2019, you were a dagger. My heart bleeds from your cuts. Though I saw your approach, I was not yet ready.

Are we ever?

My dad lived a long and happy life and left us July 23rd.

My father-in-law was a few years younger but long too was his journey, one that ended five days before Christmas.

It will be days, months, years before I can adjust fully to life without them. We never get over loss; we just add it to the tapestry.

Tilted, however, I am not. These men made my life rich. I am whom I loved; and who loved me. If I stand tall tomorrow, it is their postures I inhabit.

Standing may be possible but my gaze shifted in 2019. Apologies if you were ignored this year or if you were given short shrift or the side-eye, or a sharp tongue. Some of my grace notes slipped. My gym routines faltered; with them most of my projects. Abandoned too was a team I was proud to belong with whom I served up meals to the hungry on very cold winter days. The only service I could muster was in my own kitchen where using my hands remained soothing. My sticky date pudding has never been better.

As always, solace, for me, is found in storytelling. I find answers in art; answers that are missing in people. The older I get, the less I can solve. Life remains ever mysterious. Arrogance is becoming less tolerable. I’m with Iris Dement. For fans of TV’s The Leftovers, maybe this resonates.

If you were somebody who made me laugh this year, you are dearer than ever. Suddenly, I was binging sitcoms formerly dismissed. What got me through? Schitt’s Creek. Younger. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. My mother, now a resident in long term care, loves the Hallmark channel. No doubt the bright palettes and simplistic storylines suit her, but I too found myself amused by the sheer audacity of all that cheesiness. Hell, I’d rather be amused right now than gutted. As ever, baking shows, both the British original and all the iterations that followed, make me silly happy. Bakers just want to give love. Period.

On the big screen, I found new things moved me. Here is my list of films that impressed me somehow this year. This is a highly subjective list, as all lists are. I like all kinds of films and what moves me, surprises me, makes me laugh, cry, or ponder the mystery of life…well, it may not be yours. Have at it.

Little Women: Gorgeous, inventive, and worth your time and I mean you, men of the earth. This is not just a women’s picture. Banish the ghetto of chick flicks forever.

Parasite: See my TIFF review.

A Hidden Life: See my TIFF review.

Apollo 11: A total kick for space nerds and everybody else too. Spectacular footage and audio (both never before captured onscreen) in a fantastic documentary. Best doc of the year.

Booksmart: Kudos to Olivia Wilde. Her directorial debut is a home run. I was right back in high school. Some things are indeed timeless, no matter how fresh, how current. Movies that make me laugh get high marks. Good comedies are rare.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood : Nice just never gets old. I liked the 2018 documentary on Mister Rogers better (Won’t You Be My Neighbour?) but this one is also worthy.

The Farewell: Give the Oscar now to Awkwafina. This movie will elicit tears but don’t miss it. Directed by Lulu Wang, the real-life partner of director Barry Jenkins. This is a film with legs. If it wins awards, look for a shift, however slight, to myopia in film financing. There is a world of storytellers outside the frame. Find them. Give them money. Let them fly.

Knives Out: see my TIFF review

Uncut Gems: see my TIFF review

Western Stars: see my TIFF review

Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins: If ever a film makes you want to stand and cheer, it’s this one from yet another hugely talented female director, Janice Engel. An utterly engrossing portrait of the famous brilliant Texan journalist.

Honey Boy: see my TIFF review

Rocketman: see my earlier review

The Two Popes: Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles won international acclaim for City of Gods and here he is again with another wonderful film, based on a play, about two Popes attempting to find common ground. Sir Antony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, two of the industry’s finest, are both spectacular here. Many years ago when I was a television journalist, I interviewed Hopkins for a beautiful little film called Remains of the Day. He was gracious and thoughtful—a little Pope-like; miles away from his Hannibal Lector sneer. I have loved watching all his films ever since.

The Grizzlies: This is a gorgeous Canadian film that deserves lots of eyeballs. While the script delivers a few clunkers, I fell hard for the cast; one of the strongest on-screen this year. The story surrounds a newly minted teacher who moves to a small Artic community and attempts to introduce lacrosse to his students. Both immensely watchable and heartwrenching, this is a film sneaking by most (if not all) of the sports film tropes right to the finish line.

Several films screened at TIFF last year were released in 2019. Of the titles I loved, these gems are now available in general release or on one of the streaming networks. Girl, Wild Rose, Maiden, Everybody Knows, What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire, The Wild Pear Tree. See my TIFF 2018 wrap for reviews of these titles. Try to see them all!

Two TIFF films I loved this year and certainly should be on the list have yet to be released: The Sound of Metal (look for it soon on Amazon) and Rocks (2020). Look for more on both here. Both were also on my Best of TIFF list this year.

