TCM SALUTES MOGULS IN NEW MINISERIES

Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are movie studio names, but they also reflect the names of colorful individuals who helped get them started.
Those legends are saluted by the most appropriate network for that, as Turner Classic Movies launches the weekly seven-part miniseries “Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood” Monday, Nov. 1.
Veteran actor Christopher Plummer narrates the program that offers memories of Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor (a founder of Paramount Pictures), Carl Laemmle (Universal), Harry Cohn (Columbia) and Darryl F. Zanuck (20th Century Fox), among many others.
Each hour of “Moguls & Movie Stars” covers a specific theme and range of years, properly starting with “Peepshow Pioneers” and the period from 1889 to 1910. Among interviewees commenting on the studio system and those who sired it are directors Peter Bogdanovich and Sidney Lumet, author Gore Vidal, and moguls’ sons Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and Richard Zanuck, who followed in their fathers’ footsteps as film company chiefs themselves.
“I think he would have enjoyed it,” Goldwyn Jr. says of his late dad’s likely reaction to the miniseries, “but he would have had quarrels with it: ‘That wasn’t exactly the way it happened! So-and-so had always been a liar!’ What’s interesting to me is seeing how it all adds up. The first picture theaters were just people putting photographs on a screen, and others paid to go and see them.
“It’s also particularly interesting to see this (program) at this moment in time,” Goldwyn Jr. adds, “when the film industry is going through enormous changes and doesn’t know which way to turn. They’re groping at everything; this digital thing has confused everybody the same way (the introduction of) sound did, and the 3-D business now is an attempt to solve it. These changes take place constantly.”
With his vocal gifts evident in such recent animated movies as “Up”
and “9,” Plummer — an Oscar nominee earlier this year as novelist Leo Tolstoy in “The Last Station” — also narrated the 1988 documentary “The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind” for Turner Classic Movies. He brought his personal history with one filmmaking titan to his “Moguls & Movie Stars” work.
“I knew Jack Warner,” Plummer reports. “I remember going to dinners at his house, including one that honored Lord Louis Mountbatten. I think that because he thought I was British, I should be invited.” (Plummer actually is Canadian.) “He was a terrible snob, Jack Warner,” Plummer maintains. “He wanted me there whenever a British celebrity was in town. He was a killer personality … sort of a rough diamond out of the past, but an extraordinary character.”
Plummer appreciates “Moguls & Movie Stars” for its feel of, and for, the “old” Hollywood. “I got there myself in the late ’50s,” he recalls, “so there was still an atmosphere of the studio system alive at that time. It was much more fun then, because it was like an overgrown village.
“Los Angeles was not the huge parking lot that it has become since. It had more charm. It was much more free and easy, and it gave one a hint of what the ’30s must have been like there. I would have loved to have been a part of that.”
Despite having his imprint on the studio with his name, plus the Leo the Lion trademark that his Goldwyn Pictures company originated, Samuel Goldwyn ironically wasn’t a big player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He’d been forced out of his firm by the time of that merging of several studios; he then produced such screen classics as “Wuthering Heights,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “Guys and Dolls.”
Goldwyn also was famous for his malaprops on the order of, “That’s our strongest weak point” and “Gentlemen, include me out.” The biggest entertainment shift during Goldwyn’s Hollywood tenure, says his son, was television.
“He was thrown aback when that came in and really became a force,” he says. “It was hard for him to accept that people would want to see pictures on a little screen like that.”
While studios born during the movie industry’s infancy still exist, today’s brand of mogul can differ, suggested by crossovers from such other professions as lawyer and accountant. Major studios today also belong to bigger conglomerates, as with Sony’s ownership of Columbia and News Corporation’s holding of 20th Century Fox.
“What a lot of people have a problem realizing,” Samuel Goldwyn Jr.
reflects, “is that this isn’t the kind of career where you work hard, move up the ladder and get a gold watch one day. It doesn’t work like that, and that was one thing my father was very good about. What fascinated me about him was (his emphasis on) the importance of survival as a human being.
“These guys came to a place where they had no identity and no future,”
Goldwyn Jr. concludes about his father and other moguls of the same era. “They understood that, and they did everything by their gut.”

