Archive for the 'Movies and TV' Category
Star Trek Euphemisms
It’s puerile and ridiculous and excessive and I couldn’t sit through all ten minutes of it, but I love this Star Trek: The Next Generation montage on YouTube:
Basically, it condenses all 8275 minutes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, from all seven seasons and all the movies, into a ten minute long clip of out-of-context sexual euphemisms. All of which is presented in a linear, story-like fashion. It is quite… preposterous. I can not imagine how much work it took to compile this but I can guess at how devoid that time was of the activity it mentions.
IP Imperialism
It’s not a new development, but it is one that seems to resurface every few months. The US is, of course, trying to export US-style copyright reform to Canada. This is happening all around the world. Many new treaties and trade pacts between the United States and foreign countries include copyright stipulations. The US is exceedingly aggressive in this regard and, often times, very one sided. They complain when other nations don’t respect copyrights as strictly as they do, citing international treaties and agreements, but they turn a blind eye to their own anti-competitive practices. Sometimes even rewriting WTO treaties for their own gain at the expense of other nations: In May, the United States said it was rewriting its trade rules to remove gambling from the jurisdiction of the W.T.O.
. It’s easy to understand why the United States does this: culture is the only major exportable resource it has left.
This is why, in this age of globalization and bitTorrent and cheap DVD copies, those of us outside of the United States get this bullshit:
There’s a lot to be said about how region locking is anti-competitive and how a lot of these major IP holders are in favour of globalization if it gets them into new markets but against it if it benefits the consumer. Essays have been written. Books are likely to be published. But the biggest problem with it, from a personal perspective, is that it requires local IP holders to be as “on the ball” as its major American owners. Online region locking wouldn’t be such a problem if there were local alternatives and competition. There isn’t. Canadian media companies aren’t exactly at the forefront of such progress, which is a shame because this is a very internet and tech savvy country. Hell, we’re just now getting on the iPhone bandwagon — a year late to the party.
But there’s hope…
Quite a bit of it. Hopefully, Canadian media companies will soon get their heads out of their asses and realize that, yes, Canadians use the internet too.
Alternate Best Comedy Sketches
No doubt you’ve seen the list of 50 greatest comedy sketches that’s making the rounds. Lists like that make great weblog fodder. Unlike most lists, though, this one isn’t all bad. The top two (or three) are a little predictable and for all the Monty Python love that I have (I’d have filled half of that list with Python skits) I’m not entirely fond of the “Dead Parrot” bit. I’d have listed the Philosopher’s World Cup and the wartime joke but maybe they’re too involved to qualify as “sketches”. Also: fish slapping dance.
It might be my bias speaking, but the early to mid 90s were a great time for sketch comedy on television. These were also the years when I was television obsessed, watching all of those shows and a whole load of sitcoms and the Simpsons (those were peak years) too, so I remember all the good stuff fondly. I think this period of time defined my sense of humour. It helped that these were also some of the absolute best years of Saturday Night Live, which was a show I watched religiously in my pre-teens. I still remember seeing a lot of the classic episodes live, including the (in)famous Nirvana and Sinead O’Connor performances. I was twelve at the time. In that period of my life TV was the only thing worth remembering.
Looking at that Top 50 list I was surprised to see that my two favourite SNL clips weren’t mentioned at all: Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker and Stand-Up and Win. Who are the ad-wizards that came up with this one?
is a quote that lingered in my mind for years until it gained a certain level of self-referentiality when, one day, I realized that I was one such advertising industry ad-wizard.
Two other personal favourite sketches from that era come from short-lived shows. Before the whole MTV thing, Ben Stiller had a Sunday evening sketch show on Fox. One of my favourite bits from its run was the goofy, but dead-on, Die Hard parody: Die Hard 12: Die Hungry. The other is from the Dana Carvey Show, a really short-lived series (for numerous reasons beyond its hilarity) that had a post-SNL and pre-mediocrity Carvey and two, now quite famous, young comedians by the names of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell[1].
The show is mostly remembered for Waiters Nauseated By Food, which featured those two future stars, but for me it will always be about the very short and very juvenile pay and leave “pranks”. I remember standing in a high school class discussing that episode with friends while waiting for the buzzer to ring and over-hearing another student’s story about how he failed his driving test by running into the stop sign on the test course. As I said, the early to mid 90s defined my sense of humour.
