#toronto star

[captain-casual]

Better late than never. Let’s hope CERTAIN OTHER COUNTRIES follow suit.

[legendarytragedynacho]

Patti Smith by Keith Beaty/Getty Images via Toronto Star

[natlacentral]

'I've got to pinch myself': Paul Sun-Hyung Lee on playing Iroh in 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'

Presumably the people outside a local car dealership a couple of years ago who heard Paul Sun-Hyung Lee let out a “huge whoop” during a phone call with his agent didn't fully grasp the significance of that celebratory sound.

The Toronto actor beloved as the internet’s “Appa” thanks to “Kim’s Convenience” and a popular part of the “Star Wars” universe, too, was about to become the internet’s favourite uncle.

Lee had landed the role of Uncle Iroh in “Avatar: the Last Airbender,” Netflix’s much anticipated live-action reimagining of a well loved animated series (not to be confused with James Cameron’s “Avatar” films).

“Honestly, I have moments where I think I’ve got to pinch myself because, even as a youngster, I never would have believed that I could be a part of these things, because I never saw anybody who looked like me reflected in any of these shows,” the Korean Canadian actor said, reflecting on his roles in “Airbender” and the “Star Wars” spinoffs “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka,” in which he plays the popular Captain Carson Teva.

As Iroh in “Airbender,” Lee has stepped into the robes of another fan favourite character.

First, a bit of a primer: “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which debuts Thursday, is about a 12-year-old boy, the “Avatar” of the title, on a quest to save the world from the rapacious Fire Nation, which has gone to war with the Earth, Water and Air peoples. Despite his youth, Avatar Aang (played by Vancouver actor Gordon Cormier) is a powerful “bender,” honing his ability to manipulate air, water, earth and fire.

Aang and his friends — Katara, a water bender (played by Indigenous Canadian Kiawentiio), and her brother, Sokka (American actor Ian Ousley) — are being hunted by fire bender Prince Zuko (American Dallas Liu), who’s accompanied by his wise and compassionate Uncle Iroh, himself a fire bender and a former Fire Nation general.

If that all sounds kind of geeky, well, that’s right up Lee’s alley.

The 51-year-old has well-established nerd bona fides as a fan of “Star Wars” and other science fiction (he shares his love of the genre on his Bitterasiandude Inc. YouTube channel). He caught up with the original “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (which aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, then moved to Netflix) while he was still working on the CBC comedy “Kim’s Convenience” (2016-21), in which he played a South Korean immigrant who runs a convenience store in Toronto. 

In 2018, as new fans were discovering “Kim’s” worldwide after the series moved to Netflix, the streaming giant announced its remake of “Airbender,” setting in motion Lee's ascent into another dream role. 

“Almost immediately I got fan casted (as Iroh) by all these people on the internet,” Lee said in a Zoom interview. “I was very, very flattered, but I was doing ‘Kim’s.’”

A few years later, though, “Kim’s” had ended and Lee got an audition for what was billed as a basketball movie called “Blue Dawn,” as a coach who had come out of retirement to guide his nephew.

Although he’s “more of a baseball, hockey guy,” Lee taped the audition and then forgot about it, until a callback a couple of months later. Except now, the retired basketball coach Howard was named Iroh.

“There’s only one Iroh that I know of,” said Lee. “And so I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is for “Avatar”’ … right away I got super nervous. The stakes went up and I really wanted this part.”

But, after doing a chemistry read with Liu and not hearing anything for a couple of weeks, Lee assumed he had missed out on the role, which is part of the lot of an actor … until his agent called just as Lee and his wife were about to sign a lease on a new vehicle.

“So I excused myself, leaving the salesman completely befuddled. I went outside and that’s when I learned that I landed the role. And immediately let out this huge whoop. I had forgotten that I was in a public area and there were lots of people outside, and they all suddenly looked at me and I said, ‘It’s OK. It’s good news. It’s great news.’”

There was one more hurdle to overcome, though. 

“Airbender,” which shoots in Vancouver, overlapped Lee’s schedule for “The Mandalorian,” which films in Los Angeles. And playing Iroh meant shaving off the middle part of the moustache that Lee sports as Captain Teva.

