Friday July 25, 2008
Latest Columns 
Pretty is as pretty does
Published: Saturday, July 19, 2008 12:00 AM Page R13
In the 1968 film Barbarella, Anita Pallenberg as the Great Tyrant says to Jane Fonda as Barbarella, ''Hello, Pretty-Pretty,'' and later repeats the phrase: ''So, my pretty-pretty, we meet again.'' Was she reflecting redundantly on Barbarella's beauty or was she saying the girl was sort of pretty, or really pretty?
A stop-and-start road trip with some amusing detours
Published: Friday, July 18, 2008 12:00 AM Page R24
French actor-writer-director Jacques Tati is synonymous with Mr. Hulot, the bumbling, pipe-smoking character he played in his 1953 comedy Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday) and subsequent films. But Hulot changed over the years. Having begun as the cause of, or at least the catalyst for, all manner of humorous disasters, by the time he passed through the great Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958) and Play Time (1967), he had become more of an observer.
It's quitting ti-yi-yime
Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:00 AM Page R11
An article from New York about the divorce trial of model Christie Brinkley and architect Peter Cook inspires a couple of thoughts. The first is, hasn't Brinkley suffered enough? She starred in that video for then-paramour Billy Joel's song Uptown Girl, having to strut around while he sang ''and when she knows what she wants from her ti-yi-yime.'' That should have given her a free pass for life.
A coming-of-age classic bridges two solitudes
Published: Friday, July 11, 2008 12:00 AM Page R24
Three Canadian films arrive this week, markedly different but with a point or two in common.Mon Oncle Antoine (My Uncle Antoine, 1971) has topped international polls as the best Canadian film ever, but, as a Criterion set released this week in the United States makes clear (available at www.amazon.ca), it got there by a circuitous road.
Beach Boys, it's not, but it's got rhythm
Published: Saturday, July 5, 2008 12:00 AM Page R13
Now that summer has officially arrived, this is a good time to sing the Middle English verse, ''Sumer is i-cumen in/ Lhude sing, cuccu!'' This, according to Crowther's Encyclopedia of Phrases and Origins, is the oldest written song in the English language, inscribed by a monk within hailing distance of 1240. I remember hearing the ditty when I was a child and wondering why the Lord would sing ''cuckoo.'' But no, ''lhude'' simply means loud. Summer has come in./ Sing loudly, cuckoo! ''Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu.'' The seed grows, the meadow blooms and the wood springs forth anew.
Holy Blu-ray, Batman! That's one sharp picture
Published: Friday, July 4, 2008 12:00 AM Page R23
Batman: the Movie is out this week with a truckload of special features. This is not the Michael Keaton Batman of Tim Burton's Batman or the Christian Bale Batman of Batman Begins (a new edition of which comes to DVD next week). It's the Adam West Caped Crusader of the mid-sixties television show Batman, a tongue-in-cheek series that inspired a short-lived bout of Batmania and led to this 1966 theatrical movie. The film is as colourful, as goofy and as fundamentally dumb as ever, but that's not the chief point of interest about this week's release. The novelty is that this bells-and-whistles offering is being issued solely on Blu-ray, the high-definition format that hopes to supplant regular DVD.
The secret of multiple nerdgasms
Published: Saturday, June 28, 2008 12:00 AM Page R13
It must be murder to be a movie star on a publicity tour. Actors sit for so many interviews that, as a defensive mechanism, they take to recycling anecdotes and phrases. So it was that Robert Downey Jr., while making the publicity rounds for his successful film Iron Man, kept falling back on an unusual word.
Bad movies don't die - they just get DVD extras
Published: Friday, June 27, 2008 12:00 AM Page R25
To appreciate the jaw-droppingly awful level at which Xanadu operates, consider that seeing this 1980 musical inspired John Wilson to create the Razzies. In 1981, the inaugural year of those U.S. anti-Oscars, Xanadu director Robert Greenwald was awarded the Razzie for worst director. The film and stars Olivia Newton-John and Michael Beck were also nominated, but were licked in their respective categories by Can't Stop the Music, Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon and Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer.
A jingle, song, or a tune? It's an instrumental question
Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008 12:00 AM Page R13
Rarely has the written approximation of a tune appeared as often in these pages as ''dunt-da-DUNT-da-dunt.'' You may recognize that as the theme used by Hockey Night in Canada before the CBC and the music's composer, Dolores Claman, fell out over the terms of use and she sold the tune to CTV. If one were to remove a ''da,'' the result would be ''dunt-DUNT-da-dunt,'' which would be the theme to The Magnificent Seven. ''Dunt-da-DUNT-dunt'' would be the theme to Dragnet. Isn't musical notation wonderful?
Stylish thriller will make you rethink the Paris Métro
Published: Friday, June 20, 2008 12:00 AM Page R24
If you're in the market for a really big Parisian loft, track down the one used by the supercool, single-named Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) in the 1981 French thriller Diva. The decor is iffy - a barber's chair here, an unfinished jigsaw puzzle there - but the novel method of entry, by freight elevator, means you always know when someone is dropping by. In a thriller, those alerts come in handy.