The great Dana Carvey Show is now available, in its entirety — for the first time[2] — on Joost. If you are American.
- Also featured a writing credit for Charlie Kaufman
- There was a bootleg Brutallo DVD out there for a while but it was missing three episodes.
SimCity
I’ve been playing SimCity lately. The Super Nintendo version. On the Wii. I don’t know why I was compelled to pay eight bucks for this when the original PC game is now open-sourced and available for free. More to the point, I don’t know why I was compelled to pay for a game I already own. Granted, it’s boxed up, along with the Super Nintendo, somewhere in my parents’ house, but if I ever felt the desire to play it I could have easily picked it up over a weekend. I wonder if that battery save still works. I had a Megalopolis on there!
The PC version has the added benefit of mouse control and full keyboard support, yet I’d rather kludge around with a d-pad because I’ve always had a soft spot for the SNES version. It had a certain charm that the PC version lacked; a bit of that old Nintendo polish. It was more polished, the graphics were far clearer and distinct, the music was pleasant and everything felt livelier. The PC version, by comparison, felt really flat.
The thing that motivated me to play this classic game was Dubai: the what the fuck? new capital of the architectural world. More specifically, it was details of Dubai’s waterfront plans, with its ridiculous Deathstar building, that reminded me of SimCity. This diagram in particular:
It compelled me to build a city. A city that is designed not for living but for the sake of getting a high score. A city that exploits all the nuances of the system for its own benefit, like rails (instead of roads) everywhere, high-density donut blocks and mile long stretches without intersections, stacked zones built on top of half demolished buildings and an emphasis on waterfront development even if it means non-linking intersections on bridges in the middle of the river. And the thing is, no matter how goofy of a city I construct (so long as I do it with the goal of getting a large population), it will never match the ridiculousness of the real thing in Dubai: a tasteless because-we-can money pit of urban planning built with a high score in mind (tallest this, biggest that).
Best Picture Nominees
Before the Christmas break I resolved to see all the Golden Globe nominees for “Best Dramatic Picture” so that, for once in my life, I can be fully qualified to judge. It doesn’t matter that the Golden Globes ceremony isn’t going to happen. It’s better that way. I like the awards but not the self-congratulatory bullshit and overwrought speeches. Those are not needed to celebrate what has been a good year in film.
I notched the last of the nominees, The Great Debaters, on Saturday and soon after I was vomiting[1]. I meant to write about the nominees sooner, before the Critics Choice Awards were given out earlier in the week, but I’ve been struck down by a sick, wicked and nasty case of Norwalk virus the last few days. It seems the bug is working its way through Toronto this season.
As with most of 252 other Top Ten lists, my top two are No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Though No Country gets my number one distinction it does so by a small degree. Both are truly great films and while they share a number of similarities (greed, that sense of isolation and of the world working against you, the vastness of the landscapes, great cinematography) it’s their differences that make them hard to separate in my mind.
Above all else There Will Be Blood is a character study and its success lies solely on the shoulders of one person, Daniel Day-Lewis. To say that he carries it well would be an understatement; the awards are flowing in and he’s the front-runner for the Oscar. The whole weight and drama of the movie depends on what he does. In No Country For Old Men the characters are less prominent, victims of happenstance, sucked up in a storm that they can’t avoid. While their decisions still bear weight and have impact, chance, being at the wrong place at the wrong time or a flip of a coin, decides the fate.
Both films are bleak. It’s that force of Daniel’s character or the force of nature (or progress or violence, or however you want to interpret it) that drives you towards their seemingly inevitable conclusions. Indeed, There Will Be Blood is one of the most menacing film titles ever. It’s that kind of uneasy trip that I enjoy so much: the looming sense of despair, the uncertainty, the almost nihilist conclusions (no Hollywood endings here.) The kind of films that can depress the living shit out of you, I love them. So it’s very easy to pick these two as the top two films of 2007 and the ones most likely to get the hardware to prove it.
After those two movies, there’s a huge gap.
Under that gap are the five remaining nominees. All good films, with Atonement receiving the bulk of the buzz, but none have the lasting impact that my top two did. Of the bunch I’d have to say that Michael Clayton is my favourite, if only because I find it to be the least flawed. Considering that it starts with a failed assassination attempt on the lead character with the rest of the film taking place in the days leading to that, there’s a certain looming theme there that, as I’ve established, appeals to me. The good acting[2], decent script and editing helped too.
