So, the snow memo didn’t get out this season, and it feels like this issue deserves four more months in bookstores until Canada looks like Existere’s stunning winter cover.

This is the last issue I edited for Existere. Its first few lines are from “The Bronze Mirror of Redundancy” by Peter Tieryas Liu, who I learned, with a little Googling, is also a visual effects artist for Sony Pictures (Alice in Wonderland; Men in Black III). His language here is simply mesmerizing. What a magical way of starting a story:

“I hated the inevitability of goodbyes in international romances. It was always in the cage of an airport, Beijing capital in this case, the farewell that read like an obituary. I clutched my girlfriend, Temera, knowing our affections were as tenuous as silk threads holding up a jumbo jet.”

This issue also includes my review of Kevin Chong’s latest novel, Beauty Plus Pity. It’s an absolutely touching and funny novel about an Asian male trying to make it in the modelling industry, the beginnings of which involved leather and body oil and playing the unabashed nude model for his mother’s life drawing class, all while trying to cope with the death of his father, getting to know his late father’s love child, and sorting out his uncooperative love life (estranged ex-fiance and ex-girlfriend).

And, of course, Kristine Ong Muslim’s poem, “No Fair Play,” is previewed on our back cover. What a haunting quote:

Cover art, "City Hall," by Hall Jameson. Layout by Angela Leung.

Here’s my second journal as executive editor. It’s a good one. There’s a comic story about a father saving his house from a sinkhole, an essay on how the US military uses a clever trick to distract the enemy, a story about a talking spider and a poem called “Circumcision in a McDonald’s Bathroom.” My editorial makes fun of Snooki and Justin Bieber’s “books” — a very generous term. You can find it in selected bookstores in Canada. $8.50 CAD

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I’m almost done my editorial internship at Eye Weekly, a Toronto alternative magazine. After that, I’ll be regularly freelancing stories at the Toronto Star, where I currently work as a web editorial assistant, and focusing my energies on Existere, an arts and literary journal (now sold in selected bookstores in Canada, by the way).

Tomorrow, I’m going to review another movie for Eye Weekly. It’s called Gnomeo and Juliet, which stars — cross my heart and hope to die — James McAvoy and Emily Blunt.

Oh and Ozzy Osbourne and Michael Caine. That’s right you heard me.

If you can’t already tell by the title and the unexpected cast, this movie is going to be a hoot! I normally don’t like covering movies, because it means I have to venture into the theatre too early, coffee in hand, and sit with a pen and paper to scribble notes in the dark. Alone. Maybe I’ll bump into Jason Anderson or Peter Howell? Please?

And here’s the story I freelanced for the Toronto Star‘s Healthzone. This one’s for my late grandmother, the sweetest, gentlest, and yes, I would argue, the funniest and most fun-loving woman and who I miss very much.

It’s a story about chronic pain and as my interview subject, Beverley Perkins, mother of the lead actress in Ginger Snaps, Emily Perkins, broke down crying during our interview, I think of my grandmother who also experienced a lot of pain when she was ill but who, even then, never lost her sense of humour. You don’t hear about chronic pain a lot, and there’s a lot of misunderstanding as to what it really is. I hope to shed light on this condition in my article. Enjoy!

Finding could lead to cure for chronic pain

Try describing this to your doctor: something about the size of an egg is lodged up about six inches up your rectum. And it’s burning.

This visceral pain came like a lightning for Beverley Perkins in the middle of the most unlikely activity: reading a book. Doctors in Vancouver where she is based, baffled by her unusual condition, gave her suppositories, creams and pills, but nothing could touch the pain.

One doctor gave her an exasperated look and prescribed her a drug for schizophrenia. But Perkins had something else in mind: she wanted to be paralyzed from the waist down.

Professor Min Zhuo, a neuroscientist and pharmacologist at the University of Toronto, who released his new findings last month on a potential cure for chronic pain, notes that patients can be driven to even more desperate measures than Perkins was contemplating. “When a patient is in a lot of chronic pain, at a certain level, it could drive them to suicide,” he said.

