The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 27

Cle (3wette MONTREAL, TUESDAY, OCTOOCP. 3. 1989 Caraadfain Mms featured in She Big Apple Ms fall! Thing) were launched. Three yean ago. the market began opening Its doors to a limited number of dims from other countries, with Atom I-'govan's family Vitmg, the first Canadian film invited in 15B6 During this year" Idth eilitnn of the market, four men! Canadian films will be screened Allan King's Termini Station, Francois fiouvier's tS malms intijuios (t'nfaithful Nettie Wild A Hustling of Leaves, and Penys Arcand's Josus of Montreal.

Jesus, winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival May, has not yet found a PS distributor, whu could explain the film's showing at the Independent Feature Market, This year's market is alio holding national day seminars on the film industries of Canada. Australia, New Zealand and Itnl-am A panel with film makers Iiavid Cron-enberg. Anne U'lieeler, Hubert-Yves Hose. Nettie Wild and Roper Frappier, the producer of Jesus of Montreal, will wrestle ith the question of whether Canadian films na, the erudition includes independent; fitllls of the last live veais. a tribute to th hilnil and at tress Nell SlupmanJ and a liutui u.il overview Canadian fillip from I'ja to I'jiid A m-iim- i.l fun and pervjnal discovery apj pears to ive motivated Mani la, who has so-; lected will varied works as Ottawa film-I Frank Coirs' minimalist essay, a I itt.

Toronto din-ctor lion Mann docunvn- lary salute to comicbook artists, Comn? Umk ConUtrnw. and Arcand's 17J film! noir nustc-rpuve. fuyjnm Pacovanni. 1 By IN A WARREN Canadian Pros NEW YORK Canadian films will be in the spotlight in New York this fall, with a strong presrnce the InaYpendent Feature Market and a major retrospective at the Museum of MHl rn Ail which starts iodiy and continues until Del. II.

The premier venue for the buying and selling of American Independent films, the feature nurket is where, for instance, the first films of Spike (Do the Right are distinct from those of other countries The lollov 'f day. a gala sem-mng of $us ot Montmal at the Must-urn of Modern Art will ulflelally aumh (lie inuwtun's two-momh long retro: of CjuaJian films Oct 13 Dec. 24. The program, entitled 0 Canada L'A-tuour du cinema from North to South, nm-stsU of 45 feature movies and VU animati-d film, making It the largest exhibition of Canadian film ever presented in the I'niu-d Suites Organized by film curator Adrienne Man puts 1 3 Tightrope crew stranglehold on tMtrmktch and MmtHn of Ckt ni Am. Almo by Cot tit Oudwnt pttuntmj by TiQhttopa Producttont at Cif LtvWf lh0tii0.3StfCH"LiSl (FinltoOot i I XTv Ptrc Lt'ontMin) until Oct J.

Ana TtmoPoth csnf by Otig Lucsb. with ana lynct by OtiQ Camus, pmmntaa oy Snwf Pao fnjfr $1 Ctnttuf Tnaatta tnrougn Oct IS. so real you feel you have met them on the No. 10S bus. The dialogue has a sharp local flavor.

Walkin' After Midnight makes a fitting musical oridge. Director Vicki Barkoff lets the piece find its own style. Smith is guilty of some serious overacting; Wrench never quite hits his stride and Caryl is a little too low-key. But Gilchrist is dead on as whining 4 Mom. Steamy style By PAT DONNELLY Gazetta Theatra Critic Fringe theatre, like rock music, spells out its message in the name of the group and the title of the piece.

It's hard to beat Tightrope Productions' Marrakech and Matters of Class and Race, Also Sex by Cora-lie Duchesne when it comes to eyecatching banners. The product inside the funky wrapping is refreshingly literate, offbeat and diverting. Street People Theatre's Tires Postcards by Craig Lucas also sounds as though it should be well off the beaten track. Unfortunately, as interpreted by director Paulina Abarca and cast, it's indigestible dinner theatre. Interestingly, Three Postcards is a tested and lauded American off-Broadway musical, selected by Time magazine in 1987 as one of that year's best plays, while Marrakech and Matters of Class and Race, Also Sex is a newborn double-bill by a Montreal playwright Comparisons inevitably lead to a renewed sense of home-town pride.

At least until one discovers that Coralie Duchesne, the trilingual playwright of Matters of Class and Race, Also Sex was born in India, educated in England, and lived most of her married life in Spain. Duchesne who also happens to be the mother of six moved to Montreal in 1980. Matters of Class and Race, Also Sex is a dramatic comedy about marital disintegration in Notre Dame de Grace (or some place in Montreal that sounds exactly like N.D.G.). A young couple, Tim (Brian Wrench) and Charlotte (Kathleen Caryl), are shown in the process of setting up a bookstore just down the street from Tim's mother's beauty salon. Marrakech is a more difficult piece an erotic dual-journey in re membrance of a passionate affair.