So, in conclusion, number one film and favourite to win the Golden Globe (and Oscar): No Country for Old Men. Number two, runner-up: There Will Be Blood. Thanks for playing: everything else.
- My vomiting should not be construed as commentary about The Great Debaters‘ quality.
- Including a performance by Tilda Swinton who was in another very menacing, looming (and really, really slow) movie this year, Bela Tarr’s Hungarian film The Man from London, which I caught at TIFF this year.
Hulk Promises Violence
I went to see Eastern Promises a few evenings ago (it was good but A History of Violence was better) and the walk to the theatre took me right by the set for The Incredible Hulk. The stretch of Yonge Street between Gerrard and Dundas, a busy area, was closed for evenings and nights for a few days while the film’s final showdown was being filmed in faux-Harlem. You would think that in this day and age of CGI a blockbuster of this sort wouldn’t need to close down such a busy street to do its filming. But no, here they are inconveniencing everyone but the Teamsters, the extras and the cops getting paid extra to sit around doing nothing.
My camera, and its new lens, was with me so I pulled it out, took a few photos and quickly packed it away. I’ve always been a bit self-conscious with the camera — more so with the large and bulky SLR — which is why the photos I’ve taken have been predominantly landscapes or cityscapes that involve few, if any, people. Most were taken in isolation where there was no reason to be self-conscious. It feels different in the city.
Anyway, with it packed away I made my way to the movie just in time for the 9:30 showing. The movie started a little after 9:50. Twenty fucking minutes of trailers and commercials. I thought “oh yeah, this is why I don’t go to the theatre anymore!” The shock was even more pronounced after seeing 31 movies at the film festival where I never had to endure more than two minutes of pre-film bumpers. But twenty minutes? For a film that I paid more to see than at the film festival? I think I’ll save the “cinema experience” for the next film festival.
On the way back I stopped by the south side of the film shoot for a different perspective. After taking a photo or two a group (gaggle?) of women walked by pointing and saying “Paparazzi. Paparazzi.” One of them pulled out a cellphone camera. I looked at them and said that I’m not. “I’m just a guy with a big camera.” They didn’t believe, said “paparazzi” one more time and moved on. If random women are going to be conversing with me on the street then I’m not sure if I should remain self-conscious or if I should wield that camera exclusively.
TIFF: All Hat
I went to see All Hat at the Isabel Bader Theatre on Tuesday. All Hat is a self-described “neo western” involving the horse racing scene in southern Ontario (Fort Erie, to be specific.) It stars Luke Kirby (the big shot Hollywood actor in season one of Slings and Arrows) and Keith Carradine (Wild Bill in Dead Wood) and some other people.
The Isabel Bader Theatre is part of the University of Toronto and it’s a decent, if small, place for a movie but it’s clearly not its only function. There’s no concession stand and no cup holders and the seats feature fold out tables for lecture note taking. It also has a balcony that seems ignored by most patrons so, being the isolationist that I am, I always make use of. Front row center, balcony.
A few minutes before the film started, some ten minutes after the scheduled time, an older couple sat down a few seats to my right. Before they sat down she complained about the lack of beer in the theatres here “unlike at Cannes”. I assumed they were either globe trotting, film loving retirees or industry people of some sort. Either way it was safe to guess they were married. Maybe.
Not long after they secured their seats the woman said that she had to go to the washroom and left. The movie was well underway by the time she returned, maybe fifteen minutes in. I thought nothing of it. Every once in a while they would chatter a little bit but it was infrequent and not intrusive. I thought nothing of it. The movie kept on and the deeper it went the louder her voice became. The chatter quickly turned to single word responses to the dialog in the film. She’d say, loud enough to be heard across the balcony and below, “Yeah!” to some witty talk-back by a character or emote a loud “Ooooh” when the antagonist would do something shady. Sometimes she’d repeat lines. By this point, she was getting quietly “shoosh”ed.
It didn’t stop her. I would exchange looks of disdain with the woman on my left, she was getting as annoyed as I was. But I was closer to the loud-mouth so I politely asked her to “keep your comments to yourself”. She mumbled something and her husband answered here “mumble mumble comments to yourself mumble mumble.” She mumbled something back.
