Author: Dan Dickinson

Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque / Mill Street Coffee Porter

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Yesterday, on our way to TIFF10 film #2, we stopped in at Beerbistro. They had two Project FiftyBrew beers on their list: Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque and Mill Street Coffee Porter.

The coffee porter was okay…what can I say? It tasted like coffee, and I don’t really like coffee. I was also very full from lunch and my previous beer. I should probably give it another go some other time, but…meh.

The Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque, on the other hand, was fan-freaking-tastic. As in, one of the best stouts I’ve ever tried. It somehow tasted like chocolate AND vanilla simultaneously. It wasn’t heavy or chalky, it was just…tasty. This will not be the last time I drink this beer.

Trust

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This film festival hasn’t felt like a film festival yet. I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t seen or heard or read anything about the start of TIFF10, and by the time we attended our first screening yesterday morning, all the excitement that comes with the first two nights of screenings had worn off. It felt to me like we were joining something late, rather than really being a part of it.

What did feel kind of nice was being back in the VISA Screening Room at the Elgin Theatre. It was our first ‘home’ at TIFF when we started attending, but lately it’s become more and more off-limits to simple movie-goers (and not celeb watchers) like us and the Ryerson has become the new core of our TIFF experience. Yesterday we were able to sneak in because the screening of Trust (tiff | imdb) took place at 11AM; the gala screening had taken place the night before. Even so, David Schwimmer showed up to introduce his second film, and at least gave us a preview of how difficult it would be.

I don’t want to give away much, but if you read the synopsis on either of those links or watch the trailer you’ll get the gist: that a 14-year girl is lured by a sexual predator online and…well, bad things happen. Schwimmer donates a lot of his time and money to a rape crisis centre in L.A., and heard the stories of victims and their families, and a lot of that showed up on the screen. The emotional responses of the girl (played disturbingly well by Liana Liberato) and her father (Clive Owen) seemed more believable to me than anything I’d expect to get from a Hollywood movie.

There was also a subplot: the ubiquitous sexualization of teens. Clive Owen plays an ad exec who did a big campaign, and threw a big party, for a barely-disguised American Apparel. Middle-aged executives talk about what they’d do to 19-year-old waitresses if they weren’t married. The mall is plastered with pictures, appearing barely in-frame, of girls in lingerie. Schwimmer nearly beats us over the head with this, but manages to keep it on-track.

I also can’t describe how important it was that the star really was a 14-year-old girl when this was shot. Again, this is probably not what would have happened had this been a typical Hollywood film. Typically a better-known actress in her early or mid-twenties would be cast, and the audience would never have felt that visceral reaction one has to a child being in danger. They would never have accepted that her emotional response would be naive and childlike. We would know she’s a young adult, and expect her to react accordingly. Tragically, in the end, this commitment to realism may be what keeps the film from a wide release, or even US distribution. As of this writing there’s no American distributor.

B-

St-Ambroise Pale Ale

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Last night, after dinner at REDS, we popped over to Smokeless Joe for a beer. Or four. Happily I was able to knock off another Project FiftyBrew entry: McAuslan Brewing’s St-Ambroise Pale Ale. I was hoping to do more than that, but they were all out of Hockley Valley Dark, Mill Street Coffee Porter and Scotch Irish Sgt Major’s IPA.

No matter. Kaylea suggested a Traquair Jacobite Ale (which happens to be rated #10 among UK/Irish beers) and it was so good I had a second bottle. I circled back to Canada for my final drink, a Unibroue Fin du Monde. Which is on the list, but lord knows I’ve had it before.

Time to speed this up. I think brunch at Beerbistro is in order.

Project FiftyBrew

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About a month ago Troy Burtch — author of the Great Canadian Beer Blog — reposted a speech by Steve Beauchesne, the co-founder of Beau’s Brewery entitled “What If Ontario Had A Beer Revolution?“.

What if Ontario had a beer revolution?

What do I mean by a beer revolution? Well revolutions usually involve overthrowing tyrants, and instituting a new form of governance, but my revolution is maybe a little less violent than that, although by no means is it less radical.

Right now in Ontario, 1 out of every 20 beers drank came from an independent, Ontario brewery. By beer revolution, I mean, what would happen if Ontarians chose to drink an Ontario-made independent beer 1 out of every 2 times they drank beer?

