of several long-croaked lead singers -- Joplin overdosed soon after the festival ended -- but the very nature of the tour itself. These bands weren't travelling between festival gigs on anodyne, PR-pampered, DVD-packed tour buses, but lumped together on a single rented train, free to rock, drink, smoke and screw their way across Canada, all in the space of a few long carriages.

"There was no PR company, no makeup, no management," says Smeaton. "Just the artists, some booze, a couple of roadies and a bunch of chicks."

Shortly before his death in 1999, The Band's Rick Danko remembered the tour as "one of the greatest jam sessions ever. There were a couple of cars for music. A couple of cars for drinking. A couple of cars for food. A couple of cars for sex. It was a pretty wild ride." As the Dead's Jerry Garcia told one interviewer: "That was the best time I've had in rock and roll. There were no straight people."

The best moments in Festival Express are the most vulnerable sections, the snippets you'd never see on any so-called reality show today: Buddy Guy and his band drinking whisky out of paper bags in Winnipeg; Garcia, perilously close to a Eugene Levy caricature, making schoolboy crush eyes at Joplin, shyly telling her he'd "always loved her"; and of course, the incessant, unguarded, on-train jamming that took place between gigs.

The musical centrepiece here is a passionate, never-before-seen run-through by Joplin, Garcia and Danko of "Ain't No More Cane." Even the instruments sound drunk; it's the stuff legends are made of. "When we cut that scene we knew that we had something special," says Smeaton.

According to the director, the greatest character in the movie isn't Joplin or Garcia, but Ken Walker, the festival's wheeling-dealing promoter. I met the David Crosby-resembling Walker, now 54, at the Dundas Square Hard Rock Café, as he was being told off by the manager for smoking indoors.

Walker and his partners lost millions on the Festival Express when the entire tour was besieged by a student group called the May 4 Movement, which protested the $14 ticket price and demanded that the concerts be free. (Even Willem Poolman told me he considered the $14 charge "outrageous.")

The demonstrations, as seen in the movie, came to a head at the tour's end in Calgary, when Mayor Ken Sykes, then up for re-election, tried to curry favour with the kids by promising free admission. According to Walker, "Sykes came backstage and said to me 'I want you to open the gates and let the children of Calgary in free.' So I said, 'Are you outta your fuckin' mind?' And then he replied, 'You're nothing but Eastern scum and a capitalist rip-off son-of-a-bitch.'

"So anyway," Walker continues, "I punched him in the mouth."

It was certainly some sort of a trip: booze-ups, shakedowns, wig-outs, and flattened Alberta bureaucrats. Or, as Joplin tells Walker after the last night's gig, "I've finally met someone who throws a better party than I can." She died two months later.




JIM WHITE
Drill A Hole in that Substrate and Tell Me What You See
V2/Luaka Bop

After two albums of considerable (if filler-filled) charm, Drill a Hole is Pensacolan singer Jim White's most consistent -- but least interesting -- record to date. With too-comfortable production from Madonna/Esther's brother-in-law, Joe Henry, the carnival weirdness of White's older work has been ditched for a more straightforward AOR approach, and guest stars aplenty. There are several highlights: The Sadies turn up, to honky-tonkin'‚ effect, on "Borrowed Wings," and Aimee Mann gives good duet on the haunting standout "Static on the Radio." But the Barenaked Ladies collaboration, "Alabama Chrome," is just embarrassing, and elsewhere, White's white-trash lyricism skirts self-parody ("If Jesus Drove a Motor Home"). Fans will need this -- if only for the hilarious white-funk of "Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style," a career best -- but newcomers should start with White's 1997 debut, Wrong-Eyed Jesus.




MARAH
20,000 Streets Under The Sky Yep Roc/Fidelity
Yep Roc/Fidelity

I have seen rock 'n' roll's future, and its name is... probably not being bandied around the op-ed pages of The New York Times by Mojo spokesbaldy Nick Hornby. Two months ago, squeezed in between columnists reporting on actual news events, Hornby described 20,000 Streets Under the Sky as a record that would, "in a world with ears, be one of 2004's most-loved straight-ahead rock albums." According to these ears, however, it sounds like the usual old guff. This time around, Marah have at least stopped pretending to be Oasis (cf. 2002's godawful attempt at selling out, Float Away With the Friday Night Gods) and returned to their Springsteen-copyist roots. But it's pretty wan stuff. The only memorable melody is in "Feather Boa" (because it's The Replacements' "Someone Take the Wheel"); the rest is typical Brooce-Lite. Next week, don't miss Louis de Bernières' damning investigative exposé of crunk in the WSJ.




FAITHLESS
No Roots
BMG

Faithless are the British analogue to that old Keith Richards joke about the Grateful Dead (“What do Deadheads say when they run out of drugs?" "This band sucks."). Seen live, Faithless’s earnest, retro-hard-house sound makes them an acceptable guilty stoner's pleasure; on sober old vinyl, however, they remain deeply embarrassing. No Roots doesn’t mess with the band’s trademark formula: it's all here, from Rollo’s dated hi-NRG beats, to Sister Bliss’s incessant, reverb-y synth-stabs, to Maxi Jazz’s reliably atrocious rapping (“I'll fill you up like rice and peas,” indeed). Lead single “Mass Destruction” is a ploddingly predictable diatribe about love (a good thing), people’s parents (sometimes they’re mean) and war (it’s bad, apparently), but the rest of the album meanders in a pleasingly soporific, Jean Michel Jarre kind of way – at least until Dido turns up to spoil the mood on the title track.

A CINDERELLA STORY
Starring Hilary Duff, Chad Michael Murray. Written by Leigh Dunlap. Directed by Mark Rosman. (G) 95 min.

The finale of Hilary Duff's last magnum opus, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, was a bold departure from tween-flick convention. Instead of partnering Duff with her obvious love interest, a swoonsome Eurotrash-oid named Paolo, McGuire was instead deposited in the arms of Gordo, her nerdy, obsessive best friend.

Such inclusiveness may have proved too much for the Duffmeister's youthful audience, however. Lizzie McGuire, kissing a nerd? The horror, the horror! Or as Joseph Conrad might have said: "Like, eee-yeww!" Well, young'uns fret ye not, because the moral order of the universe is realigned with A Cinderella Story, and this time round Duff's boyfriend Austin (Chad Michael Murray, who was also Lindsay Lohan's boy in Freaky Friday) is appropriately smokin' hot. Plus, he's no geek either, but the captain of the football team — and the high school president! And he quotes Tennyson over email! Could one young man ever contain so much perfection? (Except Nick Carter, of course.)

Most of Cinderella is played in the now boringly familiar Clueless style, as a modern reworking set in Los Angeles. Duff plays orphaned high school senior Sam, who's banished to live with her demented stepsisters and tanning-machine-obsessed stepmom Fiona (Jennifer Coolidge, a moving, seal-killing slick of botox). By day, Duff slaves away as a waitress at Fiona's crass 1950s roller-diner; by night she sends anonymous instant messages to Austin, her mystery Prince Charming.

The couple finally meet at a school costume ball — with the part of the glass slipper played, inevitably, by a cellphone — but the skullheaded Austin is unable to penetrate Duff's ultra-cunning disguise, a teensy white Phantom mask. No worries, though: both are happily ever after by the final reel, especially Murray, who puts in a charismatic spot amid the mostly tiresome slaptstick. Duff, meanwhile, may not have fellow tweener Lohan's skill for picking scripts (it's no Mean Girls), but -- if such a thing can be quantified -- she remains much the better performer.

ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY
Starring Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate. Written by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay. Directed by Adam McKay. (PG) 95 min.

The latest vehicle for Will Ferrell, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a patchily successful attempt to do for news anchors what 2001's Zoolander did for male models. Not that the two careers appear to be so different. Ferrell's Ron Burgundy, a top-rated San Diego newscaster, is even more vacuous than Ben Stiller's creation: a densely moustachioed, scotch-swillin', bachelor-swingin' sexist who thinks diversity was "an old ship used in the Civil War."

If you didn't think that joke was funny, then abandon deck right here: even by Ferrell's puerile standards, Anchorman is juvenilia. (In one credits outtake, Burgundy claims San Diego is "German for whale's vagina," and even Ferrell can't quite believe what he's just said.)

The story begins in the late 1970s, when "ugly men were still allowed to read the news." Burgundy's newsroom is a boys club, pure and stupid, where he and his fellow crew (Paul Rudd and the ever-reliable Fred Willard) abuse their fame to chase tail, not leads.

The sour mix in the gang's gin is Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), a new reporter who -- unbelievably -- refuses to be Burgundy's eye candy, and starts agitating for his position. The central gag here is Burgundy's inability to comprehend that a woman could do his job -- or at least it would be the central gag, if it weren't sandwiched between several guest cameos, a day-glo animated sequence and a scene in which Luke Wilson has his arm chopped off by a panda.

Ferrell is frequently hilarious (if still too desperate for easy laughs), but he lacks Mike Myers' ability to really inhabit a character: next to Wayne or even Austin Powers, Burgundy is just a moustache in a bad suit. Still, Anchorman has a few gut-busting yuks, and if it delays Jimmy Fallon's screen career for at least another few years, then roll on the sequel.




POLYPHONIC SPREE **
Together We're Heavy
Good/Hollywood/Universal Records

There's no musical equivalent of "jumping the shark" -- in R.E.M.'s case, releasing a Monster, perhaps? -- but The Polyphonic Spree's new album caroms over the sea creature after as little as 30 seconds. Together We're Heavy begins prettily -- a touch of harp here, some choral "oms" there, and a whole heap o' Mercury Rev down the middle -- but proceeds to bludgeon that beauty only moments later, with a guitar riff so antique it should be framed in Noel Gallagher's bathroom.

A little schtick may go a long way, but if all you are is schtick, then you're pretty much schtuck. Formed by Tripping Daisy's singer/guitarist Tim DeLaughter, the Spree are chiefly notorious for non-musical reasons: the band's number (there are currently 23 members), and their outfits (they suit themselves in cult-ish robes during performances). The trouble is, behind their indie-Moonie get-up, it's painfully obvious what the Spree really resemble: just another in a long line of Brian Wilson fetishists, and rather mediocre ones at that.

It's been suggested that the best way to hear the band is to see them live, but on the basis of last year's gig at Lee's Palace, this also seems unlikely (the sound was muddier than a 1980s reissue of Pet Sounds). It was certainly a sight to see the almost-fully formed Spree on a stage as small as Lee's -- one out-of-place triangle player's elbow could've sent the whole audience tipping like a field of ironic t-shirted dominoes.

But as anyone who's visited the Grand Canyon will tell you, even the most epic sights can start to pall after a few minutes -- and The Polyphonic Spree sure as Texas ain't the Grand Canyon. Together We're Heavy begins exactly where their 2002 debut left off: the first track is even titled "Section 11" (The Beginning Stages of... ended with a song named "Section 10.") Again, plus-points for schtick, but minus 500 points for the songs themselves, which mostly sound like ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" as re-recorded by The Blues Magoos. Someone should tell DeLaughter: The Cure are big again, and we don't like fun anymore.




YOUR SECRETS SLEEP WITH ME
By Darren O'Donnell. Coach House Books, 220 pages, $18.95.

Darren O'Donnell, playwright and author, is extremely concerned about underage sex. Frankly, he doesn't think there's enough of it, especially in his new novel, Your Secrets Sleep With Me.

"If I had the chance to write the book again, I would consider putting more sex in," O'Donnell says. "But I kind of got scared and wimped out."

We're both sitting in the sweltering, noisy Bellevue Square Park. To the east, a children's swing is squeaking painfully with second-ticking regularity. On the other side, the statue of the late Al Waxman, King of Kensington, beams down on us with its ever-present, shit-chewing smile.

From a distance, O'Donnell, 38, might look like any typical Kensington irregular, part geek, part yogi. He hasn't shaved, and the yellow t-shirt he's wearing is tied round his navel to reveal a hairy, skinny belly.

Up close, however, you're immediately struck by his fast-talking presence. If this were 1969, we might describe O'Donnell as a guy with a "heavy aura".

He needn't have tripped about the sex, though. Your Secrets Sleep With Me may not be in the Jackie Collins boinkbuster leagues, but it's still sweaty to the spine with clammy, comical, horny kid-humping.

There's eight and 11-year-olds Rani Vishnu and Michael Racco, who enjoy "sucking and fucking" under a fort made from sofa cushions; Ruth, the teenager, who's screwing Kaliope, the girl from down the corridor; and androgynous 13-year-old James Hardcastle, who takes the lead role in a homemade porno film, provisionally entitled Boys with Pussies.

"They're just kids having fun, y'know," he says. "We all did that kind of thing when we were young, didn't we?"

