SeaChoice is a partnership of environmental NGOs (David Suzuki and the Sierra Club amongst others) that just publishes an advisory list. Their app is nothing but this list, but it’s more user-friendly (and less buggy) than the list portion of the OceanWise app. My favourite part is that you can switch between English and Japanese (called “Sushi” here), because English restaurants never serve anything other than the same six fish.

The SeaChoice list contains pictures and information on why fish are less sustainable unlike Ocean Wise’s curt “don’t eat that shit!”. (I’d love to be able to tell someone not to order the tuna because removing large predators might disrupt the ecosystem.) The
Ocean Wise list has more entries, but I have no idea whether I’m likely to run into “orangespot sardines” on a menu. The OceanWise and SeaChoice apps are both buggy, making me wonder about the capability of Canadian NGOs to develop (or manage contracts for development of) software. Neither of the lists has proper cross-listing between, for example, sardines and herring.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program has an app that is far slicker (although still not without bugs) than either of the BC efforts. It includes a map of user-submitted locations to find specific fish. There are none in Canada right now and there’s no API to do a bulk upload of OceanWise certified locations, but that would be the best solution. Although SeafoodWatch includes Japanese, it bizarrely doesn’t include Spanish.

The title character, whose fun-to-say name (“Yankale Bride”) is repeated over and over again, runs a matchmaking service subsidized by smuggling blue jeans or something like that. The protagonist, Arik, is taken under Yankale’s wing running background checks on suitors but kept away from the smuggling. I assumed that it would be revealed that Arik’s actually being used to facilitate smuggling, but I was disappointed. Seeing the matchmaking business in action is very cute in these days of online dating, but it’s not really more than a comedic MacGuffin to build Arik’s character.

A sideplot is that there is an outrageously hot girl visiting for the summer who is inexplicably interested in geeky Arik. Whenever I see these movies I ask myself “why didn’t I get a really hot fling when I was a geeky teenager?” and then I remember that it’s because I grew up in reality.

“The cobbler goes barefoot”: Yankale loves a woman, Clara, who is emotionally unavailable. The film has an underlying theme about the stereotype that Holocaust survivors must have done bad things to survive, but it isn’t explored in depth. There’s a line that gives the barest hint of a dark alternate reading: Yankale had to kill Clara’s infant child for the two of them to evade capture in Europe.

The film never hits that high note of directing again. The rest of the film is more subtle and much more dialog-driven. That’s okay because the dialog – or at least the English subtitles I could read – is good, but it’s high-paced, so you need to be a fast reader.

The theme of the film is a group of friends tending to their petty interpersonal issues while one of them lies in intensive care. Even though the synopsis in the Film Festival guide gives away the ending (“he lies dying”), the film is successful at pulling you into its world. I became engaged by the soap opera and forgot about the larger context.

From my perspective, the film perfectly succeeds at its goal, but I wonder if it works as well for women? All but one of the main characters are men, and she is a woman who acts like a man. Their wives and girlfriends are supporting characters, and the plot is mostly about relationships between the men.

I found the close-knit, urban group of friends who vacation together for a month every year (yay France!) to be unrealistic. I think you couldn’t get that level of cohesion with such variety (raising kids vs doing coke at clubs), but I’ll forgive it as a narrative device. The two character ages mentioned are 35 & 37, which made me meditate on the position of that age in society.

The soundtrack is overly-familiar American rock songs, which seemed a little odd but not so much as to be annoying.

Circo is a series of interviews (with English subtitles) and genre scenes of a family-run travelling circus in rural Mexico. Although there’s no larger narrative, the documentary is a series of chapters that each explore a theme with a few pieces of footage. They also employ foreshadowing, for example all the little girls announce they want to do the hula hoop act far before we meet the big girl and see her do it. The film does a good job of weaving together their bits of footage without imposing an artificial narrative.

No documentary is without bias, but I was left wondering what amount of interpretation of the carnie’s lives was done by the people, what amount by the filmmakers and what amount by myself. For example, they are stressed about the debt load of the non-incorporated business, but how many Mexicans (or Canadians) aren’t stressed about money? The most objective judgement is that the children are too busy learning acrobatics and lion taming to become literate – given that Mexico has a 93% literacy rate, it seems like this will jeopardize their ability to take over the family business. On the other hand, the delight of little girls at having pet tiger cubs is shown without any focus on the conditions in which they’re kept.

Whenever I watch documentaries without narrative nor obvious ideology, I am left wondering “what’s the point?” I already could have guessed that these situations existed and there’s nothing particularly enlightening or engaging in the showing of them. So although this documentary is as well-done as possible given the subject matter, I hesitate to recommend it to anyone without a particular interest. Mostly it made me miss Carnivàle.

This film is based on a personal essay by the chef of an Antarctic research station and it shows: there isn’t a narrative so much as the passage of time, and characters besides the chef don’t develop, they just have events. This would be great as a documentary and fine as a biopic, but it just feels like a lazy adaptation.

