In the mind of madness

Unfiltered Smoke

2009-09-02T13:44:00.002-03:00

If anyone ever checks this place again, you should know that I have started a new website with multiple contributors. I will soon be adding my own pieces like movie reviews and short stories and maybe blog entries as well.

Check it out at UnfilteredSmoke.com

Lily of the Valley by Adam Atherton

2009-05-04T14:50:00.003-03:00

Last fall/winter, Adam Atherton and his girlfriend Luiza Dragonescu entered a contest at zudacomics. If they won they would have been published by DC. They just missed the cut but haven't lost the desire.

He's been working on his follow up, Lily of the Valley. Take a quick moment or two and go over to zuda. It takes only a couple minutes to sign up, read and vote. It means a lot to him and he's a talented artist/writer.

http://www.zudacomics.com/node/1237

Revival

2009-05-04T00:48:00.002-03:00

I will be resurrecting this. In what capacity I am unsure. Possibly do a movie of the week thing. I've watched too many. By the time I finish counting down my list it will have changed. So I'm going to re-do it and post my top 200 alphabetically. Just to give you a list of flicks to watch.

The Death of the Carleton FreePress

2009-04-16T15:57:00.003-03:00

It's been a while since I've posted. I have finished university and have been relaxing, reading and writing other things. I would like to share with you my final piece for my degree in journalism.

Check it out here.

#168: Halloween

2009-03-23T16:53:00.003-03:00

Halloween (1978)
Directed by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance and the best slasher killer in the history of slasher films!

When I was a kid I dressed up as a different ninja turtle for halloween three years in a row. Only Donatello never figured into the equation for whatever reason. After my run of portraying mutan turtles turned stale, I did what many a young child did. I became a vampire.

It was sweet. I had a cape, I greased my hair into a pseudo-widow's peak and put some uncomfortable plastic fangs in my mouth and fake blood ran down from the corners of my mouth.

As a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with horror movies and scary stories in general. I would get horror books from the library at school and scare myself senseless in the dark of night. Nightmares were plentiful. Anyone who says the boogeyman can't get you has either forgotten or has never had a bad dream.

Unsolved Mysteries is a pretty lame show in retrospect but when I was 10, it was eerie and creepy. Anything to do with alien abductions and I'd be there to squirm my way through it. It seems masochistic but there is a certain exhiliration and pleasure that comes from being scared or seeing something shocking and unbelievable. If you get to the point where you're vocally trying to convince yourself that it's not real...well you're hooked.

Halloween is the greatest of all childhood holidays. We looked forward to it every year because it's the only day where the scary monsters lose their shadowy mystique and become part of the norm. We as children -- and as adults, who am I kidding? -- entered the world of the darkness for but a night. As a vampire or a werewolf we embraced the horror.

There always is an air of safety surrounding Halloween. So for John Carpenter to make a movie about October 31 where the horror is real and not just make believe he created a new level in the genre. A lumbering, escaped mental patient in a William Shatner mask wielding a knife trying to exact revenge on those who did him wrong on halloween of all days. It packs a punch.

It paved the way for the Friday the 13th movies -- which paved the way for Sleepaway Camp and others -- but it wasn't as campy (sorry about that one). Halloween is still the most effective slasher film maybe because of the double reversal within the holiday from horror to safety and back again or maybe because John Carpenter knows horror better than any other filmmaker.

Halloween is still an annual treasure for my friends and I, although sometimes my creativity takes a backseat to procrastination. The last two years I've worn a suit and attached some accessory to that suit in order to call it a costume.

In 2007 it was a briefcase. Arlo was the devil and I was his attorney.

In 2008 I wrapped a noose around my neck. I was an investment banker. I stole that idea from Traer a few years earlier when he was an Enron executive.

One of these years I'll be more elaborate with my costume. We should all channel that fear and exhiliration at least once a year anyway.

AQ Redux: The inner workings of the movie geek

2009-03-20T17:04:00.012-03:00

Being the self-described movie geek that I am, I am conscious of the image us somewhat volatile folk can be. In 2002 I discovered Joblo.com and along with it, the message board.

I thought "hey, a place where I can share my love of movies with others like me? Sign me up!"

Under the moniker of Rated R I posted regularly for six years with only occasional absences. Looking back on my early posts I am embarrassed at what I was willing to print even if it was anonymous. At least here, I am posting as myself and not an alias.

The internet has seriously hurt art critique by giving everyone the option of being their own personal critic. Lost are the days of looking for a well written piece on the depths of cinema or the flashing lights of a masterful action film. Now it's all about the statistics.

If a movie has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that's all you need to know it's supposed to be great. The problem is a lack of context. By just looking at a number you lose nuance expressed by the writer and instead focus on a an arbitrary number that can not sum up the film properly.

The worst part of the message board is how piss poor the spelling and grammar is. I can understand the occasional typo, but some of these posts are littered with the demolition of language. Like Isaac told me -- which I assume he got from somewhere else -- "the internet is like the world's largest public bathroom. Through the power of anonymity people will write anything they please. Would they ever say these things in their own home or in the face of the person they're insulting? Never." That is, of course, paraphrasing.

The inner workings of the movie geek
by Jason Wilson

The movie geek, like the music aficionado and literary nut, is obsessive and cares way too much about what the layman refers to as 'entertainment.' Films are more than time killers to these people.

I would consider myself a recovering movie geek, although that would indicate that I am no longer am or wish to be one. Neither of which is true.

Films can represent life and reflect values of what is dear and important. If you're watching Meet the Spartans this isn't the case but filmmaking is an art that is so often discarded as mere flashing lights. What's worse is that these bells-and-whistles pictures are the most successful at the box office.

There has to be balance in the media for both art and escapism. Sometimes the two cross over. If every film released was a harrowing look at the ills of humanity, we'd all be refilling Zoloft prescriptions daily.

If every movie was directed by Michael Bay, we would be completely desensitized to senseless violence and we'd lose all comprehension of basic human emotions. Without our physical self changing we would become like Roy Batty and the replicants in Blade Runner. We would look human, maybe even want to be human, but we wouldn't be able to grasp what it means to be human -- although we may not even know what it means anyway, which might be the point of Blade Runner.

If you look at the grand scheme of filmmaking and analyze the whole as its own organism, it makes sense. Our bodies are littered with bacteria. The film world's version of the bowel region is made up of Uwe Boll, Dane Cook and Julia Roberts among many others -- in music, it's the entire Emo genre.

The human body is also resilient, which is way the bacteria are more of a nuisance than anything. Sadly it's a necessary nuisance.

