the-inbetween.com

Monthly Watchings

A day after my movie watching birthday weekend, I pledged to myself that I will watch at least one movie per day for the rest of February. A February Movie Watching Month, if you'd like. A FeMoWaMo.

I went through my "shrinkwrap shrine", watching a number of the unwatched movies that I own. I got a zip.ca membership. I rented movies from a store. I caught some on TV and, when I was at my parents' place, on The Movie Network On Demand. I saw some movies for the first time and others for the third time. What mattered was that I saw them complete and commercial free.

In the end (today), the final tally is 20 movies in the 21 days since the pledge was made. That means failure. Indeed, workload prevented me from watching anything on three of those days. Throw in all the time spent with the Olympic coverage, though, and you end up with a reasonable number.

It was an enjoyable experience. By forcing the issue, I got to see a number of really good movies that I might have been too distracted or slack to bother with on normal days. I will try to continue this through March, but on an unofficial basis. February shall, from this day hence, be known as movie watching month. Along with September (Toronto Film Festival). Maybe a little bit of March too.

The final list (no reviews):

• The Brother's Grimm
• Cold Mountain
• 24 Hour Party People
• 2046
• Kontroll
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
• Lord of War
• Constant Gardener
• Blue
• Shall we Dansu? (96)
• White
• Red
• The Big Lebowski
• Japon
• Happy Endings
• Notorious
• Videodrome
• A Generation
• Days of Heaven
• North By Northwest
• In The Mood for Love
• Life of Brian
• Kung-Fu Hustle
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (81)
• Downfall

On Torino's Coverage

With yet another absurdist ceremony, the 20th Winter Olympic Games came to a close. They finale had its moments, I guess (like the flaming head skater guys!), but they always feel so counter-Olympic. You spend two weeks watching great, competitive events with the worlds greatest athletes only to end with hundreds of clowns doing a carnival rendition of YMCA. What!?

The worst part of the ceremony (next to Ricky Martin) was the small segment done by Vancouver's comittee in anticipation of their 2010 games. After the pomp and grandeur of the Italian festivities, the Canadian bit felt expectantly lame in comparison. It was as if they followed a checklist of lame Canadian festivity cliches: crappy Canadian musician? Avril Lavigne -- CHECK! Hockey reference? CHECK. Generic Canadian cliches? A snowmobiler in snowshoes and flannel ice fishing -- CHECK! Very strongly playing the native card -- CHECK and DOUBLE CHECK!

They have four years to fix that.

The actual games, however, were quite good. A lot of drama. A lot of exciting races. Unfortunately, if you're American (and not close enough to the border to receive CBC), you never got that. I caught some of NBC's coverage, but 99% of it was rediculous bullshit. Coverage of taped events, long since completed, spliced together with other sports in a seemingly random manner. There was no real "schedule". Since they mostly aired in prime time, almost nothing was ever live and, with the limited time, many events were outright ignored. Tons of feel-good fluff and filler. An overall poor showing.

About the only thing they did do right was show the bronze and gold medal hockey games live and uninterrupted, but I imagine that the only reason that was done was because they were on early on the weekend.

Lucky for me, I do get CBC. Wall to wall Olympic coverage, from 5am to 5pm live, a half hour break for news, and then all the way through to the night with repeats and highlights in prime time. Most events get covered. The ones where Canadians have a chance, naturally, get more attention -- but those without any chance get shown too. Two weeks of non-stop Olympics. They definitely do a better job of fueling Olympic interest in this country than NBC does in theirs.

They've done a great job with it for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, even though it was still a great showing, this year, I thought, there were a number of disappointments. Cracks in the concrete, if you will.

Timing. I found SRC's (French CBC) coverage and timing with live events to be a lot better than English CBC's. While Ron MacLean babbled about something, SRC was showing live B-finals in speed skating. While CBC was analyzing and overanalyzing some hockey game, SRC was showing live bobsled. While CBC was showing commercial after commercial, SRC was still on the event.

