“Take This Waltz” is a beautiful film. Channelling the smouldering (and stalkerish) sexuality of Wong Kar-Wai’s “In The Mood For Love” while also slightly cramping its vibrant visual style, director Sarah Polley is in her element when contextualizing life — long sighs, lingering glances and carnal tension spill off the screen with prodigious visual ease.

Michelle Williams slides seamlessly into the role of Margot, a 28 year-old aspiring writer and young wife, adrift in the kind of ennui those life decisions predictably entail. Williams’ performance is sublime as she turns in her best Holden Caulfield-in-a-long-term-relationship impression.

Seth Rogen plays Margot’s doting, teddy bear of a husband Lou, who despite his evident goofiness manages to elicit sympathetic good-guy vibes in potentially ominous ways. The final piece of Waltz’s love triangle is Daniel, played by relative newcomer Luke Kirby. Daniel is Margot’s neighbour and the manifestation of her physical and emotional desire, after an initial meeting that straddles the grey area between cutely serendipitous and cloyingly ridiculous.

Toronto serves as the gorgeous, bokeh backdrop for Polley’s bittersweet sophomore effort. Not to be understated, the Earl Haig Secondary School alumnus (shoutout class of 2001!) makes her hometown look better than perhaps any other film in memory. Toronto’s local haunts and iconic neighbourhoods are supersaturated in summer palates; Polley’s penchant for focusing on minutiae transforms recognizable streets into an atmospheric haze that parallels Margot’s myopic internal conflict.

It’s worth tangentially noting that at some point in the film, I stopped consciously observing that the movie was purposely set and unfolding in Toronto. Considering an early reference to “Dufferin and Queen” generated cheering from my audience, it seems pertinent that Sarah Polley might be the first director to ever make Toronto gracefully inconspicuous on screen. But I digress.

Polley’s attempts to portray life’s vagaries are often hampered by her own ambition; delicate visuals are often juxtaposed with overwrought dialogue. Moreover, excess words do extra disservice by being slightly too on-point for the films artful ambiguity. Polley is definitely more concise speaking with a camera instead of a pen.

Still, sometimes it works. In one particular scene shot in the Lakeview Diner, Daniel verbally ravishes Margot with a raw intimacy that may forever redefine the art of sexting. The monologue is in some ways absurd, but also easily the most legitimately erotic moment in the movie.

The film clocks in at an ambitious two hours long. Tightening it down by 20 minutes might have resulted in an instant classic, but it’s hard to nitpick because, much like real life, Polley’s story is not easily defined.

If I had to oversimplify, “Take This Waltz” might be a sexually charged, romantic-dramedy, coming-of-age-tale. Mostly however, it’s just a gorgeous and artful exploration of modern life.

Stephane Gauger is a Vietnamese-American filmmaker based in L.A. whose latest work, Saigon Electric, premieres in Canada tonight as part of the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. A hip-hop dance film based in Vietnam, Saigon Electric tells the story of a traditional ribbon dancer from the countryside named Mai who moves to the city to audition at a major dance academy. Failing her entrance exam but unwilling to return home, Mai befriends a local b-girl named Kim, who introduces Mai to her crew, Saigon Fresh. The new friends navigate family issues and class barriers as they prepare for a showdown with a rival crew, the privileged rich kids called the North Killaz.

The Ashcan: You were born in Vietnam, raised in Orange Country, right? Can you talk a bit about your background?

Stephane Gauger: Yeah, you can see the influence in my work. I have biracial parents – no wait, excuse me, I’m biracial [laughs]. I grew up with Vietnamese culture at home. I had a Vietnamese grandmother that didn’t speak any English so I spoke Vietnamese around the house and because of that, I’m fortunate to be able to work in Vietnam, to direct and produce in Vietnam, pretty easily. But yeah, if you ever meet me, you’ll see that I’m not very Asian looking [laughs].

Do you stay in L.A. mostly or do you go back a lot?

I go back to Vietnam for projects. I came to America when I was 5, so I’m pretty Americanized. I first went back to Vietnam in 1994; at that time it was still poor – and I’ve gone back about 20 times – and every time I go back , it just changes drastically.

I know for other filmmakers I’ve spoken to who were born in Asia but are living elsewhere, going back to film in their homelands seems to be a way of revisiting or learning about their culture. Is that what it’s like for you?

Uhm, I think I’m past the stage of getting to know my culture. Especially with my two narrative films, it was maybe [more about] sharing the culture. Like with my first feature for example, Owl and the Sparrow, what I wanted to share was that Saigon was a cosmopolitan city just like New York or Paris and that people have the same feelings of, you know, loneliness there. The country itself is still sort of getting out of the “third world” but the major cities are pretty cosmopolitan, I’d say.

In Saigon Electric you shoot Vietnam quite strikingly, but you don’t exoticize the scenery. 

Well, my interests in telling Vietnamese stories lie more on the urban side, rather than the postcard side, the countryside. That’s what the tourist board would like you to see – traditional dresses in rice fields with buffaloes—but I’m more of a city person and more interested in the hustle and bustle of the city. I tend to keep it on the street as much as I can.

Before you started work on the film, how into the Vietnamese hip-hop scene were you?

