Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road is the story of two miserable married people – Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) Wheeler – trapped in the emptiness and hopelessness of their 1950s suburban life, with no way out. They met at a party when they were young, Frank made her laugh; they fell in love; they married. Now Frank works at a meaningless job he loathes in Manhattan; April stays at home in their small Connecticut town to keep house and raise their two children.

Depressed and desperate, Frank becomes the typical misogynistic, self-righteous suburban husband. But watch DiCaprio’s performance carefully. There’s a detachment from this clichéd behaviour he performs. See how DiCaprio shows Frank uncertain about himself, confused with no recourse but to play the part of that loathsome husband who nearly beats his wife, and browbeats her into, as April says in all the previews, “feeling anything he wants her to feel”. He is unhappy, uncertain in his marriage, and terrified of searching for and finding a job he loves, for fear of failure. There is comfort in his misery. He has become his father – the one thing he never wanted to be – working the same terrible job at the same boring company, but it’s easier than trying to find his own identity. (more…)

When:Monday October 20, 2008 8PM
Where: Massey Hall
General Ticketing Info: $69.50 – $49.50; Call: 416.872.4255; Online: www.masseyhall.com
About the group: They were catapulted to international fame in 1986 collaborating on the album and international tour of Paul Simon’s seminal work, Graceland. Today, led by Joseph Shabalala, Ladysmith interprets the a cappella vocal traditions of South Africa with deep bass voices blending in lush harmonies, with synchronized dance moves and the head-high kicks that are the Zulu tradition.
How to enter: Leave a comment on this post and tell us what the best concert you’ve ever been to was. You can enter anonymously (once only!) but leave your email address (it won’t be published) and you can give us your name in that same email line, if you want. too, so that we have the info, but it’s not posted on the blog. Winners will be drawn at random from the entries.
Contest closing date: Thursday, October 16th, 2008 @ noon.

American Teen, the new documentary by Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), has more narrative, in a good way, than your average documentary. However, it ultimately fails by being even more stereotypical than John Hughes’s fictional high school film, The Breakfast Club.

American Teen attempts to describe the quintessential high school experience in small town blue-collar white Christian America, Warsaw, to be exact, and prove that those old Hughesian stereotypes – the jock, the prom queen, the artsy, the geek – really do have some basis in reality. Well, sure, if you choose to only take an on-the-surface stereotypical look at people, you can probably fit them into one of those stereotypes! And so Burstein does.

We meet Colin, the handsome, charming, pointy-chinned, and even smart, basketball superstar. Colin’s father pushes him too hard to play hard and get a basketball scholarship since his father did not bother to save money for his son’s college education. We meet Megan, the high school prom queen, student council president, and resident backstabbing mean girl, not to mention vandal. She is also quite smart and comes from a family of intellectuals who put enormous pressure on her to both get into and attend Notre Dame University, her father’s Alma Mater. (more…)

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his quintet, The Roy Hargrove Quintet, along with a series of special guests, took the stage at Nathan Phillips Square, the Toronto Star Mainstage, last Thursday, June 26th. The concert, part of the Toronto Jazz Festival, paid tribute to the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series of concerts produced by Norman Granz, first held in Los Angeles in 1944, and featuring some of the era’s top swing and bop musicians like Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Oscar Peterson.

Although it was oppressively hot outside on Thursday, the plastic seats terribly uncomfortable, and the concert started twenty minutes late, the concert was well worth the wait.

The Quintet opened the evening with Hargrove’s “Depth”, which featured some nice solos from Hargrove’s saxophonist and Hargrove himself. They played a few bop jazz pieces together that jived, and shined whenever Hargrove took centre stage with a solo. His quintet featured musicians that worked great as support but, with the exception of his saxophonist, had trouble finding that clarity, characteristic of all of Hargrove’s excellent solos.