Movie geeks don't always accept this. On movie message boards and the intenet at large people expunge cruelty toward artists(?) they don't like. Why would anyone take the time out of his day to say Tom Cruise should kill himself? What is the point? It's baffling and people who write crap like that should seriously re-examine their lives.

Dane Cook is one of my least favourite "actors." Any time he's on screen I cringe. And yea, I got a kick out of his violent fate in Mr. Brooks. But my solution is to not watch any of his movies on my own dime...simple.

The flip side -- the side most people don't seem to separate from their image of what makes a fanboy -- is that because of the film geek's obsession, a new world is opened. Without watching Goodfellas, The Godfather, Platoon and other classics at a young age, the path to Fellini, Godard and Kurosawa* might never have come.

The expression and communication of ideas is one of the most important parts of life. Film is one of the ways we communicate but film critics have been devolved into grading machines. Chances are if you read a review, it will be apparent how the critic felt about it. Instead, we want everything faster. Immediately.

Give me a rating out of 10 because I can't be bothered to read a few hundred words about it.

Rotten Tomatoes is a good resource in principle. It should be a collection of essays on film and what each individual film means as well as their quality. While links to the full reviews are there, there are only one or two-sentence blurbs summing them up. Next to it is an image indicating whether the film is considered "fresh" or "rotten."

The percentage rating is not representative of context. For the most part, horror movies are destroyed by critics. Horror movies are made with a specific audience in mind and there is art behind it.

Ask most horror fans, they'll watch pretty much any horror movie but they do not love the films blindly. Horror fans are probably the most honest and to the point about the movies they love, critics be damned.

There needs to be balance. As a movie geek I am willing to admit mindless entertainment has its place and I can enjoy it. All I'm asking is that the rest of you meet us half way so the art gets equal play.

I rate this column 5/10

*Just because it's foreign doesn't mean it's good. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

#169: Grindhouse

2009-03-20T12:00:00.006-03:00

Grindhouse (2007)
Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Special trailers directed by Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright
Starring Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin, Freddy Rodriguez, Marley Shelton, Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Naveen Andrews.

Never before have I had so much fun in a movie theatre. Grindhouse was exactly what I was expecting and exactly what I wanted when I went to see it. Sure it didn't offer anything new but that's the point. By lampooning and honoring splatter flicks from yesteryear it reached a somewhat more respectable level.

This is why I like Quentin Tarantino as much as I do. He's almost the equivalent of that one-hit wonder that maintains a crazy fanbase because he's not willing to conform to what their one hit would dictate.

Tarantino could have made Pulp Fiction knock-off after Pulp Fiction knock-off for the rest of his career and coast all the way there. Instead -- and it hasn't exactly been taken so well by critics, not that it matters in any way -- he's chosen to pay further homage to the films he watched as a child. What's wrong with that?

What you can be sure of when you go to a Tarantino movie is that it will be so slick and watchable no matter what the subject matter. And while some will disagree about his segment in Grindhouse, I think it's a wonderful addition to his resumé.

Opening night, I heard a guy shout at the screen "boring!" or "nobody cares!" during a scene where the female protagonists are shooting the shit around a table in a diner. It meandered a bit, I'll give him that but it wasn't out of place. And the slight glimpse of Mr. Kurt Russell in the background made it all worthwhile.

Rodriguez on the other hand seems to alternate making some of the most bloody and violent action movies with kid flicks for his own children. Planet Terror delivers the goods up front and just keeps it coming. Zombies or well mutants I guess but zombies all the same.

I thank Mr. Rodriguez for giving Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn work. Biehn was in some of the best damn action flicks in the 1980s (Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss) and has pretty much disappeared. After Grindhouse, Fahey has popped up on Lost several times, so there's that.

This movie is an experience to behold and it's best in theatres. The way the studios released it on DVD is a slap in the face to fans. Sure, they'll make more money by selling them individually but it really breaks up the flow of it eliminating any real chance of replicating what was seen theatrically.

I can even get behind the release of the two films individually for the reason that not everyone wants a three-hour movie experience with fake movie trailers in the middle. If that's wrong, however, I don't want to be right. So why not release an actual edition? A full blown special edition so that those of us who actually did pay to see it in its full form in theatres can enjoy it at home? Sin City got a big-time special edition treatment! Damn it!

Okay, I am coming off as a whiny fanboy and I apologize, it just doesn't make any sense to me why it hasn't happened. It would sell. And they could probably charge $60 a pop and still sell a bunch of copies to suckers like me who think the "full experience" is more important than eating his next meal.

The rationale, I guess is that the mainstream public couldn't wrap its mind around the fact that there were two movies. Never mind that the poster clearly says it's a double feature or that the trailer does the same. Nope, people still thought it was all over after Planet Terror ended*.

How does that happen? Even if you haven't seen a tv spot or an ad anywhere, or you just glossed over the poster, you would have noticed most everyone else in the theatre staying in their seats when the INTERMISSION screen started. Intermission is not the end...

So the movie was a box office failure and no special edition is in sight.

It was the best time I've ever had at a movie theatre. It was an experience, not just taking time out of your day to get to the next thing. It was exactly what I wanted from the beginning to the fake trailers to the end. Gore, sex and car chases. Really, who doesn't want to see a movie where a stripper loses a leg and replaces it with a machine gun? If you say that's stupid and unrealistic...you're missing the point.

*There were stories on it at the time. Since the internet search function pretty much only works when you need to find out about something that happened now or yesterday, I can't find them. I probably could, but it would take more effort than I'm willing to put forth.

AQ Redux: Elitism at the Oscars

2009-03-11T12:15:00.012-03:00

This is one of my failed columns. It was a piece on the Academy Awards in 2008.

I was trying to satirically deconstruct the film geek's obsession with awards. For some reason, they need the validation of seeing their favourite movie gain the accolades of award shows.

Winning or losing an award should not change how one feels about a piece of art. If you don't like the film that wins best picture, so what? I used to care, I used to get outraged until I realized how idiotic it is.

I do believe the Oscars are a farce and it's a damn shame that producers get the credit at the end. Sure without the financial backing a lot of these particular films wouldn't get made but that doesn't mean films would stop. The role of a producer is to make money and play it safe. The best picture award should go collectively to the director, writer, cinematographer, etc. Make it a Stanley Cup like thing where it's on display with names added each year. I sill love the movies, but a lot of movie fans piss me off.

Elitism at the Oscars
by
Jason Wilson

Elitism and entertainment are difficult to separate.

The indie music crowd turns its nose up at anyone who started liking Modest Mouse after 'Good News for People Who Love Bad News.' Similarly, film geeks will chastise those who love Michael Bay action movies.

I fall partially in the latter group.

