Author Archives: Jay

Lest We Forget

November 11th is Canada’s national day of remembrance, and is a memorial day observed by many Commonwealth nations to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty. It marks the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the end to hostilities of the first world war (in 1918). At 11am we stop, as a country, whether at work, play, or school, for two minutes of silence, just a small slice of our lives for such a large sacrifice of theirs.

We wear red poppies, the flowers that bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of WWI (commemorated in the poem “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian John McCrae), that have come to symbolize the blood spilled during war. They are worn as an emblem of peace – so that we don’t forget, so that no more blood is spilled. The poppy campaign actively supports retired veterans and their families.

Our remembrance ceremonies happen right here, since we live in our Nation’s capital city, Ottawa, at the National War Memorial. An honour guard – unarmed soldiers – stand by the War Memorial, and the tomb of the unknown soldier year round as a tribute to their fallen brothers and sisters. Last year Sean, Matt and I attended the ceremonies just as our city was still mourning the attack on Parliament that had occurred just a few weeks before and resulted in the death of one of the honour guard right on that very spot. Thousands of Canadians came to watch the solemn parade of veterans march in, the road being opened for the first time since the attack. The city was still a little shaky, but there is something so dignified and uplifting about those veterans and their determined entrance. The pack dwindles every year; many who remain have to be supported by others, or rolled in wheelchairs, but their presence is invaluable for young Canadians who have never known their country at war. At the close of the ceremony, we leave our poppies on the tomb of the unknown soldier and we file out to the sounds of the bells tolling at the Parliamentary peace tower (a 53-bell carillon, in fact). The peace tower was erected after Parliament burned down in 1916 as a tribute to Canadians who gave their lives to the great war. The memorial chamber up top is a vaulted room with stained glass windows illustrating our war record, and brass plates made from spent shell casings found on battlefields inlaid into the floor. There’s also a book of remembrance containing the names of all Canadians who gave their lives in service of their country. Every day a page is turned to reveal more names. Sean and Matt both have family members listed in that book; every year their families will receive notification of which day those names will be seen publicly.

Canada is a small country that fights hard for what it believes to be right. 110 000 lives were lost between the two world wars (619K served and 65k died in WWI alone when we had a population of less than 8 million), but Canadians played invaluable roles overseas, notably in battles at Ypres, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele during WWI, and Dieppe and Normandy during WW2. We are often forgotten in blockbuster war movies, but not by the people who benefitted. All these years later, a Canadian travelling in France will always be greeted warmly.

Passchendaele is “our” war movie, likely overlooked by anyone outside our borders, written and directed by Canadian Paul Gross. Gross’s grandfather was a veteran of the first world war, and he incorporates a lot of personal touches into the script, including his grandfather’s deepest secret and greatest regret: having bayoneted a young enemy soldier in the forehead. His grandfather was still muttering for forgiveness on his deathbed. It’s crippling to think not just about all the young men who died over there (and whose bodies remained over there), but think of those who came back, having done their duty, but paid a very high emotional price.

The film is no technical achievement. Gross pays his respect by sticking to historical fact within the constraints of a Canadian budget. It can’t have been easy to balance those things, and the unevenness shows through. But I’m going to forgive the flaws because when a man goes awol because he can’t cope with the fact that he’s received a medal for having bayoneted a kid, it’s kind of a powerful thing. And because our very real war contributions have tended to be forgotten by film, this is a story that needed to be told, and deserves to be seen. I wish it was better but I’m glad, at least, that it exists.

Passchendaele (now called Passendale) is only 12 km away from Boezinge, where Canadian war physician John McCrae wrote his famous poem “In Flanders Fields”. Lt.Col. McCrae died of pneumonia in 1918 near Boulogne-sur-Mer, and lies buried in Wimereux. The battle at Passchendaele was for control of the ridges south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres, about 8km from a railway junction vital to the Germans’ supply system. The allies fought the Germans but were unable to clinch because of unusually wet conditions (the mud was a defining characteristic), the onset of winter, plus the diversion of British and French resources to Italy. The campaign ended when the Canadian Corps arrived and captured Passchendaele with a series of well-executed attacks. The Canadian Corps is commemorated with a memorial in a small, keyhole-shaped area of land on the fringe of Passendale village, aptly dubbed ‘Canadalaan.’ The park is lined with maple trees.

Thank you for your service. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for my freedom.