“Luckily I was able to have my cake and eat it at the same time,” said Lee. “Lucasfilm was like, ‘Oh, we’ll just build him a little fake moustache to put on while he’s shooting (“The Mandalorian”).’”

Lee isn’t certain how familiar the producers of “Airbender” were with his work on “Kim’s Convenience” — it's an established fact that “Mandalorian” producer and director Dave Filoni was a “Kim’s” fan before he cast Lee — but he considers his latest job to be another of the many blessings accruing from the CBC series.

“‘Kim’s Convenience’ was such a wonderful launching pad for my career,” Lee said. “I mean, that show was kind of my coming out party in terms of the film and TV world.”

Lee, who was born in South Korea but immigrated to Canada with his parents when still an infant, struggled to find good film and TV roles as a young actor in the 1990s and early aughts. 

After graduating from drama school at the University of Toronto, he did a lot of theatre work, but onscreen “I played a lot of doctors, a lot of store clerks, a lot of window dressing-type caricatures, not characters.”

And yet, he persisted. 

Despite not seeing himself reflected in the television he devoured as a kid and from which he developed his love of storytelling, “I thought, well, heck, if there’s nobody (else Asian) out there, maybe there’s a shot for me to get in … that was kind of foolish thinking because maybe you’re the only one because a lot of people have tried and haven’t been able to get through. But I was just too stupid and too stubborn to quit, so just kept at it.”

Now Lee hopes to provide inspiration for the young Asian actors coming up behind him.

On the set of “Airbender,” which has many Asian actors in its cast, Lee became particularly close with Liu, the 22-year-old Chinese-Indonesian-American actor playing his beloved nephew. Just as Iroh is protective of Zuko, for whom he becomes a surrogate father, Lee said he wanted to nurture Liu.

“Every chance that I got to just sort of give him little pearls of wisdom based on my experiences … I couldn’t help but want to see him succeed,” Lee said. “This kid is a superstar,” he added.

Now that Lee himself is part of two much-loved pop culture franchises, “my cup runneth over,” but he still has entries on his acting bucket list.

“Not to sound greedy, but I’d love to do ‘Star Trek’ because that's filming right in our backyard. I’d love to do a ‘Ghostbusters.’ All those geeky playgrounds I never got a chance to play in. I want to be in a rom-com. I want to be in a Western, the genres that I grew up watching …

“But I’ll take it as it comes and I’m grateful for what I have. And if this is the only thing I ever do again I will be thankful for it because a lot of people don’t get these opportunities.”

[allthecanadianpolitics]

TORONTO - A media backlash against the Dilbert comic strip took hold in Canada on Monday as several of the country's biggest newspapers announced they were dropping the office-set cartoon over recent remarks by its creator.

The Toronto Star published a note in Monday's edition stating the strip will no longer appear in its weekend comic section because “recent racist comments by the cartoonist, Scott Adams, are not in line with the Star's journalistic standards.”

This followed a tweet from the Globe and Mail dated Sunday that it decided to drop the comic because of “recent discriminatory comments” by Adams that “do not align with our editorial or business values as an organization.” [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[christianbalefanatic]

Christian Bale and Emily Watson at the 22nd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for Equilibrium in Toronto, Canada photographed by Steve Russell for the Toronto Star (September 8, 1997)

Re: Christian Bale as John Preston in Equilibrium (2002) dir. Kurt Wimmer

[thelorenfiles]

Sophia Loren photographed by Erin Combs for the Toronto Star, 1981

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

[sekwar]

this is the most menacing thing i've ever seen in a newspaper.

[emcgoverns]

elizabeth mcgovern for the “toronto star” (september 1989) | 📸: erin combs

[agentfascinateur]

Where is the Western media outrage?