SWEAT AND TEARS BEHIND LAUGHTER & SIGHS

A good circus performance can bring out the kid in almost anyone, with its bright colors, pratfalling clowns, and thrilling acrobats and jugglers. Behind the scenes, though there’s the different, just as enthralling world of the folks who labor long and tirelessly to put together the seemingly lighthearted fare on display in front of their audiences. “Circus,” a six-part documentary miniseries airing over three weeks starting Wednesday, Nov. 3, on KCTS, gives viewers an all-access pass into that shadowy (and quite a bit more adult) world behind the scenes, where performers and crew members from around the world form a makeshift, dysfunctional family as they hit the road with the acclaimed Big Apple Circus.
“ ‘Circus’ really has everything that, as filmmakers, we look for in a story,” says executive producer Maro Chermayeff, who created and directed the miniseries along with fellow executive producer Jeff Dupre. “(It has) a high-stakes environment where human drama and challenges are inherent to the experience, a world within a world with its own upstairs and downstairs, so that we could capture the high level of performance and artistry but also reveal the grit and substance of the hardworking crew that makes the circus possible every day.”
Some members of the Big Apple family, such as Alida Wallenda-Cortes, are part of of multigenerational circus dynasties, while others, such as clown Glen Heroy, are stepping into a circus ring for the first time in this program.
Dupre notes that Big Apple got the nod partly because it had many artists who hail from “circus families,” but more than that, this performing troupe is an intimate, one-ring production that forges a close connection with its audience, an experience vividly captured here in state-of-the-art video technology.  “Our goal was to put viewers right smack in the middle of the ring,” Dupre explains. “Our high-definition cameras reveal the circus like you’ve never seen it before. We used phantom cameras to capture the action at 360 frames per second.
“And not only will you see the show from the perspective of the audience, you’ll also see it from the point of view of the performers themselves. We mounted lipstick cameras on the flying trapeze artists.
 While it may seem that they fly through the air with the greatest of ease, our cameras tell a different story when you’re at altitude.”
Among the other performers spotlighted in the miniseries are Sarah Schwarz, the dazzling German-born, Paris-trained wire-walk artist; Big Apple Circus co-founder and artistic director Paul Binder, who steps down after 30 years in the ring; teenage acrobat Christian Stoinev, who is mulling the notion of giving up his wildly popular act with his Chihuahua, Scooby, to have a more normal life in college; and Marty and Jake LaSalle, twin jugglers who face the prospect of separating as each decides to follow a new career path.
“We got our start in gymnastics while we were … hyperactive kids,”
Jake LaSalle explains. “We picked up the juggling on our own, and when we were 11, we met the guy who would become our coach for the next 10 years.”
Although the brothers hail from Pennsylvania, Binder first saw them perform at a festival in Paris and signed them for the Big Apple Circus. The miniseries chronicles the mounting personal stresses that ultimately lead the twins to retire their circus career.
Stoinev, a fifth-generation performer on his mother’s side, recalls how, when he was 10 or 11, he first got Scooby just as a pet — then his dad noticed the funny way the little dog would walk on his master while he was lying on the floor.
“It was like just playing around at first,” Stoinev says, “and obviously when you work with an animal, you have to love the animal, and they have to love you back and enjoy what they’re doing, too. If not, it’s not a great feeling either way. Scooby loves it. I know he does. Every time before we start work, he starts wagging his tail, sometimes even I forget parts of the routine, and he remembers. He’s a great pet and a great performer, and you can see how he loves being onstage.”
Unlike circus veterans, Heroy, who is seen battling massive insecurities as a rookie clown, backed into the circus after a personal history of divorce, depression and a breakdown.  “I was hired by the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit,” Heroy says. “I worked for eight years as a hospital clown at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as their supervisor and a clown doctor. I also played Santa Claus at Macy’s for 12 years, and one day I decided as a lark to crash the Big Apple Circus holiday party dressed as Santa Claus. That’s where I met Paul Binder.”
Viewers tuning in expecting to see the high-tech smoke and mirrors of a Cirque du Soleil production will find themselves in the middle of something very different, Chermayeff says. No seat in the Big Apple ring is more than 50 feet from the stage,” she points out. “So you’re really having a visceral experience. That triple somersault, it’s a real triple somersault, and the danger is very palpable. Somehow every time you go — and I certainly see it in a new light after this year (making the documentary) — you feel better about yourself when you leave.”