Band of Robbers

Suffragette

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Just a few weeks ago, Canadians voted for “change” and for “sunny ways.” We elected a young Prime Minister with a famous last name and idealism still twinkling in his eyes. He was sworn in last week and presented us a cabinet that among other things, had gender parrity.

That’s right. Half men, half women. So of course the very first question journalists needed answered about this tall list of accomplished people was why “he went with gender equality” in his cabinet. Why? Why did he “go” with “gender equality.” Is that really a question you can still ask this day in age? Okay, you know what – it is. Because sadly, this is the first cabinet to achieve this status. But Trudeau seemed to agree in spirit, answering simply “Because it’s 2015” – a mic-drop response that was heard around the world.

But the fact remains that if a Prime Minister chooses a cabinet that has a representative amount of women in it, he’ll have to answer as to why.

Isn’t that incredible? And incredibly sad?

As you know, the boys were dragging me off to see Spectre this weekend, and James Bond is probably the human embodiment of the antithesis of gender equality. To correct the imbalance, Sean agreed to hit up Suffragette with me first, because he’s a 2015 kind of gentleman, even if his movie idols aren’t.

Suffragette focuses on some of the lesser known but pivotal “foot soldiers” of the early feminist movement in Britain. After 50 years of peaceful protest, the women have amped up their right-to-vote rhetoric and are ready to engage in civil disobedience for the cause.

Carey Mulligan plays a young woman who was born in a laundry facility and has worked there all her life, working herself raw and having her boss force himself on her just to earn a third what the men take home. And then it goes directly into the pocket of her husband to do with as he sees fit. Not a naturally political woman, she gets dragged into the movement almost unwillingly but once she’s there, you can bet that neither her boss nor her husband are pleased. But it’s the vitriol from her fellow women that’s most upsetting. She doesn’t know her place, and this upsets everyone.

And it’s also enough to have her freedom taken away, and her child too if she’s not careful, so these are pretty high stakes. The laws are against her – but that’s the point. She is subject to laws she’s not allowed to influence let alone make. Women were property or commodities and laws existed to keep them that way.

Helena Bonham Carter plays a semi-educated pharmacist who is not only a pillar of her community, but an agitator and grass-roots activist. She’s recruiting and planning things when it’s time to start smashing windows and bombing letter boxes. HBC played her part well, injecting a little back bone into the character while still ultimately being subject to her husband’s whims. Helena Bonham Carter is the real-life great-granddaughter of H.H. Asquith, who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916, during the height of the suffrage movement. He was of course a staunch opponent of votes for women.

Mulligan is the perfect choice for a young mother who goes through quite the character arc, from wife and labourer to militant feminist – of course, you might find that the first two under such terrible conditions would inspire desperate reactions from anyone. Brendan Gleeson and Meryl Streep also having juicy roles, though Streep’s there in little more than a cameo, she’s nevertheless the perfect choice for the movement’s heroine, Mrs. Pankhurst (this is the little detail that got to me – that all of these brave, notable women were known only by their husband’s names, ie, Mrs. Pankhurst. It killed me). Streep is strong and steady as ever. All of this capable acting smooths over some of the flaws in film making. It’s not a perfect piece of art, but it is an important one, and it’s hard not to be stirred by it.

Women in Canada got the vote in 1916, for the most part. It was not granted in the province I live in until 1940. American women got the vote in 1920. Some women in the UK were granted the vote by 1918 but it wasn’t unconditionally granted until 1928. That’s less than 100 years ago: way too close for comfort. Is there a woman alive today who hasn’t wondered what it would have been like to live through that? To still be all that we are and yet to be so diminished in the eyes of the law – and society? It’s boggling. And yet, in 2015, when a Prime Minister hires women to work in his government at an equal rate that he hires men, he is still asked why.

The Peanuts Movie

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The Peanuts comic strip ran in papers for nearly 50 years – from 1950 right up until 2000 – 17,897 strips in all, making it (arguably) the longest story ever told by a single person, Charles M. Schulz. Schulz wrote and drew every strip himself.

This is the very first strip, featuring the original Patty and a character called Shermy. More popular characters appeared later: Schroeder (May 1951), Lucy (March 1952), Linus (September 1952), Pig-Pen (July 1954), Sally (August 1959), “Peppermint” Patty (August 1966), Woodstock (introduced April 1967; given a name in June 1970), Franklin (July 1968), Marcie (July 1971), and Rerun (March 1973).