Mr. Beauchesne goes on to make an economic argument for Ontario craft beer which doesn’t actually work all that well, but no matter: there are benefits to supporting local — if not necessarily independently owned — brewers. Besides, no living human should be made to drink the likes of MolsonCoors CanadianLight or its ilk. I felt, after reading the transcript of his speech, that I should try to drink primarily local beers. But it was the summer, and it was boiling hot, and goddammit I love me some German weissbier.

Then, this past Thursday, Nellie and I ducked into Smokeless Joe on our way home from the TIFF box office. There we met the charming and gracious Kaylea from WineNotOntario who recommended the Dieu du Ciel foursome on feature. I was no stranger to DdC, having enjoyed their Rosée D’hibiscus and struggled through their Péché Mortel (seriously, man…it tasted like a peach fucking ashtray) but I wouldn’t have noticed them all tucked away down there on Joe’s chalkboard had she not pointed them out. So I tried. I liked. And I decided: I should do with beer what we’ve been trying to do with wine: drink Canadian whenever possible. Uh, this October trip to SanFran/Napa/Sonoma notwithstanding…vacations don’t count. Aaaaaaaaanyloophole, I needed a plan. It wouldn’t do to swear off all non-Canadian beer, that’s just too drastic. But I figured I should make an effort to at least try the best local stuff, especially those I might not normally try. Hence: Project FiftyBrew.

Here’s the project plan:

  1. Go to BeerAdvocate.com and download the list of what, according to their users, constitute the top 50 Canadian beers (DONE!);
  2. Mark off the ones I’ve already tried (DONE!);
  3. Vow to try the remaining 33 (subject to availability) over the next…oh, I don’t know. Whenever. No rush, right?

I’m looking forward to scouring the LCBO, Volo, Smokeless Joe, Beerbistro and C’est What for the unconquered bottles. I’m sure we’ll also plan a trip to Quebec ’cause, uh, they’re nearly all from there…Unibroue, Dieu du Ciel and McAuslan alone make  up more than half the list.

Also, by the time I finish these fifty I’m sure the list will have changed, but I look forward to trying the new entrants too. I may be coming at this from a somewhat different angle than Mr. Beauchesne, but I do hope one of his bottles of Beau’s climbs into the top tier.

Wish me luck.

Relief

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When we found out Monday that box #7 in the advance film selection lottery was drawn, and we were in box #5, we thought we were screwed. Proper screwed. Being in the second-last box is not usually a happy place for a TIFF film-goer.

However.

We just got our email…and we lucked out. Two #1 picks, three #2 picks. No do-overs. W00t!

  • We got Trust, not Biutiful. Trust is the one I’m shaking my head at the most…I think we only picked it because it worked in the time slot, not because we rated it that highly.
  • We got Blame, not Beautiful Boy, but Blame feels a little like a sleeper.
  • We got Let Me In (the remake of Let The Right One In) which is coming to regular theatres soon, but so is Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is such a hot ticket I gave up any hope of seeing it the second I found out what box we were in.
  • The other two — Confessions and 13 Assassins — were our first picks, and I’m quite happy to close out the festival with a full-on Takashi Miike samurai battle.

And no, this was not "glamping"

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Nearly every year Nellie goes camping with her girlfriends. She has a special affection for sleeping in a tent and drinking from tin cups and sitting around a campfire. In recent years those girl-camping excursions have become less frequent, and last year she didn’t get to go at all. Since I couldn’t bear to see her miserable two years in a row I agreed to go with her. My one condition: a tent I could stand up in, more or less. So, a campground reservation in Algonquin Park and two trips to MEC and we were all set.

Of course, the worst part of Algonquin is getting there, and this was no exception. I hate long drives. Hate hate hate. But we made it, and checked in to our Mew Lake campground. Nellie had done her homework and picked one of the best sites available.

This was my first time car-camping, so getting used to having people on all sides was weird, but we were about as private as you can get there. We set up our fancy new tent (which is awesome), settled in, built a fire and started making dinner.

Our meals, by the way, provoked some mockery among our Twitter and Facebook friends…apparently eating steak and drinking wine, or having a spread of prosciutto and salami and cheese and bread and chocolate, or cooking a delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and sausage is verboten, and we should instead have cooked weenies or roasted marshmallows. To which we replied thus: since we have no kids to entertain with such traditions, why would we voluntarily eat crap food just because we’re camping? I mean, really…what’s wrong with this?

