Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me

Heartbreaking. Heartwarming. Sad. Uplifting. Poignant. The film Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me was all of those. Just after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Campbell embarks on a farewell tour of over 100 concerts. He may stumble cognitively at home, but when he walks on stage, Campbell is transformed, his brain seems to click into place, and the music comes flowing back. He may need a teleprompter to remember the lyrics of songs he must have sung hundreds of time, yet the melodies are pitch-perfect and his fingers fly confidently over the strings as he and his daughter Ashley launch into duelling banjos (video here). Campbell can't remember what happened a few minutes ago, yet remembers the melody of the last song he wrote and manages to lay down a haunting rendition of his last single I'm Not Gonna Miss You, with its heartfelt and sadly true lyrics.

I'm still here, but yet I'm gone
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end

You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not gonna miss you
Not gonna miss you

I'm never gonna hold you like I did
Or say I love you to the kids
You're never gonna see it in my eyes
It's not gonna hurt me when you cry

I'm never gonna know what you go through
All the things I say or do
All the hurt and all the pain
One thing selfishly remains

I'm not gonna miss you
I'm not gonna miss you

This lovely movie, a touching video highlights reel of two years during Campbell's final tour, dramatizes the invidious onslaught of Alzheimer's and its impact on Campbell and his family. It's intended to dramatize and advocate for the Alzheimer community. It succeeds.

P.S. I have another post with a review of the book Still Alice, also about Alzheimer's.

Being Elmo

I found this post that I wrote ages ago, but I seem to have neglected to publish it.  It's a review of another movie from the Bloor Cinema's opening week as Hot Docs theatre  in Toronto.


Kevin Clash is a man who has lived his dream.   As a young boy growing up in a poorish neighbourhood in Baltimore, he fell in love with puppets.  His first romance was with Captain Kangaroo, but Sesame Street brought his passion to full flower.  Sesame Street looked like a place he could live, and oh, those puppets were absolutely wonderful.

So Kevin started making puppets himself.  An early visit with Kermit Love broke open some of the secrets of a great puppeteer, like how did you make a puppet where the seams didn't show.  Through Kermit's mentorship, he found his way to Sesame Street, his dream home.


Clash just fell into being Elmo. Another puppeteer on the show just didn't relate to the puppet and threw it to Clash with the words 'you try to do something with it'.  Clash turned the puppet into a symbol of love.  But more than that, he just became Elmo.  His warm, all-encompassing smile and voice brings Elmo to life.  He is now Executive Producer of Sesame Street, and is greeted all over the world with delighted recognition - and yes love - from Elmo's many fans.

Hot Docs 2012 in Review

This year's festival was yet another resounding success for Hot Docs aficionados.  I saw over a dozen films and have friends who saw even more.  All but one of the feature length films I saw were very good.  Compared to other years, where my picks had ended up being mostly quite political, this year they leaned toward gentle and heartwarming, with Brooklyn Castle and G-Dog being my favourites.  World Before Her was another fabourite and they were all on the Top Ten list of audience favourites.  The winner of the People's Choice award was Chasing Ice.  It was a National Geographic photographers documentary on the disappearing ice in the Arctic.  Alas, I didn't even read the details because I assumed it was about hockey!  My bad.

Some stats about the festival:

• 11 days
• 165,000 audience
• 395 screenings of 189 films
• 17 theatres across Toronto, plus two films simulcast to 37 theatres across Canada
• 143 films went rush
• nearly 200 film makers and film subjects participated in Q&A

Great job by the Hot Docs team.

The refurbished Bloor Cinema was a delightful place to see a movie and was filled to its capacity of 727 seats for all the films I attended there.  Hot Docs has taken on a major commitment with this theatre and I wish them well in screening great docs throughout the year.  I missed many of the films that made the Audience Favourites list or earned Jury awards, but I hope that some of them might find their way onto the screen at the Bloor.  I've also always yearned for a chance to catch the winners from past years.  I hope the Bloor might be a home to show those films.