THE LAST REAL SOCIAL TABOO

This is traditionally a time of year in which we both celebrate the dead and nervously flip the finger to death. From pagan times to the present, autumn has been the setting for such feast days as All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Yet as we see in “Phantom at the Feast,” death may be our last taboo.  The fascinating documentary airs Tuesday, Nov. 2, on Vision Television as a nice postscript to the Halloween orgy of classic horror films and slasher flicks. It starts off slowly, with a predictable segment on modern-day witches and pagans in Victoria and Vancouver. The whole thing comes across as extremely flaky and pretentious, with the Victoria Wiccans tripping through a graveyard chanting, “Ancestors carry me.”
Next up is an “artist in residence” at a cemetery in West Vancouver, who stages an annual celebration of the dead. Then, as you think this is going to degenerate into an hour of New Age hokum, the film shifts from pagan throwbacks to modern times and becomes a celebration of impermanence. The transition point is the twin Christian celebrations of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days, Nov. 1 and 2, carryovers from exactly the pagan celebrations the Victoria witches are trying to keep alive. There’s a longhaired street preacher who has buried some 1,500 homeless Vancouverites.
There are a tour of Mexico’s Day of the Dead and visits with a man who makes gravestones and the former editor of the “Lives Lived” column, which marked the passing of “ordinary people” in the Globe and Mail.
Finally, there’s a nurse and Buddhist convert who says, “A day without thinking about death is a wasted day.” Then she laughs.

AT THESE DINNER PARTIES, THE HOST IS THE MAIN COURSE

Invite these people over for dinner, and they’ll leave you with tooth marks on your back.
If you ever doubted food snobbery could be a contact sport, meet “Come Dine With Me Canada,” debuting Monday, Nov. 1, on W Network. “People want to see what people say at the table,” says producer Amy Hosking. “Then they want to see what they say behind the host’s back.”
The premise of “CDWMC” is that everybody thinks they’re a master chef . And that everyone else is a culinary hack. Five people are put into a foodie club, and each has to cook a gourmet meal for the others.
While the host is cooking, the guests rummage through the house uncovering secrets and making catty comments. Then the four guests rate the host. At the end, the person whose dinner party won the most points wins a cash prize.
“CDWMC” is neither as malicious nor as deeply strange as the Brit series on which it’s based – and which featured lads who collect Barbie dolls, a soiled kilt and a gal with a nude painting of herself on the wall.
“We let Canadians be themselves,” Hosking says. “We don’t have the British humor. We are part of the Commonwealth, so we get it. But  our show is true to Canada.”
There’s also David Lamb, the famously nasty narrator with a sneering tone and biting wit. “He’s such a big character in those shows and has such tremendous fan support,” Hosking says. “And everybody was like, ‘You have to have David Lamb.’ But we didn’t want a Brit doing the narration..”
So the show is narrated by the less snooty and more playful Jamie Carr from Cornwall, Ont.
“We needed somebody with a great personality and great voice who gets it,” Hosking says. “And Jamie does.”
Like most addictive reality series, the show is equal parts lifestyle, voyeurism and comedy. “There’s definitely comedy,” Hosking says. “The biggest misconception when we started this series was that Canadians wouldn’t be as funny as the British people. But I beg to differ. I think it’s just as funny, and the characters are probably bigger.”
In the episodes we saw, the participants were so catty that you wanted to smack them with a bat.  That, however, is not a theme that carries through the series, Hosking says. “The next block, they’re very likable people,” she says. “You totally fall in love with them. So it depends, every week, on what happens.
It’s just people’s personalities and how they fit together. “People grow on you.”
As Hosking says, the people in this series tend to take on roles —probably because of the demands that they sacrifice their privacy and invade the privacy of others. In one block, for example, there’s a foodie who chortles endlessly about the other contestants and how he’s guaranteed to win. Then he holds his dinner party and crashes and burns.