Very, very minimal. I had to play a lot of catch-up. Because I’m based in L.A., what I did first was I started scouting the crews on Youtube. So I got a sense of who the crews were in Vietnam, after that  I had a co-producer go out and make contact with the crew leaders in both Saigon and Hanoi…and then when we landed and were prepping the film, I had to play catch up and really absorb their day to day routines. Some of the things I learned along the way were really interesting. For instance, I had it in the film where the North crew were very privileged and the South crew weren’t, but in actuality most of the dancers within the big cities tend to all be privileged. If there were any poor kids dancing, they’d be from the outskirts or more of the rural towns.

So that’s one thing I learned – when I got there and saw all the dancers, all the kids in crews would be decked out in hip-hop gear, Puma and Converse and Adidas shoes, and that’s not cheap to buy. Most of them come from good families.

There’s a certain consciousness in your film I think, in that Mai doesn’t sort of “learn hip-hop” and use it for herself, like we see often in other dance films.

Yeah, I mean there were a few people who were expecting — and I think some audience members would expect [as well] — Mai, the traditional dancer, to dance with [the crew]. But I think that’s a disservice to real hip-hop dancers, because you can’t really wing it in the span of a month. A lot of these dancers in the film have been with crews for at the very least two to three years. It takes time to develop those skills … [but] I did try to fuse a bit of traditional dance at the end with the lion drummers, which is a very Chinese and Vietnamese thing. And it was interesting, when I was prepping the film, asking the hip-hop crews there—because I was a little worried—I said, ‘For the finale I’m going to have a drum crew perform with you guys because I think it’s energetic.’ And they said, ‘Yes, we’ve done that before.’ They’d actually fused traditional music with hip-hop before. Those are the kind of things that you learn along the way before you shoot the film.

Did you make a lot of changes as you learned more about the hip-hop scene?

Not really, just little changes. Like, I had it in the script where one crew goes around with a donation box, and they said they don’t do that, they just dance for fun and dance for pride. Later on, before the finale in the film [I planned] a montage of them training; I had them jogging along the river, and I wanted to capture that in slow motion. But they said they just kind of train…they don’t jog. And there were a lot of these details that we get from American films that didn’t really translate to a Vietnamese film.

Are you a fan of these Hollywood dance films?

A few of them. I’m more of a drama guy, so for me, with Saigon Electric, the dance aspect is secondary to the story and characters, so structurally I tried to have it more similar to something like Save the Last Dance, which is very heavy on the drama.

So more story, and less…Step Up 3D, I guess?

Yeah. The emphasis in the Step Up movies is to showcase the dance…with mine, because I like good acting, I tried to emphasize the story more than the dance. And you know, with a small budget, I didn’t feel like I could really compete with American dance films so I didn’t even try. But because of the context of a dance film, I do have requisite dance elements in it, the final battle being one of them.

Are you a hip-hop fan?

I’m not a hip-hop aficionado; what I found interesting in the subject matter was more the youth culture. In Vietnam, hip-hop is relatively new–it’s really only exploded on the scene in the last few years—but for me, youth culture is important because you’ve got a really young population going through a sea of change in Vietnam, with everything become more global. A lot of the dancers were influenced or inspired by watching a lot of stuff on the internet, by American dance movies and watching battles of other dance crews on Youtube. That’s a part of the change in Vietnam, a lot of young people are on Facebook and the internet. We still keep in touch with the dancers over Facebook.

Saigon Electric screens tonight as part of the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, 8:45 p.m. at The Royal. Director Stephane Gauger will be in attendance. An encore screening will be held at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on November 19 at 1:30 p.m.

If you’re an avid movie watcher who’s also dealt with depression, I’m sure you have a list in your head of movies, good or not, that “nailed it,” that perfectly captured your particular experience with despair. Maybe Holly Golightly’s “mean reds” speech in Breakfast at Tiffany’s marked your personal line between feeling down and feeling out. If you struggle with anxiety and anger, maybe Adam Sandler’s emotional oddball performance in Punch Drunk Love got you in the gut. Lost in Translation? It’s taken a rap from some for affected faux-dispiritedness, but you? Maybe you totally got that shit.

One film that’s on my list is Lethal Weapon, an absurd film to relate to because it is, after all, an absurd film, but bear with me. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt the way Mel Gibson’s suicidal Sgt. Martin Riggs does, but the the idea of walking through life as a man already dead is a poetic one, and it’s one I think Gibson portrays appropriately, viscerally.

When we meet Riggs, a widower and maverick cop, we learn he’s a man who lives in a recluse’s trailer alone with a dog, disinterestedly smoking in bed, routinely sticking guns in his face and carrying around a bullet that he plans to use if he ever really decides to kill himself. At the outset of the film, after failing to pull the trigger on himself, he chokes himself. It’s an important moment, wonderfully acted, that pays off with a callback later in the film.

Riggs is a loose canon, much to the annoyance of his new partner, family man and crusty curmudgeon Roger Murtaugh (the very awesome Danny Glover). Riggs pulls Murtaugh into a bunch of otherwise avoidable situations, all of which end with Riggs tempting death, his or others’, but especially his.

Like when he makes a beeline to the bad guy, unflinching, cancer stick dangling from his mouth, as bullets ping all around him.

Or when he can’t be bothered with talking down a jumper so instead he cuffs himself to him and then does the jumping for the both of  them. (They land safely on a big inflatable mat.)

