Reality shows have become a staple of television programming over the past few years. They range from survival-of-the-fittest to toddler beauty pageants, and they’re far from waning in popularity. The Real Housewives franchise, for one, has been the crown jewel in Bravo’s lineup for quite some time, spawning spinoffs, profitable endorsement deals, and many a talk show segment. Its stars battle it out for ratings on screen, but continue their feuds and over-the-top theatrics off camera as well. These escapades have been making headlines for some time, but it’s the most recent scandal that’s captured the public’s attention in a tragic exposure of the truth behind the magic of reality television.

Russell Armstrong, husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Taylor Armstrong, committed suicide in mid-August. He was found to have been in financial ruin, and slowly but surely, details of his horrific abuse of Taylor leaked out. It’s no secret that reality television is edited for dramatic effect, but it’s a problem when the edits obstruct crimes from being brought to light. Just how much should the public be allowed to see when tragedy strikes?

Many celebrity gossip sites have stated multiple times that Taylor told other cast members and, potentially, television executives, about the abuse she endured at her husband’s hands. This abuse supposedly went on for most of their six-year marriage, and was well documented by Taylor herself, through photographs and conversations with friends. The apparent brush-off of the abuse by those involved in Real Housewives is equally terrible. Yes, one can argue for letting families deal with their drama behind closed doors, but that should be reserved for arguments about overspending and cheating spouses. Physical and verbal abuse is very serious. There’s no excuse for anyone to avoid reporting extensive spousal abuse; Taylor made multiple trips to the hospital due to injuries she sustained from her husband. While her doctor had a hand in failing to take action, there’s little chance that those filming the show didn’t know enough about the situation to report it. Cameras commonly film the goings-on of cast members, and even if they never captured the physical abuse taking place, it’s unlikely they never saw the consequences of it.

The handling of Armstrong’s suicide is another ethical nightmare. Details of his suicide are all over the media and Taylor herself has leaked images of his abuse to the press. Profitable interviews are being auctioned off to the highest bidder. The worst part of all of this is that Russell and Taylor have a young daughter, who’s going to have to deal with this media coverage during one of the worst periods in her life. Despite how awful Armstrong may have been, he was still a girl’s father, and the handling of his suicide and its fallout is going to hurt her, in the short run and when it comes back to haunt her when she grows up. 

Reality television isn’t going anywhere soon, and most of it is completely harmless. But if this story serves to teach us anything, it’s that cast members are still real people with real problems. The ethics around reality television mostly take a back seat to profitable drama, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and soon.

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Dark, ominous, and haunting aren’t the words one would first associate with the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, but their new concert film, INNI, confronts viewers with something far from the spirited, jovial, and delightfully eccentric band that many know. Vincent Morisset, the film’s Quebecois director, projected the original digital footage of the concert and re-filmed it on a vintage camera, providing INNI with a grainy quality and overtly dark sensibility.

During the two-minute instrumental introduction to the opening song “ný batterí,” Morisset hits the audience with an array of mysterious moving textures, as well as fragmented shots of instruments and pieces of stage equipment. If an audience member had not intentionally gone to see a movie about Sigur Rós, they would be far from convinced that the film was even about a band. Even as lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s voice comes in, disjointed shots of band members’ faces fade into one another, blurring the lines between real and imaginary, and demanding that the audience connect with the sound rather than the image.

The first song is almost uncomfortably intimate until a colour segment of the band on National Public Radio (NPR) in the 1990s breaks the tension. Although very short, the clip is enormously significant. NPR’s DJ asks the band if they were ever “normal,”  or if they always sounded the way that they do. In addition to being comically awkward, the clip also visually confirms the film’s subject by showing all four members of the band in one frame. Suddenly, the rare access to Sigur Rós via this unsettling cinematic composition feels like a privilege. There is a long awkward pause, and then Morisset cuts to the title of the film and quickly back to black and white for the next song.

Morisett plays with this sense of intimacy throughout the entire film by pinning old colour footage against the dark live show. The audience gains inside access to the band, but sometimes this is more disorienting and overwhelming than exciting. In the black and white footage, the members of the band look like characters in a movie. Jonsi in particular exudes a Dracula-like aura in his knee-length coat and slicked back hair. But in an ill-fitting polo and cargo pants in the flashback clips, the frontman looks more like our geeky garage band friend than a commanding cinematic persona. The contrast between the two opposing film scenarios and the absence of conventional wide-pan shots help the audience engage with the music, as opposed to just the image of Sigur Rós.