In the past, O'Donnell has principally worked in theatre, as an actor, director and playwright: his plays include pppeeeaaaccceee and White Mice, which was nominated for six Doras in 1998.

But while he's taking his new production, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, to the Edinburgh Festival this summer, O'Donnell is skeptical about the local theatre scene.

"Toronto theatre is in a sorry shape right now," he says. "Postmodernism doesn't yet seem to have occurred to anyone here. Nobody questions how to tell a story, or questions the subjectivity of representation. We're still just telling stories, stuck to this idiotic Shakespeare canon."

Writing the novel, O'Donnell says, was a liberating experience: "I wanted the relationship between the producer and the consumer of the work to be as one-to-one as possible.

"The book stands on its own. If it failed, it was because I failed, not because we didn't get the right actors, or the venue wasn't right or we didn't get a decent budget."

Your Secrets Sleep With Me is a terrific little debut. Structurally, the book is a mess: it's part future-dystopia novel, part spiritual-self-help guide, part Toronto-critique-as-strangulated-metaphor: "The city is like a teenager," O'Donnell writes, "who can't have access to the car until it does its chores. And there is always another chore."

But there's method in his madness: Coach House Books' press release describes the novel as a "punkier Thomas Pynchon," which if it wasn't such an anodyne alliteration would be fair comment. (O'Donnell hasn't actually read any Pynchon. "The guy's books are too thick," he says.)

The story is set in a nightmarish future Toronto that feels not so far from the present: the CN Tower has collapsed into the bay, and the authorities are on the rampage, locking away Muslim immigrants.

The novel opens on Michael Racco's father, who for unexplained reasons goes on a killing spree across the 401: a new syndrome is named after him, "Racco Rage." And he's not the only damaged goods here: Rani is going grey and being kept prisoner in an abandoned warehouse with other Muslim detainees; Ruth is a fashionista with vitiligo and a tendency to vomit bones; and James Hardcastle's boyfriend, Xiang Pao, has inexplicably turned into steam and gotten himself trapped in an Arctic ice floe.

One imagines O'Donnell's youthful protagonists like characters from Peanuts, wandering around with their oversized heads and little bodies, bouncing depressed aphorisms off one another like marbles: "Fame is a boat with a very big leak," says James. "The bigger the fame, the bigger the boat. The bigger the boat, the bigger the leak... anyway, fuck water."

Despite their trials, the kids are hopelessly utopian, always trying to improve their lot, whether succeeding or failing. They all have heavy auras.

"Kids are a lot more sophisticated than we like to think they are," O'Donnell says. "I'd like to see children become more politically enfranchised. They should vote, run for office. They might just build more playgrounds, but would that be such a bad thing?"

He looks across the park. "At least they'd get round to oiling that swing."




DICKWHIPPED: THE KRISTEEN AND LAURIE STORY
Featuring Kristeen von Hagen, Laurie Elliott. Directed by Lisa Merchant. Presented by Caviar and Lace Productions. July 2-10. www.dickwhipped.com.

Local funny ladies Kristeen von Hagen and Laurie Elliott get their Fringe on.

Kristeen von Hagen used to be "a real wild gal," according to her friend and fellow stand-up comic Laurie Elliott.

"Once upon a time, Kristeen played by her own rules," says Elliott, 32.

"She was always like, 'I'm going out, I'm having some fun.' If there was a party to go to or drinks to be had, Kristeen knew about it."

But then, without warning: tragedy.

"She started dating this guy," says Elliott, "and immediately he changed her ways. Suddenly, Kristeen stopped coming out and began staying at home all the time."

Von Hagen, 28, nods sadly. "That's all we do now, me and my boyfriend," she says. "We just stay in together, watch television, maybe play some cards. We're like retired seniors."

"Kristeen has become lame," says Elliott.

"I am a shell of the woman I once was," agrees von Hagen.

"Yeah," says Elliott. "You are totally dickwhipped."

Sometimes, as Forrest Gump never said, dickwhipped happens. It happened to von Hagen; it happened to Elliot; it could happen to you.

Anyone with a live-in partner knows the routine: you wish you were Zelda and Scott, but you're happy just being Mom and Pop. Nights out drinking get turned down for nights in watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. Invites from friends go unanswered because there's a troublesome game of Scrabble to finish. The living room sofa develops a gravity denser than Jupiter.

If that's the case, then congratulations: you've just been dickwhipped.

"Laurie is, like, supremely dickwhipped, too," says von Hagen. "She's pretty much engaged right now. Her and her boyfriend have this dog that they treat like a baby. It's all cutesy."

Elliott beams. There is a touch of disgust in von Hagen's voice.

"Yeucchh," she says.

Elliott and von Hagen's new show -- which you may have guessed by now is called Dickwhipped -- has a seven-day run at the Poor Alex Theatre starting Friday, July 2, as part of the 2004 Fringe Festival. A one-act play, it will mix elements of the comics' stand-up routines with longer, more philosophical digressions on the meaning of relationships and the duo's status as genitalial whipees.

There will also be dresses. "We bought these fabulous '50s housewife gowns from Kensington," says Elliott. Her costume, which includes a toothpaste-green shawl, has been nicknamed "Minty"; von Hagen's dress, which resembles a roll of flower-patterned wallpaper, has been given the provisional title "Floral Justice."

It should be mentioned, of course, that Elliott and Von Hagen are both terrific comics: Elliott won the Tim Sims Encouragement Award in 2000, and Von Hagen was recently named one of Elle Canada's Top 30 Power Women in Canada. But it'll be interesting to see how they combine their stand-up personalities onstage, with Von Hagen's well-observed, wiseacre slacker-isms bouncing off Elliott's more manic and agitated delivery.

"We always had the idea of doing a two-woman show together," says Elliott. "With stand-up, you just get up for 10 minutes and do your jokes: set-up, punchline, set-up, punchline. With Dickwhipped, though, we have more time to explain exactly where the jokes are coming from, so it's a little easier for people in the audience to identify with us."

Von Hagen herself is well acquainted with dicks: she spent a large part of 2002 touring with Australian stretch-cabaret act, The Puppetry of the Penis. "It was odd," she says. "There were naked men walking around in capes and cowboy hats doing their laundry. This guy would come into my dressing room wearing only a tank top and do exercises to warm up his penis. It was certainly an interesting time."

Although Dickwhipped is the pair's first Fringe show, they've often worked together at the city's comedy venues: both used to write for TV station Toronto One's late, mostly unlamented Toronto Show. Von Hagen created one of the program's more redeeming features, a recurring character played by Elliot called "Laurie the Girl Who Goes on Dates."

"The network told us to cut that character because she was too disturbing," says Von Hagen. "So instead we wrote her as this janitor character, Carruthers Fairmont. She was in drag and wore a beard like Charles Manson, and had this mail-order bride. It turned out to be even creepier than the first one." Elliott also hosts nights at the Rivoli, and when Dickwhipped finishes, Von Hagen will be hosting at the Laugh Resort for a week.

Both comics are currently concerned about the creep-factor of their parents seeing Dickwhipped, particularly considering its subtitle is The Kristeen and Laurie Story. "It's like chatting with your girlfriends, only your mom and 80 other people you don't know are there," says Elliott. "Although my dad actually helped out with our webpage. He came in one day and said, 'Do you know dick
whipped.com is available?'"

"We've taken some of the more disturbing true stories out, and spiced up some other parts," Von Hagen says. "With comedy, you forget how literally the audience takes things. With a lot of stand-up, it's just completely made up, but people still come up to you after the show and say things like, 'Is your boyfriend really 80?'"

Elliott says Dickwhipped will be told from a female perspective, but "there's lots in it for guys to identify with. It transcends gender. It's not all, 'What's up with guys?'"

"We both have ex-boyfriends who wouldn't enjoy the show too much," says Von Hagen. "But they're probably not going to come."

TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
Written and directed by Dennis Law. Presented by Sight, Sound & Action Ltd. To June 27. Tue-Sat 8pm; Sun 7pm; Wed, Sat-Sun mats 2pm. $35-$85. Elgin Theatre, 189 Yonge. 416-872-5555. www.ticketmaster.ca.

I should tread carefully here. The last critic to give Terracotta Warriors a negative review, Leanne Campbell of the Vancouver Westender, found herself barred for life from the play's downtown venue. Considering all she did was compare the show's use of dry ice to a "heavy metal concert," the punishment seems a little harsh. Still, this time next week, if you find my entrails stretched end-to-end across the Elgin Theatre bandstand, I can't say I wasn't warned.

At least the show doesn't want for ambition. In his program notes, director/ writer/producer Dennis Law describes Terracotta Warriors as "the most astounding presentation of Chinese performing arts in the West over the course human history." Law -- whose previous producing credits include 1997's seminal karate kangaroo movie, Warriors of Virtue -- is a true Barnum-style showman. The whole event reeks of exclamation marks. There are 300 costumes! 24 epic sets! 94 performers! Kung fu! Swordplay! Acrobatics! Plate-spinning! It's the greatest show in human history! Terracotta Warriors! (I didn't see any elephants, cockatoos or dancing bears, perhaps they came on during my pee break.)

A show like this lives or dies on the quality of its schlock, and that's especially the case here, as the narrative, based on the life story of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is near incomprehensible. (I lost the plot shortly after the actor playing Confucius' ghost started doing backflips.) Sadly, despite the skill of the players and the spectacular costume work, Law's choreography is, on the whole, unremarkable: the acrobats look uncomfortable in their dancing roles, while the often terrific dancers are wasted on bland, overly Westernized ballet routines. If anyone ever opens a hotel in Vegas called Beijing Beijing, Law's going to need more practice than this to score a slot there.




CEREBUS DIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE SIM
Cerebus #300: Latter Days 53. By Dave Sim and Gerhard. Aardvark-Vanaheim. 40 pp.

When Lee Hazlewood released his 1973 album Poet, Fool or Bum, the NME gave it a single-word review: "Bum." Dave Sim, creator of the comic-strip character Cerebus the Aardvark, took a similar critical sound-biting at the hands of Entertainment Weekly earlier this March. In one sentence, the magazine distilled Sim's entire lifetime's oeuvre, created over 26 years, into just two words: "Grade: B."

In that period, Sim has not only written, drawn, inked and published 300 issues of Cerebus almost single-handedly, but also entertained thousands of readers, pissed off twice as many, been lauded by the comics industry as a guru, been denounced by it as a lunatic and revolutionized the graphic-novel medium. Still: Grade B.

If Dave Sim recorded an album, it would be called Genius, Asshole or Madman. Many readers find it hard to believe that Sim's Sisyphean workload hasn't now driven him slightly ga-ga. In November, Saturday Night magazine published a salacious (if not wholly untrue) profile of Sim, portraying him as a reclusive, near-suicidal religious fundamentalist.

(In an interview with eye, Sim dismissed the article as a "smear piece," like being "kicked in the nuts in print.")

But all you really need to know about Sim, good or bad, is in the comics. Cerebus did not begin auspiciously: the first issue, published in November, 1977, was a rudimentarily sketched, puerile parody of Conan the Barbarian. The one memorable element was its eponymous protagonist: a violent, heavy-drinking, sword-wielding aardvark.

It was one night in 1979, fuelled by a metric assload of LSD, that Sim finally came up with his Big Idea: the comic would run for 300 issues and no more, he decided, in the process telling the story of Cerebus' entire life, up until the final issue in March, 2004, which would end with his death.

Cerebus #300, which was released exactly as planned three months ago, shows about as much likeness to those early issues as "Surfin' USA" does to "Heroes and Villains," or Lee Hazlewood does to Nancy Sinatra. Over the years, Sim has taken a more satirical, post-modern approach. In one extended 500-page story, "High Society," Cerebus becomes prime minister of the fictional country of Iest, and Sim provides a merciless critique of electioneering and spin. Later tales were even more ambitious: in the "Melmoth" storyline, Cerebus disappears entirely for 12 issues, with Sim instead offering a fictionalized portrait of Oscar Wilde.

But at the same time as Sim was hitting these artistic peaks, his idiosyncratic views on religion and feminism began increasingly to inform the comic, causing it to shed readers by the thousand -- especially women. In issue #265, Sim printed a 21,000-word text essay entitled "Tangents" that described women's right to choose as "a lunatic misuse of free will." He also rallied against what he perceived as a "feminist/homosexualist" axis engaged in a conspiracy to tyrannize straight men.

"It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate Literature against women," he wrote, "in this Fascistic Feminist country."

At this point, even Sim's most dedicated fans balked. One British Cerebus website posted often-updated columns entitled "Davewatch," and "Misogyny: Is Dave Sim Mad?" On another comics blog, "Out of the Darkling Wood," one fan confessed that he had stopped reading Cerebus altogether, because "whatever I might learn about characters I used to care about is not worth the pain of engaging with Sim's collapsing soul."