Or that time he botches an operation by shooting too fast and he and Murtaugh have to jump in a pool to try, futilely, to save a key witness’s life. (Water! Death! Who likes foreshadowing?)

Tired of this guy yet? So is Murtaugh.

Hell, Riggs is tired of himself.

Riggs and Murtaugh ride their rocky partnership toward a final showdown with drug smuggler Joshua (Gary Busey), and by the time the final fight scene unfolds Murtaugh has developed an understanding with Riggs, the kind between men who have faced death side by side. (Riggs, Murtaugh and Joshua are all Vietnam vets. The film seems to be exploring the different ways men deal with trauma, with Riggs becoming self-destructive, Murtaugh finding stability through conservative family life, and Joshua going off the deep end of moral nihilism.)

The final battle takes place outside of Murtaugh’s home but Murtaugh declines to participate. In fact, he pulls rank and tells the other cops to back off as well, creating an absurd arena on his front lawn — the swirling lights from police ‘copters standing in for the bright Vegas lights of a professional fight and the surrounding officers representing a crowd full of fans — for Riggs to do battle with Joshua and, by proxy, the demons eating him up inside.

“Whaddya say? Would you like a shot at the title?” asks Riggs.

“Don’t mind if I do,” says Joshua.

For context on how ahead of its time this fight scene was, note that the film was released in 1987 and the choreographer for its concluding battle was Rorion Gracie, an important martial arts figure from the now famous Gracie family, the pioneers of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  The Gracies wouldn’t enter the popular American consciousness until 1993 at the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship event, where Rorion’s brother Royce would dominate all challengers and cement himself a legend of a brutal sport that would grow to stir political controversy and, in the Aughts, knock on the door of mainstream North American culture.

The jiu-jitsu move that Riggs uses to put away Joshua is known to many nowadays as a “triangle choke.” At the time, the New York Times, like most of us, had never seen such a maneuver and described it, somewhat comically, like this:

[Riggs'] way of winning a fight is to force his rival to the ground and attempt to crush him between his knees.

Close, but not really. If you’re interested, here’s a primer on the ins and outs of the triangle choke:

The most common version of the triangle choke, the one we see in Lethal Weapon, is performed while underneath your opponent in the guard position. Being in that position sometimes means you’re a badass who jumped into a bad position to secure a submission; most of the time, though, it means you were taken down and put on your back, the most primal of dangerous positions. The triangle is my favourite submission to see in an MMA fight because it’s often a come-from-behind move where a fighter in trouble has used his or her technical skill to pull off an unlikely victory.

The triangle requires a person to stay calm and in control of their mental faculties while in a horribly dangerous situation. At the beginning of the film, Riggs is certainly fearless but he’s not a man particularly concerned with controlling his actions.

At the end, Joshua throws Riggs into a pool of rain water and tries to drown him, recalling the foreshadowing from the pool.

Riggs can die here, like he’s always wanted to, but he doesn’t.

He survives. With Murtaugh’s support from the sidelines, he perseveres.

And secures a triangle choke to end it — the movie, Joshua’s drug smuggling reign, and his internal battles.

It’s within this fight scene that the character completes his arc from maverick asshole to guy a man like Murtaugh can call a trusted friend. Someone who won’t lose a fight just to complete a death wish, and also someone who will release a choke at the final moment to let a bad guy live, despite a bloodthirsty crowd that’s calling for more fatal punishment.

A guy who chokes his demons, not himself.

“Fight Scenery” is a column obsessed with cinematic combat. No can defend!

Previously: The unlikely kung-fu of Scott Pilgrim and Knives Chau

Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

New York actor Michael Rapaport (Boston Public, Higher Learning, among others) was 19 when A Tribe Called Quest dropped their debut album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. They followed that groundbreaking album up with two of the most beloved (if not best) albums in hip hop, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders, so it’s fair to say that Rapaport came of age in one of the best times for New York hip hop. “All Tribe music is very nostalgic for me. Hip hop was really what I was listening to since the time I was 10, but with Tribe, as soon they came out, I was a big, big, big fan,” he said during a recent stop in Toronto to promote his documentary, Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, out July 29 in major cities across Canada. He spoke to me about the “beef” that’s been surrounding the project, the difficulties of working with his favourite rap group, and the pains of leaving some classic captured moments on the cutting room floor.

Did you always set out to do a documentary as your first film?

No, I had wanted to direct something for the last 10 years and I always wanted to do a narrative, but I was also curious about Tribe and was always asking about doing it, wondering if they would ever record again, which spawned the documentary: Why did A Tribe Called Quest break up and will they ever record again?

You’ve said that no documentary has been done on a rap group before (save for Public Enemy), so why do a doc on Tribe? Why not other influential rap groups, like Wu Tang, NWA, Run DMC, etc?

All those groups are great and I love all of them, but I just had an emotional response to A Tribe Called Quest and while it’s hard to say favourite … they definitely mean a lot to me. The fact that they had such a run from ’88 to ’98 and were so prolific album after album, then it just stopped, that’s what really made me want to know what had happened.

I take it that when they broke up in ’98 it had an effect on you?

I didn’t understand why they broke up — I didn’t accept it. I was at their last show in New York in 1998, and at that show I felt like my parents were getting divorced. I just never really got over it — why A Tribe Called quest?

As an obvious fan, but also approaching this as a filmmaker, was it hard to keep your objectivity?