Franklin appeared in 1968 at the urging of a schoolteacher who thought it might help normalize friendship between a black kid and a white kid. Schulz was initially worried it would seem patronizing, but the strip was published and was ahead of its time.

Schulz was pretty wily about gender discrimination too, once having Charlie Brown refuse sponsorship of his team when they wouldn’t allow girls (or dogs!) to play. Although some of the holiday specials on TV mentioned God, the strip itself tended to stay fairly neutral.

Schulz necessarily always wrote several panels in advance, so when he retired in 2000, there were still a few to be published and he actually passed away one day before his final strip ran.

This weekend The Peanuts Movie hits theatres, looking better and brighter than ever. The Schulz family is ever in control of the Charlie Brown empire; Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan wrote the script and hand-picked Steve Martino to direct because they felt he’d shown a “faithful to classics” with his adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! They’ve used archived music and classic settings so even though this movie is rendered in 3D CGI, it should still feel familiar to old fans of the strip and the movies we’ve watched on TV every year since infancy. Animator Bill Melendez provided the voice of both Snoopy and Woodstock ever since the first Peanuts cartoon, 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. He died in 2008, but the new movie uses archival samples of Melendez’s Snoopy and Woodstock voices from previous cartoons. Musician Trombone Shorty will even be providing the old “wah-wah” of the adults in the Peanuts universe with a plunger mute as always.

Sidebar: I have a tiny head. Yeah, I said it. I no longer wear glasses, but my sunglasses are either XS if I can find them, and children’s when I can’t. Back when I did wear eyeglasses, in the dark ages before Prada, my first pair were Nintendo brand, but my second and third were Peanuts brand. They were even more awful than you’re imagining, and no, I will not be posting a picture. I find it interesting that Charles Schulz actually disliked the Peanuts name. He didn’t come up with it, an editor did “It’s totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing,” he said. “And has no dignity. I think my humor has dignity.” And I think he’s right. Except for my glasses. Those were hilarious but totally without a shred of dignity.

As you may have guessed, the boys are dragging me to see Spectre tonight, but my heart will be in the theatre down the hall. So to soothe myself a bit, here are a couple of fun things I’ve come across while in serious-research-mode:

Which Peanuts character are you? I can’t vouch for its authenticity because it just called me a Sally Brown (Charlie’s little sister) and I’m nobody’s second banana. Still, if you take it, be sure to share your results in the comments!
Peanutize yourself! Ever wondered what you’d look like if you made a cameo in the strip? Now you don’t have to. May I present:

Sean

Matt

Jay

Learning To Drive

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Like many 16 year olds, I was at the DMV the morning of my birthday, aced the test, and had my learner’s permit burning a hole in my pocket by noon, when I unwrapped a tiny box, a gift from my mother. It was a key chain with a little red convertible with real functioning head lights on one hand, and a key dangling off the other. “Don’t get too excited,” said my mother, but I knew. I knew it was a key to the family Ford Aerostar, a hideous forest-green hulking rust monster, but I loved it all the same.

But that key never got put into an ignition. Not for days and weeks and months. I was the oldest and my mother was having none of that. Teach a teenager to drive? No thank you. So the task would fall to my crazy abusive father, right in the throes of their dirty, nasty divorce. So after my first lesson with him left me shaking and hurting on the side of the road, I chose not to repeat. I’d saved up babysitting money (two dollars and 50 gruelling cents an hour, thankyouvermuch) to go to driver’s ed, and so twice a week my grandmother would drive wayyyy out to my country-bumpkin school, pick me up, give me lemonade in a mayonnaise jar and cookies in an old pharmacy bag, and drive me very very slowly into the city for my lessons.

What I learned first and foremost was that driving instructors are sexist. But when my lessons ended, so did my driving. Mom still wasn’t having it and dad was a lost cause. So I was a non-driving spaz, until suddenly the expiry date was upon and if I let it lapse, I’d not only have to start over, I’d have to repay as well, which you might be noticing was not really an option for me at the time. So what I did was: I broke the law. My great friend Anna took me out in her parents’ van and let me practice once or twice. A learner’s permit means you can only drive with a licensed, adult driver, but what choice did I have? So I went to get my G-2 having only ever driven a couple of times, and almost never in the car I was testing in. I told almost no one, certain I would fail, but of course Anna had blabbed to my whole history class in my absence and it was goddamn good thing that I passed when my teacher put me on the spot.