"I've never thought of Cerebus as hate literature," Sim says. "I was trying to make the point that it's become impossible to discuss things in a meaningful way if you're limited only to those subjects that make women feel good. It's why movies and television suck so badly these days. People self-censor themselves so that nothing in them can make a woman feel bad about herself."

Sim's final storyline, "Latter Days," was his most difficult creation so far. It included a several-issues-long segment in which Cerebus offers an obscure reinterpretation of the Talmud, in teensy, migraine-inducing lettering. Sim concludes issue #300 by having Cerebus morph into a super-powered rabbi, complete with hat and ringlets. (In one panel, Cerebus slices off his foreskin to the sound effect "THOIT!")

So is Dave Sim a genius, asshole or madman -- or all three? Perhaps comics historians will see him as a D.W. Griffiths-style figure, objectionable and influential at the same time. His aggressive advocacy of independent self-publishing, for example -- every issue of Cerebus was published by Sim's company, Aardvark-Vanaheim Inc. -- has been a model for hundreds of creators (Todd MacFarlane's Image Comics, for instance).

Whatever happens, Sim remains oblivious to his critics. "I've heard from people who turned away from the book in disgust," Sim says, "only to see merit in those same parts years later. Cerebus is a long way from being a populist work. It has never been widely accepted and I don't imagine it ever will be."

NEW YORK MINUTE
Starring Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, Eugene Levy. Written by Emily Fox, Adam Cooper, Bill Collage. Directed by Dennie Gordon. (G) 90 min. Opens May 7.

The Olsen twins make me nervous. They’re just too freakishly wholesome, like manga cartoon versions of JonBenet Ramsey. Plus, they’re coming for me. Honestly — these people will stop at nothing in their pursuit of power. The publicity juggernaut for New York Minute, the Olsen’s film debut, could teach the Pentagon a thing about propaganda. It feels less like teen marketing than a call to war.

Appropriately, much of New York Minute is a battle. With its feverish pop-punk soundtrack and whizzbang editing, director Dennie Gordon seems more influenced by Saving Private Ryan than John Hughes. Be warned: this is a very loud picture, and unless you are under 16, it will make you feel horribly, disgustingly old. After a while I wanted to pound the screen and yell, “Quieten down, willya — I’m trying to watch a movie here!”

The plot is so slender it could be written on an appleseed with a piece of chalk. Ashley and Mary-Kate play sisters Jane and Roxy Ryan, who skip school one afternoon to take part in a daring invasion of Normandy — I mean, to spend the day in Manhattan. Ashley (the nerdy, sensible one) has to make a speech to a scholarship board from Oxford University; Mary-Kate, meanwhile (the troublemaking, potentially brain-damaged one), plans to sneak backstage at a Simple Plan video shoot, then slip her demo CD to the band’s A&R man.

It’s thrilling stuff, but things get complicated along the way, with the twins encountering a wannabe Chinese gangster (Andy Richter), an overzealous truant officer (Eugene Levy) and two really hot white boys. All this should be like so much diet-milkshake to a fan — and more power to them. It would be remiss, however, not to mention one disgraceful scene set in a Harlem hairdressing salon, featuring several African-American characters so stereotyped, reparations may be due. The Olsens: we are all but pawns in their game.




ENVY
Starring Jack Black, Ben Stiller. Written by Steve Adams. Directed by Barry Levinson. (PG) 99 min. Opens Apr 30.

According to scuttlebutt, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David asked for his name to be removed from Envy’s screenplay credits — a rumour that should worry anyone who's seen his atrocious feature debut, Sour Grapes, where, in a decision that left Alan Smithee fuming, David was unashamedly billed as both writer and director. If he could own up to that mess, how bad must Envy have been? Talk about curbing your enthusiasm.

The whole picture has been plagued in pre-production. Test audience responses were reportedly so dire that director Barry Levinson re-edited the whole film, nixing many of Jack Black’s speeches and pretty much Ving Rhames’ entire role. Future generations may not consider this a crime on par with RKO burning 50 minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons, but it’s ominous when Levinson, the master of off-message dialogue, ends up cutting whole swathes of the stuff.

That Envy isn’t so bad after all is entirely thanks to Black, Ben Stiller and co-star Christopher Walken, whose charmingly ham-handed improvisations pull the film through its (many) rough patches. Stiller and Black play Nick and Tim, two factory-working rubes whose idea of a promotion is to receive a slightly more aerodynamic office chair. Their friendship is upset when Black, a perpetual daydreamer, strikes it rich with one of his manifold dumb ideas, the Vapoorizer, an aerosol that dissolves canine excreta — shit unhappens, in other words.

The eponymous green eye soon gets a hold of Stiller, in the form of (who else?) Walken, a bum named J-Man, who urges exquisite revenge against Black. Cue much slapstick, one-upmanship, and the second scene this year involving Ben Stiller shooting a horse. (If he manages the trio, Stiller should be awarded a medal for services against PETA.)

Walken, who plays himself in excelsis, is a riot, but Levinson’s slimline cuts leave little room for laughs between the relentless exposition. Rachel Weisz and Arrested Development’s Amy Poehler are also wasted in second-string, ’50s housewife roles.




GODSEND
Starring Greg Kinnear, Robert De Niro. Written by Mark Bomback. Directed by Nick Hamm. (14A) 102 min. Opens Apr 30.

A riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a Greg Kinnear movie, spook story Godsend manages to be both cheerfully entertaining and hyperventilatingly stupid. Stretching himself as usual, Kinnear plays whiny whitebread thirtysomething Paul Duncan, whose son Adam (Cameron Bright) receives an unexpected eighth birthday gift from the underside of a pick-up truck.

All is lost until Paul's wife, Jessie (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), runs into an oddfish biologist, Dr. Richard Wells (played by Robert De Niro, pining for the glory days of Rocky and Bullwinkle). Wells, who could hardly be more shifty if he wore an eyepatch and carried around a white cat, introduces himself to Jessie with the world's least appropriate greeting to a recently bereaved mother: "Excuse me, I'm a doctor. I specialize in fertility."

Wells turns out to be a cloning specialist who's "dropped out of the game," much like a pro-basketballer. He has, apparently, perfected a procedure that can re-impregnate Jessie with an exact genetic replica of her son. There is one proviso, though: if the birth is successful, the Duncans must cut ties with their family and move to live with Dr. Wells in Massachusetts, where he runs a giant, clandestine medical complex and accompanying small town. There is also a gym.

By this point, Godsend's narrative has become so ludicrous — Robert De Niro owns a village? — that the only choice is to relax and enjoy the mounting idiocy. Director Nick Hamm piles on the industrial strength clichés: at one point, there actually is a monster in a cupboard. Adam II, meanwhile, grows up just as precocious and vomit-inducing as the first, only to develop a fondness for sleepwalking with kitchen utensils, and an odd, possibly copyright-infringing ability to see the ghosts of dead children. Godsend may be a huge jolly for bad-movie lovers, but it's another nail in the coffin of De Niro's career.




SNOW PATROL
Final Straw
Polydor/Universal

The also-rans of the Scottish rock renaissance that brought us Mogwai and Arab Strap, Irish-bred Scot transplants Snow Patrol are less the hot, young sound of urban Glasgow than the leaky splutterings of a sodden Tuesday in the Orkneys. Final Straw, their dreary third LP, is a pea-souper of milquetoast pastiche, the indie that time forgot. "Wow" imitates the chug-a-lug strumming and distorted vocals of The Strokes, but sounds more like second-tier That Petrol Emotion. The rest is mere parody, with "Run" the inevitable failed Radiohead-circa-The-Bends impersonation, "How to Be Dead" the limp Coldplay-style chart-topper, and "Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking" a faulting grasp at Young Team-era Mogwai. Dullsville is a town in Dundee.




THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
Starring Elisha Cuthbert, Emile Hirsch. Written by Stuart Blumberg, David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg. Directed by Luke Greenfield. (14A) 109 min. Opens Feb 27.

From the auteurs what brung you National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, high school comedy The Girl Next Door marks an early bet-closer for 2004’s most terrible film – an impressive achievement, in a year already front-loaded by Aston Kutcher vehicles and Ice Cube action flicks.

Where Clueless took inspiration from Jane Austen’s Emma, TGND plays the rip-off game with two other beloved Penguin Classics, Sixteen Candles and Risky Business. Our hero is Matt (Corey Haim-redux Emile Hirsch), a nerdy class president with a crush on his next-door-neighbour Danielle, played by 24’s daughter-in-distress Elisha Cuthbert.

It doesn’t take long for the free-spirited Cuthbert to fall in love with Hirsch, enchanted by his pre-pubescent looks, lack of social graces and shifty peeping Tom tendencies. One wild night, she steals her geeky protégé away for an evening of tempestuous sexual awakening and… eh, you’ve already fallen asleep. What Matt doesn’t realise, however, is that Danielle is really – of course! – a porn star. She did make the first move, after all.

By the half-hour mark, The Girl Next Door's spectacular cruddiness verges on the hallucinatory, like the wet fever-dream of sexually insecure Hollywood hack, or Mullholland Drive rewritten by 12-year-olds. There’s a weird disjunction between action and script throughout. The camera and cast react to Danielle as if she was Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, or Venus herself –- but Cuthbert can only offer a diffident, blank-eyed performance, as arousing as a peanut butter and Marmite sandwich.

Odder still is the film’s conclusion, where an Ecstasy-stoned Matt receives a standing ovation for delivering a speech so transparently piss-poor, the Dalai Lama would’ve jumped upfront to throw tomatoes. The movie’s surprise twist, a painful incident involving a high school porn video shoot, is so lazily telegraphed that the directors may as well have added a 24-style ticker at the bottom of the screen: “30 minutes till the shock ending” … “Only five minutes before the twist”, and so ineptly on.

If there’s a movie worse than The Girl Next Doorreleased this year, it better be good.




MY MORNING JACKET ***
Acoustic Citsuoga EP
ATO Records/RCA

A five-track live set recorded last Halloween in Braintree, Massachusetts, Acoustic Citsuoga is a pastoral relief after the full-tilt boogie-ballast of My Morning Jacket’s last LP It Still Moves. Instead of blustering on like The Passion of the Duane Allman, the band here revisit some of their beauteous old ballads, and you can almost here the cicadas warbling along. MMJ's remarkable singer, Jim Jones, is oft-compared to Neil Young, but he's more accurately in the tradition of great Southern mumblers like Gene Clark and Michael Stipe. A few marks are deducted for Jones’s occasional R&B-style syllabic onanism – on “The Bear”, he twice sings the word “forever” as “fuh-eruv-err-aaooww-urrrgh” – but for a Hallows Eve gig, the scares are remarkably few.




RAISING HELEN
Starring Kate Hudson, Joan Cusack. Written by Patrick J. Clifton, Beth Rigazio, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Directed by Garry Marshall. (PG) 118 min.

If you haven’t cried during one of Garry Marshall’s movies (Beaches, Pretty Woman), you are either a liar or have boundlessly good taste.

In Raising Helen, the latest addition to his cinematic wet-wipe collection, Kate Hudson plays Helen Harris, a fashion agent with a plush Manhattan pad, wads of cash, and one-night-stands up the wazoo. A successful woman in her personal, sexual and business lives, Helen is - by Hollywood terms - only slightly less evil than dentists or terrorists. You know the score: she must be punished.

Being a Garry Marshall film, we can guess this punishment will take one of three forms: cancer, death, or cancer followed by death. Here it’s just death, that of Helen’s sister (Felicity Huffman), who is killed in a car crash and leaves Hudson to look after her three newly-orphaned children: antagonistic pudgeface Henry (Spencer Breslin), five-year-old daydreamer Sarah (Abigail Breslin) and sociopathic tweeny Audrey (Hayden Panetierre).

A mute protozoa could predict the rest of the story. In order to spend more time with the brats, Helen moves to Brooklyn and starts work at a car dealership. She’s also courted by a randy pastor who runs the local Baptist school (John Corbett, once again playing a lobotomised version of Chris the DJ from Northern Exposure). Needless to say, it’s not long before Hudson learns to love the little mites, as only a fictional character with great beauty and a disposable income can.

To say Raising Helen is kind of fun would not be to excuse its horrendous sexual politics, icksome sentiment, atrocious punning title, or scene-by-scene wasting of Joan Cusack (as Helen’s frumpy sister Jenny) and Hudson herself, who is typically exuberant in an undemanding role.

But although it’s ultimately too sensible and hankie-free to touch the classic status of Beaches, this is remarkably enjoyable fluff nonetheless.