The film showcases nine uninterrupted tracks, save for a couple rare video clips and broken-English sound bites. While the picture is artfully weathered, the sound is clear and resonant. The set list is comprised of songs from four of Sigur Rós’ studio albums. A high point in the film is the song “Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur” (With Me a Lunatic Sings) from the album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. Thanks to two pianos, an array of percussion, and a short but heartwarming prelude of a young Sigur Rós setting up for a gig, “Inni Mér’s” upbeat sound emphatically stands out from its darker surroundings.

INNI is an exceptionally thought-provoking concert film in terms of cinematic form and style. Viewers are privileged and plagued by an intensely personal perspective. But in general, the film presents a unique and special perspective of Sigur Rós. Albeit uncomfortable at times, we cannot escape from the intimate world that Morisset creates. In the end, do we really want to?

 Twixt 

Like a fantastical nightmare cut short by wakefulness, Francis Ford Coppola’s ghost story Twixt gives us a wild, imaginative ride but cuts to black before it all makes sense. 

The protagonist is Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a bargain-basement horror writer making the rounds on his latest book tour. He arrives in Swan Valley, a town with a seven-faced clock tower and gaggles of Goths, but doesn’t leave as quickly as he expects. He stays to write a new story about the town’s recent murder victim—a young girl with a stake plunged into her heart. The film bounces between the daytime—sequences of writing, investigating, and collaborating with the police chief—and the night.  

At night, Hall is pulled into a dream version of Swan Valley, painted in greyscale and violent reds, and populated by ghosts. The writer meets V (Elle Fanning), a porcelain-skinned vampire with far too many secrets, and the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. 

The dreams soon become nightmares. Hall is charged with solving the girl’s murder, chasing down a ghastly serial killer, and fighting the darkness growing inside him.  

Twixt is original, eerie, and thought-provoking. But viewers beware; it ends too quickly. The plot is left unfinished, unsatisfying, and underwhelming. This film deserved a satisfying finale. Instead, we get a conclusion that slips through the cracks like a hazy dream in the morning.

Albert Nobbs  

Albert Nobbs has all the makings of an excellent period drama, with a twist. The cinematography is stunning, the costumes are impeccable, the plot rife with drama—and the main character is a woman masquerading as a man. Albert, played by Glenn Close, takes on the role of a man in order to get ahead in a male-dominated society. She works as a servant in a posh hotel, dreaming of one day owning her own business.  

Nobbs would be a strong, intriguing character, if it weren’t nearly impossible to sympathize with her; and therein lies the fatal flaw of the film. Around everyone else, Nobbs is a reserved man with no sense of humour. When we’re first introduced to Albert Nobbs the woman, we see that she is a snivelling wretch terrified of being discovered, and obsessed with counting her money.  

This disconnect causes the film’s impact to fall flat. Save for one heartwarming scene where she dons a dress for the first time in decades, Glenn Close does nothing with the role.  

Albert Nobbs is wrenchingly close to being excellent. Mia Wasikowska and Janet McTeer deliver powerful performances as women with actual personalities. The ensemble cast—the hotel’s staff and clients—is superb. Love, drama, and intrigue abound. However, it just goes to show that a compelling protagonist can mean the difference between absolutely and almost outstanding. 

The Descendants 

Hawaii is no paradise for Matt King (George Clooney), an estranged husband and father faced with two daunting tasks. One: he must inform friends and family that his wife will not recover from a boating accident. Two: he must decide what to do with the valuable plot of land he’s inherited from his royal ancestor.  

As he navigates these burdens, Matt has to reconcile with what’s left of his family: two troubled, distant daughters. As he begins to repair their relationship, Matt’s daughter Alex reveals that Matt’s wife was cheating on him. The film becomes an odyssey—Matt’s quest to find the man his wife was planning to leave him for.  