I was very conscious of trying to stay objective and not be biased and to not meddle in their business because I was so close while I was filming, but I would talk about it with my editor and constantly remind myself why I was there. I had to be mature and conscious of the fact that I was making a movie and not to get myself too involved in their personal business.

When was that moment where it set in that you were actually filming your favourite rap group?

As soon as I started filming in 2008 I was like, ‘holy shit.’ You know, it’s the first day and it’s the Rock the Bells concert and I’m interviewing De La Soul and starting to shoot Tribe. I was just so excited. I couldn’t believe I was actually doing it.

You’ve said that you wanted to give hip hop the rock n roll documentary treatment. What docs did you look to for inspiration?

There are so many. The Last Waltz, Gimme Shelter, I’m Trying to Break Your Heart, Hail Hail Rock n Roll … man, there are just so many I watched.

You often cite the lack of documentary on hip hop. Were you trying to get the ball rolling with this?

That wasn’t my agenda, but if this film inspires someone to start with someone else, that would be great, but I wasn’t trying to spawn a movement or anything.

Who else would you like to see get the treatment?

There’s plenty. Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Cold Crush Brothers, X-Clan, Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul, there are a lot of women in hip hop that would have interesting stories …

Did you have a set out narrative in your head going into filming?

No. I just watched it unwind in front of me.

So the animosity highlighted in the film is just something that happened?

Ya, absolutely. It’s the beauty of documentary filmmaking.

Was there a lot of footage that as a music fan you would have liked to see in the film but needed to cut for the sake of narrative?

I know the film has to be forward thinking and story driven, and there was tons of stuff we had to cut out about songs being constructed or verses and lyrics, stuff about people who influenced Tribe and more people that Tribe influenced, but at the end of the day you have to do what’s best for the movie. Despite how interesting or fascinating a piece or a scene might be, you have to keep things moving forward.

One noticeable thing is the lack of Busta Rhymes (sometimes referred to as the unofficial fifth member of the group). How hard was it to cut him out?

It was hard to cut Busta out. He’s in the movie a little bit and I felt the way we used him was the best way for the film and based on the footage. There was an idea and a sequence about the making of Scenario that was really cool, but there was also J Dilla stuff, Large Professor stuff, there was a lot of stuff that had to go but we had to do what’s best for the movie. As a music fan that was tough, you want to hold on to it. Everyone know’s the importance of Scenario. There are certain songs that are iconic but you can’t do every one. I wasn’t there to do a making of thing. It wasn’t a ‘This is How We Did it’ video.

There is a lot of great vintage footage of Tribe. Was that easy to get?

It required a lot of digging. I knew certain stuff existed because I had seen it, but to actually get it is a whole rigmarole and we were very diligent. It was digging for gold. You get leads and follow them, like this person has this, this person has that, and you just track them down and hope it works out. The DVD extras are going to be really strong and have a lot of fun material.

Tribe has sampled everyone from Lou Reed to France’s national anthem, how hard was the sample clearance for the movie?

The music clearing was a mother fucker, man. Obviously, Tribe gave us clearance to their songs, but then you had to clear every sample to every song. We should have done a short movie within the movie about that because that was really, really challenging. You have to deal with huge artists, or artists that are hard to find, so it was tough.

Was there any reluctance from the original artists?

I felt like we would have been able to get every one, but the hardest one was clearing Can I Kick it? And that was essential. There were other songs that we just ran out of time for.

How long were you with Tribe?

It was 2.5 years of filming, editing, etc. It was a lot of back and forth because I’m in L.A., Tip and Ali are in New York, Jarobi is in Atlanta and Phife is on the west coast.

Did you have unlimited access?

No, it’s not like reality TV. I filmed with an agenda. I wasn’t just sitting there day after day after day. It was like, ‘You have three hours,’ or ‘You can spend half the day with me.’ I wasn’t waking up with them.

It seems that Phife gave you more access, what with going to the hospital with him and everything?

Phife gave me a little bit more but Tip was pretty good. What Phife was going through health wise was pretty compelling and it tells a lot about him — it’s major. At the same time, Tip had an album coming out (The Renaissance, 2008), which is a big deal but it’s not as, you know, severe as Phife’s health.

As a filmmaker, how did you perceive the characters of Phife Dawg and Q-Tip?

They were both very human, charismatic, funny, compelling and honest. Tip is definitely a perfectionist. He’s an artist. He’s going to be making music whether there is a music business or not. He just loves it. He’ll be the guy playing on the corner if that was his only outlet.

Phife was never as emotionally invested. It was just something he was really good at and I think that was a big difference between the two of them. They both come off well rounded. They both get to show sides of themselves that fans have never seen, but in the context of the film, they get to show themselves as great but not perfect.

You and the members of Tribe, most notably Q-Tip, have been in the media a lot over certain creative differences? Did you ever think this part of making the movie would be this difficult?

No, I never thought it would be this much. But the fact that I’m sitting here and the movie is coming out in Canada and the U.S., I’m just proud of it. I don’t look at it as work, despite today being my toughest day, just with travel and everything. To be doing this for something I care so much about, I’m happy.

There was an early trailer called Beats, Rhymes and Fights. Is that where the animosity started?