A couple minutes later she did it again. Her husband, no doubt getting embarrassed, stood up and walked down the aisle and out the back. Ten minutes later I realized that he wasn’t coming back and without him there the woman got even louder.
“Will you shut. The fuck. Up?”
She looked at me and mumbled something. She was five seats away, but I was immediately struck by the scent of alcohol. “Oh no,” I though, “I just made a mistake here. Loud drunks when agitated get even louder!” The expected response came when she told me to “shut the fuck up.” She mumbled off again when the woman behind me leaned over the seat and whispered that someone has gone to get assistance. “Thank you”, I said.
A headset clad man came down minutes later and talked with the woman. She got up but quickly sat down again. They talked more. She finally conceded and was escorted to the aisle where she promptly fell on her ass. She was picked up and forcibly “escorted” out and the whole balcony managed to enjoy the rest of the film in peace.
After the credits rolled and the Q and A was done and the house lights came on I noticed an empty Mountain Dew bottle lying where the woman was sitting. Making my way out I picked it up and had a whiff and was overwhelmed by the strong smell of booze. She was doing something and it wasn’t “The Dew”.
Before I made my way out headset man approached me and asked if I witnessed “the incident”. Yes, I did. “Do you know if there was, at any time, somebody with her?” She was still there ready to be taken home (or to the hotel or wherever) but nobody was there to take her. The man, which I described to him as a “gray haired old guy with a flannel shirt” was no where to be seen. He ditched the drunkard.
All in all, I give All Hat a 2.5/5.
On Walking Out
Walking out of a movie is like a big capital F capital U to the film maker, especially if the director is in attendance. It says “I spent time and money to be here and I’m not even going to dignify this by sticking through to the end. I’ve seen enough.” Up until yesterday I’ve never walked out on a film. Not in the last two film festivals. Not ever. It’s not that I haven’t seen some real stinkers before — I was very close to walking out of Un Crime last year and The Duelist the year before — I just have a high level of patience. Or tolerance. Just not yesterday.
It’s quite simple. This year I purchased my tickets in advance, getting a Day Pass, greatly lowering the per ticket cost so I didn’t feel as though I had wasted so much money. I also had seen about 17 films, in less than five days, before last night’s screening. I was tired. My patience was shot. The price was minimal. I left.
And the film? M. The director’s last film? The Duelist. Note to self: next time do more research and don’t rely so much on the program guide’s writeup.
TIFF Day 3 and 4
Days three and four are a haze. The films are all blurring together into a giant katamari consisting of breakups and tears and suicides and subtitles and pointy nipples and Tony Leung’s testicles. After an early wakeup and multiple snooze alarms I cabbed my way to the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre at about a quarter to nine in the morning. A little after noon I wandered around on the quiet streets and went over to the Corned Beef House for lunch on the patio. It was nice and quiet. Several hours later I was at Naz’s eating a chicken shwarma. It was a lot busier on the streets. At midnight, I was out. It was even busier. The first few blocks of the walk home was a giant slalom of walking. All the revelers were out in the “entertainment district” and were all conspiring to annoy the fuck out of me.
I was home at a quarter to one in the morning. In between those sixteen hours there were movies. Control was a thumb up! The Man from London was a thumb sideways (just way too slow but there were some brilliant scenes). The Edge of Heaven was a very strong thumb up! It was a film that relied a lot on invisible connections and coincidence, a film staple, that had a masterfully pieced together script and a very strong ensemble cast. Ploy was a thumb sideways. Happiness was a thumb sideways. Actually, I liked it a little bit more than that. It was very, very close to being potential asian soap opera melodrama — not good — but it managed to avoid those cliches and was well acted enough to feel genuine.
After a brief sleep I was right back at the Scotiabank theatre for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The reviews of it are mixed, to say the least. I didn’t like it all that much when I saw it but now that it’s sinking in I’m liking it more and more. Not a great film but one that could warrant a second viewing (when I’m not so fucking tired). Thumb slightly up! Two more movies followed but right now I need to let those set in, get some sleep and get all excited for No Country For Old Men early tomorrow.