When Titanic won the Academy Award for best picture I wanted to vomit. All opinions aside, L.A. Confidential is the better film.

The Academy Awards are scrutinized more than any other award show. No one cares who wins a Grammy or a Golden Globe or especially a People's Choice award because what do people know?

The Oscar carries prestige to movie geeks, and we all expect our choice to be the one that takes the cake.

No such luck.

Maybe this year is different. Honestly, I would not be disappointed if any of the best picture nominees won.

Even Juno, a film I found to be quirky for the sake of being quirky with very little substance, would not disappoint due to my adoration of Jason Reitman and his rock-solid cast.

The front runner, No Country for Old Men is a technically sound, visually stunning film chock full of suspense. The Coen Brothers elected to end the film with subtlety. It was purposely vague to provoke a long term effect that would have been absent with a 'wrap up all the loose ends' ending. It also would have been untrue to the Cormac McCarthy novel.

It should win, but it could fall victim to "the Scorsese Effect."

"The Scorsese Effect" applies to a film/director/actor that is clearly deserving but is then passed over.

Martin Scorsese's history at the Awards has been mixed. He has only won the best director prize once, for 2006's The Departed.

In 1981 he lost out to Robert Redford, an actor turned director. In 1991 he should have won for Goodfellas, but again was thwarted by an actor thinking he's better than he is. Kevin Costner won for Dances With Wolves.

The difference is No Country's competition includes There Will Be Blood, an equally deserving picture from Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights).

If either film goes home empty handed, it will be a tragedy.

The situation is rife with peril as other nominees could sneak into contention at the last minute like Crash and Chicago in recent years.

The night will toil through the rhetoric of celebrity as the stars gather to celebrate their wealth and to a lesser extent, the art of cinema.

Teasers of the best picture nominees will be shown as people guess who will win while Jack Nicholson pops another valium and tries to remember where he is.

Everyone will smile as the producers of the winning film jump on stage to accept an award for something they had little or no part in creating. The biggest award of the entire ceremony goes to those who deserve it the least...such is the folly of being an artist.

Oh sure, Anderson or the Coens could have a moment in the sun a few commercial breaks earlier, but it's the producers who stand victorius at the end of the evening. It's a parable of life and the working class. The bosses celebrate the spoils of the hard work done by those beneath them.

Celebrate the writers, actors and directors...the producers don't need our applause and they don't deserve it either. They already have our money.

Reluctantly I predict the outcomes and analyze where I went wrong. I labour over the idea of who truly deserves it and who should have stayed at home.

All opinions aside, No Country for Old Men was the best movie nominated, but I'm no elitist.

#170: Dawn of the Dead

2009-02-27T11:41:00.006-04:00

Dawn of the Dead (1978 & 2004)
Written and directed by George A. Romero (78)
2004 edition directed by Zack Snyder
Starring zombies

Purists will hate me. As you can plainly see, both Dawns are mentioned and this will piss off a lot of hardcore zombie movie fans. Thankfully for me, no one reads this except people that barely care and don't let trivial things like remakes of a movie ruin their day.

Remakes are a maligned creature and I can understand that to a degree. It's a proponent of the lack of creativity in Hollywood. Why think of a new and original idea when you can remake one from the past and cash in on its name?

Some people think this is a new phenomenon. A few years ago The Ring came out with Naomi Watts. It was a North American rendition of a popular Japanese horror flick called Ringu. Since then the USA has imported several from the terrible The Eye to improving over the original with Scorsese's The Departed (was Infernal Affairs).

This is not new.

Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was released in 1954 and then remade in the States as The Magnificent Seven in 1960. The Magnificent Seven is one of the most recognizable titles in the western genre. Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars was also a remake of a Kurosawa film called Yojimbo. Cue the 1990's and Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing and you have a remake of a remake.

Kurosawa though adapted a couple of Shakespeare's plays into loose translations into a samurai motif. Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear) were essentially remakes but of plays instead of other movies. Is there any difference between an adaptation and a remake?

If no then the remake trend is certainly nothing new and you could argue Hollywood and cinema in general has never been very original and I wouldn't exactly dispute this.

Consider the following films: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, All the President's Men, L.A. Confidential, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and The Shawshank Redemption.

Each of those movies appeared in the printed medium first. And each of those movies are more or less celebrated. Even this year's best picture darling Slumdog Millionaire is based on a novel. Oh and captain fanboy, your beloved Star Wars? Yeah, Lucas was heavily influenced by none other than Akira Kurosawa. Lucas borrowed heavily from Hidden Fortress so there you have it.

The Dawn of the Dead's are so vastly different, and really the only similarity is they feature groups of people stuck in a mall fending off zombies. They both have the anti-consumerism message. Some have argued that it's more subdued and subtle in the original and I disagree. It's pretty obvious through the entire movie. The biggest difference is in the action.

The 70s version focuses more on character interaction while the remake is all about creating anxiety and tension with as many quick scares as possible. The zombies run and I have no problem with that.

Both films are fantastic in their own way. And even if you hate the remake as a whole I can't see how you can dislike the opening sequence and overall set up unless you just hate horror movies in general.

A lot of remakes are trash but so are the originals. Anyone who complains about the new Friday the 13th sullying the originals is on some crazy drugs. The originals hold no real integrity, for proof just watch part 8 again. Jason takes Manhattan is the worst horror movie I've ever watched and I saw Hellraiser: Bloodline.

It's infuriating to read message boards where movie fans bitch and complain about the lack of originality in the film industry. It's not a new thing and it will always be like this. Like any movie, watch it before you judge it and if it still doesn't cut the mustard well move on to the next movie. A remake isn't inherently a bad thing and remember a new idea committed to celluloid is not inherently a good one either.

The Auteurs + Criterion = Film-lover's heaven

2009-02-23T23:14:00.003-04:00

Just thought I'd run this by ya'll. If you like movies and like them for free then this is for you. If you know me, then you know I am a movie geek/fan/guy/maniac. You would also know that I collect DVD's from the Criterion Collection - or if you didn't, you do now.

The above image is from the Criterion website from the month of January. They have formed a partnership with The Auteurs, a blog-ish/networking site for film buffs. There has been a facebook application for some time now but when Criterion joined hands with them last fall it was indeed a fantastic union.

Now, every month, The Auteurs host a film festival of sorts. They select five or six films that fit a theme and screen them for free on their website. It's live streaming but it's high quality. This month they're showing all the Criterion titles that won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. I watched Black Orpheus tonight and it was great.

So give it a go, just start an account at The Auteurs and you're good to go.