Along the journey through lush Hawaiian islands, Matt does his best to make amends with his daughters, and deal with the death of his wife. There are dark emotions at play here, yet The Descendants manages to blend genuine laugh-out-loud moments with touching scenes. The story is utterly believable, anchored by powerful performances by Shailene Woodley as Alex, and Clooney, who makes a flawed, stressed man’s struggle both heart-warming and heartbreaking. 

In hindsight it seems silly to have expected any of the shows at the late night L’Église POP venue to be anywhere other than the basement of L’Église Saint-Édouard, but it was still disappointing to see Toronto punks Fucked Up relegated to the space, if only for how awesome it would’ve been to watch them play upstairs amongst the saints. Can you imagine lead singer Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham prowling through pews whilst growling lyrics about religious corruption?

Aside from the missed venue opportunity, the 2009 Polaris Prize winners delivered a raucous 1:30 a.m. set drawing heavily from their latest rock-opera, David Comes to Life.

Abraham continues to have one of the biggest personalities in music today, and it was on full display Thursday night, from teaching the crowd a Yo Gabba Gabba dance (he was a special guest on the show a few weeks ago), to debating which hot dog to buy from La Belle Province post-show, to dismounting the stage to climb on the merch tables mid-show. The man is a captivating performer.

While Abraham was off being Abraham, the band turned in a tight performance, notably on “Turn the Season” and “Crooked Head,” and a blistering performance of “Son the Father.”

Perhaps the oddest and best moment of the evening was watching sweaty punks shout along to a cover of “Jingle Bells” as the clock inched closer to 3 a.m. The reason for an early outpouring of holiday cheer? The band was recording the song for an upcoming Christmas special later in the week in New York. The host of said Christmas special is celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. Clearly, Fucked Up is a band that knows no bounds.

Though stuffed into only 150 pages, Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending, is a very big book. This thin volume trades in themes one might only expect to find in a real doorstopper of a book, a fat Bildungsroman, a sweeping history of a life. Barnes’ book is none of these.

If you are looking for scenes well set, characters comprehensively drawn, or the general ambience of 1960s Britain artfully construed, this is not that book. Barnes—through his self-admittedly untrustworthy narrator, Tony Webster—has a very specific story to tell, and is loath to write about much else.

And yet the book’s sweep is indeed magnificent: death, sex, friendship, youth, maturity, history, literature, family, memory, the past, love, regret, illusion, time, philosophy, suicide, intellect, music, conformity—these massive topics, and many more, all come in for the basic Barnes treatment: close inspection, direct interrogation, complete re-working.

As the book opens, Tony Webster is in grammar school. His clique has recently expanded from three to four with the addition of Adrian Finn, “a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself.”  Tony is captivated by Adrian’s emotional and intellectual maturity (“He gave the impression that he believed in things”) in contrast to his own pubescent insecurities. While Tony and his friends assume a rebellious posture against the world they still know nothing about, Adrian is eager to engage. “The three of us considered school sports a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive,” Tony reports. “Adrian joined the fencing club and did the high jump.”

Tony further admires Adrian’s intellectual honesty, his application of thought to life. Adrian would work a problem out in his head, announce that something was “philosophically self-evident,” and actually implement his conclusions through concrete action, while his less mature friends only affect seriousness.

But when Adrian steals his girlfriend, Tony is less than amused. He scrawls out an angry letter to his ex-friend and ex-girlfriend, expressing hopes that “you get so involved that the mutual damage will be permanent”  and that “acid rain [will] fall on your joint and anointed heads.”  The damage is indeed permanent: within a few months, Adrian has cut his wrists and bled to death in the bathtub, leaving behind a complex philosophical argument defending a person’s right to refuse the unwanted gift of life.

All this has happened by page 47. The rest of the book has Tony married, divorced, and, in lonely old age, obsessing over these episodes from his past. On the surface, he is attempting to reconstruct the story of what really happened, something he only accomplishes on the last page of the book, arguably not at all. More importantly, he is attempting to construct stories of the pasts of the people he once knew, stories that agree with the story he has told himself of his own life.

He digs through old letters and pictures and faulty memories, interviews his ex-wife and, repeatedly, the ex-girlfriend Adrian stole, trying to craft a more comfortable narrative of the past. Given the overwhelming evidence of his culpability, however, Tony finds the task too difficult. He may have lived longer than Adrian, but in a way he lived less, too.