NEW ADD: The Lighthouse. Two men go mad inside a lighthouse. That’s the pitch but if you’re looking for a masterpiece of cinematography, sound, production design, and performance, this is your film. Robert Eggers and his brother Max dived deep in their research to write this film, shot in Nova Scotia, and then director Robert pushed two movie stars (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattison) to the brink to pull off what is quite the stunner. What I loved most? This is not arty show-offy kind of filmmaking. Nothing is there that doesn’t drive the narrative vision. There are hints of poetry and folklore. Film nerds will go nuts with the influences spotted here and there, not to mention the camera work. As for the mermaids in this film? Let’s just say they are not made in Disney.

Best live theatre: The Brothers Size (Soulpepper)

My own favourite lived moments of 2019:
My London Top Ten,

Paris is all mise en scène,

No one gets to steal our joy

Still searching for a film to see to end the squabble on the family couch? Here are some of my past Best of The Year lists.

Highs of 2018, Highs of 2017, Highs of 2016, Highs of 2015, Highs of 2014, Highs of 2013,Highs of 2012

For all my patient readers, I wish you joy and peace in 2020. Thanks for sticking with me.

• Is it just me or did that horrific crash in Humboldt not just seem the most Canadian ever of tragedies??  A bleak and frozen intersection, a hockey team of beautiful boys, an overturned bus? Is it just me that can’t stop thinking of that sad and stunning 1997 Atom Egoyan film, The Sweet Hereafter?  I know I’m not alone in my tears.  Last night, the GoFundMe page dedicated to the hockey team stopped taking donations after raising $15,185,700 in twelve days.

•  Is is just me or was the crowd at the ACC in Toronto just a little too ratcheted up for the Leafs playoff game? Waving those silly towels in the air like the mad dogs we’ve become, fed up entirely with Fake Spring, one of thirteen Canadian seasons (freak February thaws, dog turd melt, pothole construction). We need to cheer for something. Go Leafs Go!

• Is it just me having a laugh listening to Viggo Mortensen making the media rounds in Toronto this week? Here to chair the jury for the $100,000 Glen Gould prize, Mortensen had to endure just about everyone being dumbfounded at his depth. “Isn’t it fascinating to discover someone with so many layers” mused one. Over on Breakfast Televison, the host dubbed the actor (also poet, painter, photographer, author, and musician) a “renassiance man”. Over here at the Red Chronicles, I’ll stick with a gem befitting no box. Mortensen said he doesn’t much believe in any kind of artistic competition but was drawn in by the level of artistry, his respect for the other jurors and past recipients, and his own curiosity, which he confessed was his guiding principle. Just place him at the head of my Fantasy Dinner Party, please and thank you. Past winners include Oscar Peterson, Leonard Cohen, Yo-Yo Ma, Phillip Glass; this year the prize went to opera singer Jessye Norman, the first female laureate in the prize’s history. Wow. It took only twelve years…

• Is it just me being schooled by my children? Over at the Pulitzer HQ, the folks who dole prizes out are also waking up to reality. Kendrik Lamar is the first hip hop artist to win the music Pulitzer for his 14-track “Damn”. The Pulitzer has long been interested in jazz and classical works yet this year’s board deemed the twenty-nine year old’s work as a “virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of African-American life”. Now it’s my children turn to gape. Huh? We knew already, Mom. Waaaaay before you clued in. 

•  I know it is not just me who lives in a world controlled by robots. Don’t think so? Didn’t you just have to type in some code for your computer’s brain to let you in? For basic access? Now let your mind travel to space. Luxury space travel. Book it now.  (Globe and Mail)

• Is it just me or does this sound just wacky…and wonderful too. Gravity blankets. They’re a thing.(New Yorker) Would you get one? Report back and let me know if your sleep was suddenly delicious.

 

 

Let’s meet in Berlin.

 You fly in from Athens and I’ll fly in from Toronto and we shall see if four days in this city of creative expressionism and tumultuous history will leave us as inspired as the thousands who come to live. Freedom, is what one transplanted Berliner told me. This is what I came for. Freedom to be whatever I want to be.

So went mom and daughter, she now grown and working in another historic city. This is our way now, these brief interludes of togetherness, and I shall learn the notes soon enough, if not the goodbyes. Travel buddies we are, with sneakers and trench coats for melancholy weather, weather that seems a good match for sombre sites like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: giant abstract blocks erected in 2005 covering an entire block near the Brandenburg Gate. 