He and a team of Canadian and South Korean scientists have discovered the key to an inhibitor peptide called psuedosubstrate inhibitory peptide (ZIP) that can stop what plagues chronic pain sufferers like Perkins – pain memories.

Zhuo predicts that since ZIP targets the protein responsible for memory storage, not just for pain, but also for everything one learns and remembers, the possible side effect is memory loss.

“I do believe, however, that our memory process is much more sophisticated than we imagine,” he said, elaborating that long-term memories, like your parents’ name and your hometown, might be left untouched. He hopes that only short-term memories like what movie you saw the other day might be erased along with the overactive pain-signal memory. For sufferers, however, this is a downside they might be willing to accept. Keep reading

Though the script does not lack a J.K. Rowling–style imagination and humour (sights include a pet shark, manufactured dark clouds fueled by confiscated toys, photos of sobbing children as an art collection), it also feels recycled from better movies. Konchalovskiy’s world is such a hodgepodge of deus ex machina, age-inappropriate violence and obligatory setpieces. Despite the pitch-perfect lead performance by child prodigy Elle Fanning, it’s hard to overlook the movie’s missteps.

(Published in Eye Weekly)

Harvey Pekar, October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010

“If you think reading comics about your life seems strange, try watching a play about it. God only knows how I’ll feel when I see this movie.” – Harvey Pekar

While in school, I did my time of hard manual labour at a factory with a colorful cast of characters, and, after seeing American Splendor, I knew I should’ve anthologized my interactions with them. These people fashioned body parts in all their unpalatable, lifelike details out of dough, and lusted over female coworkers sporting unglamorous hairnet, shapeless, unflattering all-white uniform and big honking safety shoes. One of them confided about making a killing driving up north digging through outhouses looking for bottles, which, in turn, spurned a conversation about starting a website called “Models and Bottles.”

For visionary comic writer Harvey Pekar, these blue-collar workers and their workaday comedies would have been fodder for what probably could’ve been an even funnier comic strip.

When Pekar said in the movie, “Ordinary life is so complex,” I got flashbacks of my own movie-worthy moments, like when I was watching two broken machines by myself as dough kept piling up on the ground and searing hot pans climbed on top of each other as they are ushered into a broken conveyor belt. I had to manually take these pans out, which, on top of being heavy and hot, are also magnetized to the belts. Or when I was waitressing/hostessing/bussing/bartending at a restaurant as the business phone and the bell in the kitchen played an annoying duet.

Needless to say, Pekar was my hero. He understood how the art of surviving an underwhelming life, loneliness and failures can be entertainment – even art – on its own, and we can be our own life’s comic relief. Pekar’s own real life was immortalized in a comic strip within a play within a movie within a documentary in American Splendor.

You might consider Pekar an everyday man, the anti-hero with uneventful life so un-cinematic it would not translate well into film. But who needs a life that fits neatly into a Hollywood plot structure complete with drama, climactic explosions, resolutions and a clear, marketable genre when you have a weird voice problem that lasts for months, a first date with someone who suggests you guys skip courtship and just get hitched, a coworker who gives you his gourmet jelly beans in Lent, have a falling out with David Freaking Letterman and retain a filing clerk job while also playing the superhero in your own comic book?

Pekar found all the golden moments in his life – the shit parts of it – and invites everyone to laugh with him. Even the glamorous parts of his life stink of humility. Throughout the movie, as far as I know, Pekar wore no mask. He is himself with Letterman the way he is himself with his coworker friend who is a self-proclaimed nerd and his peculiar wife who is a self-diagnosed anemic.

Paul Giamatti, as Pekar, is one talented actor for making a bored, world-weary person so engrossing to watch. His performance is so expressive that it barely needs words. He expresses ennui, disdain, abjectness and happiness with magnetic realism.

