MUSIC

MUSIC Jim Cuddy loves making music with his two sons

by Steve Newton

Jim Cuddy (above) is proud of the musical paths that his sons Devin Cuddy and Sam Polley (not photographed) have taken. They’ll perform at the online Mission Folk Music Festival.

Normally, when you think about Canadian roots musician Jim Cuddy you envision him onstage with the legendary Blue blues base and “a lot of Randy Newman in him”. Both offspring gravitated toward music at an early age, but not, according to Cuddy, in a predictable way. Rodeo, standing alongside co-songwriter and guitarist Greg Keelor while the band blasts out killer tunes like “Diamond Mine” or “Til I Am Myself Again”.

Or you might picture him doing a solo concert, performing a heartfelt number from one of his five solo albums.

But more recently, Cuddy has been performing with his two sons, 34-year-old Devin Cuddy and Sam Polley, 29. For him, that’s one of the best things ever.

“It is, absolutely,” Cuddy says on the phone from his home in “steamy” Toronto. “You know, I love collaboration in general, to just step out of your own career path and just play music. And I’m so admiring of my sons, that they have developed their own careers, their own original music, and that they’ve become good professionals. They understand that when they get on a stage, they have to perform well, and it takes some discipline.”

Cuddy says that the music his kids play could be described as roots but that guitar player Sam makes is a bit more quirky and poppy while pianist Devin has more of a “The first people that Devin liked were Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,” he says. “It was stuff I didn’t know a whole bunch about. So he really tried to move as far away from me as he could. He went to jazz school at York for four years and then sorta came around to roots. “Sam’s a little bit more like me—played guitar and wrote songs and covered the Skydiggers and things like that. So a little bit more closely inclined to my path. But they both did it entirely on their own. You know, their mother and I, we didn’t even know they wrote songs until we saw them on-stage. They were living in the same house, but somehow they kept it from us.” Though he’s been keeping himself busy during the pandemic, performing a lot of online gigs and working on Blue Rodeo and solo albums, Cuddy always keeps his ears open to other artists. When asked what he’s been listening to in his spare time, he doesn’t hesitate. “What I really like is Rose Cousins’s new record,” he replies. “She won a Juno for that, too, which is great. And you ever hear of Jimmy LaFave? He’d be just about my age, but he died at 61, and he just does this most amazing cover of ‘Walk Away Renée’. I was listening to some new Jackson Browne and then all of a sudden that stopped and he came on and I was like, ‘Whoa, who is this guy?’ He slows that song down and does a soulful version of it, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Speaking of touching tunes, Cuddy recently released a video for an uplifting ballad called “Good News” that will be included on his solo record.

“I was very moved by all the kindness and consideration that people were showing each other [during the pandemic],” he explains. “It’s not normal when we’re all shut down and people are all of a sudden inquiring about how everybody is and trying to do things for people that maybe are shut in or scared. Then all the Black Lives Matter protests. I just thought it was really inspiring to see people go out of their way for others.”

“Good News” may make the set list when Cuddy and his sons play the online Mission Folk Music Festival on a “Fathers and Sons” bill with Barney Bentall and his son Dustin Bentall. Expect to hear some original compositions from his boys as well.

“I encourage them to do originals,” Cuddy says, “so they’ll probably do an original each and then a cover each, and I’ll do a couple of originals, and then we’ll do something together. Barney and Dustin and Devin and Sam and myself, we’ve done a lot of playing in bars, so we have quite a repertoire. I guess we can’t play together because the Zoom doesn’t allow you to play in time with somebody else, but we’ve got lots of encores and inspirational tunes. It’s great stuff.”

Cuddy officially became a senior in December, but turning 65 hasn’t caused him to look back on his career and ponder how things could have been.

“Oh, I don’t think I’d change anything,” he says. “You know, so much of a music career is just what leads you along. So I don’t think I could look back and say, ‘I wish we’d done this; I wish we’d done that.’ I think we’ve been very fortunate, obviously, and it’s not a thing that I look back on without gratitude.” g

Jim Cuddy, Devin Cuddy, and Sam Polley perform at the Mission Folk Music Festival, as part of the Fathers and Sons concert, which also includes Barney Bentall and Dustin Bentall. The online festival runs from July 23 to 25.

20 21

ONLINE FREE JULY 23 TO 25

Barney & Dustin Bentall WWW.MISSIONFOLKMUSICFESTIVAL.CA

Talisk Moskitto Bar Irish Mythen

Jim Cuddy, Devin Cuddy and Sam Polley

FEATURING

Jim Cuddy, Devin Cuddy and Sam Polley (Ont) Barney and Dustin Bentall (BC) | Talisk (Scotland) Moskitto Bar (Ont) | Taylor Ashton & Rachael Price (NY) Irish Mythen (PEI) | Shari Ulrich Quartet (BC) Zal Sissokho Kora Flamenca (Mali/Que) | Leela Gilday (NWT) Gordie MacKeeman and his Rhythm Boys (PEI)

BC GROWN! Shred Kelly | Liam Docherty | West My Friend Kara-Kata AfroBeat Group | The Oot n’ Oots

MOVIES Validation comes in many forms at Queer film fest

by Charlie Smith

Unlike many children of South Asian immigrants, Anoushka Ratnarajah did not spend vast amounts of time in childhood watching Bollywood or South Indian cinema. That’s because her Tamil father—born to Sri Lankan parents in Malaysia—was far more enamoured with classic Hollywood films.

