Melora Koepke

I’ve been missing Mexico lately, maybe it’s the winter in the air in Montreal. Here’s an article about museums in the D.F. I wrote for onAir, Air Canada’s newsletter.

A few stolen moments contemplating Rivera’s splendid four-part Carnaval de la Vida Mexicana – a riot of colour and emotion that stretches across a north wall on the third floor of the museum – is a good place to begin any visit to Mexico City. Rivera’s maelstrom of human passion is a microcosm of the sprawling energy that expands outward from the city’s grand colonial avenues and crowded alleys. Read the article

Five stops on my crustacean vacation in Sydney, written for onAir, Air Canada’s monthly newsletter.

1. To get myself in an aquatic frame of mind, I start by heading to the venerable Sydney Fish Market, the city’s source for all things fishy since 1945. It’s also the largest fish market in the southern hemisphere and the second largest in the world (after Tokyo’s Tsukiji). The hustle and bustle involved in moving 13,000 tonnes of seafood annually is evident in the weekday wholesale auction (open to the public on Mondays and Thursdays). An average of 100 species – from blue mussels from Victoria province to Tasmanian salmon fillets – are sold every day to the city’s merchants and restaurants.

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Delicate Essence:
Jean-Pierre Jeunet finds his muse for Micmacs à tire-larigot
Bienvenue chez Les Ch’tis was a monster hit in Canada and the United States, bringing French comedy films back into the limelight – though some might say that Ch’tis, though undeniably hilarious, was rather broad, and that indeed, France has a subtler and richer comedic cinema mastermind at work in Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
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Earth Angel: Vincenzo Natali’s Splice explores potentialities of our genetic future Splice, Toronto director Vincenzo Natali’s (Cube) more-than-a-decade-in-the-making film about the near-future of genetic engineering, is by far the best Canadian film this year, and possibly the best sci-fi monster movie since Aliens. Though, in Natali’s words, it’s more like “a monster movie spliced with a love story.” Read article

“They don’t give you much in terms of nutrition,” shrugs Noland Johnson as he pulls down a tall frond of ocotillo and hands me its small scarlet buds. “But if you’re out walking in the desert and it’s really hot, they’re nice and refreshing.” Sure enough, when I put the bud on my tongue, I get a burst of moisture – sweet and bitter at the same time, a bit like a huckleberry.

Every morning since I’ve been in Arizona, as I head out into the Sonoran Desert or mountain canyons to hike or ride, new shapes and shades have revealed themselves overnight: bright yellow and fuchsia prickly pear blooms, pumpkin-orange barrel cactus buds, bruised purple cholla cactuses, the tall ocotillos that sway over me, their red blooms outlined in the sky like dripping flames. Johnson and his five-year-old daughter, Isabella, are leading me through the desert behind the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, tucked into the foothills near Tucson, on a hunt for more than just refreshment. They’re introducing me to the roots of Arizona’s first – and latest – fine foods. Read article

Socalled Life: Filmaker Garry Beitel takes a kaleidoscopic approach to Josh Dolgin in The Socalled Movie

It sounded like a great idea for a documentary: In 2007, the Montreal rapper and producer Socalled, a.k.a. Josh Dolgin, along with his parents, organized a klezmer/heritage cruise down the Dnieper River from Kiev to Odessa. On the chartered boat, Jewish Russian and Ukrainian immigrants revisited their once-vibrant homeland and traced their ancestral roots in the towns and shtetls they left in the 1930s and ’40s. At night, they danced, sang and communed with some of the brightest lights on the contemporary klezmer scene.

While selling the cruise at a klezmer night at Oscar Peterson Hall, Josh ran into filmmaker Garry Beitel and invited him to come along and film the voyage. Beitel agreed. But it didn’t take long to decide that Dolgin was a better subject than the cruise.

And that’s how the world missed out on a Ukrainian klezmer-cruise Up the Yangtze-style doc and got The Socalled Movie instead. Read article

The Real Neil Diamond: Cree documentarian finds his own fame at FIFA

The receptionist at the Palm Springs Hilton doesn’t miss a beat when I dial up and ask for Neil Diamond. Apparently, he’s staying at the hotel under his own name.

The Montreal-based Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond may not yet be as famous as the Jewish Elvis (Montreal Neil isn’t even allowed to use his own name on Facebook), but his documentary Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian did just close the Agua Caliente Film Festival in Palm Springs, after sold-out premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and, more recently, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, as well as held-over runs in Toronto and Vancouver.

The film, a co-production by the NFB and Montreal’s esteemed aboriginal-owned production company, Rezolution Pictures, is a groundbreaking work that began, in a sense, when Diamond was a kid in Waskaganish, on James Bay. As he recounts in the intro sequence to Reel Injun, Diamond and his friends spent their childhoods watching all kinds of movies in the church basement, including classic John Ford westerns with cowboys and Indians. And, like everyone else, the Cree kids all rooted for the cowboys. Read article

Francis Ford Coppola’s most famous scenes may be set in New York, but he’s been a Californian since his days at UCLA.

In 1972, when he started work on The Godfather, the director set up operations on Kearny Street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighbourhood.

An acclaimed vintner and hotelier, Coppola also finds the time to executive produce his daughter Sofia’s upcoming movie Somewhere, starring Benicio Del Toro. Read map

Wild and wooly

Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are will help you regress

I’ve always thought it was significant that Maurice Sendak called his book Where the Wild Things Are, and not What the Wild Things Do. In a world where the emphasis, even for kids, is so often on human striving and achieving, this grammatical precision is both syntactical and philosophical: When Max goes off into the forest, it is an invitation to play in the deepest sense. Be where the wild things are. Be a wild thing yourself. Be a kid. Just be.

Spike Jonze’s long-in-the-works cinematic adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are has a similar phenomenology. So much money is invested into everything related to “Big Film” in these lean times that a pseudo-science has been built up around everything that movies might be able to do for the gigantic industry that makes them, invests in them and watches them. What kind of box-office can this movie “do”? What will it “do” for the audience? How will it “do” in awards season?

Jonze, however, has made a film that simply is – and in that way, is also an exhortation to us to lay aside all the systems we employ to judge and observe and frame and situate and think about works of art, and to let ourselves travel fully, as Max does, across the wild sea on a tiny sailboat to a place that exists utterly in and of and for itself. Read article