Writer-director Berman and Pulcini also layered the autobiographical film with magnetic realism. American Splendor the movie is Pekar-saturated. The fake but very real Pekar goes off to appear in the David Letterman show and out comes the real Pekar in the real footage. The real Pekar narrates the documentary of making his autobiographical movie based on his autobiographical comic book and graphic novel. Pekar’s coworkers and wife also appears in the documentary.

The metafictional quality of this work is outstanding, mirroring a mirror facing a mirror in a series of self-reflexive observations that are not really entirely about himself but very much about the people around him, too. So many Pekars appear in the film – the animated, the fictional and the real. Perspectives of him vary as well. Pekar is illustrated in his comics by various artists. His wife, Joyce Brabner and illustrator Frank Stack also narrate his story, particularly the period when he battled cancer.

What’s peculiar about this film is that it doesn’t really focus on the glamorous or cinematic part of Pekar’s life. It’s not a dramatic film about Pekar battling cancer, which was the obvious choice for a Hollywood film. It’s about Pekar in the everyday – washing dishes, commuting to work, scribbling, interacting with quirky characters, getting dumped, waxing philosophic about his doppelgangers in the phonebook and shoving gourmet jellybeans into his mouth. But how does it all work? How does the mundane dominate a movie and still be cinematic? These are the details and colours one inserts in a work of art. If you minimize the plot and highlight the colour, do you still have a movie? American Splendor answers that question.

Directed and written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

“Do you wanna be nice, or do you want to be effective?” - Roy Cohn

Angels in America is essentially a long conversation about identity – a grand debate on race, sexual orientation, politics and religion. Adapted from a stage play, it retains its theatricality in its conversations and its fantastical scenes that is reminiscent of Shakespearean drama. As a film, it’s a bit jarring to see such complications in plot as the psyche of the characters are given an arena to play out the grandeurs and layers of their desires, guilt and disappointments, the revelatory chimeras and the working out of intricate psychologies.

Millennium Approaches is thematically heavy. It introduces us to two sets of couples, one homosexual and one a Mormon marriage. The former, on the surface, appears well-adjusted. Louis and Prior have healthy conversations, and they appear to enjoy each other’s company. However, the strength of their love is soon tested by Prior’s announcement that he’s afflicted with AIDS. Louis has doubts he can stick around and care for Prior and he, indeed, quickly bolts during Prior’s first hospitalization.

The Mormon marriage, on the other hand, has no pretentions of healthiness. It is a sexless marriage, troubled by the wife Harper’s valium addiction and psychosis and her husband Joe’s secret homosexual desires.

And then there’s Roy Cohn – lots of political clout but is missing a soul. He understands the underpinnings of society and works hard at staying on top, even at the cost of alienating his identity and the group he falls under. Played by Al Pacino, Roy Cohn is a believable monster, a racist, homophobic bully who finds himself suddenly at the mercy of his AIDS-ridden body.

What’s different about Tony Kushner’s Angels in America? It’s opinionated, exemplary and indulgent. Nothing about it is subtle. Its characters converse with others, themselves and with the figments of their imaginations. It is an operatic production that melds the fantastic with reality a little too heavily. The fantastic parts are uncomfortable to watch because it reveals the characters in uncomfortable depths. For instance, Harper’s desire for escape from the realities of her failed marriage transforms into a scene in the Antarctica where she is alone with her desires and actualizes them in painful self-delusions.

Kushner’s Angels in America is an epic journey, tough to travel, but as we inch closer to the second part, we feel that the elaborate way we got there is building up to a fantastic climax that will end either majestically or tragically.

Cover of About a Boy (Widescreen Edition)

Christine: You will end up childless and alone.
Will: Well, fingers crossed, yeah.

So, what could About a Boy be about? Well, with Hugh Grant on the cover, it’s safe to say it would be about love, it would be about redemption and it would be about these two things broken down to two parts romance, two parts comedy, four parts cute, insert your garden variety rom-com plot here.

Just from the cover, I could tell that serendipity would bring these father-and-son-type figures together a la Big Daddy, they would swap life lessons, and the ending, on cue, would feed us the familiar bromide of feel-good clichés.