JOHNSON FAMILY VACATION
Starring Cedric the Entertainer, Vanessa Williams. Written by Todd R. Jones, Earl Richey Jones. Directed by Christopher Erskin. (PG) 97 min. Opens Apr 2.

Wouldn’t you like a cool, refreshing glass of piss? I know I would. In recent years, it feels like I’ve seen more people drinking bodily fluids in the movies than Pepsi or Coke. So often, in fact, I’ve started to believe it can’t just be another lazy gross-out gag, but some sort of product placement for an experimental new soft drink.

In the ungrammatically monikered Johnson Family Vacation, the waste-imbiber in question is Barbershop’s Cedric the Entertainer, while the liquid-supplier is one Bow Wow, the artist formerly known to the pop world as Lil’ Bow Wow, and to his mother as Shad Gregory Moss.

Cedric plays Clark Griswold-wannabe Nate Johnson, an estranged husband and father-of-three. The plot, an inelegant mishmash of National Lampoon’s Vacation, The Great Outdoors and Le Règle du Jeu – actually, I’m lying about the last one – has Nate taking a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to Missouri, for the annual family reunion-cum-grudge match.

Those along for the ride include mom Vanessa Williams (in the sexy-but-boring Beverly D'Angelo role), Beyonce’s sis Solange Knowles (in the whorish-but-anonymous daughter part), and for reasons upon which life is too short to explain, Shannon Elizabeth as Chrishelle, a hitchhiking death cult member with a pet alligator.

An adult comedy too filled with cute kids, and a kids flick too filled with dick and tit jokes, Johnson Family Vacation makes an unworthy star vehicle for a comic of Cedric's talents. Acting the straight man, he plays throughout against his genius for improvisation. (Cedric also appears in a brief, heavily-made-up second role as a randy garage-owner, reprising Barbershop’s Eddie to lesser effect). At 97 minutes and about one-twentieth that many laughs, the Johnsons make for thirsty work. Can I interest you in a beverage?

THE LADYKILLERS
Starring Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. 105 min (14A). Opens Mar 26.

Woody Allen often bemoans his audiences for preferring his “earlier, funnier” films over his more serious works, like Interiors and September, two films so dull and pretentious they could only be loved by the French, or the dead. Lately however, the Coen Brothers have suffered a similar problem to Woody; the trouble is, unlike him, they’re still making comedies.

There are certain things we’ve come to expect from the Coens, and The Ladykillers, although a remake, is stuffed with their usual fat deckful of verbal and visual motifs: the hayseed accents, the odd-looking obese people in wigs, the fondness for dismemberment.

But what we haven’t come to expect from the Coens, also present here, are the following: tired racial stereotypes, a panoply of fart jokes, and those tripartite words of cinematic dread, “Starring Marlon Wayans.”

It’s a sign of the brothers’ desperation that even their funny names aren’t funny anymore. Tom Hanks plays Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III PhD – repeat that as much as you like, it won’t raise a giggle – a Colonel Sanders-resembling crook, who along with a cadre of equally inept felons, plans a robbery of a Memphis gambling boat.

Dorr’s landlady, the stout, God-fearing widow Marva (Irma P. Hall), quickly intimates that something no good is stirring, and when Dorr fails to bribe her with his contraband cash, a decision is quickly made: the bitch must be killed.

The original Ladykillers, shot by Alexander Mackendrick in 1955, is a minor movie, but with a major cast: Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Alec Guinness -- a one-time-only goldmine of British comics. Squared against those actors, neither Wayans nor Hanks’ frantic mugging can save the Coens’ stillborn script, with its fall-flat dialogue and too-telegraphed slapstick.

There are some nice touches: the portrait of Marva’s long-dead husband, with its ever-changing expressions; or the way Garth Pancake (J. K. Simmons), the 60s leftie thief, tries to swap the loot for a suitcase of Mother Jones magazines. But boys, boys – you really must try harder than this.

BLOOR CINEMA REOPENS
Eye Weekly, City Section, Mar 18 2003.

The Bolivians were rioting when the ceiling collapsed. It was the evening of January 16, and a sold-out crowd packed Bloor Cinema for The Corporation's Toronto premiere. Onscreen the city of Cochebamba was aflame, as police fired tear gas and live rounds at locals protesting a 35 per cent hike in the price of water.

At the Bloor, a piece of plaster the size of a cigarette pack fell on someone's head. The crowd panicked. "Somebody's been hurt!" a guy yelled. Smoke and debris dropped into the room. "Nobody's hurt!" the same guy screamed a couple seconds later.

It turned out everyone was fine, but five fire engines rode over and the police emergency-taped the block. More hundreds were queueing outside for a midnighter of Oz/Darkside, but Carm Bordonaro, who co-owns the cinema with his brother Paul, decided there was no option but to play it safe and shut shop for the night.

"The accident was a blessing in disguise," says Paul. "If not for this minor incident, something much worse could have happened down the line." At first the roof didn't seemed that badly scarred, but a later inspection revealed severe water damage, probably from an old burst pipe. For the reopening March 18, about 1,500 square feet of the roof has been rebuilt.

Joel Bakan, who scripted The Corporation, still keeps a memento of plaster from the night in his jacket . "I thought the premiere was great," he says. "The movie seemed to be having a real effect on people. They were energized, standing up and shouting. Then it occurred to me pieces of the ceiling were coming down."

Carm, who arrived late that evening to pick up his mom, remembers one guy yelling out for a refund. "I shouted, 'See you next week! We're a corporation, you'll have to sue us to get your money back.' Then everyone started laughing. The audience was so nice. If it was Famous Players, they woulda lynched me."

Since the ceiling came down, locals in the Annex have been worried the Bloor would close due to cash problems. Some, like the Victory Café and Dooney's, pledged to do fundraisers or even donate money outright. The day I interviewed the Bordonaro brothers, a middle-aged lady stood in the Bloor's lobby, tearing off Paul's ear and pointing a finger into his chest.

"I was completely verklempt when I heard you were closing," she said. "It wouldn't be the same 'round here without you." Despite their neighbours concerns, Paul and Carm are upbeat, and consider themselves there to stay. With Toronto's ever-diminishing number of reps, and never-decreasing number of multiplexes, it's no wonder the Bloor is so loved. In the forties, the pre-TV days, Toronto had over 150 neighbourhood cinemas, or "nabes." On Bloor alone, between Borden and Landsdowne, there were seven nabes: the Bloor, Midtown, Alhambra, Kenwood, Paradise, Metro and Doric.

Of these, Only the Midtown still maintains something like its original purpose, as the current Bloor Cinema. The old Bloor is now Lee's Palace; the Alhambra is a Swiss Chalet. The Metro is still there, too, showing porn seven days a week. The Festival cinemas do a fine showing, if you like your movies middlebrow or Miramax, but only the Bloor, or - if you dare - Reg Hartt's Cineforum, regularly offer the anarchic thrill of pure cinema, not just indie-flicks but underground and outsider works; shorts by local filmmakers; late-night Rocky Horror vamps; a rainbow coalition of ethnic film fests; even a revival of Deep Throat.

"Repertory cinemas are really important to the culture of Toronto," says Cineforum programmer Reg Hartt. "People do it with their own bucks, with no parachute, and they're not getting any thanks."

"When the chain stores come in, you might as well be anywhere," says local writer Brian Fawcett. "That's why I love the Bloor. It has a very important place here amongst the Starbucks and the Tim Horton's'. You don't want to lose the institutions."

Carm first purchased the Bloor in 1980, with Festival Cinema's Tom Litvinskas and Jerry Szczur (previously it had been the Eden, a skin-flick joint). Although he split with Festival a year later ("financial disagreements"), he and Paul negotiated a lease on the theatre out from under their old partners in 1999, transforming it from a much-loved dive into an art deco palace. "I coulda owned the Bloor twenty years ago and had it paid off," says Carm. "But that's the way life is."

Paul's here today to do some painting touch-ups. He's marginally quieter than his brother, if only in the way a tank makes less noise than a jet. He used to work as a music wholesaler, and twice stood as a fringe mayoral candidate for the old city of Scarborough, picking up 4,201 votes in 1982.

His brother Carm is a fast talker, even by the spieling standards of the entertainment business. To paraphrase Scott Feschuk, recounting what Carm says over five minutes of conversation would take, on average, six minutes. During a quarter-hour coffee break, he expounds on several subjects including (but not limited to): premonitionary dreams, homelessness in Belfast, yellow recycling bags, Dirty Dancing and the time Reg Hartt got his entire audience to turn up naked.

He's naturally excited about the impending reopening, with the typically Bloor-esque zombie chiller Undead. "I like trashy movies," Carm says. "We'll show anything for an audience. I don't care if people are biker killers, we'll make the cinema their own for the night. Not that I condone bike killing of course."

Both brothers would like the Bloor to be more "political" in the future, and plan to do a post-election fundraiser for NDP leader Jack Layton. Paul also has plans to update the screen and sound system; and Carm is addicted to his Final Cut Pro digital editing system, hoping to make further DV shorts of his own. But basically, as Paul says, "it's back to business as usual."

"We still want to bring a lot of offbeat stuff like Bus 174," says Carm, "but you have to augment that with second-runs, the Big Fishes, the Master and Commanders. You have to. People enjoy them, and they're good films. The trouble is the bad Hollywood stuff. They get huge press at the expense of the independents. It's like drooling over a photo of Britney Spears and then throwing away the Mona Lisa."

"Mind you," he adds, "I had sex with Britney Spears. And for the record, what she said about me isn't true."

The Bloor re-opens March 18 with the Rue Morgue presentation of Undead. Normal programming resumes on Friday. Bloor Cinema, 506 Bloor St. West. 416-516-2331.

THE PROCLAIMERS
Born Innocent
Persevere

Despite being chiefly -- no, make that wholly -- renowned for their poisonously irritating hits "Letter to America" and "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)," The Proclaimers' Craig and Charlie Reid have developed a reputation -- in MOJO-reading circles, at least -- for being two of rock 'n' roll's great lost songwriters. Born Innocent, produced by Edwyn Collins, proves that to be a less laughable notion than you might expect. "Blood on Your Hands" rollicks along like a lost Pogues classic, while "Hate My Love" has the monster-monster energy of auld Elvis Costello (before he grew a beard and invaded Canada). Had Robbie Williams not already sold his soul a thousandfold, he'd flog it all over again for a ballad like "Unguarded Moments." If you can tolerate their nasal Caledonian brogues, The Proclaimers could be in danger of giving Christian Rock a good name.




NEVER DIE ALONE
Starring DMX, David Arquette. Written by James Gibson. Directed by Ernest Dickerson. (18A) 88 min. Opens March 26.

Shot in fabulous digital Murk-O-Vision, Never Die Alone would like you to believe it’s a hard-bitten Harlem noir, a dirty little tale ripped straight from the ghetto streets.

In truth it more resembles one of those straight-to-video Quentin Tarantino rip-offs, like 2 Days in the Valley or Gang Related, that so clogged our screens and bargain bins in the mid-nineties. You know the sort: wacky casting (Tupac and James Belushi? DMX and David Arquette?), nasty, brutal, and not nearly short enough.

As an actor, Arquette has worn the same expression of hurt puzzlement on his face since he was stabbed at the end of Scream 2. Here he plays the puzzledly hurt Paul, a booze-sogged journalist who hangs out in Harlem gangsta bars all day, on what he tells his girlfriend are “anthropological research missions.”

One afternoon the perfect story drops bloodied in his lap, when coke kingpin King David (DMX) is stabbed to death next to him, leaving Arquette a set of cassettes detailing his thug life in New York and LA. It turns out David fled Manhattan a decade ago, but returned to pay off his dues and amends – only to be murdered first by Mike, a local tough seeking revenge (Barbershop’s Michael Ealy, deserving better).

Director Ernest Dickerson tries to set King David up as a glamorous, tragic film noir hero – but he’s obviously just an unreconstructed psychopath. Twice he cuts his girlfriends’ heroin with engine oil, causing them to choke to death. We’re supposed to view this as some kind of payback, that his girls were “ungrateful bitches” – but it’s impossible to imagine an audience who’ll find him sympathetic, unless they’ve just slipped roophies in their date’s popcorn.

Although based on a 1974 novel by cult writer Donald Goines, most of Never Die Alone is borrowed and blue: from Tarantino, Carlito’s Way, and Dickerson’s own (far superior) 1992 thriller Juice. James Gibson’s script even apes Sunset Boulevard, with King David narrating the story Joe Gillis-style, from beyond the grave. The dialogue’s no fount of Wilder-esque wit, though: “Whoever said you get a second chance in life,” David sagely advises, “… is a stupid motherfucker.”