100 journalists killed by Israelis.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whamond, Toronto Star

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

In the New York Times yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Swan reported that one of the reasons House speaker Kevin McCarthy handed access to more than 40,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol from January 6, 2021, to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson was that McCarthy had promised the far right that he would revisit that event but did not want to have the Republican Congress tied to the effort. His political advisors say swing voters want to move forward. In the longer term, today’s Republicans are out of step with the majority of Americans on issues like LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun safety, and abortion. Although Republicans are pushing draconian laws to end all abortion access, today Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, released a report showing that 64% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 25% say it should be illegal in most cases and only 9% say it should be illegal in all cases. Less than half the residents in every state and in Washington, D.C., supported overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as the Supreme Court did with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of last June. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) echoed Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address with his description of today’s America as one full of misery and hopelessness. Florida governor Ron DeSantis traveled this week to New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago to insist those Democratic-led cities were crime-ridden, although as human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid pointed out, Florida has a 19% higher rape rate, 66% higher murder rate, and 280% higher burglary rate than New York. Another study released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, which specializes in civil rights law, noted that domestic extremist mass killings have increased “greatly” in the past 12 years. But while murders by Islamic extremists, for example, have been falling, all the extremist killings in 2022 were committed by right-wing adherents, with 21 of 25 murders linked to white supremacists. President Biden’s poll numbers are up to 46% in general and 49% with registered voters. Perhaps more to the point is that in Tuesday’s four special elections, Democrats outperformed expectations by significant margins. There are many reasons for these Democratic gains—abortion rights key among them—but it is possible that voters like the Democrats’ vision of a hopeful future and a realistic means to get there rather than Republicans’ condemnation of the present and vow to claw back a mythological past.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[1634archive]

TORONTO, ON - JANUARY 25: Toronto Maple Leafs right wing Mitchell Marner (16) celebrates his winner as he and Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews (34) and Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Timothy Liljegren (37). Toronto Maple Leafs vs New York Rangers during OT period play of NHL regular season action at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Leafs win on Toronto Maple Leafs right wing Mitchell Marner (16) goal quick in the Overtime. 

[reignofkings]

General thoughts on Charles Bradley covering "Changes" by Black Sabbath for The Toronto Star

[violsva]

"The assumption of a radical [computer] superintelligence misunderstands both what intelligence is and also what causes problems in the world. It isn't a lack of "intelligence" that has children starving, a housing crisis in countless cities or climate change. It is, rather, politics — it is how, when and where people and technology are deployed to address issues. "It betrays a blinkered view of life in which we simply aren't smart enough to fix our problems. What is in fact true is that we are "stuck" in the issues of real life lived by real people, and as a result are mired in politics, history, and culture."

-- Navneet Alang

[heartlandians]

TORONTO STAR: What Canadian TV show is more popular with Americans than ‘Friends’? Try ‘Heartland’

The long-running family-ranch CBC drama was the 13th most popular show of any sort in the U.S. in 2022, Nielsen says.

There’s a Canadian TV show that is winning a most elusive and dreamt-of prize in Canadian entertainment: a big American audience. An almost astonishingly large one, in fact.

Big-city viewers, you may wish to sit down.

It’s “Heartland.”

Last month, Variety published Nielsen audience numbers for streaming shows in 2022; the long-running family-ranch drama was the 13th most popular show of any sort in the U.S., ahead of “The Simpsons” and “Friends.” Nielsen reported 18 billion minutes viewed, the equivalent of 360 million full episodes. It’s as if every single American watched an instalment.

It wasn’t a sudden explosion of interest; numbers from the previous year ranked the horse-filled show as streaming’s fifth most popular “acquired” (that is, not a streaming service original) show, well ahead of the likes of “Seinfeld” and “The Walking Dead.”

All this for a show that after 16 seasons and 249 episodes, is a part of this country’s TV landscape that’s rather taken for granted — getting very little love at the Canadian Screen Awards, for example.

What’s going on here?

“Nothing beats horse porn,” said veteran Canadian TV writer Bill Brioux, with tongue in cheek, when asked to shed some light on “Heartland” and its U.S. triumphs. More sincerely, “I think there’s probably a hunger for family shows, family drama. And it’s not really served these days by even streaming.”

And “Heartland” is nothing if not a family show. Set on the Bartlett clan’s expansive abode in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, it’s devoted centrally to Amy (Amber Marshall), who has gone from a girl losing her mother in the first episode back in 2007 to a young mother and widow now. Residing with her is the grandfather who raised her, her once estranged father, Tim, and their spouses and children, as they navigate matters of love and business — Amy’s business being her knack for healing troubled steeds as a kind of horse whisperer.