The others screening this month:

La Strada directed by Federico Fellini
Closely Watched Trains directed by Jiri Menzel
The Virgin Spring directed by Ingmar Bergman
Mon Oncle directed by Jacques Tati
The Shop on Main Street directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos

#171: Army of Darkness

2009-02-13T15:53:00.005-04:00

Army of Darkness (1992)
Written and directed by Sam Raimi
Starring Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz, Bruce Campbell, boomstick.

Okay, one more for the road.

If you haven't read Bruce Campbell's book If Chins Could Kill do yourself a favour and pick it up. It's a funny book above all else and if you haven't already fallen victim to the great chin's persona, you will after reading it.

The first couple entries of the Evil Dead series are closer to straight up horror than anything. The second one -- and probably the most balanced -- mixes horror with wit and slapstick very well. In the third, this one, it's pretty much a full-blown comedy. Raimi and company must have realized how ridiculous this plot was and decided to play it for laughs instead of scares.

The beauty of that decision is that Campbell was given the opportunity to really shine as the smart ass who has had enough. He's a buffoon but is given the task of leading a military outfit in ancient times against armies of the dead.

"Clatto Verata N... Necktie... Neckturn... Nickel... It's an "N" word, it's definitely an "N" word! Clatto... Verata... N- "

He's such an imbecile that he basically ruins it for everyone before using his trusty high school chemistry book to learn how to make gunpowder for his shotgun and a metal hand so he doesn't have to wear a chainsaw constantly.

My friend Arlo hated this movie because of how unrealistic it was. He has since recanted his distaste for it but I don't entirely believe him. I suspect he says this so I don't berate him about it.

Seriously, this is a movie about a guy who travels back in time to become a slave and defeat a bunch of pseudo-zombies. This guy worked in a department store. Those are his credentials. If you try to take this movie seriously you are not going to like it. Shut off your mind and laugh along with the people who made it because you can tell they weren't trying to win awards. They were in it to have a good time and you gotta respect them for that.

Sure Raimi went on to direct the Spider-Man series and has built a relatively respectable resume. Campbell remains in obscurity for the most part. Some people out there would recognize him only as the sleazy guy from those Old Spice commercials. While amusing, they don't really showcase his greatness.

Movies like this and Bubba Ho-Tep where he plays a geriatric Elvis in an old age home fighting a Mummy with a penchant for cowboy attire may be silly but they are entertaining and endlessly re-watchable. He's got a wonderful screen presence and it's amazing that he never broke through into the mainstream. Sure he was on Xena and he had his own show in that vein Jack of All Trades, but he is barely on the periphery of Hollywood.

Two of my favourite performances he gave were as guest spots in Homicide: Life on the Street and The X-Files. In the former he plays a cop who takes matters into his own hands when the law doesn't work to his favour. It's a two-parter aptly called Justice.

In the latter he's a demon burying his newborn children in his back yard. To give any more detail would be huge spoilers. It's in the sixth season and I suggest you check it out. Incidentally, Campbell was considered as Duchovny's successor in season 8 but the part of John Doggett eventually went to Robert Patrick (T-1000) instead possibly due to Campbell's memorable appearance a couple seasons earlier.

Army of Darkness is a fine flick. It's a perfect matinee or midnight movie. I think I've seen it more at midnight in theatres than I have at home. No matter where I see midnight movies advertised, this is always in the circulation. It's well worth it and it's always packed.

A few years ago, a girl I knew was throwing a costume party based on heroes. It was short notice or I put it off to the last second, either scenario is plausible. My roommate at the time had a plastic toy chainsaw and my friend DP had a toy shotgun. I put two and two together, gelled my hair and donned a blue shirt, jeans and work boots. It wasn't spot on, but it was pretty good for two hours of work.

Judge for yourself:
The movie is a crowd pleaser. You can't go wrong by showing to any group of people unless they're scientifically oriented like ole Arlo. Suspension of disbelief is not a dirty concept. Some movies are meant to be true-to-life experiences. This one is pure unabashed escapist fun.

It's also one of the most quotable movies ever. That sounds like hyperbole, but man it's up there.

Time to channel our inner vagabonds!

2009-02-07T12:35:00.004-04:00

This may be the final entry in February. The only writing I plan on doing over the next couple days is my long form piece on the Carleton FreePress. It's my final assignment before my university career at long last is over.

So why does this spell the end of the month so soon?

I'm glad you asked!

Horatio and I, who have been planning a trip of some sort for a while now, are going to be heading down the dusty trail to the United States. With a stop in Pittsburgh to see Ben Folds we will then continue to Nashville, Tennessee for a couple days before returning north. It should be a week-long odyssey.

Upon my return I will need to finish the final copy of my long form and then I will be whisked away to Montreal to see the Canadiens host the Sharks.

It's a whirlwind of activity that is needed because isolation and staying in one place adhering to a strict schedule of repetition is extremely inane and unfulfilling. So read a book. Watch some movies. Write a song. Fill the time in whatever productive way you can.

Cheers,

JCW

#172: Election

2009-02-05T14:07:00.005-04:00

Election (1999)
Written and directed by Alexander Payne
Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Chris Klein and terrifying high school memories.

High school for some reason has garnered the reputation as being the best part of our lives. If that's true then we should all commit mass suicide now. If it doesn't get any better than the rumour-filled, status-oriented, filtered information session of secondary education then the world is a much worse place than imaginable.

For some high school is legendary. Hanging championship sports banners or performing in a musical or play are cathartic experiences. But en masse, high school is training wheels for life, or at least it should be. High School is not inherently better or worse than any other part of life, it just is a part of life.

High school politics though serve very little purpose. When elected to student council you aren't given any real responsibility just the image that you do. You see, when you get chosen to lead your fellow students it's nothing more than a status symbol.

In the tenth grade I ran for the position of second vice president. Yeah, that actually existed. Every grade had to be represented in the student council, except the freshmen. A friend of mine was running unopposed until I decided on a whim to have a go at it. My platform was to bring paper towels back to the bathrooms instead of those awful blow-dryers that do not dry your hands at all.

I won, not sure why, but I won. My promise went unfulfilled and the meetings were boring as hell. The VP2 didn't actually do anything except attend a weekly noon-hour meeting. Since I didn't want to resign -- I am far too stubborn for that -- I beat the system.

During these dreadful meetings where my position was to sit there quietly and not disrupt the proceedings I read the charter of the school government. What I discovered allowed me to keep my position and only occasionally attend the meetings where all I did was occupy space in a chair.