Commercials. It is to be expected that during the Olympic games, key sponsors would get the majority of commercials. For two weeks there's nothing but the same dozen commercials over and over again. It's annoying after a couple of hours. It's extremely annoying after 16 days.

That's something that happens with every Olympics, so that alone isn't the problem this year. What bugs me this year is that there seems to be more commercial breaks than ever (sometimes interupting important live moments, as mentioned above) and, worst of all, this year's batch of ads was the most irritating ever Everything from the damned Bell beavers, to the "That's my train!" Bombardier garbage, and to that manipulative Tim Horton's ad. Those were just minor irritants, however, compared to the levels of absolute pain that was Yoplait's campaign. This fucker especially:

They were so effective in getting under your skin (in the most negative "nails on blackboard" way) that I will never buy a Yoplait product on sheer principle.

Bob Cole and Harry Neale. CBC needs to retire these guys. Now. The game of hockey is faster than it's ever been and these two aging, old school announcers can't keep up. I spent more time during a game cussing at Bob Cole's missed calls and misread plays than I did swearing at Team Canada, and let me tell you, Team Canada had a lot to swear about.

Exclusive Rights. I can't remember if it was like this (no other stations could show video highlights from the games) before, since during the games I'm generally in the Olympic bubble and not very aware of other channels, but I don't think it was ever this strong. It's disappointing that CBC has been like this. Exclusive rights don't help to spread excitement and interest in the games. After that amazing shot in the gold medal curling game, which pretty much won the title for Canada, none of the other networks could show it. Shame.

TSN Partnership. If you didn't pay attention to the schedule, you might have never known that TSN was actually showing some events while CBC was focused on other things. This mostly meant round robin curling and some odd hockey games, but there was some speed skating in there too. But CBC was pretty much content to act as if their broadcast didn't exist. There was an opportunity there for more extensive coverage spread across the two networks, but it failed to materialize. When CTV takes on the Olympic reigns (sadly) I hope that they can better leverage their networks (which include TSN).

Other than that, CBC's coverage was good.

On Torino

I have attentively watched every Olympiad since Seoul 88. Probably even Calgary 88, but I can't remember those. I'd say "probably" to 84 were it not for the fact that I was four at the time and living in Olympic boycotted Poland at the time, so even if I were to watch then there wouldn't have been much to see. Let's just say "since Seoul 88".

All through that time the winter version was always my favourite of the various Olympics. When the IOC adjusted the schedule in the early 90s, which resulted in the Albertville and Lillehammer Olympics being a mere two years apart, I was ecstatic. Two Winter Olympiads in two years? Fuck yeah!

There are reasons why I prefer them. Most simple of all, I live in a winter nation and I've always enjoyed the winter. I might not ski or skate myself, but the thought of cool winter air and snow covered mountains appeals to me. 30 degree (Celcius!) weather does not. Secondly, I find the winter events more compact and not as overwhelming. For all that flak events like Biathlon (which is great -- there was an exciting finish today) and luge and curling might get, I wonder where those same people are when they are Sailing and jumping around on trampolines and playing ping pong and archery in the summer. For one dubious sport you can name in the winter, I can name two or three summer equivalents.

Most important of all, the soul of Canadian sports wears a hockey jersey. Everything rides on that. Since hockey is at the Olympics (and now with NHL players), the games are always going to get the collective attention of this nation. Sad as it is for the other athletes, hockey's Team Canada arriving at the Games garners as much, if not more, attention than any medal on that day. Above everything else -- including Donovan Bailey's world record win -- the one Olympic memory that stands out the most to me (and many others) is the Sweden vs Canada gold medal shootout in 1994. Twelve years ago.