It might be tempting to compare it to another juggernaut: the ranch show that does get talked about, “Yellowstone.” But it’s like imagining that show without the high stakes, the violent confrontations or Kevin Costner’s star power; the most attention-grabbing guest star of the latest season of “Heartland” was a zorse.

After stumbling onto it, one U.S. blogger, Anthony Del Vecchio, wrote about the show almost a decade ago under the heading “My Girlfriend Made Me Watch This,” and described being won over.

“The show has an underlying theme of healing through love and compassion and there’s not an ironic bone in the show’s DNA … a refreshing change of pace among the cynicism that seems to be permeating the American television landscape,” he wrote, likening it to American fare such as “Seventh Heaven” and “Gilmore Girls” without the endearing/exhausting rat-a-tat dialogue of the latter or the religious moralism of the former.

“I like that the show’s about the relationship between people and animals, but I also like the fact that it’s a multi-generational family show living under one roof,” said U.S. fan Denise Cornelius, whose own upbringing was likewise with grandparents present. The 44-year-old marketing director for Yahoo, based in Virginia, loves family-friendly fare (along with “Bridgerton” and “The 100”) and has a horse of her own, and reckons both are why the Netflix algorithm offered the show up to her.

“I was washing dishes,” said 28-year-old Floridian Andrew Bjork, recalling when Netflix’s landing page pitched him on “Heartland.” He was soon pulled in by the “beautiful scenery” and the show’s penchant for shooting on film but also started appreciating the actors’ chemistry — they simply “seem to get along with one another.”

Giving Americans with various streaming subscriptions and viewing habits a chance to discover the show was very much the plan for “Heartland” executive producer Jordy Randall. He notes that the show has been available nonexclusively on a variety of U.S. platforms — Netflix; Hulu; UPtv, a broadcaster/streamer; ad-supported streaming channels from FilmRise — with a goal in mind.

“That was a conscious choice to try to broaden the audience,” he said. “This does not make a bunch of money, which is the odd thing … I think what it does is it builds brand loyalty and it builds stability … If we get to do Season 17, for example, I know there will be a home for the show in the U.S. in addition to Canada.”

All the availability “wouldn’t matter if they didn’t like it,” Randall added, pointing out that the huge library of episodes is a big reward for new fans. He suggests a common experience is a 12-year-old girl who loves horses: “she will go onto CBC Gem and start watching the show from Season 1 … It is so rewarding and usually what happens is she starts liking it and then usually the mother will say, ‘Oh, what are you watching?’ … it’s because it’s all there that we can build a brand new audience every year.”

Fan Cornelius concurs, suggesting that by the time U.S. streaming viewers found it, “it was already like five seasons in so you could binge-watch it … and people really like that here, the ability to watch a show (at length) without any interruption.”

Canadians who reliably tune in still for “Coronation Street” need no education on the charms of a low-stakes, long-running show whose characters have deep histories. And while Canadian ratings are hard to come by, “Heartland” has certainly kept a following here, which might explain why CBC is pulling it off of Netflix in this country at month’s end; viewers aiming to binge must head to the corporation’s own service, Gem.

Binge viewing can turn character evolution that took place over years into a more striking change observed over months. Bjork mentioned the satisfaction of watching Tim (Chris Potter) “go from absentee dad to him winning back his father-in-law’s trust.”

Cornelius agreed: “I remember at the beginning that Jack just didn’t like him. To have Jack respect him and be the person — in the last episode Tim is telling Jack to do the right thing — I never thought I would see the day that it wouldn’t be any other way around.”

It’s an intriguing irony that streaming and modern TV’s endless options let American viewers indulge a taste for a distinctly old-fashioned show compared by both Brioux and Del Vecchio to “Little House on the Prairie.” The former writer — noting that the much praised new arrival “Poker Face” is “‘The Fugitive’ meets ‘Columbo’ … the storytelling is almost identical” — thinks retro sensibilities are having a moment.

“There’s so much damn TV out there to cover, yet I’m still looking at ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ on Tubi … peak TV has kind of hit the wall, right?”

Source

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"FIRST TO BUY BOND," Toronto Star. April 29, 1943. Page 8. ---- Kenneth Morley Boyd, Toronto Star carrier boy, was the first purchaser of the Fourth Victory Loan at the Orillia headquarters. He purchased a $50 bond.