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January 31, 2012 19:43Extremely Loud & Incredibly Dull
I know. The Academy Awards self-fellating fest in celebration of mediocre schlock announced 2011’s nominees and not a peep from me despite my morbid fascination with the whole unsightly process. I would have blogged sooner, but the token selection of films put me into a coma. Again.
The Academy itself was so uninspired by last year’s crop, they could only come up with nine nominees. And this after only a couple of goes at their new wishful-thinking ten-nominee policy. As if ten worthwhile mainstream movies come out in any given year. Or nine. Oh, there are plenty of great films to be had, don’t get me wrong. But you have to hunt for them and (gasp!) read subtitles. And we all know that no number of awards and accolades are going to help some subtitled foreign film with its crazy mumbo-jumbo foreign language rake in more cash at the American box office. So why bother?
The choices seem to break down into a few handy categories: schmaltzy tear-jerkers (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Warhorse), token nominations for legendary directors past their prime (Hugo, The Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Warhorse again), and genuinely good films that in a better year would never be more than a dark (war)horse contender-slash-also-ran (The Descendants, The Artist, Moneyball).
Which leaves The Help. This year’s Driving Miss Daisy, only much more insulting to everybody’s intelligence. What the hell is this doing on the list, even in such a lame year? All I’ve heard across the board is what an irritating piece of sanctimonious crap it is. And not just from my film-snob buddies, but from ordinary people who like junk cinema like this. The most glowing review I’ve heard of it so far was, to quote as directly and faithfully as I can, “meh.” 
Yes, I’m condemning it without seeing it. I saw the trailer. It told me everything I need to know. Sitting through two and a half hours of paint-by-numbers Hollywood filmmaking is probably not the best use of my time and I’ve decided I’ve done far too much of it over the years. I’m trying to break myself of the compulsion to know first-hand what people are talking about when they chat about movies, but the fact is, in 99.999% of cases, I already know. If I’ve seen the trailer, or the TV ad, or the poster, or the late-night talk-show interview, I can extrapolate everything from that alone. You get that way when you watch thousands of movies. If, against my better judgment, I go see one of these things, the post-screening conversation usually plays out something like this:
Someone: “What did you think?”
Me: “I think it was exactly what I thought it was going to be.”
This isn’t because I’m clever. It’s because I’m stupid. Stupid enough to have spent a lifetime sitting through so much disposable cinema.
For the record, here’s a short list of just some of the recent releases I saw for the first time in 2011:
My Kid Could Paint That, Anything for Her, Antichrist, Enthiran, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Winter’s Bone, Inside Job, I Saw the Devil, Catfish, Dogtooth, Frozen River, Baghead, Trollhunter, A Town Called Panic, Merantau, Hanna, Red State, Attack the Block, The Last Circus, Rare Exports, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
They all have one thing in common. On some level, they each had surprises in store for me (especially Red State because I thought I would never like any Kevin Smith work that didn’t contain the word “Clerks” in the title). A few of them got token nominations or awards from Mr. Oscar, most didn’t. It’s not a list of the best film of 2011 (or whatever year they were officially released), but they were all genuinely worth my time and, in many cases, a repeat viewing.
If you’re one of the people who lets the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards pick which movies you should see, I only have one thing to say to you. Dig deeper.
December 25, 2011 15:26Christmas Crime Scene
Case File 11384752-29. Crime Scene Photo 11c: Subject: T. Bread (deceased). Sex: Man. Race: Ginger. Probable cause: Coke deal gone wrong.
“Run, run fast as you can. Can’t catch me, I’m The Gingerbread Man.” Brave final words when you’re on the lam and jacked up on blow. But that’s how the cookie crumbles in the big city.
November 30, 2011 23:56Requiem For Peaceful Protest
Remember back when the global economic protests were all about bongos and camping gear? It seems like only yesterday. Come to think of it, it was.
At this point all the major Occupy-Wall-Street protests have been swept away by police, leaving only a few scattered Show-Up-At-Wall-Street-And-Hang-Around-For-A-Bit-Before-Taking-The-Bus-Home protests in their place. The tents are down, the makeshift libraries and medical centres are gone, and the only people sleeping in parks these days are the old-school breed of economic casualties. Namely homeless meth addicts.