In a steamy style that owes a good deal to the late Tennessee Williams, Duchesne places Nicolas (Gaetan Dumont) and Amanda (Laura Mit -A chell) on stage in separate solitudes. Their interaction is limited to flashbacks of their brief but intense Moroccan affair. You can almost taste the couscous and smell the 1 mint tea, but the script dissolves in its own poetry. Laura Mitchell's performance is a little misguided but Gaelle photos. John Mahoney Yellowman (left) almost stole the reggae show of the year until Jimmy Cliff high-stepped into the spotlight.

full of bravado. Dumont provides a good, reason-before-emotion con Cliff and Yellowman let the sunshine in nun nuiua, uul vy aiicci iuilc ui jj By MARK LEPAGE Gazette Pop Music Critic hen the weather turns nasty, call on reggae legend Jimmy Cliff to bring armfuls of sunshine. The high-stepping Cliff lit up the Spectrum Sunday night, illuminating a scene that testified to the trast. Three Postcards, which has the advantage of being produced at a professional theatre, Centaur, gets off to a bad start and never recovers. Director Abarca lets the piano music steamroll over the conversation throughout, which destroys the actors' chances of finding the right rhythms of the dialogue.

The blocking is unbelievably amateurish Abarca can't even seat three people at a table without making them look ridiculous. She should be charged with talent waste in the first degree. The script is very slight to start with. Three girls played by Rena Cohen, Belinda Trimble, and Jennifer Spencer get together over dinner to talk about their husbands, analysts and dogs. The banality of it all is supposed to be tempered by a series of surreal memory flashes, usually in song.

At the performance I attended only one person walked out before it was over, but another one seriously considered doing the same. contagiousness of boundless ing toward the stage to bask in the glow. Cliff announced that he would play newer songs as well as a few favorites, and the Oneness band locked into a blissful rhythm. Smack in the middle of the set, after standard verbal broadsides at apartheid, Cliff hushed the place with a shimmering Many Rivers to Cross. The voice was a notch under its usual power, but the spine tingled to hear romance and faith distilled to their essence.

The Harder They Come completed the triumph. Religious metaphors aside, Cliff was simply more fun than, say Ziggy Marley was during the lat-ter's Aug. 31 performance. It has to do mainly with experience and the looseness that comes with it, but Cliff does one other thing Ziggy still can't: inspire people not On the floor, a dance-happy Yellowman brought a reputation for verbal ugliness to the trum, which remains intact. How-ever, on any other reggae bill, Yellowman and his Sagittarius band -might have stolen the show.

While Yellowman toasted and" rapped, his group shifted gears eU fortlessly from reggae to the kind of guitar rock 'n'roll that would give the Fabulous Thunderbirds a- run for their Stratocasters. One footnote: as is usual in the "no problem" world of reggae, this concert might never have hap: pened. Spectrum management had no idea where Cliff was until half an hour before showtime. It turns out that Cliff and his band crossed the border two days before the show, then holed up in a downtown hotel. Jimmy Clllt and Yellowman at the Spectrum Sunday night.

crazed Yellowman as opening act made this the reggae show of the year. This was never in doubt, even before Cliff had lifted the crowd on a magic carpet of reggae grooves and good vibes. Cliff's status as one of the music's first great ambassadors virtually guaranteed a blowout. Had he but lived up to a fraction of his reputation, the place would have been a madhouse. Instead, Cliff was a spiritual presence, seeming to have lost none of the power he had in the '60s.

A muted version of Rivers of Babylon, with Cliff accompanying himself on a bongo, had fans rush Back to the city They are leftover back-to-the-land types who have returned to the city after going bankrupt running a hand-carved sign business in the wilds of British Columbia. Charlotte teaches yoga part time and sets the spiritual course for both of them. Tim is a spiritual backslider who secretly lusts after cars and stereos. As it turns out, Charlotte is also secretly lusting. Their first customer, Shadow (Roland Smith), who looks like a close relative of the late reggae king Bob Marley, doesn't take long to turn her on to the joys of illicit sex.

The characters particularly Tim's Mom (Jane Gilchrist) are crowd followed every festive exhortation of Cliff and his Oneness band; onstage, Cliff was half rasta warrior in his yellow cap, half good-natured party master. His peerless voice' was ragged along the edges at times, but the singer was nothing short of inspirational throughout a generous late-night set. The combination of Cliff and the Expos may be out but CJAD winds up for World Series action 7:30. And the Montreal station will shelve this week's Chicken Soup another ABC Mike Boone "Two hours of Melanie King," says a disgruntled Finnegan fan, "is like having two wives." But Braide, who studied music and began his radio career at CHOM, is committed to talk, talk and more talk on CJAD. "We're moving inexorably away from records," he says.

"Music serves as punctuation for George Balcan and Melanie. But I can foresee a time it might be in a year, maybe in five years when we'll play no music on CJAD. "The strength of this station is news, information, sports. Why play Whitney Houston when listeners can hear it on our FM station?" to," Merrill says. "There's no rain in the Skydome." Julian Sher has become the'Fifth Estate's man in Montreal.

i Sher, 36, will produce items for the CBC's investigative current affairs program. He succeeds Brian McKenna, who has branched out into drama and long-form documentaries but will continue to produce occasional reports for the Fifth Estate. Sher has worked in broadcasting for six years. He got his start at CBM radio as a ret searcher for Daybreak. Sher became a writer-broadcaster for the show and, eventually, Dennis Trudeau's producer on the morning program.