And then I didn’t drive again for a decade. I moved away to a big city for University. I didn’t have a car, couldn’t have afforded to even park a car. A few years later the third installment of the graduated licensing testing came up and I couldn’t even afford that. So I let it lapse. The truth was, it wasn’t just the money. It was also the fear. I’d taken all the anxiety of driving with my father and blamed cars instead of him. I believed that I “couldn’t” drive, that I was worthless, and I was stuck. I moved to an even bigger city and wouldn’t have had a car no matter what. It was pedestrian-friendly, which I love, and transit-supporting, which I navigated well.

But then I moved back here to Ottawa and got a reality check in the form of a bus driver strike. I was surprised to have my independence taken away so easily, and as the strike went on, week after week, in the frigid Canadian winter, I was also in danger of losing my livelihood. Cabs were impossible to get. The city was being held hostage. I thankfully had a good-hearted boyfriend who threw kinks into his own schedule in order to negotiate mine. But I made a new year’s resolution to learn to drive, and then hyperventilated for months at the mere thought of it. But then I signed up for a couple of lessons and went for my test and: passed. Of course I’m leaving out the copious vomiting and panic attacks. Assume lots of both. Imagine the puddles I left in parking lots across the city! To celebrate, I went out two days later and bought myself a little bug. I still had anxiety, and nearly getting killed when someone ran a red light didn’t help. But I’ve had three bugs in a row (Gloria, Emma, Ruby), cute, zippy little cars, and you know what I drive today? A little red convertible. Life is like that.

Of course, the movie Learning To Drive neglects to mention any of my fraught personal experience with driving. But it is about Patricia Clarkson, who needs to learn to drive particularly after her husband leaving her means not just curbing her independence but the shrinkage of her world. Luckily Ben Kingsley aggressively offers her driving lessons, whether she’s ready for them or not. His arranged marriage really calls her own feelings about marriage into question. The plot, if you can call it that, is a bit predictable. But it’s also languid and full-bodied. It’s not a dazzler but Clarkson and Kingsley would make almost anything worthwhile. This is a film for adults, and Christ, I guess that means I am one. Goes down well with a bottle of wine.

Sidebar: one of my favourite bits of the movie is when Patricia Clarkson can’t quite see herself in a red car. “What would it say about me?” she asks, and Ben Kingsley whispers in her ear “Don’t fuck with me.” Her smirk says she’s sold. So what does the colour of your car say about you?

Gold: Warm, intelligent, glamorous

Dark green: Well-Balanced, trustworthy, traditional

Light green: Organic, no-fuss, understated

Yellow: Joyful, sense of humor, sunny disposition, risk-taker

Brown: Powerful, unique, no-nonsense

Beige: Natural, down-to-earth

Orange: Artistic, individual, complex, charming

Light-mid blue: Calm, faithful, true, stable
Dark blue: Confident, credible, authoritative, dependable

Gray: Neutral, sober, practical

Red: Sensual, dynamic, outgoing (vibrant red = bold personality, a go-getter & confident; maroon or wine colour = more subtle)

Silver: Futuristic, prestigious, elegant, maybe a little pretentious

Pearl: Glamorous, exciting, sophisticated

White: Pure, pristine, direct; fresh, young & modern

Black: Powerful, classic, elegant

Yes, Virginia, It IS Possible to Have A Drag Queen Revue Without Lady Marmalade

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Another double header – one that’s pretty good, one that’s pretty much not.

The good: Any Day Now, starring the ever fabulous Alan Cumming as Rudy, a down-on-his-luck drag queen whose whole life gets rewritten when his junkie neighbour abandons her son one night on a binge (and then gets picked up and put away by the vice squad). Rudy doesn’t quite know what do with Marco (Isaac Leyva), the quiet teenager with down syndrome, but he knows social services isn’t the answer. Together with his new partner Paul (Garret Dillahunt), they decide to adopt the kid and give Marco the kind of stable, loving home he needs. Except: it’s the 1970s. The would-be custody case turns into a witchhunt against the gay “deviant” lifestyle and the court system is quick to condemn them despite loads of evidence of them actually being really good parents. If you’re an Alan Cumming fan, as I am, then stop reading and just watch it already. It’s worth it just to hear him sing. It’s kind of melodramatic and manages to be both overblown and oversimplified, and yet Leyva’s smile lights up a screen and his two dads, and the fact that it’s taken the script 30 years to be made, remind us why movies like this exist. It has been a hard road for gay rights, but this film transcends that to point not just at the men who are being discriminated against, but the poor kid whose needs are being ignored because of a reprehensible justice system that fails to reflect any humanity. Warning: total tear jerker.

