February 22, 2010 20:58It Was A Nice, Polite Country While It Lasted

I don't know if you've heard the news, but Canada is now, officially, a failed state. After losing a first-round men's hockey game to the U.S.A. in the Winter Olympics, on home soil no less, we've decided to dissolve parliament, abandon our laws and constitution, and fight a few civil wars long-in-coming (yeah, I'm looking at you, Nunavut!). Taking a cue from our failed-state brethren in Africa, we've decided to resort to open piracy along our coastlines and launch a genocidal ethnic-cleansing campaign against anyone deemed to be a "hoser." Oh, and word of advice, if you should receive any unsolicited emails from "a Canadian prince" who wants to use your bank account number to transfer large amounts of money out of his troubled nation in exchange for a hefty handler's fee, move it to your spam folder. It's a scam. Unless it happens to be from His Royal Highness, Prince Shane the First of the House of Eyestrain. Then it's totally legit and you should do exactly what he says.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics persist regardless, however, because we have to do something with all that snow we emergency air-lifted to the venue at great expense. Yes, after years of planning and preparation, construction costs and controversy, training and tragedy, the entire world's eyes are focused on one sporting event, and one sporting event only. I am, of course, talking about Tiger Woods' apology speech.

And it was a bit of a dud, wasn't it? Allow me to offer a rewrite. I know all about rewriting because, as a screenwriter, I'm being rewritten constantly. And it must always be for the better because it ends up on TV, and isn't TV wonderful? Tiger, here's what you should have gone with -- the non-apology apology. Trust me on this one, I'm a professional.

"Hi, I'm Tiger Woods and I like me some pussy. What can I say, I'm a guy. The issue here seems to be whether or not I should have made a sexual glutton of myself by nailing lots and lots of smoking hot women. I think the answer is obvious. Hell, yeah! I'm incredibly rich, world-famous and dashingly handsome. What the hell's the point of being rich, famous and handsome if I don't use those three enviable attributes to help me score? I'm mean, shit, if I didn't spend every waking hour getting laid, commuting to the next hotel where I'm going to get laid, or chatting up the next girl I'm going to lay, my whole life would just be about golf. Think about that. Golf for fucksake! If I have to play the world's most boring sport -- and I use the term "sport" loosely -- in order to make a living, don't begrudge me the pussy it earns me on the side. I need it to get through the day. If I'm going to apologize for anything, then allow me to say that I'm sorry, truly sorry, that I married a psycho Swedish chick who tried to take my head off with a nine iron when she found out about all those other asses I was tapping. That was inexcusable. I don’t know what I was thinking when I proposed marriage. I must have been drunk or high or something, because why would I get married and forsake all that other pussy out there that was just lining up to get a Tiger in their tank? Crazy, man, crazy."

It's not too late. Book another press conference. We'll all show up. I mean, what the hell else are we going to watch? Elimination curling?

Also in the news, I have to mention the Canadian tall ship, Concordia, which sank 300 miles off the coast of Rio a few days ago. No really. A tall ship. It sank. When was the last time you heard about that sort of thing happening? I'm thinking nineteenth century. It makes you wonder, what the hell happened? Did some peg-legged brigand smoke his corncob pipe too close to the powder room when he should have been keeping his one unpatched eye on the cargo of slaves fresh from the Ivory Coast? Arrr matey, they be fetchin' a fair price after we be stoppin' by New Providence for a wee spot of rum and doxies, yo-ho! Or maybe it was John Paul Jones who perforated their poop deck when he gave them a broadside of grapeshot, thinking they were a flagship from the Canadas Upper or Lower running his blockade? I'm just saying, it's a tad nautically retro.

All sixty-four passengers and crew were rescued by the Brazilian navy and merchant vessels. No one rested their bones in Davey Jones' locker. It was all so ill-timed. Our newly failed state could have really used that tall ship for our fledgling piracy industry. Such a waste.

February 07, 2010 16:19Suppose They Gave A Press Conference And Nobody Came?

So many big announcements in the last couple of weeks, so little time to make snide comments about them.

In an act of pure optimism (or pure marketing, depending on which side of the film-buff/film-industry-cog line of demarcation you lie on) the Academy has decided to give us ten nominees for best picture this year. While most of us may be hard-pressed to even name ten decent movies that came out last year, Hollywood tells us they had to double the number of nominees just to squeeze in all that high-quality entertainment they've been milling.