The charter stated that you could only be removed from your position if you missed three consecutive meetings. Since the Clinton scandal was in full swing at the time, it would have been embarrassing to be impeached for anything less than fellatio. Considering our faculty advisor, this was not exactly a pleasing option. She likely would have feasted on my soul instead. Instead I would skip two meetings and attend the third. This infuriated the advisor and my soul shrank deep within my person out of a great and rational fear of consumption. Bravely I pointed out the loophole and she could do nothing more.

This rule has likely changed and if there's any justice in this world, the amendment would be named after me.

We didn't have a Tracy Flick at our helm. No one really cared because there was nothing at stake. There were no real real responsibilities. It's just another effort at sheltering the youth before letting them figure out all the troublesome things on their own once they go to university. For years, university was peddled without even any coaching about why. Just go to the U of your choice and you'll figure it out. Great advice. Because our hopes and dreams are of no real substance supposedly.

No, this is not a rant against teachers. They have a thankless position for the most part and much of what they try to do is greeted with apathy and sometimes hostility. How can we expand the youthful minds if books like Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are banned or requested to be banned? The whole protectionist attitude when it comes to our children does more harm than good. It's time someone actually thought of the children instead of shouting "won't someone think of the children"?

Give kids responsibility. Give them a voice. Sure, they'll screw up but that's the point. Failure is not the end of the world, and in many ways it's very beneficial.

I just realized I merely speculated for the most part here. I grew up in the system and only now recognize the flaws I encountered. So if it's a bit disorganized and lacking references then I think that kind of proves my point in a way...

AQ REDUX: Top 10 Movies of 2007

2009-02-02T20:36:00.006-04:00

I don't know why I make top ten lists. Hell it's a mystery to me why I made the top 200 movies list. Boredom is likely. Obsession is also a possibility. But it's flawed because my opinions are fleeting. My list below of the top 10 movies of 2007 has certainly changed, notably at the top.

Zodiac (pictured above) is my top film from that year. I can watch it over and over again even though it clocks in at around 3 hours. David Fincher is a movie making maven. While Benjamin Button is getting awards attention this year, it was Zodiac that really woke me up to his genius puppetmaster skills. His early flicks like Seven, The Game and Fight Club all worked as entertaining exercises of style and suspense. What he achieved with Zodiac was a more mature and engaging story. He took a tale set in reality and through meticulous attention to detail was able to essentially reproduce San Francisco in the late 60s and early 70s.

Don't get me wrong, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood deserve the praise they received and continue to be showered it. And when I wrote the following piece, I hadn't yet seen the PT Anderson epic of power and greed or a couple others. My revised list is as follows:

1. Zodiac
2. No Country for Old Men
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Grindhouse
5. Into the Wild
6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
7. Once
8. Hot Fuzz
9. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
10. Superbad

Some changes...some the same...

Top 10 movies of 2007
by Jason Wilson

1. No Country for Old Men
2. Zodiac
3. Grindhouse
4. Into the Wild
5. Once
6. 3:10 to Yuma
7. Charlie Wilson's War
8. Hot Fuzz
9. American Gangster
10. Superbad

Once again I am embarrassed to submit my top ten list of films from the previous calendar year. Why? I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick or as I like to refer to it: the cinema sewer.

I feel cheated as a fan of artistic film I was unable to see Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. A friend of mine caught it on a whim on his way through Presque Isle, Maine. Yes, some rinky-dink theatre in small town Maine has a leg up on Fredericton when it comes to independent releases.

Word of mouth in Fredericton, or rumours, informed me that the reason Empire Theatres didn't bring The Assassination of Jesse James is because the powers that be figured it wouldn't be a draw. The reasoning makes sense, but not for this particular film. Beyond starring Brad Pitt, it was touted as an award front-runner well before it was released anywhere (didn't win much but ah well).

The theatre can't use genre as an excuse either because both 3:10 to Yuma and No Country for Old Men can be slotted next to it as a western. Jesse James is a beautifully filmed picture with subtle performances and a nuanced story. It's not a classic duster. It's more like a thinking man's western*, something that may scare theatre bosses. Complexities equal fewer ticket sales, or so they think. Balls.

Chances of seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood are slim**. Daniel Day-Lewis gives another wonderful performance in a long line of powerhouse acting and Anderson is quickly climbing the ladder of film auteurs. This is not enough for Empire. Instead the same old re-hash like One Missed Call gets a slot. Kudos.

New Brunswick has never been a great place for film lovers. DVD and downloading are the only avenues for most indies. The Monday Night Film Series at Tilley Hall is a good shot, but many of the selections shown are available on DVD soon after or even before a screening. We get the shaft and every year it's the same old story.

What Fredericton needs is an independent movie house that mirrors the Empire-owned Oxford Theatre in Halifax. It's a one-screen theatre hosting indie releases through the week and midnight showings of classics and obscure foreign films on the weekends. Imagine, instead of going to the bars, you have the option to see a night of kung-fu movies for five or ten bucks! Variety, after all is the spice of life.

Chances of this happening are next to nil because there is no real area accesible to a large number of people that's big enough for a theatre. Who has the money to fund such a project and who can get the rights from film companies to screen the movies? Certainly not this semi-student raped by poverty and loan payments.

It's a pipe dream and the only way to keep me in Fredericton for any considerable time after graduation (even then). The routine in the city is the same week in and out. The music scene goes in phases of one style or another and the same bands seem to drop in on their war elsewehere. As nice as the art gallery is it's not going to warrant weekly visits. It's a once in a while thing.

Film can offer more than a night of entertainment. It can be a prelude to in depth conversations regarding the themes of what was viewed. Give it time, and no longer is the film the subject of the conversation but what it represents is.

My top film of the year, the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men left an odd taste in many viewers' mouths. For much of the film it is a straightforward chase story that suddenly evolves into much more. The intricate nature of the film's final moments are easy to construe as ambiguous, but instead they reveal more about the nature of life, acceptance and choice. It also sheds light on the meaning of the title of the film.

At least Empire had the sense to screen it although a few weeks later than expected. No film came close all year (d'oh!). It is perfection on film and possibly the Coens' best film***.

2008 begins and it will likely go a similar path in our Capital city. Empire will screen a loud, obnoxious series of action movies while neglecting the artistic and innovative. Who can really blame them though? Movies are all about escaping, not thinking...

Balls.

* Edited phrasing to be direct because my hypotheses about Jesse James were correct.

** There Will Be Blood came to Fredericton about a week before the Oscars so I was wrong. I saw it in theatres and it did not disappoint.

*** Okay, so I jumped the gun. It's a great film but it's not perfection on celluloid. It's not the Coens' best but it is one of them. Love the film, one of the few to improve on the source material but it doesn't keep me as engaged on repeat viewings like Zodiac does.

