Melora Koepke

This American Life: Mike Judge’s Extract is another wry social satire for the masses-maybe

When Mike Judge walks into our interview in Los Angeles last week, all I see at first is a mild-looking bald man in a peach dress shirt greeting me in a shy, halting, almost-Midwestern mutter. But then, as I look closer and maybe squint my eyes a little, I see Mike Judge – or rather, an amalgam of every Mike Judge character I know. As he clears his throat, there’s Beavis, and his nervous chuckle is Butt-head, though with a Hank Hill inflection.

“I think maybe I’m starting to sound more like Hank Hill as I get older,” he says.

Judge’s chin? Vintage Dale Gribble. His pate is Dale too with a bit of Bill Dauterive pathos thrown in. And the peach shirt is definitely “Boomhauer Goes to Hollywood,” if that existed.

Of course, none of this means anything if you’re not a Mike Judge fan – if you’re not part of the Beavis and Butt-head generation, or haven’t seen his recently cancelled Fox animated sitcom, King of the Hill, in endless reruns. Will Judge’s latest film, Extract, a human-scale comedy with a handpicked Mike Judge-friendly cast and Judge himself in a pivotal cameo intended for Tom Petty, finally make him a household name? The jury’s still out on that, but I doubt it. Read article

Father figure: Oldman as debauched-wolf-killer in RRH remake.

Ratings: You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t make a studio movie without ‘em.

When director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Lords of Dogtown) decided with her production team that she’d like to rejig the ancient folktale of Little Red Riding Hood as teen entertainment for the Twilight demographic, with elements of horror and supernatural gothic thriller, she must have known there’d be certain limitations: Though a PG-13 rating allows for some scary scenes and “sensual situations,” there certainly couldn’t be as much blood, guts or groans as you might expect from a film about a terrifying werewolf who is driven by human blood lust to eviscerate his victims by the light of a blood-red moon.

But still, it’s an erotic wolf-on-waif story about a ripe young innocent, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried from Mamma Mia and Big Love), caught in a love quadrangle with two very strapping young villagers (Shiloh Fernandez from Gossip Girl and Max Irons, Jeremy Irons’ son) and a strangely humanoid talking wolf.

It’s not the classic tale by any means: the scriptwriter (David Leslie Johnson, who scripted Orphan) changed the titular Red Riding Hood into a young woman rather than a child, perhaps one reason the movie has dropped the “little” off Red Riding Hood. (The other having to do with, according to Seyfried, “the size of my breasts.”) Read article

Women on the Verge: Sucker Punch puts weapons of destruction in the hands of babes

A sucker punch is synonymous with what’s called a “dirty hit,” or misogynistically, a “bitch move.” It’s a hit that takes the recipient unawares, usually from behind.

But Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is nothing if not full frontal (though not literally, since the film is rated PG-13). More a filmic concept album than an actual narrative feature film, the movie is part Girl, Interrupted, part Moulin Rouge, with a strong taste of Heavy Metal.

The director of heavily CGI-ed screen adaptations of two cultish graphic novels – Frank Miller’s 300 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen – throws a Sucker Punch that’s a mash-up of Snyder’s admitted fondness for ’60s sexploitation films, as well as Japanese manga from Sailor Moon to Ikkitousen.

“For me, a sucker punch has [a] double meaning,” says Snyder during an interview in L.A. “One, I think, is the mechanism in the movie that sneaks up on you. We plant a seed of this [story], and then at the end of the movie it kind of comes back around. And that, in some ways, is what a sucker punch is.”

“[Secondly], the audience will look at [Babydoll] and have a preconceived idea: You look at her, and she’s innocent, sweet and weak, and capable only of a certain amount of things. But… that’s a mistake.” Read article

Dirty oil, sold dirt cheap: Montreal filmmaker Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil digs deep into Alberta’s multi-billion-dollar oil industry

As Canadians, we are the proud owners of what may be the most environmentally destructive undertaking of our or any other era. The multi-billion-dollar industry that extracts oil from the Athabasca oil sands is internationally controversial and environmentally omni-destructive – it has also made Canada the largest supplier of oil to the U.S. and created an economic boom in Alberta’s North that, despite claims of being only short term, is impossible to deny.

In recent years, the oil sands have become the progenitor of numerous grandiose claims: Proud proponents of the industry like to say that it’s an endeavour on a scale as massive as the pyramids in Egypt or the Great Wall of China. And indeed, the oil sands’ byproducts can be seen from space in the form of giant, leaking tailings ponds. The so-called ponds are actually man-made dammed lakes filled with billions of litres of carcinogen-laced, formerly fresh glacier water that has been used to clean some of the dirtiest oil on the planet.

Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil, the first feature-length documentary made about the Alberta oil sands, focuses on the oil sands’ effects on the province’s water, and the people who drink it, study it, sell it and fish in it – those who were the first to notice that something was very wrong in the water table.  Read article

Montreal director makes dreams come true in her first feature, The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom

Next week, Tara Johns’ first feature, The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom, will close the Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois – a huge honour for any film, especially a first feature from an anglo filmmaker, shot and set in Manitoba, with an American country-music superstar referenced in the title. But here’s the thing: This is actually a perfect film for the RVCQ, because it showcases the best aspects a film made here can possibly have – namely that, by any standards, it’s a well-executed, accomplished first film by a promising Montreal filmmaker. Which is what the RVCQ is all about. Though who knows? There might be a bit of Dolly Parton magic thrown in there as well.

When I met the filmmakers for lunch in Little Italy, I was determined not to dwell on the obvious potentially hot-button question about an English-language film closing the RVCQ. But I had to ask. The answer, apparently, is that Ségolène Roederer, the vaunted director of the RVCQ, was taken with the fact that The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom is, above and beyond everything, an unabashed “chick flick” in the purest sense. Read article

Shot in Halifax: HwaS is transgressive independent cinema at its very best…or worst, depending on the time of day

Forget lobster, bar fiddles and the Cabot Trail – once Hobo With a Shotgun hits screens next week, Nova Scotia may soon be famous for gore-spattered urban decay.

The aptly named debut feature directed by 28-year-old Jason Eisener features Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, as the perfect setting for a young genre-movie director’s fever dream: a crime-riddled wasteland so corrupt that it takes Rutger Hauer as the titular vagrant with a sidearm to set the city straight. Read article

New York’s master of pork buns visits Montreal to hawk cookbook, Banh mi

By the time I get to meet David Chang, the interview has been put off twice because of what a good time he’s having in Montreal. Chang, whose four Manhattan restaurants – Momofuku, Ssäm Bar, Milk Bar and the new-ish, two-Michelin-starred Ko – are within two blocks of each other in the East Village, is probably the most sought-after chef in America right now. With his friend and cookbook co-writer Peter Meehan, a New York Times critic, he booted up to Montreal for a semi-guerrilla press stop and kitchen demo hosted by Westmount’s Appetite for Books.

My time with Chang happens over a beer in Appetite for Books’ gleaming demo kitchen, dwarfed by a giant pile of banh mi sandwiches that are being eyed by the gathering crowd of foodies here for the book signing and demo. He apologizes for his delay: He had a late night, and has been eating and drinking with his friends, the triumvirate of Joe Beef/McKiernan’s/Liverpool House owners, for nigh-on 48 hours.

Chang is younger, and more tired looking, than you’d expect for a guy who has been nominated for several James Beard Awards, whose restaurants are among the most vaunted on the New York resto scene, and whose cookbook, the eponymousMomofuku, has been on the bestseller list since its release. Read article

All Sex Workers want for Christmas is a Charter Challenge, etc

Why is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Émilie Laliberté’s Christmas wish list? Our cover model is a sex worker and spokeswoman for Stella, Montreal’s community organization by and for sex workers. There is still a long way to go before sex workers in Canada are offered equal protection under the law, and Stella works to affect that change all year long. They have several special actions in the month of December that are open to everyone interested in seeing equal rights for working women and an end to violence against sex workers.

This has been a banner year for Canadian sex workers’ rights: Two Charter challenges in the provincial courts of Ontario and British Columbia are calling into question the constitutional validity of prostitution laws that they claim threaten the safety and lives of street workers, escorts, masseuses and anyone working in the sex industry. Though prostitution is technically legal in Canada, there are several laws – nicknamed the communicating, transporting, bawdy house and pimping laws – that they say make it impossible for sex workers to ensure conditions of safety in their work. Read article

I arrive at Price Canyon Ranch just as the sun is setting behind the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. Half a dozen riders are ravenously tucking into ranch-raised flatiron steaks as I sit down across from the head wrangler, Randy Barnhart. I expect questions about my riding experience, but he just grins and asks if I’m ready to join them on the morning ride. I say, yeah, trying not to sound too thrilled. I’m here to work on the ranch’s monthly cattle drive.

Price Canyon runs over 300 head of Texas longhorns, and the idea here is that guests ride with the cowboys, not vice versa. “People used to dude ranches think that I’ll just ride ’em around in circles,” says Randy. “But I’ve got work to do and I need riders to help me do it.” Read article.

Expectations are high for Due Date, screenwriter/director Todd Phillips’ follow-up to last year’s The Hangover, a dirty little flick set on the seedy side of Sin City, starring semi-unknown actors, that became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. The Hangover‘s most memorable quality, besides the Phil Collins/Mike Tyson cameo, wasthe wildcard in a movie of wildcards: Zach Galifianakis, a hirsute, thickset Greek-American character actor with crazy, charismatic eyes the colour of a North Pacific storm.

“Todd has told me of late that I’ve never thanked him for anything, and I’m just here to say that I’m probably not going to do it today,” said Galifianakis at a recent press conference for Due Date. “In all honesty it’s a little bit strange. Todd helped me; he took a chance plucking me out of the stand-up comedy scene. Nobody ever knows that a movie’s going to be so big – we just kind of got lucky.”

That’s sometimes what happens in Vegas, baby. Read article