Yesterday I attended the second-to-last screening in the Cumberland Theatre, one of the mainstays of the Hot Docs festival.  It's sad to see it go, because while TIFF Lightbox is a fantastic venue, it's not in the wonderful cluster that let film goers walk easily from film to film in the Bloor/Avenue Road area.  It underlines the difficulty in keeping open smaller theatres screening excellent films that aren't necessarily top box-office.  All the more reason to support the Bloor Cinema.

Congratulations to all those at Hot Docs for a great festival.  See you next year.

Racing Dreams

I'm a bit behind in reporting on movies I saw during the opening week of the Bloor Cinema.  Let me catch up.

Racing Dreams follows three young people above (ranging in age from 11 to 13) as they chase the title in the World Karting Association National Series. Incessant practice and long drives to tracks for competitions is the consuming centre of their lives during this.  They feel it's worth it, as many NASCAR drivers have arisen from the Karting circuit, and each of these kids dreams of making it to NASCAR.

It's not that I'm totally enamoured of kart racing; I outgrew that after I dislocated my elbow when I rolled a go-kart many years ago at a go-kart track.  But this documentary movies is not just about racing.  It's about watching seeing three kids in mid-development, making choices about their future.  The challenge of the race exposes their formative characters. 

Josh is grooming himself for the big time, and not only on the track.  He's already a good public speaker, smoothly attracting sponsors and giving them what they want in a clean-cut driver with a winning attitude, a winning smile and winning record.  He steps up to meet a NASCAR driver to make sure he knows Josh's name for the future. 

For Brandon, from a troubled family, being brought up by a wonderful supportive grandfather, it's probably his last year in racing, because the family lacks the resources to take the next step.  He already battles a quick temper and a tendency to challenge the rules with aggressive driving, a trait that has already seen him disqualified in one race.  We leave with a fervent hope he will not follow his father's treacherous path to jail. 

Meanwhile, Annabeth is starting to feel the tug of boys and dating, and the likelihood she will exit racing and the grueling practices and weekends on the road in favour of the life of a more normal teenager.  And yet, . . .  When her father puts her in the newly purchased stock car, the engine revs and her blood surges.  Which path will she choose?

It's a fascinating movie, and was a good choice for the first week at the Bloor.

Waste Land

Tonight, I attended the first movie to be shown in the newly renovated Bloor Cinema here in Toronto.  The Bloor is one of the few old-time movie theatres left in Toronto.  It was originally called the Madison Picture Palace when it was opened in 1913.  Somehow, despite the disappearance of all such theatres in Toronto, the Bloor survived as a theatre until this year, when it was bought by Hot Docs, the wonderful people who put on the Hot Docs Festival in the spring, largest documentary film festival in North America.  The renovation is great - wonderful comfortable new seats, while preserving the atmosphere of the original theatre.

And tonight's movie Waste Land was great.  It is the story of US-based Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz and his art project in the world's largest landfill outside Rio de Janiero.  In this dump work 2,500 catadores who 'recycle' 200 tons of garbage a day.  The charismatic leader of the Catador Association, Tiao, is quick to point out that the garbage pickers are not really picking garbage, but removing recyclable materials from the land fill.  This picture shows Muniz standing beside the mountain of waste that has just arrived at the land fill, with the catadors swarming over it.  The catadors sell the recycled material to wholesalers, and respond to demand from those wholesalers in determining priorities for picking.  They also salvage books for their own use, and other materials.

Muniz gains the trust of the workers at the dump, and takes photos of them which he then enlarges many times.  Muniz then involves the workers in artfully arranging garbage - oops make that recycled materials - over the photographs to create a work of art.  Muniz then photographs the result.

To see the transformation, here's the original photograph of one of the women and the resulting piece of art that she herself helped to create. 

At the left you can see the original picture of Tiao being taken at the garbage dump posed as Marat in the bath tub from a famous painting by Jean Louis David.  The next picture shows Tiao looking at the art from a catwalk with the garbage spread on it.  That picture gives you a sense of the scale of the art work before the final photograph is taken. 

The movie shows Tiao's triumphant trip to London with Muniz where his photograph is auctioned for $56,000.  In all, the art work sold for $250,000, all the proceeds of which was donated to the Catador Association.  The dump is to be closed in 2013, so the money will be put to education and retraining.

This was a very uplifting movie.