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As we approach the cultural dry spell that lingers in the wake of the big holiday shows, it’s good to be reminded of just how much interesting art, music, theatre, film and dance goes on in this city. Below, we look back at some of our favourite moments in culture and entertainment from the last year.
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Over the past year or so, a particular breed of talented Torontonians made it big. Sheila Heti’s quirky semi-autobiographical novel How Should a Person Be?, about a bunch of Toronto artists struggling to live life authentically, became an influential bestseller, endorsed by Girls creator Lena Dunham. The music world gushed over the moody R&B artist The Weeknd, otherwise known as Abel Tesfaye, a 22-year-old of Ethiopian descent from Scarborough, who was discovered in 2011 by his pal Drake and is now filling stadiums all over
North America.
The music journalist John Norris called Tesfaye the best musical talent since Michael Jackson. And the filmmaker Sarah Polley recently released two movies: Take This Waltz, a much-admired romantic comedy set in Toronto, and Stories We Tell, a riveting, critically acclaimed documentary about her complicated Read the rest of this entry »
family history.
The people driving the agenda for the city are more likely to come from outside local government than inside. This was the year our premier, rendered virtually impotent by a minority legislature, up and quit without warning. And our mayor, who listens to no one and refuses to build consensus on council, has created a city hall power vacuum.
What follows is Toronto Life’s list of the real influence peddlers—the people who, either publicly or behind the scenes, have had the greatest impact on the city. We looked for people whose power was broad enough to be felt across different sectors, or else so palpable in their immediate field that it somehow changed things for the rest of us. We looked for people whose ability to alter public opinion, raise money, rally troops or simply get stuff done was both formidable and undeniable. The result is a carefully calculated and highly opinionated look at power in the city in 2012.
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Sure, Hollywood’s stars descend on Toronto during TIFF, but the local talent was also well-represented on the red carpets this year. Sarah Gadon looked the part of a classic starlet on Antiviral’s red carpet in a gold Dolce and Gabbana dress with patent black pumps and scarlet lipstick, while singer Chantal Kreviazuk wore cerulean for the premiere of Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of the Garth Drabinsky. Toronto darling Rachel McAdams took to Passion’s red carpet in a sleeveless tux-inspired look from Italian designer Emilio Pucci, accented with a gilded scarf (we like the idea, but those pants are a little bulky-looking, no?). Finally, writer and director of Stories We Tell Sarah Polley was characteristically low-key on the red carpet in a short, sheer dress, though her gold floral heels are sweet. Whose look wins out?
Sarah Polley (Image: Christopher Drost)
Following screenings at Venice, Telluride and TIFF, and a spate of favourable reviews, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, the Toronto filmmaker’s first foray into documentary, was picked up for distribution yesterday. Roadside Attractions managed to snag the film’s U.S. distribution rights, despite the National Film Board of Canada, Stories’ production company, being “overwhelmed with excellent offers.” The film has been billed as being as much about storytelling and memory as it is about the story itself, and sees Polley laying bare her family history through narration, interviews and home movies to expose a long-held family secret (the spoiler is here). Roadside has scheduled the film for an early-2013 theatrical release in the U.S.
Amid the cocktail swilling and celebrity gawking, eating can be an afterthought during TIFF. Good news: there are plenty of excellent restaurants that let you do all three. Here, the glitziest places to dine, drink, and catch starlets cheating on their diets.
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Single tickets for the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival go on sale this Sunday, September 2. And with a record 372 films being screened (146 of them world premieres), it can be daunting trying to figure out which ones are actually worth the $20 (or $40, for galas and special presentations) and hours in line. The solution: our guide to the 50 most talked-about movies at the festival this year, in which we scrutinize the advance hype (and the buzz from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice) to separate the must-sees from the flicks that only a mother could love.
The Canadian films to earn spots at TIFF this year include a range of comedies, dramas and thrillers, but also some that aren’t so easily defined—for instance, Sarah Polley will screen her follow-up to Take This Waltz, the genre-bending Stories We Tell, and David Cronenberg’s son Brandon will show his first film, a horror-thriller called Antiviral that premiered at Cannes. Here’s the rest of the Canadian talent:
The urban fantasy depicted in Take This Waltz is as as beguiling and instantly nostalgic as an Instagram pic (Image: Mongrel Media)
In the middle of directing Take This Waltz, recently released in theatres, Sarah Polley hit a snag. She desperately wanted to get Leslie Feist to record a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time” for the soundtrack. Given how in demand the singer-songwriter is, it was almost impossible to pin her down—even for Polley, a bona fide Canadian celebrity herself. And then one night, around 2 a.m., while Polley and her crew were shooting on a small street in Little Portugal, she heard someone call her name. It was Feist—she and fellow singer Howie Beck, both on bicycles, were on their way to Trinity Bellwoods Park to play glow-in-the-dark Frisbee. Polley asked about the Cohen cover, Feist agreed, and her version of the song is heard at a pivotal point in the film. “That kind of moment is very specific to Toronto,” Polley says now. “It’s a really special place that way.”