Think of this review as second chance in life; don’t see the movie.




SPARTAN
Starring Val Kilmer, Tia Texada. Written and directed by David Mamet. (14A) 104 min. Opens March 12.

Calling his new thriller Spartan is an unusual statement of the obvious for David Mamet — he might as well have named it Tough Pricks Who Shout a Lot, or Difficult To Follow. At any rate, it's genre-deconstruction time again in Mametville; this time it's the spy flick. Val Kilmer plays Robert Scott, a Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of a young girl, Laura Newton, whom we presume (but are never told) is the president's daughter.

Scott is a typical Mamet-ian ballbuster who only lives to ignore the orders of his superiors, Stoddard (William H. Macy) and Burch (Ed O'Neill). Within the first five minutes, Scott has yelled at most of the supporting cast and ordered two soldiers to beat themselves to death — and yes, he's supposed to be the good guy.

This being a Mamet film, the concept of the good guy is looser than we might usually expect. No Mamet movie can last five minutes without at least six backstabbings, scams or double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses. It's not apparent whether Scott wants to find the missing teen or kill her himself.

Kilmer is well cast here: his vacant, generic looks are ideal for this ambiguous role, and he has Mamet-speak down to a polished T. The trouble is, we've been here before. Spartan may be a fine spy-procedural picture — probably the best since No Way Out — but like 2001's Heist, it's paint-by-numbers Mamet, and less clever than he seems to think.

Mamet may feel above his genre, but he never masters it. For all its double-agent twists and turns, Spartan is no less loopy or fast-paced than an average episode of Alias. That television series might be pulp, but at least its writers respect its genre appeal, and the characters have some emotional heft. The cast of Spartan remain ciphers to the end — less good cops than cop-outs. In earlier movies like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, the puzzles and austerities of Mamet's script seemed intentional, part of the films' essence and charm. In Spartan, however, those abstractions have begun to look less like style and more like laziness.

Since his protagonists' motivations are never meant to be clear-cut, Mamet has the perfect get-out clause for plot consistency, or three-dimensional characterization. Of all the performances, only Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher), as Scott's partner Curtis, offers anything resembling a real live soul. There's no grand scheme here, just a screenwriter who hoofs it as he goes along.

DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS
Starring Romola Garai, Diego Luna. Written by Boaz Yakin, Victoria Arch. Directed by Guy Ferland. (PG) 86 min. Opens Feb 27.

To begin with: no, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights isn't a sequel. Sadly we're denied the sight of a middle-aged Baby and Johnny, divorced and unhappy, strutting their stuff on the disco scene. But yes, to answer your next question, this is Dirty Dancing, and that is Patrick Swayze, appearing here in a cameo as — what else? — a dirty dance instructor.

Alas, the years haven't been kind to Swayze's once-famous phizog. With his leathery skin and botoxic features, he appears to have been the victim of a terrible mix-up at Madame Tussaud's, as if they accidentally re-sculpted the actor to look more like his waxwork.

Havana Nights, set in 1958, is effectively a prequel, although the storyline is an almost exact photostat of the original, right down to the Freudian father-figure theatrics. This time round, our heroine is Katey (Romola Garai), who moves to Cuba avec famille when daddy is transferred on business. These are the final days of the Batista tyranny, and Christina Aguilera-soundtracked revolution is in the air — but Katey only has time to dawdle at the lido, where she meets sultry pool boy Javier (Y Tu Mamá También's Diego Luna, crimes-against-humanity handsome).

Wouldn't you know it, Javier may be from the wrong side of the barrio, but he's more than fancy with his footwork. One night while hoofing off after work, he leads the staid Katey to an underground dance shack, whose customers like their music dirty, rugged and — mysteriously, this being the 1950s — sounding a lot like hip-hop. As with the earlier Jennifer Grey/Swayze partnership, the pair begins a love affair across ethnic and class boundaries, despite Katey's odd views on race. ("Look at the way they feel the music," she comments at one group of dancing Cubans, before, presumably, mounting her steed and returning to the plantation.)

Sadly, no amount of fast cutting can hide the fact that, for all their smouldering, Luna and Garai can't actually dance. The pair might be nominally better actors than Swayze and Grey, but neither has their kitschy, melodramatic bravado. The first Dirty Dancing was no Singin' in the Rain, but it remains an alchemical classic of trash. Compared to the copious teen shagging and backdoor abortions of the original, however, Havana Nights's sexual politics feel rather chaste — less Dirty Dancing than Mildly Risqué Humping. Luna is certainly a dish, but Garai's a wishy-washy substitute for Grey's fearless Baby. Who'd have thought, nearly 20 years on, the '80s could look like glory days?




BARBERSHOP 2: BACK IN BUSINESS
Starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer. Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Written by Don D Scott. 105 min (PG) Opens Feb 6.

You know the blueprint by now for Hollywood sequels: bigger budget, crasser gags, lotsa CGI, better haircuts for the stars, maybe even a few big-name cameos. Who cares about the script — there's Bruce Willis and Britney Spears! And Demi Moore in a swimsuit! And Leslie Nielsen as The President! And look — it's an old man being raped by a giant hamster! There's no beginning to the entertainment.

Thankfully, for the most part Barbershop 2: Back in Business sticks to the less-is-more schtick of the first film. The original, a smart but sentimental ensemble comedy, was like Seinfeld relocated to a Chicago South Side salon: a movie about nothing, just some guys and girls cutting heads and cracking wise. Any attempt to finagle with the formula would have ruined the simplicity of its basic premise.

Once more, Ice Cube plays beleaguered shop proprietor Calvin, still using that charismatic 90-minute smirk he confuses for acting. This time 'round, instead of butting heads with a slum landlord, Cube comes up against a far more insidious evil: Starbucks. Urban gentrification has brought the corporate coffee dollar to the ghetto, along with an upscale new hairdressing franchise, Nappy Cutz — its salon replete with black chrome floors, an aquarium, and other relics of bars that were fashionable in 1997. Yet again, Cube must decide whether to sell out to the highest bidder, or stay in the 'hood and watch his business get eaten alive by competition.

Wisely, the sequel ups the screentime of Cedric the Entertainer, who provides a second stellar turn as historical-revisionist barber Eddie, blindsiding the barbershop with asides about the Panthers and the Washington Sniper ("The Jackie Robinson of crime!"). The plot, needless to say, is hooey. Nobody needs a lecture on corporatization from an MGM movie filled with Pepsi and Dunkin' Donuts product placements — and it takes especial chutzpah to hear Cube sermonize on the evils of big-business franchises, when the entire presence of Queen Latifah (as an uptight beautician) is only meant to serve as advance publicity for her yet-to-be-filmed Beauty Shop spin-off. Still, there's no better ensemble working in mainstream Hollywood today than this crew, and the movie more than surfs on the goodwill engendered by the first, superior, film. Roll on, Barbershop: The HBO Miniseries.




THE AUTUMN DEFENSE
Circles
Arena Rock

After all the shemozzle over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco's much-delayed "experimental" album, the record itself proved to be disappointing, overblown fudge. By comparison, The Autumn Defense's Circles, featuring Wilco bassist John Stirratt on lead guitar and vocals, is a small, unheralded gem. This is laid-back California rock in extremis, with the band playing so low and slow you can almost hear the sideburns grow track-by-track. "Silence" fuses Lambchop with Jim O'Rourke's pastoral pop, while elsewhere Stirratt is unafraid to show off his less fashionable influences, on the Jackson Browne-ian "The World (Will Soon Turn Our Way)," and the gorgeous Wings doppelgänger "Some Kind of Fool." After a decade of cack-handed Gram Parsons impersonators, it's time to give another Byrd his due: the David Crosby revival starts here.

THE NOTWIST
Different Cars and Trains EP
Domino
The Notwist's Neon Golden, released in 2002, was one of that year's finest albums, a collection of gorgeous electronic ballads that invented a new musical sub-genre: country 'n' glitch. Sadly, there's not a single standout on this five-track EP, a collection of B-sides and remixes, mostly helmed by Notwist laptop-man Martin Gretschmann. Even the most dance-phobic of listeners should be able to catch the laziness at play here, with few of the remixes developing beyond the most hoary of dub and thump clichés. "Neon Golden" is misshapen into a bouncy, big-beat bore, and the once-pretty "Pilot" is remade as a queasy "Professional Widow"-style bass-bumper. Only "This Room," remixed by Four Tet and Manitoba, struggles to be heard over the cacophony, with Markus Archer's vocals cut up into a hi-energy disco babble. PI

THE SPECIAL GOODNESS
Land Air Sea
Epitaph

If Rivers Cuomo could collect royalties on every Weezer knockoff released in the last decade, there'd be riches enough to keep his family in spinster glasses and cross-hatch sweaters for centuries. The Special Goodness, a side-project for Weezer drummer Patrick Wilson, replicates the "Say it Ain't So" sound to such an obsessive degree that they're almost geek-rock's Single White Female, with Wilson playing Jennifer Jason Leigh to Cuomo's Bridget Fonda. That would be fine, of course, if Wilson displayed any of his boss' knack for melody, one-liners or killer hooks, but it's mostly an undistinguished bore, if not quite the disaster that was The Rentals' second album (there's no Damon Albarn raps, at least). Excepting the Pinkerton-esque riff-sludge of "Inside Your Heart," there's little here to suggest Wilson should quit the day job.

CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Glenne Headly. Written by Gail Parent. Directed by Sara Sugarman. (G) 89 min. Opens Feb 20.

An adaptation of the kids potboiler by Dyan Sheldon, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen follows the adventures of hi-skooler Lola Cep (Freaky Friday's Lindsay Lohan), a bratty aspirant luvvie with dreams of becoming the next Audrey Hepburn -- although Pia Zadora would be more realistic.

The story begins after Lola's parents' divorce, as her family relocates from rich, white Upper East Side Manhattan to the suburban hell of rich, white Dellwood, New Jersey. Despite Lola's misgivings about moving so far from Broadway and 42nd, she quickly settles herself, making friends with an obligatory ugly sidekick, Ella (Alison Pill), and making enemies with an obligatory high school bitch queen, Carla (Megan Fox).

Well, so far, so Disney: there's plenty of bright colours and pop songs to entertain the kids, and enough montages of Lohan and Pill in busty t-shirts keep the dads from snoozing. Still, even the most Ritalin-drugged of youngsters should experience an odd cognitive dissonance here. We're meant to cheer Lola on, the eternal underdog in a strange and brutal new world -- high school -- but she's clearly as much of an insufferable, privileged ass as Carla, her rival-in-drama-queenosity.

Lola enjoys a lifestyle the average Seventeen reader can only wet-dream of: a wealthy hippy mom (Glenne Headly), a boyband-esque boyfriend with a vintage sports car (Eli Marienthal), and a Narnia-sized wardrobe of trendy electroclash gear. Within the first 20 minutes, she's even landed the leading part in her high school production of Pygmalion (modernized in bafflingly non-ironic fashion as a hip-hop musical, Eliza Rocks).

It's like watching a re-cut version of Election, where Reese Witherspoon is the hero. If this were a 1980s movie, it would finish with Pill pushing Lola into a swimming pool, or driving her into a truck of manure -- a happy ending for everyone concerned. Instead, those indiginities are heaped upon Carla, who ends up getting dunked in fountain for daring to be only slightly more irritating than the lead character.

Business isn't helped by a wooden leading performance from Lohan, who, when the lighting is good, resembles Frankie Muniz in a blonde wig. As was the case with Freaky Friday, she's out-maneuvered at every moment by her co-star -- not Jamie Lee Curtis this time, but Pill as the gawky Ella, dominating the proceedings throughout despite her put-upon second-banana status.




LOVE LETTERS
Featuring Carmen Gillespie, D. Kirk Teeple. Written by A.R. Gurney. Directed by Alexander Galant. Presented by Lucard Theatrical Limited. Artword Alternative Theatre, 74 Portland. 416-366-7723 ext. 290.

Never underestimate the strength of a powerful cheese. To be sure, Love Letters is an elegant, accessible work, capably acted and staged by its miniscule crew. But boy, is it cheesy – and not just in a mild cheddar sense. This is a fragrant, full-on radioactive Camembert of a play. Which is not to say it stinks.

Love Letters was written in 1988 by A.R. Gurney, a prolific American schmaltz-merchant with an unabashed fondness for WASP-y tearjearkers, preferably involving fights at cocktail parties in New England mansions. Those with the un-ironic ability to weep at Debra Winger death scenes and Linda Ronstadt ballads will be in seventh, eighth and ninth heavens here. For everyone else however, it’ll just be hell.