TIFF Day 2
The thing that I both hate and love about the film festival is how it reinforces how little I have seen and how little I know about films. Sure, I know of Dario Argento and Hsiao-hsien Hou, but I’ve never seen their films. The film festival often provides that first impression. Exposure to some director’s latest film makes me want to seek out more from their back catalog or, in some cases, makes me want to avoid it altogether.
Glory to the Filmmaker! starts off as a goofy, Japanese comedy version of 8 1/2 before it falls into this weird absurdist comedy. It’s full of humour that I often did not get. Glory to the Filmmaker! was clearly self-referential and I might have been better served, and better amused, if I had prior experience with Kitano’s films (beyond his Zatoichi remake — which might explain why I liked the Zatoichi spoof in the film the best). Thumb sideways!
Argento’s The Mother of Tears is a trainwreck. In the first few minutes of the film a woman gets gutted and then strangled by her own intestines. This is a promising start for a horror film! But, unfortunately, it’s all down hill from there (it wasn’t that high a hill to start with). Bad acting, bad script, no real “horror” and an ending so ridiculous that it could easily be mistaken for one long joke. It’s not. On top of everything it also comes across as overly misogynistic. Thumb down!
Le voyage du ballon rouge is a homage to 1956’s Le Ballon Rouge, which I have not seen. So that too I can not comment on, but it has Juliette Benoche and she’s great as usual. I might write more after I go through my Q&A footage since it’s interesting how it was filmed. Thumb sideways but tilted up!
Ulzhan. I liked it a lot. Variety didn’t (though I really don’t get their comparison to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, they’re similar in so far as the main character goes somewhere.) Thumb up!
But now I’m tired and I have to get ready for 25% more movie tomorrow. Oi. I’m already sick of those pre-movie bumpers.
(Also, Jar City has already been purchased. Seems it impressed a few people, myself included.)
TIFF Day One: Jar City
Day one was supposed to be the easiest and least irritating day — only one movie — but it proved highly annoying. I decided to get two or three extra tickets for myself and I could try to get a pair for a friend that requested some but had no luck getting any. No luck on the latter as both of that movie’s screenings were “off sale” but the movies I wanted were still available so I got in line. I expected a line, having bought only individual tickets for the last two years, so I was prepared for it.
After thirty minutes of slow shuffling, from the outside heat into the cool AC breeze of the College Park doorway, the line stopped. Ten minutes passed and not a single step forward. Then twenty minutes. Then an announcement: the system is down. All of it. The website, the ticket booths, everything. But, “we hope to have everything back up and running in ten to fifteen minutes.” I already committed all this time so I wasn’t going to leave quite yet.
Forty minutes later and it was still dead. A new announcement was made. IF the system is back online before 6:30 everyone in line will be processed. The emphasis was on the if. I couldn’t afford to waste that much time, I had a movie to catch! So I cut my losses and left. What a waste of an hour and a half that was. Maybe I’ll try the rushline tomorrow.
An hour later and I was once again in line. This time, though, it was for something I already had a ticket for so I was more patient (I swear, half of the film festival is spent waiting in line). Jar City was my first film of 07.
Jar City is an Icelandic murder mystery that weaves together a modern day crime to a series of long forgotten scars in the 1970s. Holding it all together is a chain of heredity and genetics based on a controversial real-world genetic database of the country. It’s an interesting tale and an interesting premise marred by the predictability of that genetic hook. It’s a shame that a film that expertly reveals each little mystery fails to hide its biggest surprise.
That’s not to say that the journey to that end isn’t an enjoyable one. Complementing the wonderful shots of Icelandic wastelands and the interesting police choir score is the performance of Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson. In the Q&A after the film, the director said that in his previous movies he tended to make fun of the police and that, for this movie, he “owed them one.” Ingvar’s Detective Erlendur character is that debt repaid[1]. He’s a grizzled veteran that’s seen it all but still remains sympathetic and sad. His personal life, with his daughter, is a contrast to the lost relationships that shaped the motivations of the crooks in the film. And that side-story is kept brief enough to not detract from the main plotline.
It has its flaws and the end is predictable, though it does throw some curveballs to try to make you second guess your expectations, but overall not a bad way to start the festival. Thumb up!
Twitch review. Variety review. Torontoist review. NOW review.
Tomorrow I have four movies and Saturday I have five. Don’t expect similar writeups!
- Although Erlendur’s police partner is pictured as a foreign trained “pussy”.