Sher switched to television in 1986. He was an investigative reporter on Newswatch for three years and has been producer on the CBMT-6 newscast since July: Sher becomes the second Daybreak alumnus on the Fifth Estate. Bob McKeown was host of the CBM morning program ior three years before moving to Toronto in 1981 to begin a TV career as a Fifth Estate reporter. Great viewing tonight on Man Alive, which is off to a hot start this season. The Warrior From Within (CBMT-9 at 9:30) is an intimate portrait of Douglas Cardinal, Metis architect who designed the National Museum of Civilization in Hull.

The documentary was produced and directed by Halya Kuchmij. the gifted film-maker who did last season's superb special on the mil-lenium of Christianitv in the Ukraine. The Expos are dead, but baseball lingers on at CJAD. The English radio voice of our late and largely unla-mented heroes will broadcast the American and National League Championship series, beginning tonight w4th the Blue Jays game in Oakland. CJAD will pick up the CBS radio feed of National League games and will plug into the Toronto network for American League action.

CJAD also will broadcast the World Series. If baseball's grand finale goes a full seven games, they'll be calling balls and strikes through Oct. 22. Then, on Monday Oct. 23, the radio station will launch its new off-season evening lineup.

Rob Braide, general manager of 'AD and its FM sister station, CJFM, is putting the finishing touches on a lineup of current affairs talk shows that will run weeknights from 6 to 7. The topics will be interpersonal relationships (sexual dysfunction sufferers phone in to broadcast their troubles to the world) to be moaned about with Tobi Klein; cars which ones to buy, which lemons to avoid, how to keep 'em running with Phil Bailey; home renovation with Ira Gladstone, money matters (with a varying cast of financial experts) and the law with Jordan Chamess and James Taylor (not the singer, and more about the imminent extinction of music on CJAD later). Chuck Phillips will be host of the 6 p.m. program and will stick around from 7 to midnight to chat a bit and spin a few records. Braide would like to launch a new talk show, possibly targeted at teens, in his 7-to- show bucking baseball tonight for future telecast.

Game 2 of the American League series will air at 3 p.m. tomorrow. Channel 12 loses General Hospital but will make it up with a two-hour telecast of the popular soap opera on Thursday afternoon, when there is no baseball. The CFCF prime-time schedule is virtually indistinguishable from NBC's on Wednesday and Thursday, so no problems will be created by the opener of the Chicago-San Francisco National League series tomorrow evening or Game 2 between the Cubs and Giants on Thursday (both night games at historic Wrigley Field). Merrill's programming headaches won't assume migraine intensity until the World Series begins on Saturday, Oct.

14. ABC is telecasting the October Classic, which means business as usupI on which means Merrill has to scramble to find time slots for his baseball-bumped NBC shows: Matlock. Midnight Caller, Unsolved Mysteries, Night Court, The Nutt House, The Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers and Dear John. "This time of year is awful," says Merrill, who is not a sports fan. In addition to planning pre-emptions and schedule shifts to accommodate baseball playoffs and World Series games, he has to have contingency telecasts ready in case of rai.iouts.

"At least we're safe for games in Toron 9 evening slot and hopes to do so early in the new year. The election of CJAD editorialist Gordon Atkinson to the National Assembly was the subject of barbed humor around the station last week. As usual, Ted Blackman had the best quip. The CJAD sports director said: "Robert Libman has asked for a recount in N.D.G." Jim Duff, former host of CBM's Daybreak and ex-publisher of the Daily News, pinch-hit for Atkinson during the election campaign. Braide says Duff will continue for at least another week while news director Gord Sinclair decides on a full-time successor to Atkinson.

Braide hopes the CJAD editorialist "will tell it like it is, but perhaps less vitriolically than Gordon did." There may be less vitriol but there definitely will be more talk on CJAD as Braide fine-tunes the sound of his successful station. The trend toward more spoken content will not be good news for listeners who have lamented Braide's decision to replace Jack Finnegan's music 'n' light banter afternoon drive show with an interview and phone-in program. Post-season baseball will wreak havoc with the CFCF-12 television schedule for the next few weeks. CTV is carrying all League Championship Series and World Series games, which means baseball on Channel 12 almost every day, which means pre-emption, shifting and shelving of regularly scheduled programs. "We get a break on the League Championship Series," says Bill Merrill, program director of CFCF-12.

"The games are on NBC and a lot of our prime-time schedule is bought from NBC, so we're not missing out on any episodes of regular series." Tonight, for example, Channel 12 has the opener of the Toronto-Oakland American League series, which will pre-empt Matlock and Midnight Caller on NBC. CFCF telecast Roseanne, a Tuesday ABC hit. last night at.