D. Kirk Teeple and Carmen Gillespie star as Andy and Melissa, two bratty childhood sweethearts. Gurney’s set-up is forehead-slappingly simple: the two actors sit behind desks for the play’s entire duration, reciting letters they’ve sent each other over a lifetime’s correspondence. There’s barely any movement, unless you count the edgy moment where Melissa
changes her cardigan.

Over 50 years, we watch Andy grow from being a staid, simpleton, Catholic poppa’s boy, to being a staid, simpleton Massachusetts senator with a frightening resemblance to John Kerry. Melissa meanwhile, initially the more mature of the two, becomes a painter, but squanders her talent for a life of booze, depression, and every other sensitive artist cliché in the
book.

Needless to say, it doesn’t end well. The pair, obvious soulmates, never get it together, apart from the odd one-night-stand. Whether you buy into their misery – or whether it gives you the urge to upchuck on your programme notes – will depend on your tolerance for slush. But why not give in? Teeple and Gillespie offer such mannered, nigh on unhinged performances, that Love Letters shouldn’t work at all – and yet the finale doesn’t leave an umoist eye in the room.

What a show! What performances! What cheese.




TORQUE
Starring Monet Mazur, Ice Cube. Written by Matt Johnson. Directed by
Joseph Kahn. (14A) 84 min. Opens Jan 16.

Movies are routinely described as being “so good they’re bad”, but Torque, to quote the sage advice of Enid from Ghost World, is “so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.” The latest braindead-on-arrival offering from the producers of such gems as XXX and The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Torque has been pitched as The Fast and The Furious on motorbikes, but even that faint praise is pretentiously generous. From the first frame, you're deafened between the sound of revving engines and dragging knuckles.

Martin Henderson, the Aussie soap babe from The Ring, plays the unlucky but roguishly handsome biker Cary Ford, who’s set up by a rival hood (Matt Schulze) not once but twice: first for phoney drug dealing charges, then for murder. (Presumably to prove the screenwriter went to high school, Shulze’s villain is named Henry James. This provides one of Torque’s sadly few unintentional laughs, when Ford cries “Henry James! He set me up, man!”). Soon afterwards, following a bizarre biker festival sequence that acts as the movie's sole excuse to show some teasing, ugly T&A, Ford is forced to go on the run, with the murdered man’s brother (Ice Cube), the FBI’s “Biker Gang Division” and the author of The Bostonians not far in tow.

Hollywood action movie pickings are so scant at the moment, that we’ve learnt to forgive such minor misdemeanours as witless acting, sub-chat room scripting, and characterisation that would shame a Saturday morning cartoon. But even for a film that’s just an excuse for an 60-minute chase sequence, Torque is lazy and thrill-free. The Fast and The Furious was a minor exploitation classic, partly because of the weird, elephantine chemistry of Vin Diesel, but mostly because it remembered to include some pretty spectacular stunts. Torque, however, is bathed in mediocre CGI, and director Joseph Kahn edits the action sequences into such tiny split-second chops that any sense of excitement is killed off; next to Kahn, Michael Bay looks as languid as Renoir.




TEACHER'S PET
Featuring the voices of Nathan Lane, Debra Jo Rupp. Written by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner. Directed by Timothy Björklund. (G) 68 min.

Did Michael Eisner secretly appoint Wile E. Coyote as his new director of animation? Over the past few years, Disney has churned out one useless invention after another, each precisely engineered for a critical splattering. Pixar excepted, Eisner Corp. hasn't released a half-decent cartoon since 2000's The Emperor's New Groove, flailing away instead on a production line of limp originals (Brother Bear), creatively bankrupt sequels (The Jungle Book 2) and cheap television spinoffs -- the latest of which being the dire Teacher's Pet, based on a Saturday morning show of the same name.

Teacher's Pet is the creation of Gary Baseman, a talented painter and cartoonist for The New Yorker with a penchant for drawing potato-shaped noses, pus-infested animals and anthropomorphic, lactating blobs -- kids love him, in other words. Nathan Lane voices Spot Helperman, an ugly-looking blue dog who disguises himself as a human to sneak into school with his master, Leonard (Shaun Fleming). Like Pinocchio before him, Spot wishes he were a real boy, but rather than enlisting the help of a lovable top-hatted insectoid, gets Kelsey Grammer instead, playing an evil, Dr. Moreau-like scientist who creates genetic hybrids of pink alligators and Pee-Wee Herman.

What could have made for 12 minutes of enjoyable grotesquerie on the Cartoon Network quickly becomes tiresome at feature length. After the 53rd parade of radish-chinned, snot-drenched animal skeletons, Teacher's Pet ceases being fun and gross and starts being miserable and unpleasant -- a factor little helped by the drab script from Cheers alumni Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, nor by Lane's decision to voice Spot as a grating, Borscht-Belt vaudevillian. Relief comes as usual from the second-fiddle sidekicks, in the form of bird-and-scaredy-cat duo Pretty Boy and Mr. Jolly (voiced by the great Jerry Stiller and David Ogden Stiers, respectively). Perhaps they'd be deserving of their own spinoff spinoff, if Disney isn't too busy producing Oliver & Company: The New Generation.




PAUL BURRELL IN CANADA
From eyeWeekly's "Wandering Eye" diary section, Nov 2003.

Paul Burrell has done something very un-British. Instead of biting his stiff upper lip, Charles and Diana’s ex-butler has told all in A Royal Duty, a memoir about his service with the prince and princess.

The book is, like Diana, polite but deranged, changing tone without warning between commas.

A typical anecdote, on page 35, begins with Burrell gushing over the princess’s corgi-handling skills: “She is the most caring dog owner you could meet,” he (ghost) writes.

A few sentences later, it’s a canine Lord of the Flies: “The smallest and weakest [corgi] was being literally savaged by the others…[it’s] stomach had been torn open and there was blood and mess everywhere.”

Such egregious tattling was simply too much for The Daily Telegraph. “Nothing in the experience of the Queen could have prepared her for a world in which loyalty and service are forgotten,” it fumed. “We… prefer self-discipline and trustworthiness.”

The Wandering Eye caught up with Burrell at Chapters at Richmond and John recently, on the Toronto stop of his North American publicity jaunt. We are pleased to report him fighting fit; he will not be silenced.

He wore a tidy black suit with an open-necked pink shirt. Security was heavy, and Burrell was exiled to a single table near the Ursula K. Le Guins. Yards of emergency tape, velvet cordon and monobrowed guards cut the butler off from his queue of about 100 fans.

“Have you read the book,” Burrell asked us, as we gave him our complimentary copy to sign.

“Yes,” we lied. “About half-way through.”

“Well, did it surprise you? It’s not the book many people think it is.”

Not half. There are minor scandals here and there, but nothing too disgraceful: that Burrell bought porn for Prince William (the British, non-erection revealing kind, one hopes); that the Duke of Edinburgh isn’t such a cad; and that Prince Charles once threw a book at Burrell’s head for refusing to lie to Diana about Camilla Parker-Bowles.

“Remember,” Burell tells us conspiratorially, “I think it’s important that history is written by witnesses, not by people who reinvent things when they’ve never been there. So thanks for coming.”

Then it’s a firm handshake and we are escorted away, silently thanking him for such a refreshing redefinition of the word “history.”

Towards the exit, a semi-obese man tired of waiting for his wife in line begins to scream: “This is mind-blowing crap! Where’s the toilet? Me finding the toilet is way more important.”

A very unsporting Canadian.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES
Coach House Books, 99 pages, $16.95.

Like The Sopranos or 24, superhero comics are basically just soap operas with added ultraviolence. The reason 12-year-old kids dig reading, say, Ultimate X-Men isn’t to find out how Magneto plans to enslave the humanrace again this week, but to get the scoop on whether Phoenix is still in love with Cyclops – and why does she keep flirting with that Wolverine guy? And did Cyclops really sleep with super-villainess Emma Frost – that slut! Spider-Man and Daredevil? They're just the Sweet Valley High twins in red spandex.

All My Friends Are Superheroes, the Toronto-set debut novel from CBC radio producer Andrew Kaufman, is comic in a ha-ha rather than pow-kaboom kind of way, but it’s still soaked through with that magic soapy lather. Kaufman’s heroes don’t have supervillains for adversaries, just super-bad relationships. Their powers aren’t even special enough to mark them out from average jerks like you or I. There’s the Perfectionist, who’s obsessed with tidying things up; Hypno, a sexist asshole who can make any girl think she wants to sleep with him; and The Couch Surfer, who is “empowered with the ability to sustain life and limb without a job, steady companion, or permanent place of residence… and can be found roaming from couch to couch of friends’ apartments all across the city.”

The plot centers around Tom, who isn’t a hero, but is married to The Perfectionist, who’s been hypnotized by her ex into believing he’s invisible. As Tom attempts to convince his wife he exists before she forgets him entirely, Kaufman slowly introduces us to Tom’s league of unextraordinary superfriends, including The Amphibian, who can’t think of a use for his superpower (the ability to live underwater), and so gets a job as a motorcycle courier instead.

There’s a touch of vintage Richard Brautigan about Kaufman’s writing, in the way he combines a Hemingway-esque brusqueness with a more whimsical, deadpan naivety. The novel’s central comic conceit, of describing standard-issue neuroses as if they were fabulous superpowers, may be a one-joke premise -- but Kaufman delivers that joke with aplomb, and more importantly doesn’t loiter too long in the telling of it, flying away early with a punchline on page 99. Be sure to watch the skies for him in the future.

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN
Starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt. Written by Craig Titley, Joel Cohen, Sam Harper and Alec Sokolow. Directed by Shawn Levy. (PG) 98 min.

Somewhere between 1992's execrable Housesitter and 1995's excremental Sgt. Bilko, Steve Martin simply gave up the comedy ghost and morphed into Wallace Shawn's better-looking older brother. Now strictly dividing his time between "quality" projects like writing fiction for The New Yorker and jerk-for-hire box-office trash like Bringing Down the House, Martin's career has reached an impasse: his comedy isn't funny enough, and his more considered work, like the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, remains too frivolous to be taken seriously. (The exception was 1999's underrated, Martin-scripted Bowfinger, a cheap but exceedingly well-aimed shot at B-movie-making.)

An unexpected compensation is that Cheaper by the Dozen, a Christmas bauble from hack director Shawn Levy (Just Married), more than benefits from lowered expectations. Martin plays Tom Baker, a football coach and father of 12 who transplants his kids from Podunk, Il. to Chicago when he's offered the dream job of coaching his college football team. The family barely touches down in the big, bad city when journalist mom Kate (Bonnie Hunt) is whisked off on a coast-to-coast book tour, leaving Martin alone to look after the manifold little bastards. Cue various bumpkins-in-the-city montages, group hugs and predictable agonizing from Martin and Hunt about whether to sacrifice their careers for the good of the kids.

What just about saves Cheaper by the Dozen from its moralizing is a surprising lack of sentimentality, a watchable slow-boil performance from Martin and all-round excellent showings from the tykes, who manage to retain distinct personalities despite their multitude. Only Hilary Duff cellphones in a vapid performance as fashion-obsessed Lorraine (which only goes to prove how much craft Alicia and Reese put into their clueless/blonde roles). Far more distressing than the movie's 1950s worldview is its troubled third act, which piles the punishment on Hunt and Martin to a dizzying degree. In some ways, it's the most depressing family flick since the pets-in-a-blender antics of Babe 2: Pig in the City.

Still, Cheaper by the Dozen's willingness to un-sugarcoat the pill is commendable, and its narrative is unusually well constructed and MTV-jump-cut free. As for the post-credits outtake sequence in which Hunt is french-kissed by Smallville's Tom Welling, who plays her son in the movie: that's the kind of sick move in which any filmgoer should rejoice.




BLANKETS
By Craig Thompson. Top Shelf Productions, 592 pages, $41.99.

2003 was the year comics finally shed their fanboy image, and ironically it was thanks to a movie, American Splendor -- in particular Paul Giamatti's terrific performance as comic book writer Harvey Pekar, a disgraceful mensch about as far from the stereotypical Spawn nerd as Tom Waits is from Ryan Malcolm.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether that interest can translate hipster cachet into sales. Just like owning Kind of Blue and some Astrud Gilberto doesn't make you a jazz buff, graphic novels tend not to occupy more than token shelf space in the average home. Which is a shame not only for the indie-comics industry -- which has barely pushed a profit in its almost half-century existence -- but for readers themselves, who are missing out on some unique and wonderful literature.

Three outright classics of the form were published this year: Joe Sacco's gonzo Sarajevo story The Fixer, Marjane Satrapi's Iranian memoir Persepolis, and Craig Thompson's Blankets. The latter, the sophomore work of 28-year-old writer-artist Thompson, is the industry's current great black and white hope. At almost 600 pages, costing more than 40 bucks and the size of a well-stuffed Christmas goose, Blankets is too unwieldy for most handbags or satchels, but it's worth the expense as well as the lower-back pain.