#173: F for Fake

2009-02-02T15:13:00.005-04:00

F For Fake (1974)
Written and directed by Orson Welles
Starring Orson Welles and abundant mind-fuckery

"Illusion Michael! A trick is something a whore does for money...or cocaine."

Guys like David Blaine and that hair metal wannabe Criss Angel have it wrong. Magicians or illusionists need a little more charisma than the rock of Gibraltar, though what a charming rock it was. They are forcibly serious and always have a look of smug constipation on their faces. Who cares if they fool you? They're dicks.

Okay, so Orson Welles seems like a codger. A fat, bloated, drunken coot of a man whose final screen credits included the voice of Unicron in the Transformers movie. But he was responsible for one of the biggest and most successful illusions of all time.

Imagine a time when radio was the pinnacle of home entertainment. One day you're minding your own business and you've never even heard of H.G. Wells (no relation) before. Then a report comes flying in saying the world is being attacked by invaders from another planet. Hoo boy, yeah, that happened. He adapted War of the Worlds to the radio in a much more effective manner than Spielberg did to film. Spielberg is a master of cinema, but that movie was awful.

F for Fake was the last film Welles directed. It's a pseudo-documentary about liars and the lies they tell. Within the film, one of the subjects he tackles is a complete lie itself. So even the documentary is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. It's absorbing.

Never before this film had I heard of Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian born art forger. It's said in the film that at any given time in some of the most prestigious art galleries in the world, his forgeries -- many of which were Picasso reproductions -- were on display instead of the original. He would don a disguise and an alias to peddle his forgery, selling it to the gallery for a dishonest buck.

The sad part is he was never able to make it as an original artist despite attempting to quit the forgery racket to make an honest living. These attempts were unsuccessful.

Clifford Irving, another liar of a different colour, wrote a biography on Hory. Funny because his fakery centered on the biography he wrote on Howard Hughes...except the billionaire never spoke with him. This was chronicled in the film The Hoax with Richard Gere.

Welles plays with the smoke and mirrors and asks the audience to reflect about what it has witnessed. Do you believe everything you're told? Do you believe everything you see? How trusting are you that the truth is being presented at all times?

The most ballsy thing Welles did was admit that he was lying to the audience. This movie is an illusion masked as a documentary as much as it is a documentary about illusion. It's a head scratcher and probably my favourite work in Welles' directorial catalogue. Even moreso than Citizen Kane.

Ordered it over a year ago. The premise was intriguing even though at first I thought it was a work of fiction told in modern abstract style. When the documentary aspect was revealed the further I read on it, I knew it had to be mine.

Watched it for the first time with good ole Arlo at his parents' place on a cold December afternoon. Despite the lack of alcohol or other mind-altering substances this was the type of film that makes the room spin into surreality. When the smoke clears, what was real and what was fake? Is the film itself a forgery?

Check it out for yourself. Revealing the mystery to be another mystery is half the fun.

Procrastination...

2009-02-01T12:41:00.002-04:00

...is a devilish thing.

The book is coming along. We've surpassed 110 pages now and part one should be finished this week. We will then edit the hell out of it and send it to the agent. Regardless of how that goes, we'll finish the book as quickly as possible after that. Soon I will get my hands on the video from November when we did the reading of the prologue and I'll post it here for your enjoyment.

Trying to figure out the future. Applying for internships because jobs are hard to come by. Might flee the country in a couple months.

Pittsburgh and Tennessee in under 2 weeks.

That is all for now. Time to stop procrastinating. A full entry will be posted tomorrow.

Folly at a midnight movie

2009-01-24T17:35:00.003-04:00

At the midnight showing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last night in Fredericton, embarrassment seemed inevitable. Obviously, like most others in attendance, I was a bit shy from interaction unlike my normal self and this played into my brief and slightly humourous downfall.

95.7 FM employs bastards. They organized this wonderful event and invited 10 people from the packed crowd to stand at the front like a firing squad execution to answer trivia questions about the film. I was the final contestant on the stage after much prodding from Horatio, Veda, et al.

However they asked each of us randomly after appearing to start chronologically from left to right. Imagine the stress of knowing the death blow is imminent but it could strike all around you first. This was the trivia - and mind altered - equivalent.

Question 1: Who directed the film?

Easy answer. Terry Gilliam. The contestant didn't know and was given a consolation prize.

Question 2: What hotel was the police convention at?

Little trickier. But I knew it was the Flamingo. Contestant numero dos also swung and missed and got sent packing.

The woman from 95.7 FM looked down the row at me and said "it's looking pretty good for you on the end now isn't it?"

Being the idiot that I am I decided to wade in this great fortune by smiling and giving her the thumbs up. Had I stood still, ignored her attention perhaps they would have continued along the beaten path. But no, instead I got cocky.

So the big bald bastard she works with got the idea, and it was clear in his eyes that his intentions were to eliminate me swiftly. He wanted to wipe the smug look off my face. It was as though he were thinking "oh so you think you know Fear and Loathing huh? You gonzo wannabe hack? Well you get question number 3 then since you think you're so good."

Question 3: What kind of dessert does Dr. Gonzo order at the diner?

Shit.

"Oh man," I said.

"Oh man," the bald bastard replied in a mocking tone.

After an asinine back and forth where I felt like a lobotomy patient being encouraged by equally stupid individuals, I said "pie."

"Yes, but what kind of pie?"

Fucker.

"Um, banana cream?"

"Oh so sorry," he said. He wasn't.

It was lemon pie...lemon. The smug Mr. Clean with tats handed me a card from Jumbo video promising a free rental with a paid rental. Great. An offer to save money if only I actively spend some first. That makes sense.

Question 4: Who wrote the book?

Somehow, the person on stage didn't know and received a resounding chorus of boos. She deserved it. It's not a bad thing to go see the movie in theatres if you have never heard of Thompson, that's fine. But why take part in a trivia contest about Fear and Loathing if you have no proper frame of reference to what the hell is going on? That person probably would have said lemon...

Semi-joking, I started complaining about the coupon Butterbean gave me when I said "yeah, and it's only good until...six days ago." They gave me an expired coupon.

"Why not just punch you in the stomach?" Isaac said.

I'll have my revenge on this one. The hosts from the radio station said next month they'd be showing Ghostbusters on March 20*. First of all, next month is February so there's that. Second, I know Ghostbusters like the back of my hand. I'm going to step up to the plate and show Stay Puft who to call when it comes to film trivia...

...lame? Yes. Somewhat pathetic? Sure. But hey, pride is a silly thing in general anyway.