Marginalized by corporate media outlets that never passed up a photo op with the dippiest hippies, reporters couldn’t wait to talk to the next unfocused radical or glam-rock attention-seeker showboat, conveniently skipping over anybody involved in the movement who knew what the fuck they were talking about. “Where’s your leader? What’s your demand!” was all they could think to ask, which kinda misses the point by several hundred miles. The world already has its leaders, and look what a splendid job they’ve done of running the economy off a cliff. As for boiling it all down to a single demand, that’s impossible. The reason this has been such a successful, widespread movement is because the litany of complaints is so long, everyone feels included.
Now that the most obvious evidence of civil discord has been put out of sight, the media mills can’t help but gloat. Some have been terribly rude about it, others can’t quite muster that Rupert Murdock level of vitriol we’ve come to expect in our current age of disinformation. I had a look at the local right-wing shitbag newsrag that comes free in the mail along with the advertising fliers, coupons, and free food samples. It was sitting on the doormat when I came downstairs to look for some real mail. “Sorry, But It’s About Time,” screamed the headline in a civil, apologetic tone that pronounces “about” at the midpoint where “aboot” and “aboat” meet. The picture was of a pair local police officers carrying one of the last occupiers out of the park in a rather gentle fashion. A third officer brought up the rear, carrying the protester’s bag. Respectfully. If there had been a piece of hockey gear in the frame, it would be the single most Canadian front page I’d ever seen. At least under a Conservative party majority.
Cops in other cities didn’t play so nicey-nice, and there are protesters painted pepper-spray orange to prove it. I guess it’s reassuring to know that when the MUC police force trample our basic human rights, they do so politely, with Nerf riot gear. Well, unless you’re a black man who gets all uppity and decides to drive an automobile in broad daylight while recklessly obeying the rules of the road of course. Then they’ll blow your ass away.
 Before tent city had its stakes pulled up, I went down for a visit. Occupy Wall Street was Occupy Victoria Square up here. And although I didn’t strike a single beat on a drum, bongo or otherwise, I had a leisurely wander around the site that had roughly two hundred tents by my quick count and bad math. It was all as peaceful and non-violent as advertised, and I knew I was witnessing history. This was the last moment in the coming global turmoil that would play out so civilly. It can only get nastier from here.
With the camps forced out, the powers-that-be think they’ve won. But it was a terrible strategy on their part. They could have just waited for occupiers to get bored and cold and go home. Failing that, they could have waited for the cholera to set in and wipe them out. Either way, the protest problem would have resolved itself, and no one would have had to look like a fascist. But no. There are just too many cops and politicians and pundits who are just dying to slip on the jackboots and see if they make for a perfect Cinderella-fit.
The problems are all still there. The issues are all still there. Things are getting worse, not better. And the movement is now on the move. You got violent with the peaceniks and now you can bet that the next wave of protesters is going to be prepared to step it up. All you did was let everybody know that no matter how peaceful the protest, eventually The Man is going to come down hard with billy clubs and tear gas. Round two will only escalate accordingly, and there will be fewer verses of Kumbaya in the drum circle before things turn ugly.
October 31, 2011 23:55Faustian Fashion
We hit 7,000,000,000 people today. How’s that for some Halloween horror?
Well it scares the shit out of me. And it’s not just because I’m a misanthrope who doesn’t like the idea of being stuck on the same hunk of space rock with that many assholes. Rather, I’m terrified of the next wave of children that will be showing up at my door every October 31, looking for a handout. It gets worse and worse every year.
My wife bought so much shitty candy this Halloween (shitty so we wouldn’t be tempted to eat it ourselves) I thought we’d never get rid of it all. Normally we get a few hundred kids in our area. This time around we got hit by that many in the first forty minutes. We were cleaned out by a quarter past seven, and the streets were still packed with the sugar-fuelled piranhas. The feeding frenzy was so brief and intense, it hardly seemed worth my ten minutes of effort to butcher an innocent pumpkin into something reasonably jack-o-lanterny.