A veiled autobiography of the author's childhood in rural Wisconsin, Blankets is a straightforward but never straitlaced recollection of family and first love. To begin with, the teenage Thompson is numbed to distraction by the Christian life of his strict, religious parents, but when he meets Raina, a fellow outcast at Bible camp, their relationship forces him into a crisis of faith about God and -- even worse -- Mom.

If that all sounds rather Wonder Years, don't worry -- Thompson's writing is witty throughout (one roadside billboard proclaims, "God is the Only Fire Insurance"), and equally, his observations about teen-geek-love mark him out as a superb, Sedaris-esque commentator on simple human embarrassment. He's also a gorgeous artist, and the wilfully naïve illustration makes a wonderful mirror to his protagonists' bent adolescent emotion.

Like American Splendor before it, Blankets proves that great graphic novels can be written without recourse to pulp fiction, cute animals or radioactive strippers in tights. What the comics world needs now is a pledge of faith from book readers to go the distance and actually buy a comic. Blankets would make anyone's perfect first, third or 43rd purchase.




Terence Trent D'Arby
Terence Trent D'Arby's Wildcard!
Sananda/Universal

Even among the legion of egotists in the music business, Terence Trent D'Arby has a special room of his own. Ever the wallflower, the man who once described himself as "a genius -- point fucking blank" has now changed his name to Sananda Maitreya, a Buddhist phrase that means "saviour of the universe." Needless to say, Wildcard! won't rock anyone's world, let alone save it. Opener "O Divina," a banjo-led showtune, sounds like Calexico being mugged by Hall and Oates. Elsewhere, D'Arby runs the gamut from Embrya-ish electronic funk to straitlaced pop and '80s coffee-table soul ("Goodbye Diane"). Little of it fits, however, thanks to D'Arby's inexpressive Pop Idol vocals, paper-thin songwriting and a murky trip-hop production that even Dave Stewart would consider passé.

Q&A: RYAN ADAMS
Eye Weekly music section, Dec 4/03

If dating Winona Ryder and Parker Posey in tandem hasn't already alienated Ryan Adams' boyish alt-country fanbase, then giving his new album the cockier-than-Courtney title of Rock N Roll can't have helped matters. Fortunately, the Artist Who'd Rather Not Be Known As Paul Westerberg's Mini-Me has come back with his best LP since his former band Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac. Where 2001's Gold sold out for Goo Goo Dolls goop, RNR flaunts Adams' jones for 1980s college radio, with Hüsker Dü; and Boy-era U2 an obvious influence. He's also releasing a (rather drearier) two-EP set, Love Is Hell, recorded with The Smiths' original producer John Porter. We caught up with Adams on tour in London, England, the same week fellow countryman (and ZZ Top-lover) George W. Bush came to town.

So, how's olde England treating you?
It's fuckin' depressing. We're at the BBC studio to perform on Jools Holland's music show, and it's dark at 4:30 so it might as well be fuckin' midnight. It's fucked up. I miss being home in New York.

Are the Brits giving you slack over your president's visit?
Aw, I don't give a fuck about that guy. He's not my president. I don't think he's anybody in the US's president. Apparently he didn't even win the election. He's an idiot. I think he bumped his head on the plane on the way here. He's just a masthead, it's Donald Rumsfeld who's running stuff. But what do I know? It's none of my business, they're the ones that control the world, I just wanna play music.

Rock N Roll is lot heavier and less polished than Gold. Was that a deliberate attempt to rough things up?
It's more interesting for people to say I have a masterplan or something, but I just wrote a bunch of songs and put them on the record. It happened that me and Johnny [Pisano, Adams' bassist] don't have an acoustic guitar in our rehearsal space, just electrics. We wanted to play more loud and obtuse, like a live show.

No plans to release a trendy electronica record then?
Well, I've got some pretty weird shit at the house. I'd like to write an opera or something, but there's not enough fuckin' time in the day. I have a new band, Werewolph, with me, Johnny on drums, my friend Spanky singing, and this girl Sarah on bass. It's really fuckin' heavy stuff. Really, really, really. Goth-heavy.

Like the Sisters of Mercy?
No, more like The Melvins. Some of the other guys think it sounds like Black Sabbath or Voivod. It's gonna come out on my label when it's done, but I have to get home from touring to record it.

You're not playing any older music on the tour.
I played songs [from the new albums] on the first night and people bitched about 'em online and stuff. But then I thought, "fuck everybody," so now I'm only doing songs from Love Is Hell and Rock N Roll. It's like, shit man, I just released two fuckin' records, I should probably be playing them on tour. Maybe the new stuff doesn't make people happy, maybe they want me to stay the same. It's not gonna happen though. I have to grow up.

Music journalists tend to be quite snarky about your image as a rock 'n' roll hellraiser.
Y'know, whatever karmatically I've done to end up in this position where I seem to be in constant quarrel with people, people havin' problems with me, it's just fuckin' amazing. Y'know, I must have lynched the fuck out of somebody in a past life, or maybe some of my relatives were in the slave trade, or like they were the guys that invented bullets. Something very wrong. (Pause.) No, I'm just joking.

Pet Shop Boys
PopArt
Parlaphone/EMI

Great Pop Questions, No. 43: How did two Kraftwerk fans with a fondness for pointy hats, Village People covers and pitiful white raps about Issey Miyake conspire to become the best British band since The Beatles? The answers are right here on PopArt, a two-disc retrospective of every PSB single from 1985-present (save for "Absolutely Fabulous," which has been conveniently Stalin-ized out of the picture). Cynics might suggest that PopArt's non-chronological track sequence puts a deceptive gloss on the Pettoes' patchy, post-Very career, but why protest when this generous, 150-minute set contains "Rent," "DJ Culture" and 20-odd-more of the most heartbreaking 45s ever recorded? Even new track "Flamboyant," an indie-NRG cousin to Belle & Sebastian's recent "Stay Loose," excels - it's the best PSB song in over a decade. As Neil Tennant would say, "It's quite good, actually." PAUL ISAACS

Michael Jackson
Number Ones
Epic

It's easy to forget that, before we knew Michael Jackson as a suspected pederast, bad parent and a nose-imploded, creatively bankrupt caricature, he was also a fine singer, entertainer and one of the best singles artists in pop history. With that in mind, it shouldn't be difficult to assemble a five-star collection of Jackson's greatest hits, right? And yet even on a Christmas cash-in scale, Number Ones is a mediocre rip-off. By concentrating only on the chart-toppers, Ones drops some of MJ's most defining hits ("Human Nature," "P.Y.T.," "Leave Me Alone") in favour of late-career, processed pap ("Dirty Diana" "You Rock My World" and "Earth Song," which wasn't even released as a single in North America). For completists, there's an obligatory unreleased track, "One More Chance," a mediocre slow jam written by fellow alleged-sex-offender R Kelly, and a turgid live version of "Ben." If you want to do Mike a good deed this Yule, just buy Off the Wall instead.




TEQUILA VAMPIRE MATINEE
Featuring JD Nicholsen, Amy Rutherford. Directed by Ted Dykstra. Book, lyrics and music by Kevin Quain. Presented by Rat-A-Tat-Tat. To Dec 7. Tue-Sat 8pm; Sun 2:30pm & 7pm. $25-$34; Sun PWYC or $16 advance. Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson. 416-504-7529. torontoboxoffice.ca.

If Toronto singer-songwriter Kevin Quain is really so bothered by the Tom Waits comparisons, perhaps he should stop hanging around in a goatee, bowler hat and waistcoat, then falling asleep at the piano between goblet-sized jiggers of Wild Turkey. Still, Waits never wrote a burlesque musical about pyromaniacal vampires -- and if he ever does, who's to say it'd be any more wondrous than Tequila Vampire Matinee, Quain's theatrical debut?

I haven't seen a more appreciative audience reaction to a play since Charlton Heston died at the end of A Man for All Seasons. A modern retelling of Pagliacci set in a three-horseshoe town cantina, TVM is a tall tale in the great North American bullshitting tradition. Our protagonists are travelling clowns Big Daddy (J.D. Nicholsen) and Sugar Plum (Amy Rutherford in a pitch-perfect performance), two no-biz chancers for whom the Z-list would be a step up.

Together with their aides de camp, Lulu (Shelley Simester) and Twitch (Stephen Sparks), the pair settle at a cantina, owned by the Tyrone Power-like, faux-Mexican Ramon (Brendan Wall). A love triangle between Sugar, Big Daddy and Ramon takes seconds to erupt, and the bar itself may be haunted by several hungry bloodsuckers.

Quain's play is so generous and amusing that it's humbug to mention its faults. But there are a couple: as Big Daddy, Nicholsen's accent wavers distractingly between cod-British and cod-Deep Southern; he'd be better off sticking to the former, which he manages more ably (if Buffy has prepared us for anything, it's Cockney vamps). And there are also a few bizarrely unresolved subplots -- a few extra lines of exposition might clear up some confusion in the final act.

On the whole, though, this is a magical effort, superbly staged and with memorable songs (only one of which is a ringer for Waits' "Innocent When You Dream"). It deserves a long and successful run.




ENTER... ZOMBIE KING
Starring El Fuego, Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart (above). Directed by Stacey Case. Written by Bill Marks and Sean K. Robb. 72 mins.

Ever watched Night of the Living Dead and thought, "What this movie really needs is an indie-rock soundtrack, some intermittent girl-on-girl action and assorted cameos from the stars of Canadian masked wrestling?" Well, your dream could finally become a reality with Enter... Zombie King. Directed by Stacey Case, guitarist for masked wrassle-rockers The Tijuana Bibles (who also provide the music), EZK is stacked full of grapplin' jocks, flesh-eatin' zombies and artsy-chick nudity. It's trash, of course, but that's kinda the point. Our hero is Ulysses (Jules Delorme), the sort of wrestler who won't even remove his mask to brush his teeth. When a series of zombie killings begin to plague his 'hood, Ulysses is forced to assemble a cadre of similarly bemasked fatsos to fight the undead menace -- with body-slammin' results. Though it's neither as well-scripted as a Romero film, nor as unselfconsciously cheesy as a Mexican wrestling picture, EZK is so inspiringly lowbrow it's practically zen. It could just be the best popcorn movie since Citizen Kane Meets the Mummy.

Kelly Osbourne
Changes
Sanctuary

Sorry to disappoint, but this isn’t a new Kelly Osbourne record – I know, I know – just a revamped re-release of 2002’s Shut Up, her sprightly but unsightly Avril-does-Daisy Chainsaw debut. As a kind of My First Punk Album for seven-year-old girls, Changes succeeds admirably: it’s full of bratty, catchy bubblegum ("Disconnected", "Contradiction"), and the lyrics won’t offend the sternest of Midwestern moms. Even "Coolhead", an ode to PMS, is more instructive than destructive. Less successful are the bonus tracks: a lame, rocked-up "Papa Don’t Preach"; four dire live recordings; and a projectile vomit-inducing duet with dad on Black Sabbath’s lighter-waving anthem "Changes". Just say no, kids. Perhaps Alice Cooper’s "Only Women Bleed" would have been a better choice.

The Book Against God
James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 257 pages.

“Intellectuals are the jocks of the mind,” somebody once said — I think it was Burt Reynolds — and if that’s the case, then the leading jock of literary intellectuals must be James Wood, The New Republic’s hatchet man-in-chief. As a book reviewer, Wood has been gleefully unafraid to feast on the most sacred of canonical cows: Pynchon, Roth, Bellow and Updike have all been subject to his bitchy, scholarly reviews. In the last year alone, he’s savaged Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis as “a bald Bildung, fairly conventially mapped,” and robustly trashed Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man as “cartoonish” and “vacant.”

His first novel, The Book Against God, proves Wood to be a bully without creative ballast. It’s a shallow squib of a tome, one that falls prey to exactly the kind of bogusness the author has spent the past decade bemoaning in others. Wood has often been scathing about what he calls the “hysterical realist” idiom — the sort of prolix, sickeningly in-the-now novel as practiced by Smith and DeLillo, or Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers. Sweepingly, Wood has characterized these authors as the sort of writers who focus on facts at the expense of character. “The novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result...is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very ‘brilliant’ books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.” (Smith actually had the last word and best line in this argument, when in a response piece for The Guardian she reassured Wood she had no plans to “sit in my Kilburn bunker, planning some 700-page generational saga set on an incorporated McDonald’s island north of Tonga.”)