But just as our protagonist Marcus, a 12-year-old vegetarian with a bowl cut and an indifference to fashion, no longer questions why candies are being propelled at his direction, we start to see beyond the blunt bangs on his forehead. We see a child engrossed by his newfound father figure, Will, who mostly just lies in front of a TV and, alternatively, lies elaborately to single mothers to score what he hopes are short-lived relationships with them.

Marcus couldn’t have found a worse mentor and friend but he clings to him to delay the fear of possibly finding his hippie mother (Toni Collette) post suicide attempt again. All of a sudden, this is not just another Mickey Blue Eyes or Notting Hill. This is something dark, not just about a boy, but about clinical depression, childhood trauma, bullying, divorce, suicide and deception – all while trying to tilt towards comedy and lightness.

As the movie sheds its clichés, it begins to unravel its delicate layers of emotion that are simply unrecognizable with this type of film. There really is something about the “boys”: Even though it’s hard to warm up to them, by the end, you want to cast them in a Snuggie infomercial.

And though I mockingly (and correctly) predicted that Hugh Grant and the kid would break out into a song at the climax, that number was so funny that it beats Toni Collete’s dance number with Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, which is also about a family of misfits.

About a Boy shows that risky comedy about more daring themes, combined with a spunky script and absorbing performances, is enough to salvage the most cringe-worthy of romantic comedies.

Patrick Bateman is a splendor in symmetry. But when he’s not returning videotapes, flexing and admiring his deltoids and biceps or running his fingers through his tumble of wavy, full-bodied hair, you’ll soon see that, on the inside, he’s the equivalent of the horrors of his refrigerator containing a woman’s shrink-wrapped head.

Christian Bale, as Bateman, exudes comical pomp. He speaks with affected sophistication, which is especially fitting in the disproportionately dramatic scene of business card rivalry, complete with the chilling-wind sound effects. In their showdown of whose business card has the most tasteful tint of white, they equal Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in Clueless with their cutthroat corporate version. Bateman even says “Oh my God” over his colleague’s use of watermark.

However, this trifle talk showcases great characterization – how competition and superiority complexes have created nothing but two-dimensional personalities in the vapid corporate world. Much like their bone, off-white, eggshell and pale nimbus business cards, these characters’ dullness only differ in small gradation of shades.

As for the one of the more unique murders, Bateman transforms the atmosphere to one of unexpected levity, as he prances around like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, plays the upbeat “Hip to be Square” and dons a raincoat over his suit for the rain of blood to come. Bateman grins as he executes, then turns maniacal as his no-longer competitor’s blood splashes on his flawless skin and over-coiffed hair.

Which is what this film is all about: the undoing of the ideal. Even though they could be interpreted as real or imagined, these murders being mere episodes of Bateman’s imagination makes for a stronger satire. It seems fitting that this emasculated man with inferior bone-white business card imagines the murder of his colleague, who chooses a superior off-white, in an ironically pristine apartment.

But Bateman’s imagination never materializes. He tries to create disorder in his ordered reality and elevate himself by eliminating all that is wrong in his world (panhandlers, cats, hookers, threatening competitors), but his colleagues, lawyer and the real world ultimately dismiss him.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the prettiest of them all. Bateman: YOU are, stud.

The blog comes back tomorrow, because today I have, wait for it, a hockey game! Yay for beer and nachos and guys in protective gear beating the crap out of the other guy’s protective gear. And oh yeah, shooting the plastic thing in the net with a stick.

But enough about hockey and the grammatically incorrect Maple Leafs.

Tomorrow I continue plowing through The Best DVDs You’ve Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten, but this time, I’m going on a hunt for films I actually haven’t seen, just missed or have almost forgotten, which means a trip to Blockbuster. There’s nothing more I enjoy than going through the movie shelves and movie hunting. I discovered gems like A Simple Plan, Swimming Pool and Mean Creek that way.

In the mean time, resume playing The Band on loop.