One of her dad’s favourites that left a lasting impression on Ratnarajah was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn. It marked the first time that Ratnarajah had seen an interracial relationship on-screen, and it paralleled her father’s interracial relationship with her white mother.

“Even though Sidney Poitier and my father don’t have the same experience, I still felt like I saw some semblance of what my family life and my reality looked like on-screen,” she recalled. “I remember that being a really impactful moment for me because I had never really seen anything like that before as a kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in a pretty small white town in Ladner, B.C., in Tsawwassen territories.”

As the artistic director of Out on Screen, which produces the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, Ratnarajah takes the responsibility of showing the queer community’s diversity extremely seriously. She noted that when she began as artistic director in 2017, some asked why there weren’t any transmasculine stories.

“It took me until 2021 to really find the kind of content that was made with intention and ethics and integrity, because I don’t want to show films that are going to contribute toward stereotyping particular members of our community,” Ratnarajah said. “And I also really look for films that are filmed through an experiential lens, so the folks behind the camera have similar life experiences to the folks who are being portrayed on-screen, because I think we’ve seen such a rise of tokenism in the arts.”

This year, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival will present a feature film and a diverse program of four short films featuring transmasculine protagonists and transmasculine people behind the camera. The feature, Adam, is inspired by the life of Adam Kashmiry, an Egyptianborn drag artist who found asylum in the U.K. and struggled to gain access to gender-affirming medical care.

In addition, several films at this year’s festival explore the role of kink and leather culture in queer activism and queer history. According to Ratnarajah, these are timely given public debates about folks showing up at Pride parades in their leather and kink gear.

“One is called Rebel Dykes,” Ratnarajah said. “It’s set in 1980s London and it follows a group of leather feminists, performance artists, activists, and dykes who were really active in the social-justice scene.”

By presenting films like Caer (Caught), about trans Latina sex workers, and the documentary Raw! Uncut! Video!, about kink moviemakers in the 1980s, Ratnarajah feels that she’s giving viewers across the gender and sexuality spectrum a chance to feel validated.

“I think those small moments where you see a fraction of yourself represented—like I did with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—sort of cements how important representation is for folks to feel connected to the world around them and feel like you’re a real person,” Ratnarajah said. “And your experience can be shared with other people.” g

Anoushka Ratnarajah knew what it felt like not to see herself reflected back on screens as a child in the 1980s. Photo by K. Ho.

…I don’t want to show films that are going to contribute toward stereotyping particular members of our community.

– Out on Screen artistic director Anoushka Ratnarajah

The Vancouver Queer Film Festival runs from August 12 to 22.

Snake Eyes keeps it real in stunt and fight scenes

by Maggie McPhee

After lukewarm responses to the too-stupid G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and the not-stupid-enough G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Paramount and MGM have pivoted with Snake Eyes, a soft reboot of the franchise in theatres July 23. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the man who fought to make The Matrix and bought the rights to Harry Potter, couldn’t be a wiser choice to produce the rebranding.

The film follows Snake Eyes (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding), a loner driven by the singular desire to avenge his father’s death as he’s recruited into the Arashikage ninja clan. Focusing on the origin story of one of the most popular characters in the G.I. Joe series “opened up a new way of telling a G.I. Joe story so it’s part of the universe but stands alone”, Bonaventura told the Georgia Straight during a prepandemic visit to the aptly named Mammoth Studios in Burnaby.

Snake Eyes is equal parts action movie and character study, and the film’s eponymous protagonist advances through a series of physical and mental tests to determine his spiritual oneness and official adoption into the Arashikage clan—“all the great kung-fu mumbo-jumbo stuff”, as Bonaventura put it, including ancient albino anacondas that can sniff out true ninja masters and annihilate imposters.

In the backdrop, an uber-conflict plays out between the Joes (the good guys) and the Cobras (the bad guys) that throws Snake Eyes into the ultimate trial between his ego and his ascension. The film’s denouement, presumably, reveals the reasons behind the vow of silence that sets him apart in the universe.

Under Bonaventura’s direction, the franchise has traded in supersized allAmerican military propaganda for a character-driven story with minimal CGI stunts, six weeks shooting in Japan, and an international cast. The lead actors hail from Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Britain, and Ghana, with a notable absence of any Americans. These changes amount to “serious risks”, Bonaventura’s assistant said while watching Golding pretend to rappel into a snake pit.

Risks artistic and literal. Golding and his costars trained extensively to perform many of their own stunts. The highway-chase sequences involve real cars, real motorcycles, and real people. Legendary action figure Iko Uwais (The Raid) plays the Hard Master, and Japan’s heavyweight stunt coordinator, Kenji Tanigaki, choreographed all the combat scenes. “We have a lot of firepower going on here,” Bonaventura said, though actual explosives will take a back seat to kung-fu fights and deftly wielded katanas.

The fact of the impossibility of translating months of hard work, skill, and fight-scene choreography into a three-minute action scene only intensified when the production team led a visitor down into the belly of the Mammoth, a studio large enough to contain multiple city blocks and a Goodyear blimp. The artistry involved in constructing the immaculate sets will whiz by on the silver screen, effectively unnoticed.

Much like the kung-fu “mumbo jumbo” at the heart of Snake Eyes, the labour behind the scenes demands herculean feats of mind and body—and no glory. g

Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding plays Snake Eyes‘ titular hero, a loner driven by the desire to avenge his father’s death—meaning plenty of kung-fu fights and expertly wielded katanas.