Nothing, sez I. Anyrant, once dinner and dishes were out of the way we sat our asses down by the campfire and watched the sun go down. It got a little chilly that night so the fire, while a pain to start, was sorely needed to keep us warm until we could tuck into our sleeping bags for the night. Reports of a bear in the area had us a tiny bit jumpy, but nothing serious. The next morning I got up before sunrise and took in the view of the steam billowing off the lake.

As I took pictures of the lake and sunrise (both, in some cases) I heard a rustling along the shore right in front of me. I saw a…well, I’m not sure what it was. A small heron of some kind maybe?

Whatever it was it took a few awkward strides through the water and then took off into the grass. Any ideas? A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything. I saw it again that afternoon, in the same spot, so maybe it had a nest there. Not sure, but Nellie got a kick out of him/her.

Since we had such good weather (seriously, ridiculous weather…warm and sunny during the day, moderate at night and not a cloud in the sky the entire weekend) we went for a hike at the nearby Track & Tower trail.

It was a good workout, but worth it for the deep woods seclusion, lake views (like the one above) and amazing lookout from a cliff toward Cache Lake.

We even came across a very unexpected trail companion: a turtle sunning himself on a hill. I’d never seen a turtle this big in the wild…he was about a foot across. I think it was a snapping turtle, but didn’t get close enough to find out. We got some pics and said our goodbyes.

We were pretty pooped (and extremely warm) by the time we got home so we jumped in the lake to cool off. During our swim, half a dozen Canada Geese descended down to the lake, circled us once and water-landed twenty feet from us. Which was pretty cool.

That night we didn’t have the energy for much…fortunately our meal involved slicing, not cooking. Still, it was nice to sit there and drink a bottle of Southbrook Fresh White and build a fire and be entertained by a chipmunk.

Sunday morning we wanted to beat traffic, so it was a whirlwind of breakfast and cleaning and packing and road-getting-on. We did pretty well too; it was smooth sailing all the way down highway 11 and the 400. The only traffic we hit was on the DVP at York Mills. Nevertheless, when we unloaded, returned the car and walked home we felt…well, smelly. Hooray for whoever invented the shower.

So, lots of fun was had, but I’m hoping to minimize the driving next time. And yes, there will be a next time. And yes, we will be eating awesome food and drinking good wine. Deal with it.

First choice: subtitles

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At this year’s film festival, if all goes to plan, we’ll be seeing five of these movies:

The most frustrating part of this year (aside from the eternally unusable TIFF website) was finding out that the ‘premium’ screenings — into which ordinary movie-loving (as opposed to celebrity-slobbering) attendees are not allowed — are no longer limited to Roy Thomson Hall and the Elgin. We now find ourselves cut off from a few screenings at the Ryerson, Winter Garden and even the sad little Isabel Bader theatre.

If we get all our first picks we’ll have a nice little lineup, and a bad-ass samurai movie to close it out.

This week in entertainment

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I’d kind of forgotten about all the movies we’ve watched over the past week:

  • Kick-Ass: most excellent
  • Precious: good, incredibly well-acted (in that if I ever see Mo’Nique walking down the street I’m likely to punch her face in) but hard as fuck to watch
  • Stripes: I’m sure it was a classic for its time, but it doesn’t really hold up.
  • Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day: look, the original isn’t exactly a classic, but it’s always been kind of special to me because we discovered it ten years ago in a self-serve movie rental machine, not having any idea what we were about to see. I didn’t expect the sequel to live up to that, but I would have been happy with a close approximation of the original. Unfortunately it was hammy and stilted and over the top, and not in the cool way that the first one was. Lots of shots of my neighbourhood though, just like the first one.
  • The Men Who Stare At Goats: I think I had the same reaction as most other people: quite funny in parts, but nothing special. Also: Ewan MacGregor continues to do the worst American accent of any British actor.
  • Paranormal Activity: Okay, we watched this two weeks ago, but whatever. Actually a pretty effective little scare-machine, but completely blew it in the final 20 seconds. Also: Katie Featherston = girlfriend du jour.

.:.