‘CSI: NY’ VISITS NEW YORK FOR ON-LOCATION FILMING

If a series has New York in its title, it’s a good idea for it to film there. Like all of the shows in the franchise, “CSI: NY” has its production base in Los Angeles, but its stars and crew make an annual trip east to shoot footage for several episodes. The CBS crime drama has three such stories early in its seventh season, and the first – giving new series regular Sela Ward her first on-location “CSI”
experience – airs Friday, Oct. 29.
Her character, Jo, team leader Mac (Gary Sinise) and the rest of the squad are perplexed by a murderer who sways his victims’ parents into tampering with the sites of his killings. Once they determine his modus operandi, the forensic detectives race time to predict his next step.
Ward was glad for a taste of the real New York while filming the episodes, especially so soon in her “CSI: NY” run. “Here’s a show that’s been on the air for six years,” she says, “and it’s not on my shoulders, so I think I’ll be able to have a life and at the same time be challenged. I didn’t realize until I got back on the set how much I missed what I do. I’d done (the movies) ‘The Stepfather’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow,’ but nothing to really sink my teeth into, so this has been fun.”
An Emmy winner for both “Sisters” and “Once and Again,” Ward says she “had made a conscious choice not to do another TV show while my children were at the age they were. I really wanted to be around, plus I was burned out from that kind of (weekly television) schedule. Now that they’re older, I started thinking, ‘I think I really miss it. If I could figure out how to have some balance, I think I’m going to go for it.’ ” Also a producer of “CSI: NY,” Sinise is happy to have Ward on board.
“Sela is such a nice and warm person,” he says, “and we have such a relaxed and fun and easygoing vibe on our set; we welcomed her in, and she wanted us to help her through all this CSI stuff …  because it doesn’t come naturally to most people. It’s a new world, and she just grabbed hold of it. It was all very cordial and perfect, I thought.
“Melina (Kanakaredes, Ward’s ‘CSI: NY’ predecessor) did a great job on the show for six years,” Sinise adds, “but she decided she wanted to move on, and we wish her well. The show goes on, and we were fortunate enough to have someone like Sela Ward come in.  We wanted it to be a smooth transition for both us and the audience, and I think it very much is.”
Getting back to New York took quite some time for Ward, who recalls, “I think it was 1987 when I did (the movie) ‘Hello Again’ and last shot on the streets there. I love New York so much. I lived there when I was in my 20s, and I keep threatening to move back when my kids are in college. I couldn’t wait to be back there.”
Ward’s two children will be college-ready within the next few years, when “CSI: NY” may or may not still be going. Even while the show is in season, Sinise travels extensively with his Lt. Dan Band (named after his “Forrest Gump” movie character) to entertain military personnel on behalf of the USO, and he’s noncommittal about another round of weekly television work.
“Everything is up in the air,” Sinise maintains, “but the one thing that we do know is that we have a seventh season to do right now, and our writers are tackling it with the same passion and fun that they go at everything with. And we have a fun new co-star who’s bringing a lot of life to the show.”

THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BARS

There’s something naturally sympathetic about underdogs who beat the system — especially if they do it by using their wits to solve an impossible problem. That’s the ongoing theme of “Breakout,” debuting Wednesday, Nov. 3, on Discovery Canada.  The show is a series of eight true-life prison escape thrillers, told from the perspectives of the people who planned and executed them and using mostly their own words.  The series was inspired by films such as “Escape From Alcatraz” and the TV series “Prison Break,” says executive producer Dimitri Doganis.
The stories include those of six men who slipped out of a Pittsburgh prison in broad daylight, a band of rather brutal born-again Christians and a “gentleman” robber who hitched a ride out of jail on a delivery truck.
“The way we wanted to make the fi lms requires a certain amount of twists and turns, a certain number of dramatic beats,” Doganis says.
“A lot of escapes are: A guy jumps into a mail truck and escapes. It’s difficult to give that the kinds of twists and turns we thought would work over an hour. So we chose the stories on the basis that they were engaging enough and had enough beats that we could think of them in the same way that you’d think about a movie.”
Two things all the stories have in common are the intricacy of the escape plans, often displaying ingenuity that borders on genius, and the inability of the protagonists to cope with the world once they get out into it. “We were very struck by the way all the people who planned the escapes all seemed to have similar character traits,”
Doganis says. “A lot of them were people you would imagine would be very successful in other walks of life, were they not criminals.”
On the inside, they’re masters of their world, often acquiring a knowledge of the prisons that even the guards could never have.
“What these guys have is 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Doganis says. “Week after week, month after month, year after year, they look at this thing, which is the prison regime. So they can be incredibly sophisticated about finding a way through the smallest gaps and the briefest opportunities.  “But once they’re out, they’re completely fish out of water.” “Breakout” was an unusually difficult show to research, he says. Piecing together the stories from the prisoners’
points of view involved a lot of letter writing and negotiating with prison officials and convicts. “A lot of the prisoners were reluctant to talk about the details of their escapes, because there were often parts that they were afraid would expose co-conspirators or corrupt guards.”
In the case of the “Pittsburgh Six,” prison authorities were not “desperately keen for us to hear a catalog of their errors,” Doganis adds.  “It took us about a year and a half to get all of the different accounts from the prisoners. For example, we were writing to Nuno Pontes (mastermind of that escape) for well over a year and receiving letters from him.
“But he was not writing about the escape. He was very reluctant to write about the escape. He wanted to talk about what he saw as the harsh conditions he was in and the injustice, as he saw it, of the American penal system.”
Pontes was serving a 24-year sentence for a burglary when he and five accomplices staged a daring daylight escape from Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary.
They were all rearrested in short order, and Pontes has since been serving his time in solitary confinement, allowed out only for short periods into a wire cage similar to a dog run. As Doganis says, Pennsylvania prison officials have made sure Pontes is an example to other inmates who might be considering breaking out.
Other episodes have much less sympathetic lead characters. For example, the story of the “Texas Seven” involves a violent episode in which hostages were taken, guards overwhelmed and weapons seized.
Another involves armed robber Dennis Hope, who engineered a prison riot to cover his escape.  The show has to walk a fine line between the “inevitable human sympathy” we all tend to feel for the underdog and the fact that most of the people profiled in the series had done some very bad things to innocent people, Doganis says.  “A lot of the people who escape from prison are there for really horrible crimes.
These are not nice men, and I felt quite strongly that we had to balance that natural sympathy with the fact that these are not prisoners of war escaping from a prison camp. These are people who have in some cases killed or infl icted terrible injury or trauma on people and who are seeking to escape justice.”