And yet if only Wood had taken the time to diagnose these problems with his own novel. For The Book Against God is nauseatingly stuffed with “things” — the working methods of loan sharks! How Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven! The hypocrisies of Kierkegaardian philosophy! — all entirely at the expense of “knowing a single human being.” Our main protagonist is the sketchily drawn Thomas Bunting, a thirtysomething academic failure, still in permanent rebellion against his father, who is an Anglican priest. As his Philosophy PhD and marriage crumble in tandem, Bunting invests more and more of his energies into his “BAG” — the eponymous Book of the title — an atheistic tract that is part Nietzsche, part Adrian Mole.

Our Thomas remains an avowedly indifferent figure throughout: a liar and bad husband, he’s a bit of a balding bildung himself. Wood has often praised Philip Roth for being unafraid to create unsympathetic leading characters, and like Roth’s own Mickey Sabbath (from Sabbath’s Theater), Bunting remains a nasty little shit to the last. In the final chapters, when he’s asked to deliver the eulogy at his father’s funeral, Bunting instead gloats about how relieved he is to be wearing “expensive Italian shoes”. It’s never clear however, whether Bunting is unredeemable because Wood wants him to be so, or because as a novelist he’s simply not up to the task of showing believable character development. Wood’s storytelling never has the insight (or, most crucially, humour) of a Lucky Jim or Herzog — Bunting’s obvious antecedents.

But even as a novel of ideas, the book is a mess. The central themes of the novel — the death of God, the meaning of suffering, all that first-year undergrad philosophy crap — aren’t addressed through the novel’s action, but in huge swaths of clunky, expositional character dialogue. Everyone here, from restaurant waiters, to a poor parishioner Thomas befriends, to his conveniently all-knowing father, seems to have taken some sort of correspondence course in existential philosophy. This is one of those novels in which it’s not unusual for a character to shout at the dinner table, “I can’t stand Mr. Norrington’s psuedo-Dostoevskian line of argument, it’s so fucking unempirical.”

But it’s also so fucking unbelievable. The structure is less imitative of Russian literature than of ’70s porn, with Nietzsche references where the blowjobs should be. Typical scene: character enters room; characters talk; characters undress; characters discuss why God left us alone in the universe. Repeat ad nauseam. Wood’s like a man who grew up reading Woody Allen’s literary parodies, but thought they were the real thing. Besides, I could sum up the book’s entire argument in a four-line poem I found on a bathroom wall yesterday evening: “If His ways were less mysterious / Perhaps it would be clear / why the Lord took Otis Redding / but left Rod Stewart here.” Maybe the graffiti artist never heard A Nod Is as Good as a Wink. But then again, everyone’s a critic.

RANDY NEWMAN
The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1
Nonesuch/Warner

There's no getting around these facts: Randy Newman is a squat, plump, ugly, old man and he sings like a cancer victim with his dick caught in his zipper. Other than that, the guy's a fucking genius. Songbook, Newman's first recording for Nonesuch, Emmylou Harris' label, is a solo re-recording of his greatest hits, piano bar-style. It won't win him a hip, younger audience like Harris', but it's sharp, mellow and satisfactorily depressing enough to warm -- or freeze -- the heart of any regular old fan. There's no "I Love LA" (shame) or "Short People" (hurrah), but ballads "Lonely at the Top" and "I Think it's Going to Rain Today" are as haunting as ever, while "Rednecks" and "Political Science" (a rollicking ditty from 1972's classic Sail Away about America starting World War III) look spookily prescient. New material soon, please.




STEREOLAB
Instant O in the Universe
Elektra/Warner

Who needs to own more than one Stereolab album? A single LP of psychedelic Krautrock prog-bossa nova is fine, but seven? That's the kind of recording rate that makes Frank Zappa look tasteful. For once, Instant O in the Universe finds the 'Lab in restrained and funky form. The first release since the 2002 death of keyboardist Mary Hansen, this EP is their most direct and tuneful collection since 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet. It's also -- perhaps not coincidentally -- the first in years not to rely on the over-prettifying input of High Llamas' multi-instrumentalist Sean O'Hagan, a man for whom no guitar is necessary when three harpsichords and the London Philharmonic Orchestra will do. But this is still for fans only.




ELVIS COSTELLO
North
Deutsche Grammophon/Universal

Elvis Costello is punk rock's Woody Allen, an ambitious dilettante still butting heads with the fans who prefer his "older, rockier ones." North, a bloodless collection of wannabe-jazz standards written about new flame Diana Krall, isn't a career-killer of sleeping-with-your-stepdaughter proportions, but it's easily EC's most anodyne album to date. "Someone Took the Words Away" and "When it Sings" are tired rewrites of "Almost Blue," while "I'm in the Mood Again" evokes hideous images of Costello as an Aznavour-esque loverman. If North is Costello and Krall's "love" album, then roll on their Blood on the Tracks.

FIX: THE STORY OF AN ADDICTED CITY.
Directed by Nettie Wild. (14A) 93 min.

Vancouver has a drug problem like the Vatican has a Pope problem. The main port supply of Asian heroin in North America, Vancouver has suffered over 2,000 drug-overdose deaths in the past decade. Of the 3,000 addicts who currently haunt the Downtown Eastside, 30 per cent are said to be HIV-positive, while 85 to 90 per cent have hepatitis C.

Things are beginning to change, however, and this September the city opened its first safe-injection site. The struggle to get that site built represents just one narrative strand of Nettie Wild's terrific documentary, Fix: The Story of an Addicted City. Forget the unwieldy title and worthy subject matter, this is a breathless piece of reportage, like a vintage New Yorker feature put to film: expansive, comic, digressive and ever so slightly demented.

Fix is structured like a classic three-act play, with action and character propelling the narrative. "It's like this incredibly complicated political drama," says Wild, a Vancouver native, in a recent interview in Toronto. "So you need a clear narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Otherwise the audience is lost."

The films opens on Dean Wilson, an articulate heroin user with Dee Dee Ramone's looks and Nick Nolte's screen presence. Wilson used to be an IBM salesman until his co-workers saw the tattoos and track marks on his arms. A perpetual quitter, at one point Wild films Wilson shooting smack just to get through his methadone withdrawal -- a classic example of addict logic.

Then there's Ann Livingston, the president of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. She's an avid church-goer, a non-user and confrontational as hell. She also might just be involved with Wilson, a fact Fix never makes explicit. (In fact, the two have had a kid together since filming ended).

Livingston is introduced while driving a truck full of addicts dressed as skeletons to a city council meeting, which is where we meet the film's other protagonist, (now ex-) Vancouver mayor Philip Owen. Unlike Livingston and Wilson, the grey-haired Owen is a total straight-edge: we initially see him showing off his expensive Mercedes, then dancing the funky chicken at a black-tie function, a picture of the world's most embarassing dad.

In the end though, the film is as much about Livingston's attempt to open a safe-injection site, and Wilson's attempt to kick the habit, as it is the story of the deeply conservative Owen's own rebellion. Suprisingly, this starchy mayor turns out to be Livingston's biggest supporter.

"The first time I met Philip, I thought he was kind of square," Wild says. "But then I got really surprised. First [time] we filmed him, he said we should go to the Downtown Eastside. He knew the street prices of heroin and crack, he knew the users in the alleys. They were all yelling, 'Hey Phil!' We discovered this complicated human being.

"In fact, I was really lucky with all the main characters, Livingston and Wilson too. They're all very intense, bigger than life. You couldn't make them up."

Eventually, Owen was kicked out of his own political party for supporting injection sites and drug reforms. In a generous move (and ironic fuck-you to his old colleagues), he used the $140,000 in funds raised at his farewell bash to pay for Fix's 35mm blow-up and cross-country tour.

Owen, Wilson and Livingston have even trekked the length of Canada with Wild to talk in special post-screening forums. "We're like the weirdest travelling roadshow ever," she says. "It's strange. Philip's wife always thought he was nuts for letting us near him."

DAMIEN RICE
O
Warner

The latest in a ceaseless death march of sensitive white boys pretending to be Nick Drake, Damien Rice is, incredibly, a star in his native Ireland, where his debut O went triple-platinum this year. (It also just won the Shortlist Music Prize in the US.) A mournful confection of weak "Saturday Sun" rewrites, O takes the Five Leaves Left template and augments it with insipid strings ("Amie"), sub-Radiohead guitar noodles ("I Remember") and even an opera singer ("Eskimo"). Regrettably, the over-instrumentation only underscores how weedy Rice's voice sounds, especially against haunting backing vocalist Lisa Hannigan's. There are some passable moments, including pretty single "Volcano" and the bitter, Triffids-esque "Cheers Darlin'," but you're usually just two verses away from some strangulated Jeff Buckley impression. File under: Not as Bad as Starsailor (But Close).

RON SEXSMITH
Rarities
Linus

Last year's Cobblestone Runway saw Ron Sexsmith ditch the acoustic guitar for synths and electro-pop beats, most successfully on "Dragonfly on Bay Street," the best song the Spice Girls never recorded. Rarities, a stop-gap collection of B-sides, live cuts and demos, is more traditional: less beat-driven, mostly acoustic, and not a little dull. Some musicians use the B-side as a means to experiment, piss about or cover their favourite drinking song; Rarities is strictly Sexsmith-by-numbers. The pace is set by sedate opener, "On a Whim," with the tempo thenceforth varying from static to stagnant. ("Good Old Desk," which sounds like Randy Newman singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," stands out, but only on account of its ridiculousness.) Rarities is, however, redeemed by "Almost Always," a gorgeous country-soul ballad in a Get Happy!!-era Elvis Costello style. Kazaa that song, and listen for the rest at Starbucks.

DUPLEX
Starring Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore. Written by Larry Doyle, John Hamburg. Directed by Danny DeVito. (PG) 104 min.

Some movies can only be understood as unconscious acts of anti-semitism towards the pioneering Jews who first built the film industry. What else could explain Duplex, Danny DeVito's latest cinematic warcrime? A tardy addition to the killin' old folks movie genre (Throw Momma From the Train, A Fish Called Wanda), Duplex features Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as Alex and Nancy, two artsy Manhattanites with a disposable income and latent psychopathic tendencies. Unable to rent a New York City apartment that's larger than a hotdog stand, or less expensive than Buckingham Palace, the couple plump for a dream-home duplex in inexpensive, up-and-coming Brooklyn.

But they haven't counted on the machinations of Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essel), their crotchety battleaxe of a neighbour. Wearied by her habit of blasting the television at full volume and counting blueberries one by one, Stiller and Barrymore naturally decide to off the old cow -- only in true Ladykillers form, she proves far more resilient than her young assailants.

Stiller is in familiar, yuppie-nebbish form here, like Gaylord Focker in Meet the Parents, only with a slightly less amusing name. At one point, Barrymore vomits on his head, which is at least better than getting her to speak dialogue. The eightysomething Essel (only previous credit: Ali G Indahouse) makes her Hollywood debut with Duplex, and proves to have the acting chops of a young Britney Spears.

If I were to reveal here that Mrs. Connelly has a comedy parrot sidekick, that said bird is named "Little Dick," and that at one point it flies into Barrymore's hair causing endless mirth -- that would be warning enough for us all, and we could move on to better things, like rolling down a hill of broken glass, or watching a John Ritter movie marathon. Sadly, in the spirit of full disclosure I must also warn you that the cast includes the wonderful Harvey Fierstein and Wallace Shawn. Both should now retire to their trailers and think quietly about what they've done.

CAMP
Starring Daniel Letterle, Don Dixon. Written and directed by Todd Graff. (PG) 114 min.

Camp Ovation is a summer camp for musical theatre-obsessed teens in upstate New York, the sort of kids who’ll burst into show tunes at the drop of a top hat, or a tantrum at the drop of a tiara. The sort of kids who know who Stephen Sondheim is, but not Neil Young. The sort of kids who are wallflowers in their high school corridor, but on stage blossom into extravagant Oliviers and Bernhardts. The sort of kids who – oh forget it, you know who I’m talking about. Dorks. Camp, the directing debut from actor and writer Todd Graff, follows three such dorks during the high and low notes of their summer at Camp Ovation: Vlad (David Letterle), the sexually ambiguous jock dork; Michael (Robin De Jesus), the acne-ridden gay dork; and Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), the insecure female dorkette. There’s an underpowered love triangle between the trio: Ellen fancies Vlad; Michael fantasises about Vlad; and Vlad just wants to screw whoever he can – or at the very least bare his waxy white chest to them.

Still, this earnest, after-school special of a movie is clearly a fraud: why does Graff focus on straight-edged borehole Vlad, when Michael – a kind of neo-Rickie from My So-Called Life – is clearly the star of the show? For a movie bursting at the sequins with teen homoeroticism, buckle-busting musical numbers, and even a cameo from Sondheim himself, Camp plays it awfully straight.

My name is Paul.