I guess that started it. It was hacked off the Internet and it was an old trailer with a title that they didn’t like. And I was fine that they didn’t like it. There was a chain of events that started the whole thing. I’m not happy that it went that way but it did and fortunately in the last week or so me and Q-Tip have agreed to disagree on certain things. He’s been supportive of the movie and doing some press for the movie, so it’s sort of moved past that. It was a a lot to deal with.

What was the main source of fighting after the film was done? Did Tribe want more say on the editing?

In an nutshell that would be it. They wanted less emphasis on the relationships and more on the music, and to me I don’t know how to tell a story that way. That’s not a story, it’s a concert film, and I never said I wanted to do just a concert film. In the beginning they would have been happier if that’s what I’d done, but I made the movie because I wanted to know if A Tribe Called Quest will ever make more music, and in answering that you have to roll up your sleeves a little bit.

Do you know if Q-Tip has seen the movie?

I don’t think Tip has seen it with an audience. He’s seen it on a computer though.

How important was it to have Tip on board?

I was never trying to get him on board once I realized where things were. I stopped reaching out, but then the movie was getting ready to come out and the response was so good, we decided to disagree on certain things and I’m glad he’s been supportive of the film. I had other dreams and hopes for what the band would do for the movie and themselves, but none of that stuff really panned out, which is the wacky world of A Tribe Called Quest.

What role did Nas have in starting this whole project?

Nas was never a day to day producer and at one point he talked about producing it with me, but then he just got busy with his own stuff. He’s been supportive of the film, but it took a lot of time to make the movie so he decided to be supportive from afar.

What about the idea out there that it was his idea?

No, no no. That conversation that was put on MTV did not happen. I came up with the idea to do a documentary, I asked them in 2006 at the Wiltern Theatre, I called Q-Tip myself. Nas was thinking about doing something at the same time, and it’s just coincidence we were thinking along the same lines. This is my idea though. I didn’t make the movie by myself, but I will definitely take credit for thinking about making it, initiating it, and financing it at first. I will not let that misinformation be out there because it’s not the case.

What do you think about the comments that only the rap community should be telling its own stories?

It’s fucking retarded. It doesn’t make any sense. I think that was not the smartest thing to say.

Are you on good terms with them now? Do they like the movie?

They’re supportive of the movie, they know it’s good, but some of the dysfunction that you see in the movie within the group fell over onto my lap. The group doesn’t move as unit. That dysfunction spilled over to me. It’s not a surprise that this has happened. Anybody that’s ever done business with them has always said, as great as the product is, it’s never easy getting it.

You know, if this was a doc about Wu Tang this would be deemed as a joke. People would be like this is bull shit, this ain’t Wu, if all they were doing was bickering a little bit, but because it’s Tribe it’s hard to accept. If this was NWA or EPMD, you’d be like, ‘That’s it?’ But because its Tribe and the music is so positive and the spirit of the music is so positive, I think it’s been hard for fans to swallow the fact that they’re not perfect. What they go through is the same thing The Beatles have gone through, N Sync, The Supremes, it happens. Groups have there shit, families have their shit, businesses end. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

You end the movie on a positive note, about their outstanding record deal with Jive Records. Is that you as an optimistic fan, or do you really think they will record another one?

I did it as an optimistic fan, I did it to inform the fans, and I did it to remind A Tribe Called Quest that it’s there if you want it and the people would be excited about it. I was definitely conscious of what I was doing with that. I wanted people to understand that if Tribe wants to do it, they can.

OK, just some quick ones: Favourite Tribe song?

Lyrics to Go

Favourite Tribe album?

Midnight Marauders

Top 5 ’90s albums

Midnight Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest

Enter the 36 chambers, the Wu-Tang Clan

Illmatic, Nas

Ready to Die, Notorious B.I.G.

Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast

Any current artists excite you as much as Tribe?

A handful of people excite me today. Talib Kweli, Common, Jay Electronica, Mos Def, I like this kid Tyler the Creator and his whole little deal that he’s doing. I’m not going to sit here and say the music is easy to listen to, but I like his personae and like his style, and I heard him rhyming on this track yesterday with Pusha T from Clipse, and I think he has a real interesting flow and the things he says, he’s very witty.

An article based on this interview originally appeared in the National Post.  

First, some words from screenwriter Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity, Michael Clayton) to screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men), from Goldman’s book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”:

Tone scares me.

When you fuck with tone, you risk squandering that spark. You risk losing the one thing the audience brings with them. The noir-comedy. The romantic-spoof. The gothic-farce. This is very tricky, alchemical stuff to play with.

When talking about “tricky” tones, I can’t help but marvel at Edgar Wright’s and Michael Bacall’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A romantic-comedy/hipster coming of age/zeitgeist transmedia meditation/comic book adaptation/kung-fu flick? Good luck with that.

Wright pulls off the film with admirably sure feet. The video game in-jokes and cutesy emotional moments roll with the sarcasm and fight choreography so seamlessly it’s easy to not notice what a tonal disaster this movie could have been in different hands. And while it’s true that we’ve been trained by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic books and video games in general to accept all of Scott Pilgrim‘s noise as normalcy, credit has to go where credit’s due.

In the books, O’Malley can insert Scott’s first fight scene, against Mathew Patel, at the end of his first graphic novel with nothing more than a flippant bit of exposition (comic books are more forgiving of sudden turns).

