The Globe and Mail

Last week, as part of an ongoing bid to catch up on summer movies, I went to see Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. I did not like it, but never mind: This is not a film review. I bring up this picture here because of Altman's curious decision to decorate his present-day story — one character has a cellphone and another arrives in this year's model limousine, so you know it's happening now — in dusty beige costumery and furniture, and other anachronistic doodads, from the 1940s. Such mish-mashing of contemporary props and historical styles does not work in a movie. And it can get pretty dismaying even in a big city, where most people are accustomed to seeing pastiches of building styles from every period of history. But when is Toronto going to outgrow the mediocre architectural Victorianism sprouting up everywhere across our twenty-first century city?