Meditations on the ambiguities of memory, the non-linearity of time, laments for lost youth are common. What is unique about The Sense of an Ending is Barnes’ treatment of these themes, and the accessible, clear, almost epigrammatic way he has of writing them into his narrative. Those meditations do not sacrifice clarity for complexity.

Throughout the book, Tony seems to waver between considering maturity a welcome improvement of life, an achievement, and moments when he laments his lost youth, and more, regrets the years since that have robbed him of his ideals and replaced them with pitiable excesses of complacency, stubbornness, and undeserved self-satisfaction: “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.” Coming from a 65-year old British novelist (and an admitted Francophile) that will have to suffice as a contemporary substitution for “Aux barricades!”

If Tony’s meditations waver back and forth and conclude on a note hardly more convincing or final than previous, contrary assertions, Barnes has at least drawn a moving picture of the doubts and lamentations that precede death. They are essentially the unwanted rewards of ordinary life.

Tony’s belatedly acquired wisdoms fill most of the final third of the book. He apparently needed to live a full life before discovering them: “When you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring…But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings.”

We can’t learn these emotions by reading about them. But The Sense of an Ending rewards the reader with a peek, however brief, at what we can look forward to looking back at. It’s not pretty.

Laura Marling’s stage banter at Theatre Corona on Saturday night was as endearing and honest as her music, drawing the audience right into her performance. Self-aware at first and claiming to be terrible at witty banter, she warmed to the audience and eventually confessed to a long-standing obsession with Canada and Canadian culture. The soft-spoken blonde often gets asked what her lyrics mean or what inspired them, and so she explained that many of them are inspired by other people or events, and not necessarily her own life.

“My husband did not leave me last night,” she said, referring to the song, “I Speak Because I Can,” which begins with the line, “My husband left me last night.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m a liar,” she joked.

Audience favourites included “Blackberry Stone” from her 2010 album I Speak Because I Can and “Ghosts” from 2008’s Alas I Cannot Swim.

Marling was accompanied onstage by a keyboardist, cellist, upright bassist, banjo player, and a drummer, all of whom left the stage while she played a short, quiet acoustic set including the songs “Salinas” and “Goodbye England (Covered In Snow). Other songs like “Rambling Man” and “Sophia” are surprisingly rock-and-roll for Marling’s genre of British indie-folk, but they were sporadically and strategically placed throughout her set to keep up the crowd’s energy.

Towards the end of her playlist, Marling paused the band’s performance and told the audience apologetically that they would not be coming back onstage to play an encore. “We’re not rock-and-roll enough for an encore,” she joked. “So if you wanted an encore, then this is the last song, and if you didn’t want one, then it’s the second-to-last song.” Although Marling and her band never perform encores at their shows, it made for an anti-climactic ending to an otherwise enchanting performance. Overall, her performance was exactly like her music: emotional, sweet, and engaging, something no Laura Marling fan could be disappointed with.

If you’re going to make a documentary about a band, you generally need at least two things: music, and interviews with the band in question. Color Me Obsessed features neither. Instead, director Gorman Bechard tells the story of famed ‘80s punk band the Replacements via interviews from those close to the band and fans both famous (Colin Meloy, Dave Foley, Goo Goo Dolls) and not.

The anecdotes reveal a band that was as dysfunctional as it was brilliant. Take their MTV appearance, where they shaved and then painted on eyebrows, albeit slightly higher, so as to look surprised throughout the interview. Or the video for “Bastards of Young,” a three-and-a-half minute shot of the song playing from the speaker once they found out they weren’t contractually obligated to appear in the clip. Or that fans never knew whether they’d be sober enough to perform. All of them paint a picture of a self-sabotaging band that could’ve achieved greatness had they actually wanted it.

While the stories of chaos are amusing, interviews about the meaning of the band to the average fan cut to the emotional core of the film. These are stories of self-discovery, regaining self-confidence, and feeling comfortable with your imperfections. There’s no doubt the Replacements both saved and enriched lives.

So while it might seem misguided to make a Replacements documentary without the Replacements, ultimately it works. After all, it doesn’t matter who the Replacements thought they were, or even are—what a band becomes lies in the hands of those who listen to its music.