OF THE WEEK
WHAT BETTER to sip on during the holidays than a big glass of smooth eggnog? Spiked eggnog, of course. Taking things beyond a shot of rum, Royal Dinette bar manager Kaitlyn Stewart created the Little Lebowski, rich with coffee and vanilla flavours. “For some reason, watching The Big Lebowski
has become a Christmas tradition,” Stewart says. “With that comes White Russians. So a few years back I decided to swap out the milk with eggnog, and the Little Lebowski was born.”
Serve this sipper alongside a plate of chocolate-chip cookies to keep warm on a cold winter’s night. 2 oz (60 ml) eggnog
1 oz (30 ml) vodka,
such as Absolut
½ oz (15 ml) Tia Maria
coffee liqueur
¼ oz (7 ml) Galliano L’autentico 1 oz (30 ml) espresso
9 drops chocolate bitters, such as
Mrs. Better’s bitters
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake vigorously for 10 to 15 seconds. Fine-strain into a mini milk bottle, or chilled coupe, or rocks (oldfashioned) glass. Garnish with a pinch of cocoa nibs.
GANS, OKLAHOMA (population: 312), has been the home of songwriter Cal Smith, best known for the 1974 hit “Country Bumpkin”, and of
STARTING IN Greece, where the philosophical concept of liberal democracy first flourished, roughly 2,500 years ago, this incisive documentary unravels an inquiry that’s actually a lot more complicated than it sounds.
“It’s a question that almost defeats the purpose of asking it,” posits one young woman interviewed by Canadian filmmaker Astra Taylor, who talks to academics, activists, historians, politicians, immigrants, and ordinary citizens in places as varied as Florida and Italy.
The movie is structured around quotations from Plato, and these are elaborated upon by folks like professor Cornel West, who stresses that democracy is more than a numbers game. “If it was just a matter of majority rule, we might still have slavery.” Instead, he points out, emancipation had to come from presidential fiat. Famed ’60s activist Angela Davis says that the U.S. missed its chance to restructure its politics after the Civil War, and that the Africa-derived part of the population was never invited into the process. The amendment proclaiming birthright citizenship, in fact, was a unilateral move to enfranchise black voters—one of the main reasons the birther-in-chief is going after it.
Voting rights in general are being eroded throughout the nation, and Taylor’s visit to a Trump rally reveals the results of poor education and antidemocratic propaganda, as seemingly nice young white people express their main concern: that being a foreigner or poor person of colour is somehow highly advantageous in today’s America.
Even apart from obvious factual errors, their notion of citizenship is extremely stunted. Plato called members of a true democracy “citizens” because they came from heterogeneous zones called “cities”, not from sparse rural areas ruled by clan loyalty. Itself a slave state in Plato’s time, present-day Greece is also seen as a flash point of income inequality, with immigrants bearing blame for the nation’s austerity measures— themselves mostly the result of usurious banking practices that hobble poorer countries the same way they do blighted urban areas.
Most of the interview subjects ponder the taming of the “unruly passions” endemic to democracy, since they always allow for the possibility of fascism. That is, we tend to think about personal gain or security, not responsibility to make society function at its best. West, again, quotes Dostoyevsky as saying that many people gravitate toward authoritarianism “because they are afraid to authorize themselves”.
Ken Eisner
DIRECTOR ALFONS Adetuyi comes from a versatile and highly accomplished family of Canadian filmmakers. Cowritten by brother Robert Adetuyi, his second foray into scripted features feels more like an unnecessarily expensive calling card than a full-fledged romantic comedy. The ’60s soul tunes on the soundtrack must have cost as much as Love Jacked’s whole budget.
Having grown up rich in the fictional, Malibu-like town of South Bay, played by Ontario, spoiled Maya (Happy Together’s Amber Stevens West) is around 30, but is in unusual thrall to her blustering father (U.S. TV veteran Keith David, hamming it up). He’s against her going to South Africa on a spiritual quest, and even more apoplectic when her Cape Town stay results in an instant marriage proposal from a wealthy local player called Mtumbie (Demetrius Gross). When she catches the guy cheating, she’s in a double bind—because proving Daddy wrong is more important than her own happiness.
Enter Malcolm (Wynonna Earp’s Shamier Anderson), a genial hustler who hears her dilemma, and for some reason agrees to impersonate Mtumbie for her already wary family. Naturally enough, he shows up sporting a decidedly inappropriate dashiki and a one-size-fits-all accent—raising the suspicions of her Afrophile uncle (comic Mike Epps, of the Friday movies). He immediately wins over her live-in aunt and grandmother, played by real-life daughter-mother combo Angela and Marla Gibbs. (The latter, a stalwart of The Jeffersons, is now 87.)
A deal’s a deal, though, and their brilliant plan is to get legally married and then claim that Mtumbie has died in a terrible accident. Because who would look closely at events like that? Happy now, Dad? Things get even thornier when Malcolm’s erstwhile partner (The Book of Negroes’ Lyriq Bent) shows up, with a gun, wanting a cut of whatever is going on.
Although the movie is set in a parallel universe filled with moneyed black folks, it reinforces social tropes we could easily live without. The young men here are dark-skinned demicriminals while the female lead is as fair as Meghan Markle. Maya’s generic prettiness apparently trumps the fact that she has no interests, skills, or sense of humour—even apart from the fact that her ideas are batshit crazy. On the other hand, costar Anderson manages to maintain both dignity and a comic touch amid this mess, making him a talent to watch.