That is why I like the winter games. I can understand if they have no relevance to people that live in places where a single snowflake is enough to declare a national disaster. I can (marginally) understand testosterone driven objections to the mere sight of figure skating. I can understand the overall disenchantment with the "Olympic movement". And I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't like the games if all they had was coverage by NBC! But I really can't understand this idiotic Bryant Gumbel opinion:

So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention. Try not to point out that something's not really a sport if a pseudo-athlete waits in what's called a kiss-and-cry area, while some panel of subjective judges decides who won ... So if only to hasten the arrival of the day they're done, when we can move on to March Madness -- for God's sake, let the games begin.

Sheer lunacy. Not even worth responding too. Ignoring the retarded race card that he throws into the argument, you'll have to excuse me if I, as a Canadian, don't give a fuck about minor league American college sports -- regardless of what the background of the athletes is.

The only white I care about is the white of the snow. There's not a lot of that going on this season in Toronto so, if anything, it's nice to see some of that powder on the ground this year, even if only in Torino. And in our northern nations, it's also nice to celebrate those sports that can only be played for four or five months of the year. It's what we have and we enjoy it. It's hard to swim when the lake is frozen.

technorati

The top 5 tags at Technorati right now are:

1. Islam
2. Cartoons
3. Bush
4. Recensioni
5. big dick shemales

Proving that spam is still as viable as it ever was. If you're in the game of relying on other people's content, as Technorati is, you are going to get gamed.

Weekend Watchings

The weekend was spent on my parents' couch at my parents' place watching a lot of (my parents') TV, snacking on almonds and cake (of the birthday variety). The Sunday also had "The Big Game"™® and, really, it was quite boring. I don't watch a lot of football, but for a game billing itself as the biggest in the world (yeah, wait til' July 9th for that), it was really dull.

You sit for a couple of minutes through commercials then watch the players set up for another minute or two. Then then snap and you watch five seconds of a possibly exciting play, only to to see it called back by the referee, leading to the next commercial break. Meh. The (lowly, lousy) Raptors' game against the Clippers that afternoon, which went to overtime, was considerably more exciting. The Leafs' near collapse (again!) on Saturday was more exciting. And to make it seem as though I'm not football biased (though I am a bit), last November's Grey Cup was far more exciting. Better reffed too (an almost prescient article from November). Granted, that's probably and unfair comparison to the Superbowl since the 93rd Grey Cup was arguably one of the most exciting football games ever, but still. At least the game wasn't on Fox, which meant that I could flip back and forth between Family Guy or some lousy, uninspired episode of the Simpsons.

In between the hockey and the football and the basketball (I sound like a sports fanatic), I watched:

• Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 (good analysis at the link) (4/5)
• Kontroll (3/5)
• The Brother's Grimm (2/5)
• Cold Mountain (4/5)

There's a bit of a lull between now and the Olympics so I hope to catch up with my DVD movie shrinkwrap shrine this week. Maybe even writing some reviews along the way. Or, you know, just numeric ratings without any commentary backing them up.

Amalgamated Feed

When online web services don't play nice together, doves cry.

Right now they're bawling their eyes out over the glitchiness between Bloglines and del.icio.us. I don't know how it all began (and it began weeks ago) -- perhaps an overly eager spider got itself throttled -- but the end result is that most user feeds from del.icio.us don't work very well anymore. Luckily, that's what my inbox is for. However, in trying to fix and/or workaround the problem, I turned to yet another third party web app: feedburner.

In the process, I've ended up with a single, amalgamated feed that mixes this weblog, my del.icio.us feed, and even my flickr photos. It is here. This is something I've wanted to do for a while; preferably rolling my own system but there's no accounting for the combination of laziness and feedburner's ease of use. I've railed about the decentralization of personal information and content on the web before, so this amalgamation is useful to me. Of course, the catch is that those various third party feeds are now being combined by yet another third party application, so it doesn't solve the problem that my content is dependent on their services. For now, though, it's a good stopgap. Useful too.

So if you're so inclined, point the ole' news reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/n0wak. If you do then you might see further evidence as to why Guitar Hero, despite its many frustrations, was my game of 2005. I still play it a lot and my pinkie still hurts a lot. It is possibly the game of decade.