*Horatio has updated me on the status of the next midnight movie. Apparently, they did intend to say February 20. It is next month and good old Faustus and I are going to be somewhere between Tennessee and Pennsylvania on our return trip. You've cornered me again world!

AQ REDUX: The boys of $ummer

2009-01-19T09:24:00.011-04:00

<-- Me enjoying a Fenway Frank

Baseball is a huge part of my life. The following column was first published in the Aquinian in September 2007. I was supposed to write a pop culture column for the arts section but this is what my brain churned out. So instead of picking up where I left off, a sports wrench was thrown into the spokes of my arts column.

It had to be this way, it was in my head and it needed to be put on paper. So I did what anyone would do...I wrote it at work. My history of finding ways to kill time while working at a call center would fill a book -- a mostly uninteresting book, but a book nonetheless. That summer I had ordered MLB.TV, which allows you to watch every out of market baseball game live on the internet.

The call center scheduled me for a series of 5pm to 2am shifts. Around 10, all the authority figures left the asylum to the inmates. Probably because anyone of importance wouldn't agree to work such insane hours, but us mere peons grateful for their generosity of employment had no choice.

Being a nightowl as is, it wasn't a big deal to me especially since I had a corner cubicle where I could twist my monitor to face the wall. Facebook was blocked by the server but mlb.tv wasn't. So my late night shifts consisted of watching west coast teams like Oakland, LA, San Francisco, etc. Other than that I usually read at my desk once I realized I wasn't going to stay much longer. As long as the job was done -- and done right -- then what's the big deal?

Call centers and most menial jobs put the fear into the employees mostly because they'll hire anyone and anyone they hire is completely expendable. It's much more stressful an atmosphere than playing baseball for a living. Sure, the media scrutiny is insane but so is the payroll. So the amount you get paid should be somewhat relative to the interest the media pays to you, I guess. However, if the media didn't care about baseball, or sports in general, would the players make less? It's spiraled so far out of control now that my column probably seems a bit dated... judge for yourself.

The boys of $ummer
by Jason Wilson

The crack of the bat; the pop of the mit; the smell of the grass blades kicked up in the air. The elements of baseball fill me with self-awareness and the uncanny realization it is summer.

Since I was young this game has represented a peace of mind that drifts to the outer reaches of consciousness for most of the year. Watching Joe Carter hit that fabled home run for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1993 World Series -- TOUCH EM ALL JOE! -- remains one of the most pleasant memories of my childhood. Baseball represents more than a simple sport or a game. It represents joy, purity and innocence...or at least it used to.

"If you build it, he will come". Ray Kinsella heard these words whisper through the wind to his ear while walking through his corn field on his Iowa farm. An image of a baseball diamond appeared in the middle of the field. While Kinsella didn't know why, or who exactly was speaking, he needed to build it, he needed to follow the voice's advice.

When the field was built, the "ghost" of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson appeared in the field and was soon followed by others from baseball's yesteryear. Most notably along with Jackson were the other eight members from the 1919 Chicago Black Sox banned for life for cheating.

This is fantasy. Field of Dreams is not a testament of reality, but of what baseball has meant to North Americans for over a century. "Shoeless" Joe tells Kinsella when he first appears that he would have "played the game for food money" and even "for free" after hitting a few more balls for the first time since being banned for life. How many of today's (living) sports stars would do the same?

Somewhere along the line power and greed took hold of the sports world. Owners care more about winning than what the total is in their bank accounts. Most owners have come to the point where money is no object so they can afford the best players at whatever the cost. Free agency has put the ball in the players and agents courts to demand wages and the owners giddily pay whatever price is asked if they think a championship will soon follow.

More and more, players will hold out to demand better pay. It's painful to watch superstars like Alex Rodriguez play the game like it's a job. Yes he is getting paid the big bucks, but there is no joy in him on the field; he is all business. When Ken Griffey debuted with the Seattle Mariners in the late 80s, he was a kid and played with the verve of a boy his age. His smile represented everything baseball should. Since signing with Cincinnati (and a trade in 08 to the White Sox) before the 2000 season, his smile has faded as injuries have plagued him. The disappearance of joy is accompanied by the tainted purity of America's National pastime.

Steroids and big contracts have damaged the connection between the game and the die-hard fans. Sure, Barry Bonds has never tested positive for steroids, but his career is one of the most sscrutinized in the "steroid era" by those in the media and fans alike. Bonds breaking the home run record in 2007 should have been dramatic and celebrated. Instead it will forever be thought of hand in hand with speculation. Many label Bonds a cheater, having tainted a once-pure game -- I think Roger Clemens has done more to damage the game. Watching the allegations pile up, and the controversies mount, the innocence is gone.

There is no salary cap in baseball and there never will be. The player's association wouldn't allow it. They stand to make a killing, and why not? They retort that they travel so much and are away from their families over half the year and deserve those contracts. They have been consumed by their own celebrity and the fans and media are partially to blame along with the bottomless walleted owners. Would anyone in Major League Baseball play just to get by? The fun is lost. I love baseball, it means more to me than a sport should and yet it will potentially carry a cloud of corruption for all time.

Cue to four years ago. My dad and I sitting in the front row on the right field foul line in Fenway Park. A Fenway Frank in one hand and a beer in the other, sitting with my dad at Fenway experiencing my first Major League baseball game. A Canadian kid falling in love again with America's game seems almost blasphemous but to me it was joyful, pure and innocent. Hearing the crack of the bat, the pop of the mit and smelling the freshly cut grass brought back the magic of the game that to me at least represents the character of us.

Baseball, along with everything else now, is under a constant microscope calle the public eye. Sometimes we see beyond the looking glass into the harsh reality proving we are all human, even the baseball players we as children idolized. Even with this harsh reality it is comforting to know it can all disappear for an afternoon sitting in the stands chowing down on overpriced food and warm beer cherishing the game that has not changed much on the field in a hundred years.

On rare occasions, the magic is still there.

#174: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

2009-01-16T18:12:00.006-04:00

Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
Written and Directed by Terry Gilliam
Based on the book by Hunter S. Thompson
Starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Christina Ricci, Gary Busey, Tobey Maguire, a trunk full of narcotics.

As a student journalist it's no surprise that I am a follower and fan of Hunter S. Thompson. His fame is almost stereotypical among twenty-somethings who have a vested interest in writing, especially journalism. He represents the ideals of both creativity and telling a true-to-life story. His work is also very self-indulgent by traditional journalistic standards but that's the point. Dr. Gonzo and his specific brand of writing (GONZO!) ignores tradition and no one has or ever will do it better.

Even if the good doctor hadn't blown his brain out with a shotgun, he wouldn't be the same guy or writer as he was in the past. In fact, his columns for Page 2 on ESPN -- while amusing -- didn't quite meet the standards of his old writing.