The not so good: Flawless, where Robert DeNiro plays a retired cop who strokes out during a crisis in his building. He’s too proud to leave his apartment after the resulting partial paralysis and is forced to hire a drag queen called Busty Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to help him in his recovery. Neither is very happy about the arrangement, and lots of gay slurs and hate speech is bandied about, but as you know from all oddball couple movies, they’ll soon grow to like each other, and then grow to need each other: aww. The script is…oh you know, some clever synonym for absolute failure (real sample: “You shot me? Why’d you shoot me?…You shot her! Why’d you shoot her?”…Normally I’d say you can’t make this shit up, except Joel Schumacher did). The drag queen character is…offensive. At best. It’s complete stereotype and would have been outdated even in 1999. I feel embarrassed for having watched this.

A treat:

Gone Too Soon

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I recently sat down to watch 2 biographical documentaries, Amy (about Amy Winehouse) and I Am Chris Farley (about Bob Marley. No, I’m kidding. It’s totally about Chris Farley), that were shot through with parallels.

Fame and addiction don’t have to co-exist necessarily, but when they do, the fame feeds the addiction. Literally: you and I might have to choose between cocaine and groceries, or cocaine and prostitution, but they have unlimited resources. Couple that with a need and want for approval, of being adored by everyone except maybe yourself, and it makes for a really bumpy road.

That said, I Am Chris Farley is not entirely the bummer you might think. This film asks: can you make small-dick jokes about your dead brother? And the answer is: yes. The Farleys can! Chris may have been the star, but the funny gene seems to have been a family trait. His brothers recount their idyllic childhood, and their brother’s quick rise to fame, leap-frogging others from Second City immediately toward the father-like figure of Lorne Michaels at SNL, where Mike Myers points out Chris was an instant favourite. Dan Aykroyd likens Farley to his own friend (who met a similar demise) John Belushi, and Lorne Michaels thinks of him as the love child that Belushi and Aykroyd never had.

I first found Saturday Night Live when Farley et al. were at their height. Babysitting late at night, their reruns kept me company.Farley, David Spade, and Adam Sandler were clearly friends who wrote for each other and worked together all the time, and it was magical to watch them (dubbed “the bad boys of SNL” along with Rob Schneider and Chris Rock). Then they got bigger than the show itself and started casting each other in their movies – Chris appeared with Spade in Tommy Boy, and with Sandler in Billy Madison. Shit blew up. They were all celebrities. I remember watching the 25th anniversary show in 1999, and Sandler and Spade came back to pay tribute to him just 2 years after his sudden death. Those casts are often very tight, and the remembrances are far too many (send-ups to Belushi and Hartman are equally touching).

Chris Farley had a huge heart and is clearly still missed today. Interviewees are choked up recalling his problems with drinking and drugs and it’s hard to watch the regret on their faces. Farley didn’t want to die. You don’t go to rehab 17 times because you want to be this way. But his addictive personality was strong and his self-confidence weak, and he died alone on his kitchen floor at the age of 33.

Amy Winehouse died when she was 27. She was messed up before she was famous, she made her fortune on a song that mocked rehab, and it was probably not much of a surprise, but no less a tragedy, when she passed the way she did. Newsweek called her “a perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent and poor impulse control” while paparazzi documented her wasting away in front of us, in clear emotional and physical distress. It was hard to watch at the time, especially knowing that the people who should have been caring for her were instead treating her like a meal ticket.

In the documentary, all the people in her life come together to speak on her behalf, and theirs – and we’re talking about people who clashed over her in life and defend themselves and their actions since her death. You really get a sense of what a tangled mess her life was, but it also manages to be tender. It’s just a story that you wish didn’t exist. This woman with an enormous voice and huge talent poisoned herself to death with alcohol in the end, and everyone was too busy trying to make money off her to notice or care. That’s the tragedy. She was a lost little girl insulated by her money and success, and it killed her.