The whole scenario sounds like a parody of the lives of hip, young downtowners—the punch line for a skit from a rejected Torontolandia pilot, maybe. But it’s exactly the kind of bohemian and pleasantly casual community that Polley, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, set out to capture.
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The recent release of Payback, a new feature documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name, confirms it
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The next NDP leader will be obligated to adopt Jack Layton’s Toronto-born brand of socialism—childlike, sentimental, and entirely ineffective
Jack Layton, posthumously, has more influence over Canadian left-wing politics than any living person. When Nycole Turmel, the NDP’s interim chief, announced the date for the party’s March leadership convention, she said, “We will not replace Jack Layton,” the implication being that Layton is irreplaceable. And yet, the main leadership candidates appear to be trying their hardest to prove they can replace the irreplaceable. Brian Topp, the quintessential backroom operator, recently gained prominence as a member of Layton’s inner circle and the author of How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot: The Inside Story Behind the Coalition. (Note to file: books with the word “almost” in the title are almost never worth reading.) Thomas Mulcair, the MP from Outremont, promotes himself as the creator of Layton’s strategy for taking Quebec, and therefore the most likely candidate to maintain that legacy-defining victory. Peggy Nash, MP for Parkdale–High Park, is the candidate most similar to Layton personally: an urbanist, supported by artists like Sarah Polley, and inspiring in a safe sort of way. (She wants to make Canada a global leader in innovation. Who doesn’t?)
No matter whom the NDP delegates select to replace Layton, his memory will shape the aims of the party for the foreseeable future. So the time has come to evaluate his legacy clearly, unflinchingly. The popular narrative—certainly the party’s narrative—of his time in federal politics casts the story as an unadulterated victory. And in one sense it was: when Layton took over, the NDP held 14 seats in the House of Commons. Within a year, he had nearly doubled the party’s share of the popular vote. Seven years of steady rises culminated with the NDP winning 103 seats in 2011. The expansion of the party under Layton was much larger than anyone could have imagined.
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(Jack Dylan)
Dear Toronto: I’d like to say that it’s me, not you, but I’d be lying. It is you. You have no passion, no ambition. You elected Rob Ford! I’m leaving you for another city
About a year ago, in what felt like defeat, I moved to Toronto. I was looking to overhaul (some might say “ditch”) my career. I’d spent five years in New York as a corporate attorney, warring with myself from the get-go over whether I could stay in a city that I loved on employment terms I despised. When I was finally laid off and I decided to leave practice altogether, Toronto was the obvious choice for a crash landing. Though I’d never lived there, I had a lot of friends in the city, there were cultural events aplenty, and rents seemed shockingly cheap after Brooklyn and Manhattan. Maybe, I thought, I’d been crazy to stay away. Read the rest of this entry »
Jennifer Podemski at the premiere of Take This Waltz (Image: Christopher Dross)
Baby bumps were in fashion this year at TIFF, where several expecting stars strolled red carpets in clothes that skirted the usual maternity clichés. Canadian director Sarah Polley announced she was pregnant before the festival started, joining TIFF’s mommies-to-be club that also included Jennifer Garner, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jennifer Podemski.
The unmistakable and infectious chuckle of Seth Rogen could be heard from backstage a full 10 minutes before yesterday’s press conference for 50/50 began, and it didn’t stop until the show was over a half hour later. We can say this of Rogen: he’s a happy guy. Though he kept the laughs coming, we’ve noticed that he’s had zero tolerance for superficial questions throughout the festival. He refused to respond to an inquiry about his beauty regime in the Take This Waltz presser on Sunday, and he excused Anna Kendrick and Bryce Dallas Howard from answering an admittedly patronizing question about pickup lines. Writer Will Reiser, on whose battle with cancer the film is based, admitted it was tricky walking the fine line between humour and tragedy, and Rogen agreed: “It might be our goal to make jokes that offend some people, but not all people,” he said. Seeing as the flick includes a scene in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt uses cancer to pick up chicks, we think it’s safe to say, “Mission accomplished.” See our photo gallery, after the jump.
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(Image: Lia Grainger)
The press conference for Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz was an uproarious mix of masturbation humour and Jewish references, and, really, we expect nothing less when Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman share the stage (they might have even stolen the crown for funniest press conference duo from Ryan Gosling and George Clooney). Silverman quickly referred to herself as “Jew” so the assembled press could easily differentiate between her and director Polley, who seemed thoroughly amused by the proceedings, and Rogen, for his part, responded to the repeat questions on his approach to a serious, dramatic role with sarcasm, lots of it. “I do say the word cocksucker decidedly less in this movie,” he pointed out, and he also noted, “I approached it the same way I approached Fart Cops” (it’s not a real movie, we checked). Michelle Williams was absent (sigh)—but actor Luke Kirby was there, although he seemed extremely spaced out, taking excruciatingly long pauses mid-sentence and then coming up with…nothing. See the photo gallery, after the jump.
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