In no particular order, we have…

District 9 // I hate it when movie critics complain about plots holes. When they do, it's usually a sure sign that they don't even know what a plot is, let alone what a hole in one might look like. I won't try to claim there are all sorts of plot holes in District 9, but there are gaps in logic you can drive a truck (or, indeed, a convoy of eighteen wheelers) through. While everyone was being dazzled by seamless special effects that gave the film a documentary level of realism, no one seemed to notice all the questions about the basic premise of the story that went flying by unanswered. Maybe a sequel can spend an hour or so of its running time explaining all the stuff that didn't make any goddamn sense in the first movie.

Precious // Haven't seen it, and it doesn't seem like such a fun night out at the movies. My main concern is that it's been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. In my experience, anything endorsed by Oprah has turned out to be awful or fraudulent. On a side note, I'd like to address Oprah personally: O, I know you've recently announced the date you'll be retiring from your talk show. Please, for everybody's sake, don't promise to hand it over to Conan O'Brien and then change your mind. We can't live through that again.

Avatar // Proving, once again, that in Hollywood you don't have to tell an original or engaging story, or even have any interesting thematic points to make, in order to receive all sorts of critical praise and awards. You just need to make boatloads of money. I mean, how can the biggest money-maker of all time not be the greatest movie ever? It's simple math, people.

The Blind Side // Sandra Bullock plus football. I can't imagine why I haven’t already seen this. Oh wait. Right. Sandra Bullock plus football.

An Education // Wow. We haven't had a good Oscar-bait jailbait movie since Lolita. Except maybe The Reader. But it doesn't count when hot chicks do it to underage boys.

Inglourious Basterds // Spoiler alert! Every Jew on Earth owes it to themselves to go see Hitler get machine-gunned in the face.

The Hurt Locker // The year's most over-praised movie. It's still quite a good movie, and I've been a long-time Kathryn Bigelow advocate. But honestly, I don't even think this is her best film. Or her second best film. Maybe not even her third.

A Serious Man // If there's one thing racists have taught me, it's that Hollywood is run by Jews. So I guess it's no surprise that the latest Coen Brothers movie, the Jewiest film since Yentl, got a nomination. It also happens to be the densest and most impenetrable movie of the brothers' career, so that must mean it's profound -- although I have yet to meet anyone who can explain all of its nuances, let alone sit through it enough times to determine where all those nuances may lie.

Up // You mothercusser Pixar cusses. Isn't it enough you're already nominated for Best Animated Feature Film and will probably end up stealing an Oscar from Fantastic Mr. Fox (not to mention Coraline)? Seriously. Cuss!

Up in the Air // If I had to pick one to win from this batch, this would be my choice. What can I say? I just like movies about sad people in depressing jobs. George Clooney living in planes and airports and hotels while he flies around the country firing people? That is such a cooler job than, I don't know, being a space marine and going hunting with a bunch of giant blue people on a pretty planet.
 
And yeah, I know I'm totally behind the Twitter world media on this, but I just have to mention the big iPad announcement that rocked the world to sleep a couple of weeks back. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely respect Steve Jobs' Rasputin-like ability to survive his own body's frequent attempts to murder him. But really? An iPhone you can't put in your pocket, take a picture with, or use to make a phone call? That's the announcement all you Apple fanboys were on tenterhooks waiting to hear?

Maybe I just don't understand the phenomenon of Apple worship. I'll readily admit, as a long-time PC user, that PCs suck. It's just that Macs suck even more. True, we're utterly beholden to Microsoft who, when it's time to release a new operating system, apparently flips a coin to decide if it will be a good and useful operating system, or the worst thing since smallpox. But the trials and tribulations of PC use, particularly back in the day when I got my first one -- a 286 that was a big upgrade from my Commodore 64 -- have taught me to troubleshoot against the odds, and bring a finicky machine back from the blue-screen-of-death. Learning to rewrite batch files every ten minutes so you could squeeze out that extra byte of memory to play Jumpman was good training in computer maintenance. Unfortunately for Mac users, they live by the credo that you should just be able to plug-and-play anything. As a result, when anything goes wrong, they flop around like a fish on land, gasping for air and begging tech support to toss them back into the ocean. It's sad to watch, really. As is their zombie-devotion to anything that rolls off the Apple assembly line. To quote one friend from a few short days before the iPad was announced, "I don't know what they're coming out with, but I'm getting one."