Boycotting Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, Among Others

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Police unions across the U.S. are calling for its members to support a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

What provoked their ire? Tarantino attended a Black Lives matter rally in NYC on October 24th. “This is not being dealt with in any way at all,” Tarantino said. “That’s why we are out here. If it was being dealt with, then these murdering cops would be in jail or at least be facing charges. When I see murders, I do not stand by. I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”

The National Association of Police Organizations, representing nearly a quarter million sworn law enforcement officers asks “officers to stop working special assignments or off-duty jobs, such as providing security, traffic control or technical advice for any of Tarantino’s projects. We need to send a loud and clear message that such hateful rhetoric against police officers is unacceptable. The police he is calling murderers are the same officers who were present along the protest route to ensure the safety of protesters, who provide security when he is filming, and who put their lives on the line to protect our communities day in and day out.”

This is not the first time, nor, dare I say, the last that a major film has met with resistance. Ender’s Game, you might recall, was released under a cloud of controversy because the author of the book, Orson Scott Card, was a raging homophobe. People boycotted and refused to give their money to such a cad, despite the fact that their movie ticket purchases were not directly lining his pocket, and that neither the book nor the movie, starring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, contain any overt homophobic material. Paradoxically, Card’s book sales continue to rise, and he sees any controversy as free publicity. So just how effective are these boycotts, anyway?

Catholics have been urged to boycott all kinds of movies – The Da Vinci code being a recent one, as well as The Golden Compass for its reported anti-Christian agenda.

Lately, white people were called on to boycott the Thor movie, the Council of Conservative Citizens justifying the call to action with the following statement: “It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves. An upcoming movie, based on the comic book Thor, will give Norse mythology an insulting multi-cultural make-over. One of the Gods will be played by Hip Hop DJ Idris Elba.” A black god? Impossible! Is nothing sacred??? Racist trolls do not know when to shut the fuck up and they’re at it again, this time with Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens in their crosshairs. #BoycottStarWarsVII they say, because JJ Abrams, a “white-hating Hollywood Jew” is perpetrating a “white genocide” on the Star Wars universe by casting multiple people of colour. I don’t know Abrams but I’m guessing he doesn’t mind if these jerks stay home.

You know who else may have stayed home and nobody noticed? The “men’s rights activists” who called a boycott against Mad Max: Fury Road for being a “feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick.” They were concerned that unsuspecting men “are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes. Let us be clear. This is the vehicle by which they are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat. This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic.” These sweethearts prohibit women and homosexuals from posting on their site at all, so I can’t even call them the ass monkeys they are. Guess I’ll have to defer to our male readership – men, do you feel duped?

Other movie boycotts:

Aloha – for making a movie about Hawaii and failing to cast a single Hawaiian, and for having the audacity to call Emma Stone just a very pale Hawaiian

Exodus: Gods and Kings: again, for an all-white cast in brown face playing Middle Easterners

Sicario: the mayor of the city featured in the movie and about 30 of its residents are boycotting because they say the movie is “out of date” because the 8 murders a day figure has vastly improved since 2010

50 Shades of Grey: for showing domestic violence and calling it erotic

There’s a can of worms here that’s hard to really comment on. You may take issue with some or all or none of these things. But does a boycott just impose your own judgements on someone else? And at what point do we start nearing Trumbo territory? Remember Hollywood’s shame: the blacklisting scandal. Dalton Trumbo was a famed screen writer who was jailed and blacklisted (which meant no one would hire him) because of his political beliefs – or his perceived political beliefs, because blacklisting became a witch hunt and there was no such thing as a fair trial before your career was ripped away from you. So I wonder if any film maker, whether pro-gay or anti-gay, for example, should suffer the same fate. Do people have the right to think and say what they really believe, and do we have a right to deprive them of their livelihood if we disagree?

And for that matter, do we then start boycotting people like Woody Allen for being a weirdo and probably a pedophile? And Christian Bale for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister? There are actually a LOT of unsavoury characters in Hollywood and it seems impossible to avoid all of them for their various transgressions. I have neither the time nor the inclination to vet the beliefs and behaviours of every artist, and I have even less inclination to have them vetted for me by the squeakiest wheel.

Should we just boycott anyone who has different beliefs than our own? But isn’t that what art is about – challenging our preconceptions, sampling different viewpoints? We don’t have to agree with them of course, but isn’t a good thing to read and watch and experience from a variety of sources?