For the film and its unsuspecting audience, Wright has to set things up first. He does this by including a very smart scene, within the film’s first 10 minutes, where Scott Pilgrim and too-young girlfriend Knives Chau hit the arcade. This original scene (and its later counterpart) not only foreshadows some of Scott’s and Knives’s respective character arcs, it does something a little trickier. It subtly establishes Scott Pilgrim as a world where amazing kung-fu skills can belong to a skinny nerd who never hits the dojo.

It starts innocuously enough, with Scott and Knives displaying amazing, yet still believable, levels of co-ordination. Nothing you haven’t seen before from random Asian kids at the local arcade house.

The film is telling us two things here. That Scott and Knives “make a good combo,” as Ramona Flowers herself notes at the end of the film, and that Scott is the kind of 20-something guy who plays just as much video games as an immature high schooler. Worse, an immature Asian high schooler. (i.e. He’s playing a shitload of video games.)

Then come the punches and kicks, Scott and Knives still fully, effortlessly, in sync. What kind of video game is this, exactly? The Dance Dance Revolution-ish foot pads stop meaning as much; the game avatars are clearly perfectly aping whatever Scott and Knives do. And what Scott and Knives do, increasingly seems to be more than just “playing games” as we know it in our world.

Enter the flip. Scott shuffles to the center and Knives instinctively knows exactly what to do. She steels her stance and stands up straight as Scott kneels –

– then rolls over his back with perfect form, legs perfectly straight, executing a gymnastic move that has no place in an arcade.

And there you have it. Scott Pilgrim is a world where characters jump and punch and flip. The other arcade dwellers don’t even bat an eye, and neither will we when later Scott does battle with the first of Ramona’s seven evil exes.

In Scott Pilgrim‘s universe, playing video games can give you kung-fu skills. Playing enough of them can make you the best fighter in the province. Being a vegan can give you special powers. As can rocking out on the bass guitar. The skills of youth culture here translate to skills found in other, fantastical movie genres.

This one scene and its one bit of gymnastics is the magic that holds Scott Pilgrim together. So much so, that Wright re-visits the arcade again later to show how Scott is changing, and to foreshadow that Scott needs Knives’s help physically and emotionally.

Scott can’t beat Gideon without her –

–and her advice to not “beat yourself up about it,” regarding Scott not being able to defeat his evil double in the game, paves the way for Scott defeating Evil Scott — his mental baggage — by befriending him instead of doing battle, returning us by the end of the film back to a world where emotional growth is more valued than crazy kung-fu.

How’s that for alchemy?

“Fight Scenery” is a bi-weekly column obsessed with cinematic combat. No can defend!

Just another day on the job

He’s both easy and impossible to miss amid the bustle of New York City. Between criss-crossing pedestrians and lane-changing taxis, you first see the flash of blue. And then comes the click.  Follow the sound to the source and there he is: a fuzzy-haired old man, Nikon in hand, scanning the streets with his gaze. A messenger bag is slung casually across his lanky frame and he hurries ahead of a leggy young thing, just to whip around and snap a frame before she glides on by. Smile—you’re on Bill Cunningham’s camera now.

William J. Cunningham, now 82, is the tireless tour de force behind the On the Street section of the New York Times. There you’ll find, on any given day, odes to the stylish everyday people of the city: anything from businesswomen skipping puddles to the swaggering stance of Harlem youth.  He is an egalitarian in every sense and to say he is simply a fashion photographer does not do the man justice. For over half a century he has chronicled emerging trends, celebrated fashion innovation, and—in the process—become a cultural anthropologist of sorts, meticulously documenting the intersection of society and style. And so, in 2010, filmmaker Richard Press and Philip Gefter of the Times finally convinced him to appear in front of a lens, for a documentary about the man behind one.  It took eight years of get him on board but the resulting documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York”, is both moving and utterly charming.

We learn very early on that blue will always be “in” to Bill. He can almost always be found sporting a soft blue pullover and a bright blue workman’s smock. As we later learn, he first found the coat sold in the hardware stores of France –it’s the same kind bought for street cleaners and park staff. But Bill doesn’t care much for his own clothes – he barely owns a handful of items and favours his ubiquitous smock for its big pockets and inexpensive price tag. When it rains he pulls out a crumpled black vinyl poncho. Strips of gaffer tape line the seams because Bill says he can’t stand the wastefulness of buying another one that will rip just as quickly and easily as the last.

While he has an endless sense of wonder for fashion, it's simply not his own

It soon becomes clear that Bill leads a life very different than one might expect from a fashion world fixture. His tiny artist’s studio (located in Carnegie Hall at the time of filming) is crammed tight with towering filing cabinets of his film; off to the side, there’s just enough room for a modest cot. There’s no kitchen in the apartment and Bill must share a washroom down the hall with other tenants. Friends who have known him for decades say it’s been like that for as long as they can remember.

And yet—Bill seems to have everything he needs. He is never happier than when he is able to hop on his bicycle and circle the city’s boroughs.   (He’s now on his 28th bike, having lost the first 27 to the petty thieves of NYC). He’s developed a thick skin for those who dislike their picture being taken and a hilarious sense of humour for the smitten few who strike up a conversation. He peddles around from morning till night, spending his days on the street, photographing everything from spike heels to graphic print hoodies, and his nights in a suit, snapping shots of New York’s pulsing social scene. Somewhere in between, he agonizes over negatives in his office at the New York Times. Everything that passes through his hands must first pass his own critical eye. Then, and only then, is he content to send a spread to print.