As for me, iDontcare.

January 15, 2010 16:32You've Ruined It For Everybody

Ever since Captain Underpants tried to blow up a commercial jet with explosives hidden under his ball sack, air travel has turned into an ordeal only slightly less luxurious than a prison bus trip to the new wing of the super-max detention facility. Very nearly known as the Christmas Day Taint Massacre, the thought of what might have happened if this would-be suicide bomber had been competent enough to light a fuse has gripped a worried world. I mean, MY GOD, one flight out of the ten million airliner passenger runs last year may have possibly, perhaps, we're-not-quite-sure, ended in disaster. Which would have increased the number of airliner disasters last year…um…slightly.

Remember when air travel was glamorous and exotic? Back when you could smoke and drink to your heart's content and stewardesses, most of them blonde and Swedish, would perform any variety of sexual acts with you in your choice of toilet stall or first-class seat. Well I remember that, and a great many other things I learned from watching 1970s pornography, and I miss those times terribly. Mostly because I never experienced them due to inconvenient age issues.

Well those heady days of hot stewardess head are gone forever. If a stewardess touches you inappropriately now, it's probably because she's performing a digital cavity search for banned substances like finger nail clippers, tweezers, or C4. New security measures are in place, with more on the way, and we won't see them rescinded in this lifetime. I expect we'll be stuck with this crap forever -- or at least until Brundlefly perfects his teleportation machine. Yes, congratulations Captain Underpants, you've ruined it for everybody.

Which brings us to James Cameron.

I finally saw Avatar or, as I like to call it when I'm feeling snide (which, let's face it, is pretty much all the time), Dances With Smurfs. Third time was lucky, because 3D IMAX tickets are booked weeks in advance, with any convenient days sold out completely as I found out the hard way twice before. Avatar has become the fastest movie to reach the one billion box-office mark. Apparently, the secret to accomplishing this feat is to charge people damn near twenty bucks for a ticket. If only someone had thought to charge, say, a hundred bucks a pop to go see Hotel for Dogs, that could have become the box-office champ of the year. Or at least the opening weekend.

After ten years of development, Avatar is being rolled out as the big game-changer. There's innovative special effects technology poured into it by the tanker load. It's just too bad the story itself doesn't offer a single drop of originality. There's not one thing here I haven't seen before at some point, and the overall plot can be traced back to somewhere around the genesis of literature itself. In case you were too busy being dazzled by the eye candy and weren't paying attention to what you were told by the often clunky exposition, it goes something like this: Invading imperialist-colonialist comes to appreciate the beauty of aboriginal culture and goes native, turning against his former masters in a righteous battle to avoid all-out genocide. Yeah, seen that one before. About a hundred times. Just not with smurfs.

Nevertheless, because Cameron's new film is so successful, we're going to see a million billion knock-offs and copycats in the coming decade. Everyone will want to make their own 3D movie, ignoring the fact that 3D has always been a gimmick, revived once a generation, that does more to take you out of a movie than draw you in. Everyone will want to fill their movie with computer-generated motion-capture performances, even though you can never replace real acting by a real human being. And everyone will want to plagiarize whatever content they saw in the last World of Warcraft patch and turn it into an action sequence or plot point. Sure, I liked the part where he got his epic flying mount, but did the movie really have to cut to a loading screen right after that?

Yes, congratulations James Cameron, you've ruined it for everybody. Again.

That's right, again. He's just too damn influential, and whatever shit he tries in whatever movie he's shooting catches on and spreads like the swine flu (you know, like if the swine flu had actually spread and become the promised pandemic… Sorry, bad analogy).

Movie titles referred to by acronyms? T2. His fault. Movies with an unstoppable killing machine? Terminator. His fault. Monster movie sequels where all they can think to do with their cool monster design is multiply it a couple hundred times over? Aliens. His fault. Movies where the creatures are all computer graphics that don't quite gel with how physics actually works? T2 and The Abyss. His fault. Movies where some spectacular historical event, recreated  with an unsurpassed level of detail, is ultimately ruined by a trite and stupid romantic sub-plot? Titanic. His fault. Movies where carnivorous flying fish terrorize humanity by soaring through the air and being all bitey? Piranha Two: The Spawning. His bloody fault.

Goddamn you James Cameron, who elected you king of the world? Oh wait. We did. At the box office.

