Griff's Village

The Life of Pi originated in 2001 as a novel by Yann Martel. In 2012, the story returned, this time as a movie. I read the book about twenty years ago and saw the movie about ten, so I went into Lolita Chakrabarti's stage adaptation (performed at Toronto's Mirvish Theatre, and directed by Max Webster) knowing what to expect. My only question was how well this story would work on the stage. I had high expectations going in, and I'm happy to say the show met them. Life of Pi is about Pi, a young Indian kid (originally a boy, though Pi was played by Riya Rajeev and rewritten as a girl for the performance I saw) who is stranded on a boat with various dangerous animals--most notably, Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger. The original book is very philosophical, dealing with issues relating to religion, truth, and storytelling. Yet, like Moby Dick , it also functions as an adventure story. The movie turned Life of Pi into a visual spectacle, and the stage version follows suit by u...

I'm a huge fan of old black-and-white silent comedies. In that world, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd cast such a large shadow that it can be almost impossible to notice anyone else. Nonetheless, I'm always open to discovering new gems, so I recently purchased and watched Flicker Alley's 2019 release, The Extraordinary World of Charley Bowers . These movies--a collection of short films, both animated and live-action and predominantly comedic--are a delight, and it's a shame that their star isn't more well-known. Bowers--or Bricolo, as he is known in France and in the French-language intertitles included in this collection--had worked as an animator before becoming a screen comedian, and he continued to use his skills during his live-action career. He loved stop-motion the way Keaton loved stunts, and used it to create effects that hold up surprisingly well almost a hundred years later. Some of his earlier live-action shorts only make use of stop-mot...