Eat it, vinyl-lovers. Bill still deals exclusively in film.

Make no mistake—this is no old man with a hobby. Bill has spent a lifetime watching style evolve from the runway to the sidewalk and back to the runway. He just really loves the clothes. It’s a simple statement that he mentions over and over again throughout the film and it’s true. He’s not a paparazzi, consistently ignoring drably dressed celebs for vibrant cross-dressers in SoHo. He’s also not wowed by every single thing a designer churns out; while flashes fire out in rapid speed from the photographer pit at the base of runway shows, Bill sits patiently in his front row seat, peering through his viewfinder only when a silhouette excites him. And he’s not afraid to call it like he sees it. With his razor-sharp memory, he’s been known to snap shots of copycat trends and then dig up the images from the designer who pioneered the look seasons before. He is not out to attack anyone; he simply wants credit to go where it’s deserved.

But while visionaries like Anna Wintour have developed reputations for their short-fuse approach to perfectionism, it’s Bill’s kindness and humanity that sets him apart from his industry contemporaries. In addition to defrosting the icy queen of Vogue herself (Wintour admits, “I have said many times we all get dressed for Bill”), everyone from Annie Flanders, to Michael Kors, to Tom Wolfe count themselves among his circle of admirers. He pals around with his young artistic director at the Times, cracks jokes with the teenagers he’s photographing on the street, and never once assumes that what he’s doing makes him “better” than his subjects.

Says Bill, "I'm not interested in celebrities and their free dresses."

As much as we know about Bill, however, there’s very little known to anyone about his personal life. When asked point-blank about his relationship history, about his friends, and whether he ever feels lonely, there is a pause. A long pause. We have spent the entire film falling in love with Bill’s quick wit and incorrigible sense of mischief. And for one, excruciating moment, we are forced to re-evaluate the man in front of us, as he struggles to find an answer. Is a lifetime pieced together from fleeting frames of beauty equivalent to a lover’s touch or young child’s laugh?  Thankfully, Bill rallies quickly. The corners of his mouth turn back up and the glint reappears in his eyes and I, for one, breathe a sigh of relief.

Because I’m not sure how Bill Cunningham even exists. I don’t know how he’s managed to live his life, doing the job he does, in the heart of Manhattan, without being eaten alive by the city and its jaded inhabitants. But there he is. Armed only with his film camera, his Schwinn, his sharp eye, and an unflappable sense of passion, he’s turned what he loves into a shining testament of everything he loves best: his work, his art, and the extraordinary creative individuals that inspire him.

We should all be so lucky.

1 to 4 from Real Frequency on Vimeo

And speaking of radio-friendly reunions, you should totally tune in to CBC Radio 3 at 8 p.m. tonight for the first ever Hip-Hop Summit presented by Manifesto, Northside Hip Hop, Dalton Higgins and Addi “Mindbender” Stewart.

The live performance will feature: Kardi, Michie Mee, k-os, Shad, Saukrates, Classified, Maestro, Red1 of Rascalz, Choclair, Dream Warriors, Ghetto Concept, Reema Major, Cadence Weapon, Skratch Bastid and “more.” My mind is racing at who “more” might be? Thrust? Checkmate? Infinite? If I witness a live rendition of “Northern Touch” I might die happy! Can’t tune in tonight? While the summit performance is closed, there will be a full day of hip-hop (including visual exhibitions and panel discussions) open to the public going down at the CBC Studios on Wellington Street on April 1, culminating in a video broadcast premiere of the Summit.

Jef and I we

In a sprawling piece over at GQ, Mark Harris digs deep into the systemic problems with Hollywood’s studio system and the slow death of American mainstream cinema. From the whoring of films for profitability, devolving tastes and economic realities, Harris weaves into his truly informative essay plenty of levity and Solomon-like pinches of balanced perspective.

One of the most interesting passages I thought was regarding a recent trend towards less “adult” fare:

We can all acknowledge that the world of American movies is an infinitely richer place because of Pixar and that the very best comic-book movies, from Iron Man to The Dark Knight, are pretty terrific, but the degree to which children’s genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio executives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays.

Although I felt Harris was incredibly on point with almost everything else he said in this essay, I remain somewhat on the fence about this argument. By “infantilizing” I read this to mean the source material is originally for children. To marginalize all children’s work as infantile however seems like an oversight — after all, most of the best beloved kids books and graphic novels work because they are universally well written stories, applicable equally to children and adults. A movie like Wall-E, for example, is going to teach a child a lot about good storytelling and I would never call that movie “infantile”.

Yes, there are plenty of immature movies based on kids material, but any more than there are based on cliched romantic comedy tropes or Adam Sandler scripts? I don’t know.

Anyhow, read the article. Then discuss. I am curious what people think about the topic.

The general consensus around Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is that it’s a very bad choice for a first date activity. I don’t disagree. But it’s also an awkward idea for a ten-thousandth date, which I learned after catching a screening with my girlfriend of nine years.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Cindy and Dean, a married couple with young daughter in rural Pennsylvania. The film jumps between their falling in love as young 20-somethings to living loveless and worn down in their late-20s/early-30s. As adults, Cindy is an ambitious, always-tired nurse and Dean is a modest, too-content house painter. They’re both well-meaning and incredibly nice people; just not to each other, not anymore.