My headphones were filled all week with the new releases by Best Coast (pretty good…almost like the Raveonettes without the male voice), Japandroids (good, but not as good as their last album, I’m afraid; few things last year were), Sleigh Bells (which I like more than I feel I should), Mates of State (hearing them cover the likes of Tom Waits and The Mars Volta seems sacrilegious at first, then awesome, then just fun) and, naturally, The Arcade Fire. Which is < Funeral but > Black Mirror and therefore one of the best things I’ve heard all year. Speaking of CadeFire — which is what I call them now, due to us being so very tight — Frank Yang (aka Chromewaves) summed up awfully well what’s so captivating about them:

They somehow manage to evoke that singular moment in everyone’s life where youth gives way to adulthood, where one becomes acutely aware of the fact that they are not in fact invincible, that they will someday die, but also the sense of still having their entire lives ahead of them and the sense of opportunity that offers – that mixture of anxiety and optimism, insecurity and confidence. It’s a powerful, primal resonance made even moreso when rendered in broad, bold musical strokes. With Funeral, it was conveyed through the lens of family and neighbourhoods, of being part of a special gang. Neon Bible turned it around to be them against the world with no sense that they’d actually triumph. And The Suburbs realizes that there’s no us and them, there’s just everyone.

I’ll probably keep The Suburbs on perma-rotation until my next big anticipated release: Lisbon by The Walkmen.

.:.

With Treme, The Office, Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie off the air right now the only things I’m watching are Mad Men (because it’s the best thing on TV right now), True Blood (because it’s the most entertaining thing on TV right now) and Entourage (because, despite its persistent suck whenever Ari’s not on the screen, for the life of me I cannot seem to stop watching it).

.:.

The miniature time slot attributed to reading is reserved for, as ever, Tony Judt‘s Postwar and Kate Carraway’s twitter feed. However, all other reading shall cease on Tuesday and Wednesday as I have only those days to select our TIFF films.

.:.

And, with that, I’m off to work. After all, all play and no work makes Jack really far behind on his to-do list.

Voyage of the Damned

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I’m the seventh generation of my family to live in this country. To people in Toronto that seems like a lot, but where I grew up — Nova Scotia — it wasn’t such a big deal. Still, we’ve been here longer than most. By my best guess my family’s lived in this country since before it was a country.

That’s why I’m always so disheartened by the kind of xenophobia that meets incidents like the arrival in Vancouver of a ship carrying 490 Tamil refugees. We don’t live in an ancient society, we live in one that’s barely adolescent. Our country is, by its very nature, made up of dozens — hundreds, probably — of different peoples, many of whom fled war or famine or worse, the likes of which these very Tamils fled. The difference, as Michael Valpy rightly pointed out in Friday’s Globe, is both where they come from, and how they get here:

Globe and Mail reporter Rod Mickleburgh discovered nearly 10 years ago that refugee claimants arriving by plane at Vancouver airport were almost never detained, were soon given access to social and medical benefits, were rarely deported and had a cracking good chance of being smuggled into the U.S.

Most claimants arriving on filthy, rusting ships or stowed away in containers, on the other hand, saw the inside of jails, lost their applications for refugee status and were deported. Immigration officials say it’s because the boat people are being trafficked by organized criminals.

See? If these Tamils just had the good sense to be white and buy some plane tickets, they’d be all set. But instead they did it the hard way, cramming themselves into an old freighter for a four-month slog across the Pacific. Surely their lack of drive and unwillingness to endure hardship will cause a drain on our social services.

Please, not another Komagata Maru. Not another MS St. Louis.

They don't love you like I love you

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I have a special fondness for good bands who take bad pop songs and make them awesome. I picked a few of my favourites, and let me tell you…it was only Gordon Lightfoot’s general awesomeness that kept me from putting The Dandy Warhols‘ version of “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” on here.

The Bird And The Bee . “Don’t Stop The Music” (Rihanna)

Cat Power . “Sweedeedee” (Michael Hurley. Who? Okay, I realize Michael Hurley isn’t a famous pop star, but that version of “Sweedeedee” is just so good I listen to it every chance I get.)

Elbow . “Independent Woman” (Destiny’s Child)

Flaming Lips . “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” (Kylie Minogue)

Frontline Assembly . “Justify My Love” (Madonna)

Johnny Cash . “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (Moby…kinda…I think Johnny wouldn’t have recorded this except that Moby had popularized the riff a few years back)

Lissie . “Bad Romance” (Lady Gaga)

Ted Leo . “Since U Been Gone” (Kelly Clarkson) Please note: any partial awesomeness in the middle of the song is exempt from any “bad song” label.

Travis . “Hit Me Baby One More Time” (Britney Spears)

White Stripes . “Jolene” (Dolly Parton)