JULIA BENSON RETURNS TO STARGATE

Julia Benson has become synonymous with alluring, charismatic and intriguing characters and is returning to her role as Lt. Vanessa James on ‘SGU: Stargate Universe.’ She was also recently cast as the female lead in the sci-fi TV movie ‘Earth’s Final Hours’.
 ’Stargate Universe’ follows a band of soldiers, scientists and civilians forced through a Stargate when their hidden base comes under attack. The survivors emerge aboard an ancient ship locked on an unknown course and unable to return to Earth. The danger, adventure and hope they find on board the Destiny will reveal the heroes and villains among them.
Julia’s recurring role allows her to play a versatile and engaging
character: A fighter and who can hold her own, with a softer side that reveals her vulnerability. Julia can relate to the character: “I have a combo of strength and sensitivity, polarities that I see in Lt.
James.  I relate to the discipline and determination to be good at what she does. James can also be one of the boys; which is a quality I definitely have!”
Julia was recently won the 2010 Leo for Best Supporting Performance by a Female in a Dramatic Series. Julia is anxious for fans to see what is up next for her character. “This season has action, exploration and human conflict. By confining all of these characters into a claustrophobic atmosphere it’s only a matter of time before something gives. Many of the characters are pushed to their limits. Their beliefs and actions spark great conflict.”
There is one element of ‘SGU’ that Julia has always liked, both as a member of the cast, and as a fan of the series: “We get the opportunity to explore new planets; which is part of the show I’ve always enjoyed”.
Entertaining was in her blood from a very young age. At six years old, Julia began training in ballet, tap and jazz, and at 13 discovered her passion for theatre. She went on to study theatre at UBC, and honed her craft at David Mamet’s Atlantic Theatre Company in New York.
Since those years, Julia has built a resume of film and TV credits including ‘Harper’s Island’, ‘Reaper’,  ‘Supernatural’ and ‘Smallville’. Film credits include ‘Mr. Troop Mom’ and ‘Blonde and Blonder.’ “I try and look for roles where I can do a lot of different things,” she say’s, “I love Jennifer Garner on ‘Alias’. She was a kick-ass woman who got to explore many different characters each week.”
After recently co-creating and producing a pilot for City TV, Julia and husband Peter Benson are working on a feature film they’re going to produce and star in. Stargate Universe airs Friday nights at 10pm PT on SPACE.

NHL CANADIAN TEAMS PREVIEW & STATS

CANUCKS 2009-10 Record: 49-28-5, 103 points, first place in Northwest Division, third in Western Conference. Head Coach: Alain Vigneault, fifth season. Key Additions: D Dan Hamhuis, D Keith Ballard, F Victor Oreskovich, F Manny Malhotra, F Jeff Tambellini, F Joel Perrault.  Key Departures: F Pavol Demitra, D Brad Lukowich, F Matt Pettinger, D Nathan McIver, G Andrew Raycroft, F Steve Bernier, F Michael Grabner, D Willie Mitchell Season Preview: Stopped in the playoffs’ second round two seasons running, the talented Canucks acted swiftly to add even more talent, notably top-tier defensemen Ballard and Hamhuis and third-line center Malhotra, who meet GM Mike Gillis’
goal of making his team harder to play against. They’re already a tough team to defend, starting with Hart Trophy (MVP) winner Henrik Sedin, who led the NHL with 112 points last season. His twin brother and linemate, Daniel, chipped in 85 points in just 63 games, and second-line center Ryan Kesler, the team’s heart and soul, scored a career-best 75. Backstopping their solid defense is goalie Roberto Luongo, who has been terrific in the regular season and not so much in the postseason. Pierre McGuire says: “This is a very deep team, amazingly athletic, they’re very big. They should be one of the top teams in the league all year.”

