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. 

Arcade Fire proudly put on a remarkable show for the thousands of people that crowded the Quartier des spectacles on Thursday night. The band’s passion for their beloved hometown shone through in their performance, and it was clear how happy they were to pay tribute to the people and city that have supported them over the years.

Starting the set with the appropriately titled “Ready to Start,” it was immediately clear how exciting the show was going to be. After expressing their pleasure in performing the show—”Our hearts are very full,” Butler said—they proceeded to play an old favourite, “Keep the Car Running.” The whole set was a flawless mix of songs from their three albums. There was a common thread connecting each of the songs, the order of which seemed to be meticulously planned out to illustrate a narrative, especially coupled with black and white strobing images playing on screens behind the band. The mood of the audience changed with every song, from swaying calmly to the slightly subdued “Modern Man,” to dancing ferociously to “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” before which Butler encouraged the polite and well-behaved crowd to let go of its inhibitions.

The band played for over an hour before coming back for an encore of “Rebellion (Lies),” which ended with Will Butler repeatedly smashing his floor tom on the stage, and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” where the band launched LED beach balls into the crowd. The band’s music lends itself to anthemic group sing-a-longs and it’s difficult for even the most hardened cynic not to be moved by the cathartic chorus of “Wake Up.” At once a thank you and a celebration, it was a show not likely to be forgotten.

Peter Hook and The Light, playing Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (and more), were warmly received on Sunday night by a full house at the spacious Club Soda. The crowd was an eclectic set—men outnumbered women five to one—and an age demographic skewed strongly toward two poles: fashionably-dressed 20-somethings and original Joy Division fans who were those 20-somethings in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Peter Hook soaked in and stoked up the crowd with arm-waves and poses in between his vocals and choice morsels of excellent bass work on his red-and-cream Eccleshall Viking. Hook’s son Jack Bates, sharing and swapping out bass parts for Hook on a red Yamaha, proved himself to be adequately prepared to follow in his father’s footsteps. Nat Watson on guitar, Paul Kehoe on drums, and Andy Pool on synth each held their own and shone without outshining.

Both “Transmission” and “Digital” whipped the crowd into a furor of raised hands and appreciative shouts. Hook played the stage like a pro, showing off his string technique especially close to the faces of those lucky enough to be down right of stage.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Joy Division’s best-known track, saw the audience at its most enthusiastic. Fans seated in the wings rose to dance, and girls were lifted up on shoulders for a full-throated audience sing-a-long as the floor turned into a dance pit roiling with bodies and marijuana-scented smoke.

Peter Hook seemed pleasantly surprised by the crowd’s reception toward the end of the show, humbly offering a few refrains of “merci” before he came back for one encore, and then a second. He wrapped up with two New Order songs, leaving the audience crying out, clearly still hoping for more, until the very last amp was clicked off.

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.