Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

See, Hear and Feel Pauly Shore LIVE AND IN PERSON!

Special Midnight Screening of the film

PAULY SHORE IS DEAD

Friday, January 28th at The Royal Cinema

[608 College Street West]

with Pauly Shore LIVE in PERSON!

Tickets $12 advance / $15 night of show

Tickets available from Suspect Video

(605 Markham St & 619 Queen St. West)

Sponsored by Suspect Video and Presented by Ultra 8 Pictures

Finally, a movie that answers the question “what ever happened to Pauly

Shore?” with a satirical, sometimes self-deprecating, and often

hilarious honesty. Tracing the rise of the comedic it-boy and his

subsequent fall from favor, Pauly eventually loses everything: his

popularity, his house, his representation and his career. He is

humiliated in the public eye, and is forced to go to work parking cars

at his mother’s club, The Comedy Store; at a loss, he receives a

visitation from the ghost of Sam Kinison, who advises suicide.

According to Kinison, Shore’s dead career would be resurrected and

canonized in the event of the comedian’s death, and Pauly decides to go

along with this, at least to a point. He fakes his own death, and

Kinison’s prophecy comes true as all of Hollywood and fans across the

nation begin to extoll the genius that was Pauly. Basking in the glow

of his newfound appreciation, Shore goes out on the town in disguise,

but unfortunately his secret is discovered, he’s locked up, and now

looks more the fool than ever. The film is successful on the strength

of it’s good-natured, self-conscious quality of comedic revelation, and

is certainly augmented by its star power. The half-fiction,

half-autobiographical film boasts cameos from the likes of Sean Penn,

Pam Anderson, Paris and Nicky Hilton, Whoopi Goldberg, Kurt Loder,

Carson Daly, Vince Vaghn, Snoop Dog, Ben Stiller, Britney Spears, Chris

Rock, Corey Feldman, and Heidi Fleiss, among many, many others. It

would appear that The Weiz is not quite as unpopular as he presents

himself.

In Europe buskers are so well respected that tour guides often show

them off to their passengers. Studebaker, who has taken his show on the

road a number of times, has witnessed the difference, and the

excitement in his voice gets even more hyper when he is asked about the

response overseas. “If you date a girl in Europe and she takes you home

her mom would say, ‘cool, he’s got a good job.’ Here it’s more like,

‘what, he’s a bum?’” Yet, most buskers are not homeless, rather they

are determined, struggling artists who are on the streets to make money

doing what they love, performing their chosen art for an audience.

The

lack of admiration for buskers is not always the audience’s fault

either. The ratio of good artists to bad is not always favourable. For

every Michael McTaggart (better known as Subway Elvis, an Elvis

impersonator from Tennessee who played on TTC property in the 1970s

before it was legal to do so), Jeff Burke (a 26-year veteran of the

bassoon who plays covers of Nirvana and Black Sabbath in subway

stations and performs with bands from jazz to world-beat to hip-hop),

and Graeme Kirkland (the legendary jazz drummer who used to draw crowds

playing buckets outside the Rivoli) there are the guys who clink toy

xylophones and acoustic guitar players who play bad renditions of Bob

Dylan or The Beatles with no emotion whatsoever. Still, without any

buskers in our public spaces the only free outdoor performers we would

see would be those who are hired to play on that big slab of concrete

at Yonge and Dundas. We would only be able to see “acceptable” forms of

entertainment and, the bottom line is, entertainment in our public

spaces would be owned by private interests.