FLAMES 2009-10 Record: 40-32-10, 90 points, third place in Northwest Division, 10th in Western Conference. Head Coach: Brent Sutter, second season Key Additions: F Olli Jokinen, F Alex Tanguay, F Raitis Ivanans, F Tim Jackman, F Stefan Meyer, F Ryan Stone Key Departures: F Jamal Mayers, F Eric Nystrom, F Nigel Dawes, F Chris Higgins, G Vesa Toskala, F Brian McGrattan, F Craig Conroy. Season Preview: It’s the Olli Jokinen era, take two.  To which most Flames fans want to scream, “Cut!” Amazingly, Jokinen is back  after underwhelming severely in his first stint in Calgary, which led to him being traded last March. And GM Darryl Sutter didn’t stop the reunions there; he also signed Tanguay, who did have his best NHL season with the Flames, but that was four years ago. Needless to say, his play has since steadily declined. The same cannot be said of winger Jarome Iginla, defenseman Robyn Regehr and goalie Miikka Kiprusoff, who have stood tall amid the roster mismanagement. But they can’t prop the franchise on their shoulders forever. Nor can the Sutter era continue much longer. Pierre McGuire says: “Last year they were 29th in offense, do it again, they’re not making the playoffs. Kiprusoff will have to keep them in a lot of games.”

OILERS 2009-10 Record: 27-47-8, 62 points, fifth place in Northwest Division, 15th in Western Conference. Head Coach: Tom Renney, first season Key Additions: F Taylor Hall, D Kurtis Foster, D Jim Vandermeer, F Colin Fraser, F Steve MacIntyre, F Gregory Stewart, F
Ben Ondrus, F Alexandre Giroux, G Martin Gerber, D Shawn Belle   Key
Departures: F Robert Nilsson, F Ethan Moreau, F Patrick O’Sullivan, F Marc Pouliot, F Ryan Stone  Season Preview: The once-proud Oilers gushed losses last season, a franchise low point that was beneficial in only one way: securing the top overall draft pick. With it they chose Hall, a winger who has the look of a young Mark Messier, literally and figuratively. The 18-year-old is the foundation upon which the Oilers will be reconstructed, along with prime building blocks in fellow rookie forwards Jordan Eberle and Magnus Paajarvi-Svensson. They join holdovers including Sam Gagner, Dustin Penner (career-high 32 goals) and Gilbert Brule to give former Rangers coach Renney options up front.  The defense is big but not very mobile beyond Ryan Whitney and Tom Gilbert, and the goaltending depth is thin behind Nikolai Khabibulin, whose best days are behind him. Pierre McGuire says: “They’ll be fun to watch, but they’re going to be up and down because of all their youth. They’re on the right track though.”

LEAFS 2009-10 Record: 30-38-14, 74 points, fifth place in Northeast Division, 15th in Eastern Conference. Head Coach: Ron Wilson, third season Key Additions: F Kris Versteeg, F Colby Armstrong, F Mike Brown, D Brett Lebda, F Marcel Mueller, F Joey Crabb
Key Departures: D Mike Van Ryn, F Viktor Stalberg, F Ben Ondrus, F Jamie Lundmark, C Wayne Primeau, D Garnet  Exelby. Season Preview: President Brian Burke’s transformation of the Maple Leafs continued over the summer, albeit without the second-overall pick that became Boston’s in the ill-fated Phil Kessel trade. And Kessel is still without a top center to play alongside. Oh well, maybe next summer … or maybe youngster Tyler Bozak develops into that guy. Former Blackhawk Kris Versteeg will help on offense, and the Leafs have high hopes for rookie Nazem Kadri. New captain Dion Phaneuf anchors a defense along with still-developing Luke Schenn and Carl Gunnarsson, while J.S. Giguere and Jonas Gustavsson present an intriguing duo in goal.    Pierre McGuire says: “They need Nazem Kadri to come in and play on one of their top two lines as a center.”

SENATORS 2009-10 Record: 44-32-6, 94 points, second place in Northeast Division, fifth in Eastern Conference. Head Coach: Cory Clouston, third season Key Additions: D Sergei Gonchar, D David Hale Key
Departures: D Andy Sutton, D Anton Volchenkov, C Matt Cullen, F Shean Donovan, F Jonathan Cheechoo. Season Preview: The Senators opted for puck possession over puck deflection with the addition of the offensively skilled Gonchar over tough shot-blocker Volchenkov.
Gonchar should improve Ottawa’s power play (ranked 21st last season) and help revive fellow Russian Alex Kovalev, who managed only 18 goals last season. Veteran captain Daniel Alfredsson returns, as does center Jason Spezza, whose talent is grand, but oftentimes his game shrinks when it matters most. The Sens will also need more out of winger Milan Michalek (34 points in 66 games), and will look to youngsters such as Nick Foligno and Peter Regin to chip in on offense. In goal, Brian Elliott and Pascal Leclaire likely will share time until one outplays the other. Pierre McGuire says: “They need Jason Spezza to be a happy Jason Spezza and not a disconsolate Jason Spezza. He’s gotta be an 80-plus point player.”

