Limes with Orange

It's been a busy week so I'll just do a summary post. Wednesday night after the Doc School screening I watched the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Why is this noteworthy when I watch the Daily Show most nights? Because this was the night that my friend Liz was in the studio audience! And it was the night that Lynne Cheney was on the show. Yep, you read that right... Lynne Cheney agreed to be interviewed by Jon Stewart. And my friend was there to witness it in all its hilarious awkwardness. Starting with the "You Don't Know Dick!" segment that was modified to "You Don't Know... Richard Cheney" right up to when Lynne made a dash for the exit at the end. Wish I'd been there, too!

Then Thursday night was the Deco Dawson screening. He showed several of his short films in chronological order and then ended with his latest film "The Last Moment" which is quite brilliant (and I'm not just saying that because it reminds me of a short film idea of mine that is in outline form at the moment). I was going to quote the Toronto International Film Festival program, but I feel like its brief blurb says too much and yet not enough. So I'm going to use this quote from Winnipeg's Uptown Magazine instead:

Winnipeg filmmaker Deco Dawson... emerges with the best film of his career — perhaps one of the best short films ever made. The Last Moment... shows us all that is fascinating about the medium. It's lurid, depraved, sleazy and cold. It's breathlessly romantic, hopeful and poetic. It's intentionally absurd and self-referential. It's shocking, confrontational and breathtaking. It's sexy and it's violent, artificial and honest. In short it is Cinema. The Last Moment is beautiful.

If you ever have a chance to see this film, watch it!

Friday night was Deco's Director's Eye talk at the CSIF. The Director's Eye series gives filmmakers an opportunity to talk about their cinematic influences and show clips that inspire and inform their own work. Well, Deco's style has a wide variety of influences from the Surrealists, Film Noir, Dogme 95, Hitchcock, French New Wave and recent filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino. So his clips ranged from an extravagant Busby Berkeley number in the 1934 musical comedy "Dames" (I had no idea that you could find Surrealism in Hollywood musicals) to "Dark Passage" (it's Bogie so it must be Film Noir) and "Europa" (not a Dogme film but by a Dogme director) and many, many more. I have to admit that before Deco's residency I would have been stunned to learn about the variety of his influences but having seen some of his more recent work, and hearing him talk about why these clips influenced him in such a way, it really makes perfect sense.

A couple of noteworthy news items: The Liberals won a second majority in the Ontario election... not a huge surprise, but a relief that at least they didn't go big-C Conservative (even though McGuinty is rather small-c conservative anyway). And congrats to Al Gore on being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about the threats posed by global warming. (I wonder if he still has no plans to return to politics?) Unfortunately, the Nobel committee decided to split the award between Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rather than Canadian Inuit environmentalist Sheila Watt-Cloutier (who was jointly nominated with Gore by Norwegian parliamentarians). Pity.

But enough of all that... now I'm ready for a little weekend chillaxin'... Ciao!

Labels: film, jon stewart