We start on a roof with a little girl named Martina. She looks at the camera and eats a sandwich   Though the camera isn't talking back, she figures out how she wants to talk to the camera. There is footage of hands examining a flower, with a monologue about flowers and love and organs. There's footage of a grown-up woman also figuring out how to talk to the camera - she is clearly more anxious about the situation. You can see her aching a bit to talk to the person behind the camera, to interact with them, maybe even  to be reassured. There's more footage of Martina, now inside, confidently conducting her own playtime for the audience of the camera. More than just evocative or suggestive, Martina's Playhouse reveals a poetic and complicated structure made from subject, camera and quiet filmmaker behind the camera. During Martina's interesting and noticeably uncensored play time, we are reminded, as Martina occasionally talks and looks up to the camera, that a camera doesn't blink, express concern, distaste or encouragement.

Though we know well enough that a camera changes everything, we are reminded here that people change everything.permainan memasak sushi online gratis It made me think of parents - and also of good science fiction, where we are often shown how machines are kinder and more cruel than humans.sushi grade salmon cost Moonrise Kingdom is a sweet, good-natured, good-looking movie about young love. sushi conveyor belt londonThe love is between two child runaways on a charmingly idiosyncratic island set in 1965.sushi yoshi menu ksa I have really liked quite a few Wes Anderson movies, but I found this one difficult to watch.sushi bamboo mat plastic

Though everything about the movie seemed interesting and pleasurable, my eyes had a hard time instinctively knowing what to look at. sushi grade tuna las vegasEverything was interesting and pleasurable. yo sushi takeaway high wycombeThe movie frame was continuously filled from corner to corner with things lovingly crafted and interestingly arranged: the unusual curtains, the overly solemn children, the coiled rug, the crooked picture. It was as though my eyes couldn’t find the thing that was different. Everything was perfectly off, but to the same degree. So where to look? If all the objects and characters and animals and sky in the movie are as crafted and cared-for as the young lovers, it can make you wonder what the movie wants you to concentrate on. If this sameness makes it hard to understand where to rest your eyes, it makes it even harder to understand where to rest your heart.

Stern, unhappy adults and an approaching storm offer the main opportunities for disorder. Unfortunately, the stern, unhappy adults on the island are the most perfectly-off unhappy adults to be found in the world (or at least in Hollywood): Bruce Willis is an endearingly hesitating Police Captain; Frances McDormand is a stern and matter-of-fact secret lover; Bill Murray is a deliciously depressed father; Tilda Swinton is a militaristic child-protection employee; Bob Balaban is the wonderfully detached-and-I-know-it narrator. Every single one of these characters, like everything else in the movie, is a treat. But they in no way offer a break from this relentless uniformity of the “perfectly off”. Nor does the storm. The storm is just another charming rival to the charms of everything else. If absolutely everything is perfectly off, it perhaps becomes more accurate to describe it as simply perfect, or having evolved towards a state of inert uniformity. I started to crave a glimpse of a really sad child, a genuinely thoughtless action, a window that would open up and let you crawl out of this claustrophobic heaven – even if it just led you to a mall in 2002.

(from June 7 2012) "Jiro dreams of Sushi", to my slight irritation, continues to play in a few theatres across Toronto. It has been playing here for a few months now. In this particular story of that story, Jiro, of "Jiro Dreams Of Sushi", neglects his wife and his children to make the perfect sushi.  "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is a straight-up and well-made documentary, interesting enough and well received on the Tomatomometer. But it sure is about that old story. Sushi doesn't manage to make that particular old story any more interesting. Content-wise, I probably would have liked it better if I saw in a program where it was sandwiched between Hayao Miyazaki "Spirited Away" (an animation that includes adults who gorge themselves on delicious food, turn into pigs, and then are threatened death by a witch unless their child can pick them out of a crowd of pigs) and Dan Stone's "At the Edge of the World" (where animal rights activists led by Paul Watson war against a Japanese whaling ship

That probably would have been delicious. (from May 3 2012) I was thinking about Crosbie's work recently (and its effect on me) because, in April, I read her new book of poetic prose Life Is About Losing Everything. Though is about that, about losing everything, when you look up from the book while riding on Toronto's Dufferin bus, everyone and everything looks so much more valuable. It is my favourite book of hers so far. I'll be co-hosting the book’s launch, under The Production Front, along with House of Anansi Press at The Mascot on May 10th. (from April 19 2012) On most mornings, for the last few months, I’ve had the good fortune of having to walk through an exhibit of Goya etchings to get to where I was working. As I pass through, I think, “Goya”. (from March 22 2012) Toronto's TIFF Lightbox has been, and will continue to be, screening the animated films of Studio Ghibli until April 13. It’s hard to keep track of all the cultural events going on in the city, even my own, but I have carefully written down the screening times for Hayoa Miyazaki’s "Spirited Away" at least two additional times by accident.

I had never seen Miyazaki’s 1988 "My Neighbor Totoro" and somehow doubted that it could rival his later masterpieces (though it does, effortlessly). This past Saturday, I went with four grown-up friends to a matinee. The audience was filled with kids. We sat in the second row, right in the middle. I had just woken up. "My Neighbor Totoro" is about two little girls who have moved into a new, slightly haunted house in the country. The movie is primarily from their perspective. It is so gentle and beautiful and captivating and exciting. It’s full of good and bad things, and is also very smart and comforting. The kids in the audience made a lot of cooing and murmuring noises throughout. They sometimes collectively suddenly said something like, "What did the big furry one just say? What did he say?" Or they would all seem to move forward at the same time. It was like being in a gently moving child-ocean. I had no idea kids had such consistency, or that their imaginations could all be harnessed so masterfully by an animator.

There, as an audience, they seemed like the most interesting group of people in the world. Even afterwards, as we all shuffled out of the cinema, kids running around the stairs, or outside on the sidewalk, a couple of them shaking a city tree with all their might (hoping a forest spirit might come out?), they suddenly looked like they really knew what they were doing. It made me think of the value in partaking of another culture’s art. It’s easy to remember the importance of that when it comes to other countries, but it's good, too, to remember it applies to groups like age and gender - that there can be entire groups of humans you forget to care about or give credit to, or never thought to in the first place. It also made me think of the tricky sport of appropriation; how interesting and useful things can happen when trying on another group’s perspective. It kind of made me long to watch a movie that maybe some 8-year-old out there is making from the perspective of an elder whale or something - a live-action feature, perhaps.