After the first few tunes, jazz guitarist virtuoso Russell Malone, and saxophonist/flautist Frank Wess joined the quintet for a rendition of Dexter Gordon’s “5 Bananas”, which swung with lots of energy. The highlight of this collaboration was “Over the Rainbow”, with Wess on flute, featuring some of the best solos of the concert – in particular Malone’s and Hargrove’s – with a very nice riff on this old familiar tune. (more…)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet closed the Toronto Jazz Festival in fine form at the Four Seasons Opera House on Wednesday, July 2nd, with Brubeck on piano, Bobby Militello on saxophone, Michael Moore on bass, and Randy Jones on drums. Although Mr. Brubeck had a bit of difficulty getting out the words to introduce the songs in his first set, and he played with a backrest, you would never know he was at the ripe age of 87 by his playing, except perhaps, as a tribute to his mastery of playing those keys like the jazzmaster we know him to be.

Dave Brubeck made a name for himself in the jazz world in the late 50s/early 60s for his fantastic playing and his tendency to impressively play around with time signatures, on great albums like Time Out, Time Further Out, and Countdown Time in Outerspace. He liked deviating from the usual 4/4, and instead playing in everything from 9/8 to 7/4, and most notably, for playing in 5/4 in his most famous piece, “Take Five”, which appears in numerous films including Annie Hall and Say Anything…

Although the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond on sax, and Joe Morello on drums, which made those classic albums, has long since disbanded, Brubeck’s latest quartet showcased some fine talent, in particular bassist Michael Moore, who wowed the audience with several complex, musical, and mesmerizing solos throughout the evening. In the grand finale piece, Randy Jones gave one of the more musical drum solos I’ve heard, “Take Five”, in which you could almost hear the melody singing through his percussive improvisations.

In the first half of the evening, the Quartet took the stage, starting out with the standard “Gone with the Wind”, possibly the most-played piece at the festival this year (Renee Rosnes/Bill Charlap and Sophia Perlman also performed the piece during the festival), and certainly the best rendition I heard at the festival, played so masterfully by these ‘grandmasters’, as the concert series rightly dubbed them. One of the highlights of the first half involved a three-way improv solo between Brubeck, Moore, and Militello, pulling off a spontaneous ‘call and response’ that worked almost all the way through, and which followed Moore’s best – and great it was – solo of the evening. (more…)

Today (Thursday)
What: Salute to Jazz at the Philharmonic with Roy Hargrove, et al.
Where: Toronto Star Mainstage @ Nathan Phillips Square
When: 8PM
Tickets: $35 @ Ticketmaster

Friday, June 27
What: Sophia Perlman & Adrean Farrugia
Where: Commensal – 655 Bay Street – (416)-596-9364
When: 6:30PM
AND
What: Don Thompson & Reg Schwager
Where: Mezzetta Restaurant – 681 St Clair Avenue West – 416-658-5687
When: 9:00 PM

Saturday, June 28
What: Hilario Duran and Arturo Sandoval
Where: Toronto Star Mainstage @ Nathan Phillips Square
When: 8PM
Tickets: $30 @ Ticketmaster

Wednesday, July 2nd
What: Dave Brubeck
Where: Four Seasons Centre
When: 8PM
Tickets: $40-$120 @ Ticketmaster

On Friday the 13th, I, along with several other music and short film keeners, ploughed my way through the crowds at the Little Italy street festival on College to head on over to The Royal Cinema for an evening of short music films, music videos to be precise. Luckily, many of these videos can be found online, so if you missed the experience of seeing them on the big screen, you can still see them, albeit with much less audio punch and probably much blurrier picture.

Scene Not Herd was mostly a showcase for music videos by Indie Canadian band talents. There were two videos of music by The New Pornographers, Myriad Harbour and Challengers, off their latest album. Challengers was also one of my personal favourites from the programme. Aside from being a big NPs fan, the weird paint-oozing simplistic aesthetic of the film is actually quite appealing. The main focus is a boy and girl who start of in black and white, but as they begin to hold hands, colour rushes to them starting at their hands, a la Pleasantville, and then coloured paint starts seeping in from every nook and cranny. It’s actually a pretty creative way to show that sexual charge that can come with that first time you hold someone’s hand. And if the visuals bore you, the music is swell. (more…)