Back to Tarantino. No one has a problem with the movie because no one’s seen it. They have a problem with what he said – which, from what I can tell, is actually a pretty inarguable fact. Cops are gunning down black kids just for being black. Which is not to say that all cops are like this, or even most. But there is a discernible problem with racism, and when you give them all guns, even a small racist minority can turn really deadly. Since when is it wrong to point out flaws in the system? Isn’t it the job of artists in particular to provide social commentary?

Which of these movies would you boycott?

The Congress

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Have you ever watched a movie and thought – I need someone to tell me whether I liked this or not. Or better yet, I need someone to show me how to like this. Or even why.

It’s possible I lack the mental acuity to even describe this movie to you, despite the fact that I’ve seen it very recently, discussed it very recently, and have Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDB right at my fingertips. Still this movie eludes me.

The Congress: a deceptive title if ever there was one. Robin Wright plays Robin Wright – an aging actress who was once a bankable sex symbol as the Princess Bride, but after a series of bad choices and focus on her family, has been out of the public eye and is much less in demand. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) has landed her one last meeting with the Miramount studio where executive Jeff Green (Danny Huston) offers to save her from herself. The movie industry is in the middle of a revolution: actors are being digitally scanned into a studio’s bank, and Robin is urged to join up now while she has any cachet left at all. The studio will own the character of ‘Robin Wright’ and the real Robin Wright must never act again. She takes a lump sum and a 20 year contract, and she and Keitel share a powerful scene – while she stands in a sphere where a cinematographer is now employed to be her scanner, Keitel recounts a story that takes her from laughter to tears. This is Robin Wright at her absolute best. The years fade away. She is radiant. It feels a travesty that this will be her last performance; she bares her soul even as she sells it.

We jump ahead 20 years. About to renew her contract, Robin now an older woman goes unrecognized since her famous digital self is timeless. She attends Miramount’s Futurological Congress, located in the animation zone, where everyone entering must take an ampoule to become an animated avatar. So this is when the live action movie becomes a cartoon.

The studio executive cartoon tells Robin Wright the cartoon that they’ve now developed the technology where Robin Wright the character can now become Robin Wright the chemical. Still following? People will be able to sprinkle her compound into a milkshake, drink it, and become her. They can use her likeness in their fantasies. They can think up any scenario. They can fuck Princess Buttercup or be chased by zombie-Jenny from Forrest Gump or get spanked by Claire from House of Cards. Movies are “old news – a remnant from the last millennium.”

Robin is supposed to give the keynote speech at the symposium but has a change of h The-Congress-stills-17 eart, instead railing against the technology, angry that they haven’t used it instead to cure real disease. “I am your prophet of doom” she says.

Then things get crazier still. Still animated, she gets caught up in a rebellion and is saved, ironically, by the former “head of the Robin Wright department,” an animator who knows her so intimately he’s a little in love with her (voiced by Jon Hamm). She’s unable to distinguish reality from hallucination in this state, so they freeze her for many years until she wakes up in a time when in fact hallucination can become reality, with a pill. The real world is bleak, its inhabitants leached of colour, dysfunctional. The only ones still able to cope hover above the earth in airships, the last of a dying breed.

This is obviously a very ambitious film, adapted from and loosely based on a novel by Stanisław Lem. Director Ari Folman, of Waltz with Bashir, is no stranger to ambition, but this little mindfuck takes the cake. Using a political allego the-congress-wright-bw-plane ry to savage the increasingly degrading and dehumanizing movie industry is not a perfect fit, but it does inspire some interesting questions, though Folman is, as ever, light-handed with those. He doesn’t like to beat us over the head with ‘message’ so we’re left to make of this hybrid what we will.

The people in the film are duped by pharmaceuticals into believing their dystopia is actually utopia, and we feel the contrast acutely, jumping from lush animation to miserable cinematography. I felt a lot, actually – I reacted viscerally to the emotional undercurrent even when I was struggling to identify what was real and what was dream and what was my own projection. It’s provocative and introspective but not particularly cohesive, even factoring in an allowance for a certain amount of “trippyness”. There’s a vision here that isn’t quite pulled off, and I more or less felt abandoned during the final chapter of the film.

Do I regret ta congress king this on? Not in the least. Attempts can be inspiring. I only regret that I didn’t take someone along with me, because when you’re lost among lofty ideas and niggling questions, it’s best to have a hand to hold.