These clear and present memorials are hardly hidden: my excellent free walking tour with Sandemans expressed this amply. In the Topography of Terror, erected in 2010 on the historical site of the main organs of Nazi terror between 1933 and 1945, we (and several tour groups) walked through fifteen comprehensive stations detailing the horrors of the SS. In the Jewish Museum (the largest Jewish museum in Europe) we watched in stunned silence as visitors were invited to walk noisily over ten thousand faces made of steel in the Memory Void; created by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman in one of two buildings designed by Polish architect Daniel Libeskind(whose studio is based in Berlin)—Torontonians will recall that name from our own infamous ROM crystal.  Also at that museum, a moving exhibit (continuing to April 2019), Welcome to Jerusalem, an immersive experience using film and audio clips, art, maps and more, all highlighting the many contradictions of a sacred city.

Next door was the Berlinische Galerie.

Sleek and clever, housed in a former glass warehouse, here was one of my favourite exhibits on this visit: a permanent collection of art produced by Berlin artists from 1870 until the present. These artworks are presented in chronological order with a helpful dotted route on the floor to lead visitors into each historical period from Expressionism to Dada to Art under the Nazis…and so on.

Art spills out of every corner in this city where museum hopping could saturate any schedule: we also saw Nefertiti at the Neues, Dietrich at the Berlin Film Museum (you knew I wouldn’t miss that one), and a bevy of nudes at the Helmet Newton Foundation.

According to the German culture secretary Tim Renner, the majority of the artists featured in the 2016 Venice Biennale live in Berlin. The city resides continuously on the brink of action. The tension between policing and anarchy, uniformity and debauchery, rules and social unrest, as well as a bristling right wing intimidation is also tangible. This makes it a fertile space for activism, creativity and agency that artists record and channel into their work. Many also come to Berlin for the (still) affordable studios and space that allows them to nurture their practice.

-Sleek Magazine

Hodge podge architecture lends Berlin’s avenues a storybook sheen, but we know none of it is fiction. If museums daunt, walking throughout the city’s boroughs would offer too its own lessons. Most visitors (three million a year to this site alone) find their way to the East Side Gallery, a series of murals painted on a remnant of the Berlin wall; explosive art that make up the largest open air gallery in the world.

Walking makes us hungry. Shall we go to the market? Which market first?

Perhaps the Turkish market?

 

Or delicious Reubens at Mogg…

 

Or wine at Café Jacques…

Or twenty miraculous offerings at Ernst (once we discovered the secret door)…

 

None of it…none of this heady activity prepared us for The Long Now, the closing event of MaerzMusik Festival. Held in the magical moody setting of Kraftwerk Berlin, this wildly popular event includes concerts, performances, electronic live-acts, sound and video installations to form a study of time and space.  

 Here is what we were told going in:

“Embracing musical worlds from early Renaissance polyphony to the musical avant-garde, experimental electronics, Ambient and Noise, this fourth edition of “The Long Now” allows for sonic and bodily experiences of an exceptional kind. Visitors are welcome to spend the entire duration in the powerplant, sleep over, or come and go. Beds will be provided. The Long Now is a place for the enduring present. A space in which time itself can unfold and the sense of time can take uncharted paths. With a duration of more than 30 hours, the project invites visitors to detach from the clocked pace of the present and indulge in the chronosphere of “The Long Now”.

-Resident Advisor

Here is what we knew going out: we want to, need to, MUST go back. No, we didn’t live out our wristbands allowing us to stay until 8am—packing loomed for flights the next morning—yet stretched out on a cot beside hundreds of others of all ages, all shapes, listening, no, absorbing the strangest music—beautiful, sad, enthralling music—we locked arms and floated on this surreal pillow of possibility…this here, this long now is all we have, this place, this is Berlin. All of it pushing forward in relentless modernism…No posturing here. This surely was the absolute expression of freedom.

And this too…my cab driver en route back to the airport. My wife knits, he told me. 

What a city!

Auf Wiedersehen!

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Moments—as a writer and producer, I mine them— and this plaque on my desk is a helpful prompt. As a criminal lawyer, my partner in things beyond crime (love, kids, mortgage, insane movie marathons, late night ice cream dives) navigates those who have seen their lives changed by a single moment.

Today is THIRSTY THURSDAY. I’m hungry for your moments. Share some below of your summer bliss moments. Here are some of mine:

Read More

2016 was a year to say goodbye to my youngest off to university, and to my childhood home where my parents lived for almost six decades. A year of frights that came deep in the night, some that lingered longer than others: my mother and my oldest child suffered accidents, as did my father-in-law. Caring emergency workers and excellent medical supervision mean we have them all yet to cherish this holiday season.

We will toast them tonight, but first, a peek at some of my favourites of 2016: Read More