CANADIENS 2009-10 Record: 39-33-10, 88 points, fourth place in Northeast Division, eighth in Eastern Conference. Head Coach: Jacques Martin, second season. Key Additions: G Alex Auld, F Dustin Boyd, D Alexandre Picard, F Lars Eller, F Ian Schultz, G Karri Ramo. Key
Departures: G Jaroslav Halak, C Dominic Moore, C Glen Metropolit, F Sergei Kostitsyn, F Georges Laraque, D Paul Mara, D Marc-Andre Bergeron    Season Preview: So what happens to the player who was the main reason your team upset the Capitals and Penguins in last season’s playoffs? He’s traded, of course. The summer decision to keep the very talented but inconsistent Carey Price over playoff hero Halak, who was sent to the Blues, is the story line this season in Montreal, one new GM Pierre Gauthier is staking his reputation on. Up front the spotlight is on Eller, the key acquisition in the Halak deal, to show he belongs in his first NHL season. Another rookie, P.K. Subban, did just that in last spring’s playoffs, and he’ll be counted on to play meaningful minutes on the Habs’ backline. Pierre McGuire says: “They really need Lars Eller and Dustin Boyd to step up offensively and hope their smaller guys stay healthy.”

GAME’S ON FOR HOLMES AND WATSON IN ZINGY NEW ‘SHERLOCK’

In the annals of TV programming, the notion of taking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Victorian sleuth Sherlock Holmes and plopping him down into modern-day London may sound like a train wreck waiting to happen. That’s the very concept, however, at the heart of “Sherlock,” a new “Masterpiece Mystery!” series that begins a three week run Sunday, Oct. 24, on PBS (check local listings). And expectations be hanged.
This thing not only works, it does so thrillingly. Series co-creators Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”) and Mark Gatiss (“The League of Gentlemen”), both self-professed “Holmes” geeks since childhood, have adapted Conan Doyle’s original stories with great affection, imagination and fl air, incorporating today’s cuttingedge technology into the mysteries.  And they’ve found two extraordinary actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, to be their Holmes and Watson for the new millennium.  The series opener, “A Study in Pink” (fans will recognize it as a riff on “A Study in Scarlet”), wastes no time in chronicling how eccentric, socially inept genius Sherlock Holmes and doctor and Afghanistan war hero John Watson meet and become roommates in Holmes’cluttered flat at 221B Baker St. They’re still getting to know each other when they are swept up into Holmes’ latest baffling case, in which a series of suicides sweeps London. The police are puzzled because the diverse victims seem to have swallowed poison capsules voluntarily, but Holmes gleefully seizes on the truth of the
matter: “We’ve got ourselves a serial killer. I love those!”
By the time the 90-minute mystery has reached its climax, Holmes has solved the case, found and confronted the killer, and made a revelatory discovery about Watson that seals their friendship forever.
“That’s an incredibly moving moment, isn’t it, because you realize that these are two men who are now bonded for life,” Cumberbatch says of his and Freeman’s characters. “Sherlock is the drug that Watson has been missing, because he provides that action edge that Watson craves now that he is back from the war. It’s very touching, although both men handle it in a very ‘English’ manner.”
While the cases are very clever and satisfying in their own right, make no mistake, the relationship between this Holmes, a borderline sociopath with clear symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, and Watson, with his down-to-earth humor and innate sense of duty and loyalty, is what gives “Sherlock” its heart and soul. For Freeman, the masterfully deadpan comedy actor who “unofficially” has been cast as Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming big-screen adaptation of “The Hobbit,” this new incarnation of Dr. Watson was close to irresistible, since the character is multilayered and far more than a mere foil to Holmes. “I don’t think I would be interested in just playing a ‘sidekick,’ but this version opens through the eyes of John Watson, who has just returned from Afghanistan, and we meet Sherlock via Watson,” Freeman explains. “I liked that, because while Sherlock is still the main guy, this gives Watson so much more of an equal footing. John has been back for a while, and he’s completely rudderless, aimless, and all of a sudden he meets this extraordinary person who takes him on dangerous adventures involving guns and murder and stuff, which absolutely appeals to John. He’s a career soldier and doctor, so he is very much at home in life-or-death situations. What I found interesting is that in any other situation, John Watson would be the alpha male, the main guy, which just underscores how extraordinary Sherlock is. But John also saves Sherlock in a way. They give each other a sense of purpose.”
In fact, as Jerry Maguire might put it, they complete each other, because whereas Holmes gives Watson an adrenaline rush, Watson keeps his cerebral friend grounded, often reminding him that the people they encounter, including bereaved survivors of murder victims, are not, in fact, merely pieces in a fascinating puzzle to be solved. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the writers get some witty mileage out of having people, including their landlady Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs), mistake the pair for a gay couple, especially since Holmes at one point tells Watson that girlfriends are “not really my area.”
That line has led some British viewers to leap to the conclusion that this Holmes is gay (Freeman’s Watson is clearly established as straight), but Cumberbatch says that’s simply not true. “Holmes is very ambiguous in terms of modern standards of pigeonholing what a person’s sexuality is, but I think it’s because he really is not interested,” the actor explains. “He’s utterly asexual at this point in time, and there really is not a sniff of him being attracted to men at all. When he says girlfriends are not his ‘area,’ he means that he doesn’t do relationships. That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t done them; he just doesn’t do them at present. A lot of people are fixated on this idea that he fancies Watson for something beyond a platonic friendship, but it isn’t. They do love each other. Of course they do.
And in an odd way they need each other, but it’s not a love story in that sense.  Sherlock is a workaholic, and his obsession is work. I think perhaps in the past female intuition and logic have been the one stumbling block, the weak link in his armor, and for that he is always on his guard.” When “Sherlock” premiered in the United Kingdom, it was a massive success, stunning even the show’s creative team. “The Sherlock Holmes Society of London came to a screening, and you have an impression that they’re going to be incredibly fossilized in their opinions, and they absolutely adored it, because we tried to be very, very true to the original characters, and there’s so much in there for real die-hard fans to like,” says Gatiss, who also plays a key supporting character who is Holmes’ frequent adversary and whose name begins with an M. “But for us, it’s about getting back to the characters as written, rather than about the trappings of Victoriana.”