Hits & Misses

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Steve Jobs: This movie is underperforming at the box office right now so my expectations were tempered, but the truth is, I was riveted. Yes, riveted, for the entire 2 hours. Aaron Sorkin has crafted a film in 3 acts, all three covering the moments before big product launches and pivotal times in Jobs’ life. 1984: the Macintosh is launched just days after that historic Superbowl ad while Jobs is angry at having lost Time magazine’s Man of the Year to a computer in part because of his vehement denials of paternity to 5-year-old Lisa. 1988: after the failure of the Macintosh, Jobs has left Apple and is launching the NeXTcube with his eye on the bigger picture. 1998: back at Apple, he’s launching the iMac, computer of tomorrow. Jeff Daniels plays the Apple CEO and Kate Winslet plays Jobs’ right hand woman; both exactly as brilliantly as you’d expect. Michael Fassbender is of course Jobs himself, and I have no qualms about his portrayal of an extremely complex man. He’s an egomaniacal dick, and yet we still see his humanity. The surprise for me was Seth Rogen who plays Steve Wozniak, who is a very interesting character. He’s very much the affable, humble counterpart to Jobs’ mad genius, but is also the one who actually knows how to design and build computers (Jobs being more of an idea man). Rogen manages to strike a balance between being second banana, and also being the only one who can truly stand up to Jobs. Colour me impressed, Seth Rogen. Danny Boyle has a well-crafted beast on his hands – maybe a little too rigidly structured, but admirably made. I didn’t expect to love this, but I really did.

Truth: An icon playing an icon – Robert Redford portrays Dan Rather as he becomes embroiled in the journalistic snafu that would end his enviable career. In 2000, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) was about to break the story of George Bush’s spotty military career. You may remember the highlights: that he pulled strings to be admitted to the National Guard in order to avoid service in Vietnam, then went AWOL and never really completed even that much. It was going to be a big deal in rather an election ultimately decided by just 500-odd votes, but that summer Mapes’ mother died and the story never aired. Four years later, though, the story is revived when someone comes forward with documents. Mapes and her team (Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid) bust it wide open after a lot of teasing and research and legwork, and Dan Rather presents the case on 60 Minutes. But of course Republicans were never going to let this story sit, and pretty soon the internet trolls are working feverishly to discredit whatever they can. Truth becomes not just a story about journalism, but about government corruption at the highest level. 60 Minutes is on CBS. CBS was owned by Viacom, a conglomerate that relied on government tax breaks. Can they afford to upset the presidency? Truth, the actual truth, gets lost somewhere in the shuffle. Sean felt it made a better story than a movie, and he may be right. Blanchett is note-perfect, and Redford surprised me – he doesn’t do an impression of Rather, but he does capture his cadence and persona in a way that felt convincing but not mimicky. The film, though, is pretty conventional, and it’s oddly paced. I absolutely believe that a journalist’s job is to ask questions,b ut that doesn’t mean I needed 18 different soliloquies on the topic. I have a headache from being hit over the head with this message. Relax, James Vanderbilt; your premise is solid and the movie is good if not great. No need to be so sanctimonious.

Jem: A complete defilement of my childhood, no 80s baby is going to have anything to do with this travesty. They’ve ruined everything that made the cartoon of our innocence great: the look is wrong (she used to be outrageous!), the sound is wrong, they’ve traded in a tal JemMovie00-630x420 king, hologramming computer for Youtube. I spent years as a little girl putting on Jem concerts in a neighbour’s garage, so I think I know what I’m talking about. Even the earrings were botched, for crying out loud. And where was the awesome rival band, the Misfits? Jem and the Holograms weren’t just rockstars, they were businesswomen, philanthropists, crime fighters, and foster mothers. While it aired during the mid-80s, it was in the top 3 most watched kids’ cartoons. Why then did the studios spit in the eye of the franchise by making a movie that was sure to fail? And isn’t even good enough to attract a new audience? How would audiences have felt if the same was done to Transformers, a movie that, according to IMDB, had an estimated budget of $150M in 2007. A couple of years later, GI Joe was given $175M and even though the first one didn’t do all that great, they found another $130M to throw at the sequel. Jem, on the other hand, was given an estimated budget of just $5M. So let’s sit with that for a minute and ask ourselves why. Yes, the 80s version was goofy and over the top, but that beats the bland, paint by numbers crap this remake is offering. It’s trying so hard to appeal to millennials it completely denigrates any nostalgic appeal and alienates the people it was first made for. Epic fail.