The food porn was decent, but I would have liked more details about the difficulty of cooking in that environment, not just the crew’s emotional reactions. In particular, I was hoping for scientific ingenuity in making the most of their resources. Instead all we got was off-hand serendipity about kansui.

Despite not living up to my expectations, the title character was very cute and this can be considered a sophisticated feel-good movie. It gave some interesting insight into the plight of the team’s situation and the nature of scientists. There were a few stand-out scenes that captured emotional nuance. Most of my friends had a more positive reaction than me.

The film felt quite long to me at 125 minutes – definitely don’t arrive hungry! Perhaps even a creative edit could make this movie great.

But while home sick recently I started going through Rotten Tomatoes’ top films of 2011 and watched Exit Through the Gift Shop. It turns out it’s not really about Banksy: it’s the story of a guy (Mr. Brainwash) who starts making a documentary about street artists including Invader, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, then decides to go copy them and immediately sell out becoming rich.

The documentary claims that while Mr. Brainwash is off selling out, Banksy edits the footage Mr. Brainwash took into a documentary about Mr. Brainwash. The media speculates that the story is actually a mockumentary staged by Banksy. Of course if the mockumentary is performance art that includes real art shows, then we have to ask in what way is it not true?

Either way, it has a very clean narrative structure, unlike many documentaries where the producers are obviously just randomly stumbling around (eg: Gasland). And because Mr. Brainwash’s art is so derivative, it fulfills the documentary’s purpose of explaining street art while raising a number of critical questions. I can’t imagine a better film about street art – the self-reflective, satirical angle just makes it postmodernly delicious.

The dancers were three women and a man, wearing street clothes with some face makeup. Their style was contemporary: afterward one of them told me that the spatial and emotional structure of the piece was planned but the individual moves were improvised. There was a sign on an easel by the main entrance that just said “Dance Days brought to you by YAM magazine” – there was no spoken introduction. A camera person filmed the performance with a hand-held camera and there was a photographer at the start. There was no music, just ambient noise from a coffee shop.

There were at most a dozen audience members who seemed to know what was going on, everyone else were just passing through or sitting in an adjacent restaurant. For me, the piece raised some critical questions:

What separates the dancers from normal people and from crazy people? How do we know that those people are dancing and other people aren’t? Their sign, makeup, camera person, training, schedule and audience are what make them official, not anything inherent in their actions. (As you can see in my photos, I was a bit obsessed with the sign.)

It felt like the sort of thing you might watch in a public square or a park – how is it significant that The Atrium is private space that feels public? What would happen if me and my friends were to try the same thing? I’m sure the public amenity of The Atrium’s courtyard figured into the development permit, so is this just a case of government outsourcing the creation of public space?

… especially for things like outlining stuff in photos to V3Dify. Still, I’d rather have a Minority Report display to edit with.

[Update: Oh, right: It doesn't have an eraser-nib -- Booooooo!]

I was expecting and hoping the Freestylers would play what I believe is called breakstep: a dubstep-style bassline with a full-time (~140bpm) breakbeat drum. My favourite song of the night was Cracks, which perfectly demonstrates what I’m talking about at 0:50:

Unfortunately, there were also plenty of pure dubstep songs. The massive popularity of dubstep has lured over both drum & bass* and breaks DJs, subsuming two of the most danceable genres of electronic music.

Only Aston Harvey was spinning. I’m not sure that DJ pairs spin any better than single DJs, but it’s fun to watch them interact behind the decks and it makes you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth. He didn’t play my favourite Freestylers song, Push Up (which I admit is cheesy and misogynistic):

A microphone on stage was unveiled with fanfare. Breaks is essentially just sped-up hip-hop instrumentals, so it’s common to rap over it. The Freestylers latest mix has a number of dancehall acapellae and according to their wordy bio they sometimes tour with an MC. But the guy who eventually took the microphone looked awkward while he did nothing with it besides call for applause during the excessive trance-anthem-style bass drops.

* I recently went to Dieselboy where he announced “I can play whatever the fuck I want”, which was two hours of dubstep.

This is both the background and the plot of the play Clark and I Somewhere Over Conneticut, for it is the most postmodern play I can imagine. I found the postmodernity charming, but it’s possible that you’d find it trite if you hate postmodernism. Highlights include:

• The sound and light technician sits at a table on the side of the stage and interacts with the actor.
• The play opens by the actor taking a photo of the audience, which is then projected onto the backdrop.
• Actions are used to signify characters/people.
• A story told by the actor is then retold by his friends and family as surreal and unreliable narrators.
• Some of the photos are kitsch of an overly-adored toy dog.
• It’s unclear what parts of the play are fiction, which are about the family in the photos and which are autobiographical about the actor.
• The actor spends most of the play in a bunny suit, just because.

The play feels kind of epic with a number of recurring threads and I was engaged throughout. I left the play with a desire to work out the “truth” in my head, as well as a realization that attempting to do so was futile. I’d recommend the play to anyone who is into postmodernity or experimental theatre, but don’t bother if your idea of good theatre is yet another Fringe comedy monologue.