As always, I made a careful tally of the costumes on parade. My favourite this year was the kid dressed as Don Cherry. At least, I assume he was supposed to be Don Cherry. He was a clown in a hockey jersey so I think I made a fair assumption there. I like to take this annual opportunity to tap into the psyche of today’s youth to see which costumes most commonly appeal their pop-culture ravaged hive mind. In reverse order, here was tonight’s top ten:
10) Cowboy (An oldie but a goodie. Sadly, most of them were of the Sheriff Woody variety.)
9) Robot (Like Apple hasn’t already turned everybody into one of those with all their iShit.)
8) Trailer Trash (At least, I keep telling myself those were costumes.)
7) Darth Vader (Nooooooooooo! You’ll only encourage George to keep reissuing those damn movies.)
6) Various Harry Potter characters (Yes, still. It’s over. Please stop.)
5) Fairy Princess (Disney Inc. scrambles the brains of yet another generation of young girls.)
4) Spider-Man (The web-head blew away the superhero competition. Batman, Iron Man, Thor and Green Lantern only made one appearance each.)
3) Skeleton (Or, arguably, an Eating Disorder. Take your pick.)
2) Pirate (I guess the kiddies still like those Johnny-Depp-cashes-a-paycheck movies.)
But it was the number one most popular Halloween costume of 2011 that shocked the hell out me, so to speak.
1) The Devil
Boys, girls, the tiny five-year-olds, the giant teenagers, and at least one parent -- they all wanted to hit the town and paint it devil-red. I was beginning to wonder if there was a fire sale on eternal damnation over at Walmart, but there was too much variety in evidence. These weren’t off-the-rack one-sin-fits-all getups. They were cobbled together do-in-yourself Beelzebubs and Belphegors. And it pleased me greatly. It was sinister, it was horror related, it was on-topic. And it had nothing to do with sparkling vampires or beefcake werewolves.
Satan had his night, so suck it you Jesus Ween tools. Eat shit you anti-scary-costume Calgary schools. And kindly suck my balls all you Christian fanatics who freak out every time anybody has anything critical to say about Christmas or Easter, but then turn around and fuck with my spooky pagan candy fest.
The horror nuts and gore hounds have taken back the night. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of that night melting my brain with another half-dozen crappy monster movies. 
Pwned! All Your Soul Are Belong To Us.
September 30, 2011 00:20The Swarm
“I’ll take ‘Bad Michael Caine’ movies for five hundred, Alex.”
I’ve been swamped -- or should I say swarmed -- of late. Aside from running around dealing with a bunch of organization and writing tasks, most pressingly I’ve been dealing with that latest invasion of nature in my house.
A couple of years ago, you may remember it was raccoons. This time, it’s wasps. A whole nest of them resides under the exterior paneling above my front door. They’ve been getting into the house lately, much to the delight of my cats and the horror of my wife. After disposing of ten of them in the vestibule one day, I went outside, armed only with a step stool and a vacuum cleaner, and proceeded to suck up another five hundred of the little bastards in one hour flat.
Supposedly, this variety of wasp dies off in the late fall when the queen leaves to find a warm place to hibernate, so the problem should resolve itself soon. I’ll remain on vacuum patrol until then. And one day, once it gets really chilly out, I’ll open up the vacuum cleaner and take the bag to the trash. There’s nothing like a cold day to calm down an eight pound sack of pissed-off wasps.
I’ll try to keep you up to date on a sting-by-sting basis.
*
One of the infrequent attendees at my movie night soiree is Rachel, who made an appearance and stayed for the film this week. With advance knowledge of her presence, I came prepared to exchange gifts. We have an arrangement, you see. She brings me exotic pilsners from the distant land of Saskatchewan every time she visits home and, in exchange, I taunt her about her phobias like a fucking asshole.
Rachel has a thing about broken bones, as I discovered last year when Adam Green‘s film Frozen drove her from the building at the halfway mark. She didn’t quite flee screaming, just cringing and gagging. With that in mind, I brought the infamous movie-night whiteboard filled with the following menu selections:
Finger Breaking Good (1976) - Mobsters try to muscle in on Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe only to find they play for keeps down in Kentucky -- one piggy at a time.