LOOKING AT THE UH, INS AND, ER, OUTS OF… HMMM…

Why can some people memorize the order of a deck of cards while others can’t remember yesterday?
That question drives “Where Did I Put My Memory?” on CBC Television’s “Doc Zone’ Thursday, Oct. 28. The feature documentary was written and directed by Montreal filmmaker, writer and journalist Josh Freed. And as the title implies, it explores the ins and outs of the most mysterious part of our brain. The show is particularly timely because we have an aging population of baby boomers who are concerned with surviving their wits, as the Irish like to put it. In fact, statistics show that memory loss is our second biggest health fear, after cancer.
“It’s an obsession with a lot of people,” Freed says. “It’s not so much that you lose your memory. You lose little traces of it, and you start being terrified. The film explores such topics as the biology and psychology of memory, and the reasons we start to lose those traces of recollection as we get older, and looks at some extreme memory powers and disorders.”
We meet people, including eight-time world memory champion Dominic O’Brien and Canadian champ Dave Farrow, who compete in challenges to perform insanely complicated feats of memorization — but only when they want to. In day-to-day life, one champion says, he’s actually quite absent-minded. “If something interests him, he turns his memory on,” Freed says. “He turns on all these visual techniques and begins to pay attention and begins to apply himself. And he becomes a memory machine.”
Perhaps the most useful part of the film involves how we can take the techniques the masters use and apply them to our everyday lives. “You are capable of having an exceptional memory if you work at it,” Freed says. “One of the things I do more than I did before is just to pay attention to what I need to remember. When I park my car, I stare at
it: `I’m going to remember where I parked this car.’ And I’ve gotten into the visual devices from the film. I put my car keys down and imagine them exploding. When you rethink something for a moment, you engrave it in your brain.”
And there are two women with opposite disorders. One suffered brain damage that has left her memory so impaired that she can only recognize her family members by the color of their clothing. The other has been cursed with an inability to forget — to the point that she can tell the day of the week, the weather and what happened on a given day just by being given the date.
The strange thing, Freed says, is that the woman with no memory is happy, while the one with total recall is chronically depressed. “For all of her loss of memory, I would say she seemed more at peace and a more engaging person to be with,” he says. “The woman who can’t forget seemed to be haunted by a billion things that just won’t let her live in the moment for a second.”
It’s not just seniors and the middle-aged who are concerned with memory loss. “We interviewed a lot of random teenagers,” Freed says.
“I remember a huge swath of these guys in their late teens and early 20’s. They were all talking about being overwhelmed by the passwords they couldn’t remember, and they were giving up.”

Next Page »