Not to say that Dean and Cindy’s tenuous marriage is anything like my relationship with my girlfriend. We’re incredibly in love and (groan) stable too. In some ways we’re the exact opposite of Blue Valentine’s test case: we’re not sick of each other’s voices and we don’t frequently fight. Even when we do, it rarely reaches anything near the chest-squeezing intensity of Dean and Cindy’s final shouting match.

Nonetheless, Blue Valentine shell-shocked us in a way that was initially difficult to process. The heartbreaking inevitability of Dean and Cindy’s separation is conveyed through vague sadness and a loose plot structure. They’re happy in the past, miserable in the present; we’re not sure of what happened in the meantime and maybe neither is the film or its characters. That’s just how time works, and if long-term couples understand anything about love that others don’t, it’s time.

As Roger Ebert points out, it’s one thing to mark calendar turns when dealing with decades, as many movies do. Blue Valentine, though, addresses the subtle but drastic change over just five or so crucial years. Not much time in the grand scheme, but enough to raise a baby into a loving daughter, or to bury the family dog. Enough time to lose your ambition and collect paint stains on all your clothes, or to gain 10 pounds of weight in all the wrong places. Certainly enough time to find yourself staring at your partner, realizing they are no longer the person they were when you started dating.

Blue Valentine milks this, puts its two protagonists in a cheesy sex motel for a night and lets us watch in horror as they sadly attempt to be who they no longer are. They end up drinking too much and yelling and Dean’s last-ditch grasp at intimacy approaches rape. Flashes of familiarity give false hope that things might work out, but the truth is that while they know each other well, Cindy and Dean don’t know what they’ve become.

Although we’ve been rolling safe and steady almost a decade now, my girlfriend and I have similar challenges ahead of us. We don’t live together, don’t share bills, and don’t really have set careers to disdain or defend. She currently doesn’t want children and I’m currently cool with that, but who knows who we’ll be in five years and what those people will want from their lives. We found each other at an age that everybody grows out of.

We discussed Dean and Cindy’s breakup immediately after the screening. She felt that Cindy maybe grew disgusted with Dean’s passivity and lack of ambition. His adaptability and willingness-to-please long slid from the pros to the cons. I felt that maybe Dean was running out of ways to deal with Cindy’s perpetual unhappiness and distant demeanor. He stabilized her life but maybe that’s not what she wanted. Both readings are supported by the film, but both are undoubtedly also our own projections of our own fears. The film is too complex for such simple character readings, a condition mirrored by real life — and I admit, that’s a scarier prospect than those presented by any clear-cut story arcs.

‘Commitment’ is a word bandied a lot, especially around Valentine’s Day, but the older you get the more you know you can’t keep every promise no matter how sincerely you swear by them. Promising to love someone forever is a strange utterance — romantic, yes, but defiantly against logic and the laws of physics. The more things change, the more they stay the same; but that also means things mutate even if they remain familiar. There’s a reason why Dean and Cindy spend a good chunk of the film trapped in a falsified spaceship (courtesy of their thematic hotel room) — the romance genre is in some ways as far-fetched as science fiction.

After a day of depressingly noting the similarities between our relationship and the one under Blue Valentine‘s microscope, the film’s suffocating fog dissipated a bit and I got to noting the important differences. Whereas couples like Dean and Cindy find themselves in situations that incubated for years and then react badly to them, my girlfriend and I have been mindfully adjusting and re-adjusting ourselves over the years, our expectations of each other, and our reactions to how the other person is growing before us. Unlike others who claim being in love, we are together, yes, but clearly aware and appreciative of the fact that we are separate people with intimately intertwined but separate lives. This means our relationship is boring by Hollywood standards — there will never be a movie made about us — but I’d have it no other way. It’s been my pleasure to watch my girlfriend grow into the beautiful person she is, and I plan to keep bearing witness to her journey for as long as I can imagine, as long as she’ll have me. (I promise to wear clean pants.)

Blue Valentine is a wonderful, wrenching film, but what it’s not is an inversion of naive Hollywood romances. Part of why Dean and Cindy fall apart is precisely because their courtship perfectly follows the genre’s model. That scene so wonderfully played by Williams and Gosling on the street, Gosling playing the ukulele, Williams dancing under a gently-lit doorway? Fantastic stuff,  but misleading, as the film shows, and ultimately unimportant. I have similar memories with my girlfriend, but thankfully, splintered moments are not what we hinged our relationship on.

I love movies because they are able to show us what we are, in interesting, new, and visceral ways. They can also show us what we are not. Blue Valentine wasn’t a good date movie, but it’s the first movie I’ve seen that made me contemplate my life with my girlfriend in its entirety — its romance and difficulties, its dullness and passion, its unknowable future — and make me thankful for all of it and all of her. Because of that, Blue Valentine will be one of those movies that, despite its differences from my life, I keep around, on my shelf and in the back of my mind, for better or for worse.

Who is John Galt? In this case, Paul Johansson who for this project tackles double-duty by playing Galt as well as being the films director. Also, he is that dude from One Tree Hill. Also also, according to his IMDB page, he spent a few years playing on the Canadian National Basketball Team. Amazing.

I particularly love that part of the movie title is “Part 1″. That’s some optimistic thinking right there. Clearly a Dagny  idea.

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