December 13, 2009 16:05Request For Fire

It snowed a few days ago. The first real snowfall of the season. And with it, began the national festival known as The Kvetching of the Canucks. "I'm cold," "I can't feel my toes," "Three of my fingers have turned black and fallen off." Bitch bitch bitch. It's the same thing every year and I'm sick of it. So sick, in fact, that I was tempted to skip the Chase-the-guy-with-the-fire-stick ritual.

Canada, as you know, is a primitive and backwards land, full of ice and tundra and people apologizing for things that aren't even their fault -- like all the ice and tundra, for instance. We do have things like cars and airplanes and cell phones and wireless internet. Fire, however, remains an elusive technology.

For much of the year, we don't really need fire. The weather is reasonably temperate and unless you're really into barbecuing those caribou ribs on an open grill, you can get by fine without it. But then the north winds whip through our log cabins and everyone starts to think we should have poured more tax dollars into fire research instead of dumb technologies like skidoos and insulin. That's when it's time for our Minister of Fire to blow some of that hot parliament air on the single ember we keep archived just in case winter comes back to haunt us -- which it always seems to do on an annual basis. Once a modest flame is sparked, our fastest runners are dispatched to deliver fire via torch to all the remote Canadian hamlets and villages so that at least some of our nation's modest population might hope to survive until the thaw.

The fire-stick runners are celebrated heroes of the winter months and, as such, are greeted by many grateful citizens wherever they go. The masses wave and cheer and then mob them and tear them into little pieces as each individual tries to gain control of the magic fire-stick for themselves. Occasionally, if it's been a particularly weak harvest, the runners are roasted over their own fire-sticks and devoured. Like all great world heritage traditions, such as slavery or honour killings or hockey riots, this is legally sanctioned.

Thanks to my participation in this great Canadian tradition, I now have a small flame burning in my home. I will nurse it carefully all winter, feeding it fuel regularly so it won't go out. It will be there whenever I need to get warm or see in the dark or heat up some food. And then, when spring comes at last, I'll douse it with a garden hose, content in the knowledge that I'll never need fire again.

November 30, 2009 02:21Neglected

November was one of those months that was full of suck and grind. I've been running in place on the pitching treadmill lately, and the only writing I've been doing is contractually obligated and paid. After I wrap up the year-end cash grab, I'll see what I can do about composing something a little more interesting and informative in this space. Until then...

October 30, 2009 03:10Starfucker Memories

Last week I attended "An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt" at the Cinematheque Quebecois, which was a treat since so many speakers, acts and performances skip Montreal out of concern that it's going to be too French here and no one will turn out to see them. I shudder to think that some people reading this might not know who Don Hertzfeldt is, and if that's the case, stop reading this crap and go immediately to his website bitterfilms.com to learn more. Suffice to say, I consider Don Hertzfeldt to be the single most important animator working in the world today. It may sound like hyperbole, but that's my opinion, this is my blog, and if you don't like it you can get the fuck out now. There's the door.

Now some of you will rattle your sabres and try to bitch about Hayao Miyazaki, Brad Bird and Henry Selick, and I'll agree with you. They're all fantastic, and you can probably rub my nose in a few other names that don't immediately spring to mind. Granted. Good on you. But I hate it when people soft-peddle their statements about people, places and events and pussy out with a "one of the greatest" or an "among the best" bullshit. If you have a reasonably broad grasp of a subject, make a clear and concise statement. Like Niccolo Paganini was the greatest violinist of all time. Or George W. Bush is the most successful retard in history. Or brussels sprouts are the suckiest vegetable ever. And then stand by your assertion.

Not only are Hertzfeldt's films hilarious, poignant, innovative, brilliant and all those typical adjectives -- they're also a solo act. Don does just about everything himself, alone in his studio, just him and his pen and his camera. The results are a completely unfiltered vision of an individual, rather than another example of committee-think that fuels most animation out there. I like following careers that grow and evolve, and it's been fascinating watching Hertzfeldt develop his craft from his early, silly, dark comedies like Ah, L'Amour, Lily and Jim, Genre and Billy's Balloon, to his profound The Meaning of Life, Everything Will Be Ok and I Am So Proud of You, with immortal cult favourite Rejected acting as the precise point of transition. Despite people's tendency to laugh through Rejected from start to finish, I consider the crumbling-fabric-of-reality climax to be on my short list of most disturbing things I've ever seen in a motion picture.

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