Ah, the 2011 list. For a hack of a blogger like myself it’s my once-a-year bread and butter. This year instead of separating music, movies, and television I’ve decided to produce a comprehensive list and lump it all together. Hold onto your hats, and enjoy.

Favourite Films of 2011

I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.

The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.

Barney’s Version

Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.

Win Win

Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.

Read the rest of this article »

Win Win is a movie about a small-town lawyer who coaches a high school wrestling team. It’s about an old man in a retirement home, his grandson, and his wayward mother. It’s about relationships, how they begin and how they end, how they break down and evolve, and the consequences of our actions. It’s a creative and inventive story, full of the same kind of deep humour that packed a movie like Lars and the Real Girl or The Family Stone. It packs a similar moral punch, too.

Read the rest of this article »

I had the opportunity to watch The Brothers Bloom this weekend. It’s a film that Maria and I had wanted to see for a long time but just hadn’t got around to it. To be honest, after our extended Oscar-nominated film-watching marathon we’ve both been a little burnt out on the cinema. However, if we’d realized how great The Brothers Bloom was going to be, we certainly wouldn’t have waited this long to watch it.

Read the rest of this article »

This past weekend, Maria and I watched Yes Man, a film which we normally wouldn’t have rented if it were not free from the library. I’m going to summarize my thoughts on this film in three paragraphs. I think that’s all it will take. This paragraph does not count.

Read the rest of this article »

In case you thought it was over, it’s not, and it only gets better. Earlier in the week I blogged about Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser. A comedian of sorts who has been going around to local American mornings shows claiming to be a Yo-Yo champion. His tricks are outrageous. He’s awkward beyond belief. And he’s hilarious because he’s got everyone fooled.

Strasser, of course, is not a Yo-Yo champion. You can tell right away, just by looking at him. Everything about him says that he’s putting you on. Well, he’s still going at it.

WGN9, one of the news networks that he duped, was pretty steamed by the trick and did an expose on him. They’ve been issuing takedown notices to YouTube, so I can’t actually link to any of their videos but there is  a clip of his original appearance on their network still available.

WGN9′s expose—of their own guest!—revealed that Strasser was a fake. Well, duh. But they didn’t stop there, they wanted blood so they invited Strasser back into the studio. This time, Strasser appears in a wheelchair with both of his arms in slings wearing a shiny black eye and a neckbrace. When asked about his accident he explains that “some of our Yo-Yos are the size of chocolate chip cookies” and then falls asleep.

With Strasser in the studio this time is Eric Stringer, an individual who Strasser himself called the “Garth Brooks of Yo-Yo” in a previous appearance—Strasser also claimed that Stringer was dead and, on live TV, paused for a moment of silence. Apparently WGN9 didn’t do their research very well because there’s no mention of Stringer’s apparent resurrection. Stringer, who I think is wearing a wig, plays the mature older father figure, despite appearing to be the same age as Strasser, quite well. While the station suspects the Strasser is a fake they seem to have no clue that they’re being had by Stringer as well; sure he can do some tricks but guys, they’re pulling your leg!

Now the brilliant part here is that not only did Strasser dupe this network, but he doesn’t it again because the anchors are taking this serious. They ask serious questions about Zim Zam, about Stringer, and about Strasser’s past as a  Yo-Yo champion. They’re still pushing for actual answers and it just goes to show that they’re still bring strung along. Not only by Strasser but by his buddy Eric Stringer, who is clearly in on the joke as well. And no one at WGN9 is the wiser.

Stringer claims to be the new “spokesperson” for Zim Zam and their Green campaign; a company and a campaign which don’t even exist. He claims he was brought in to “salvage” things and the hosts are just eating it up!

This is comedy gold. The network is obviously playing right into the hands of this clever duo and are about as dumb as a doorknob to the bleeding obvious!

You can watch the interview in its entirety on WGN9′s website which, admittedly, is very lacking in quality but the video isn’t available elsewhere.

Update (10:48pm): I am beginning to love this campy little hometown network. The video clip that played for me immediately following the Kenny clip was talking about a university giving out free iPad “tabloid” computers to all their freshman so that they could “learn even better.” I’m not making this stuff up!

I came across this brilliant individual on the Intertubes this morning and I just had to share.

Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser has been making the rounds on local American morning shows claiming to be a Yo-Yo Master with a non-profit organization called Zim Zam, LLC. The catch is, he is anything but proficient with a Yo-Yo. Strasser is a prankster and comedian of the highest order, it would seem.

A quick YouTube search reveals a plethora of appearances by K-Strass on the sets of unsuspecting morning news programs. Once on camera K-Strass is an awkward looking guy in green shorts, a white t-shirt with suspenders, and a yellow hat. He looks nervous, but I suspect that it’s all part of the act. The tricks K-Strass performs are hilarious. His special, the “Blue Flying Angel” involves him twirling around two handfuls of four Yo-Yos each—in one appearance, losing grip on one of them in the process. His tricks are clearly below amateur and don’t even involve any real Yo-Yoing, but  he passes them off as genuine routines.

But his tricks aren’t the real trick. When given air-time K-Strass does anything but Yo-Yo, instead he talks about his failed marriages, his childhood and being spanked by his father, and even takes calls on his cellphone twice during one appearance. In one appearance he requests a “second of silence” after the loss of a supposed close friend, the “Garth Brooks of Yo-Yoing.” And, when he showed up for an appearance on another local morning news show, he told the hosts that he brought his Yo-Yos, but forgot the strings—instead describing the tricks he would’ve performed.

K-Strass is a master comedian and is already drawing comparisons to the late Andy Kaufman.

Here’s a clip of K-Strass from one local morning show:

And it’s not just pulling pranks, K-Strass, in my opinion, has reached the height of hilarity after an appearance on a local NBC station. Perplexed by his performance, the station was prompted to do an investigation segment on their own guest to find out who Kenny Strasser really was—something you think they’d do before having him on the show.

Strasser even remains in character under investigation.

Unfortunately, the station involved has pulled the video off of YouTube but as the NBC report suggests, that this might all be part of some kind of documentary that’s under production. I would love to see all the behind-the-scenes finagling of a guy pretending to be a Yo-Yo champion, and scamming American morning TV. Five stars.

500 Days of Summer is one of those films that surprises you. I was surprised. When Maria mentioned that she wanted to watch it I was kind of skeptical. It looked like a chick flick, and even though I’ve been known not to mind a chick flick from time to time, I still approach them with some reserve. That said, 500 Days of Summer was really anything but a chick flick. Instead, it was an absolutely wonderful piece of film making that stretched and bent the edges of narrative story-telling, character and plot development, and imagination. It’s a must-see.

Read the rest of this article »