The Bone Crusher (1981) - A loan shark grows weary of his job breaking people’s legs and finds a new lease on life when he switches to breaking people’s arms.
Snap Goes the Femur (1990) - The heart-warming true story of a downhill skier who bounces back after a career-ending injury.
Ribbed for Her Pleasure (1995) - A construction worker, pinned under a ton of sheet metal with a crushed rib cage, finds true love with a passing angel of mercy who talks him through his ordeal.
Fractured (2008) - A world famous stuntman refuses to be recruited by the CIA until he breaks every bone in his body during a failed motorcycle jump. How can he say no when they offer him a new identity, a new face, and a new skeleton made out stainless steel?
Rachel stayed for the movie anyway. Mostly because all of the above films are entirely fictional -- phony fabrications on my part. For now at least. If there are interested producers out there, I’m available to write any of them for scale.
Call me. We’ll cut a deal.
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Referring back to those writing tasks I mentioned earlier, there will probably be more multilingual translations of Longshot Comics coming in the near future. Europe keeps on calling and I hope to make some deals while the Eurozone still has a currency to pay me with.
Also, later this year, my short story, Bayonet Baby, will be appearing in the Weird War anthology from War of the Words Press. I’ll post a heads-up once it’s out. 
Don't look at me like that.
August 15, 2011 23:27As The World Burns
Have you been watching what’s been going on in the world these last few weeks and months? To recap:
England went all Lord of the Flies on us, Somalia starved, America went bankrupt, so did the Eurozone, Norway turned into a shooting gallery (Norway?!?), Syria openly revolted, as did Libya with the help of the rest of the world, Turkey nearly went military coup on us, Egypt is a mess, not to mention Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland, Afghanistan remains as hot as ever, Pakistan and Iraq haven’t exactly cooled off either, Mexico is openly run by gangsters, and, for the record, Japan still glows in the dark.
If you’re smart, you’re probably well stocked with food, water, guns and ammo, crossing off days on the calendar until the socio-economic apocalypse arrives. Unfortunately I’m Canadian. So the best I can do is cower in my igloo with a couple of cans of maple syrup stuck in a snow bank. But I’m armed with a hockey stick and I’m totally willing to go for a high-sticking penalty on your ass if you fuck with me.
Good luck, stay strong, and try to hold on until Apple finishes taking over everything and installs the new world order.
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In more celebratory news:
Happy fortieth birthday, unbacked American fiat currency! You look like a million bucks. Even though you’ve lost 85% of your value since Nixon.
Enjoy your special day and live it up. Because you won’t see fifty.
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I had to share this because it made me laugh. And then cry. And then laugh some more. Read it for yourself and we’ll talk…
So apparently Hollywood now holds the written word in such disdain, they’ve taken to blowing up screenplays. Oh sure, they use the excuse of terrorism paranoia and suspected bomb threats to cover their tracks, but we all know what’s going on here. Screenplays and their screenwriters have always been considered marginally necessary evils by the movie moguls. Past films like Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink and The Player have allowed the power brokers to openly play with the idea of murdering screenwriters for fun, profit or sport. But now, in an era when Michael Bay films make a billion bucks, they’re getting bolder and have begun actively destroying scripts Michael-Bay style -- with a big fiery explosion. I bet they even had a hot chick washing a car in the background when they blew this poor defenseless manuscript to smithereens. How much longer before they load a bus with explosives and screenwriters and purposely drive it below 55 miles per hour?
It’s clear they’ve decided they don’t need those nuisance writers after all, and that blockbusters, left to their own devices, will write themselves. Don’t believe me? Have you been out to see any Hollywood movies this summer? I think they may well be old plots pulled randomly out of a hat, and populated with characters written by a computer algorithm with all the associated warmth and understanding of the human condition you might expect. You can argue that qualifies as writing too. And sure, technically speaking, there are a lot of words to be found in them. Just let me know if you ever spot a soul in there too.
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