I don't want to be an elitist. I hate it when fans of a musician or a director or a writer arbitrarily dismiss new material. The line "I liked [insert artist name here] before he/she/they were famous" is the most arrogant and self-serving line that can be uttered, especially because it is rarely followed up with any concrete argument. I was never a fan of Sugar Ray, but I'll tell you one thing, the song Fly prevented them from ever being respectable. Every single they released from there on out was exactly the same light and fluffy style. Considering Sugar Ray started with songs like Mean Machine, this change makes sense when you don't like how they progressed. Back up your arguments.

Thompson's downfall in his writing isn't as easily pinpointed and I don't even really dislike his Hey Rube columns. I discovered Thompson after his glory years because I wasn't exactly alive when he was pounding back every drug known to man. Like Mr. Lahey was the liquor, Thompson was the drugs (oversimplified...well aware).

No, I'm not a historian of his legacy and I haven't read all his work but I recognize what he represents in the world of journalism and in a way he has hurt it as well as helped. He is a cartoon character as characterized in Gilliam's film. He was a drug-addled freak who could have paved the way for a new style of writing. Instead, anyone who tries to write a stream of consciousness style is dubbed a Hunter Thompson wannabe.

Especially in school.

STU has taught us the fundamentals of writing for a newspaper. From writing leads to nut-graphs to pyramid style, etc. we have learned it. One thing the school never encouraged and likely never will is breaking convention. Or if we tried to break convention our professors cringed or started to tell us to try to write the story by the formula we had been trained with. Creativity has very little place in the news medium, or so our professors would have us believe.

But what gets attention? What is praised? Take a look at This American Life from NPR. These stories are long format, one per hour-long episode in fact. Compare that with a network newscast where every story is around the standard length of two minutes or less and you have differences. Sure, most people have wavering attention spans but the more time you have to tell a story the more in depth you can go with it.

Hunter S. Thompson wasn't quite the print equivalent to This American Life but he wasn't a run of the mill reporter either. He broke boundaries, supposedly but how many journalists have applied his style?

Robin Esrock writes a column called Gonzo Travel for Brave New Traveler. It's pretty decent especially if you like reading about adventure. It's not quite the same and I think using the word gonzo in the title is a cheap contrivance to draw in Hunter Thompson enthusiasts. But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to bring in readers, so I don't really hold that against him. (His website is called modern gonzo as well...so hey, he loves HST as well. Glad the legacy didn't go to waste)

Stream of consciousness journalism is definitely a valid form of reporting but it can't be called gonzo if it's going to exist in mainstream publications (which it likely won't anyway, so it may be silly to even throw this out there). The connotations with prolific drug use and the word gonzo prevents it from being taken seriously.

And whether you agree with recreational drug use or you abhor it, Hunter S. Thompson told some amazing stories and wrote with a tenacity and enthusiasm that isn't present in the world of journalism today. Now that is something we do need more of. Stop trying to fit the mould and write the way that feels right to you. It will only help the global journalistic community.

If anyone has a link to an archive of all his work that would be great. Also if you have examples of writers that do take the unconventional approach and do it well...let me know, I would greatly appreciate it.

* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is playing in Fredericton, NB at Empire Theatres on Friday January 23 at midnight.
** I recommend the following: The Rum Diary, Great Shark Hunt, Screwjack and Hell's Angels.

AQ REDUX: Kid A changed my life

2009-01-12T14:56:00.004-04:00

This is kind of a cheat on the whole AQ Redux idea and it's only the second posting of my history as an Aquinian columnist. I pitched the idea for my column, essentially a hodge-podge of pop-culture musings and rantings at the end of my second year at St. Thomas. We ran the one on image and coolness in the last issue of the year.

A week or so later I wrote the following piece on a whim but it couldn't really wait until the following semester to be printed. My editor, the wonderful Hiedi Irvine, helped me get in touch with Here magazine. I emailed the column to them along with my image column to give them an idea of my style. After weeks of waiting, I finally hear back with a message saying Here has enough columnists as is.

With great haste I shoot back a reply asking what they would be looking for as far as a freelancer would be concerned so I could figure out some story ideas. After an even longer wait, I finally get an email back re-iterating the fact that they don't want a columnist even though I specifically indicated that I was fine with doing straight up features. Their editor gave me a vague idea of what Here was looking for but I was so disgusted with how long it took to get a reply that I decided to work at a call center for the summer instead of write.

Anyway, for the first time ever, here is my column about Kid A by Radiohead. It's a bit self-serving, I'll admit that but hey it was a fun one to write.

Kid A changed my life
by Jason Wilson

Outside my apartment, I stood smoking a cigarette and thinking about life. More accurately I was thinking about my music collection and the limits within it. It consists of albums I have either heard too frequently and have become bored of or those that I tolerated once and have no interest in repeating.

For the first time ever -- at least since it was released -- I was compelled to listen to Radiohead's Kid A. This is not a record that is or has ever been in my possession. When it was released, people treated it as the second coming of rock music and this critical fellating it received turned me off. Why should I feel obligated to listen to (and love) an album because music critics have labeled it as the best of its kind?

Nearly seven years ago I avoided Kid A and tonight I needed to listen to it. NEEDED TO.

Luckily, I found a copu in a pile of my roommateès discs beside his stereo. Funny, I have never seen him play it.

My compulsive list-making has shielded me from many bands because I have pigeon-holed myself into my particular taste. I refused to like Radiohead -- except The Bends -- because they had been built up far too much. Radiohead seemed like a trendy choice in the late 90s spilling over to the new millenium and I never wanted to jump on that train. Now it seems safe to finally give in and objectively analyze the music.

On track three The National Anthem I realize that I am absorbed. It is a visceral experience. The tracks blend into one another unapologetically, telling a story. As the listener I have inserted myself into a Kubrickian reality where past, present and future have collided in a dreamy haze. I am not on drugs; at least not of the narcotic variety because this album -- and most good music -- is like a drug itself.

This, I realize, is why Kid A is important. It takes you on a journey. Without sounding too much like an elitist snob it needs to be said that this is a rare quality in popular music these days.

Singles drive the industry while the album offers little more than empty hooks surrounding them. An album does not need a storyline to be good, but some coherent idea of the content is welcome. The concept album is almost an archaic form of media (or is it?).

The tracks on Kid A flow together but do not imitate the rest of the record. Pop stars try to find a signature sound that sells and then create an entire album consisting of essentially one song on twelve tracks. It's a formula appealing to the lowest common denominator. Why make something that requires effort to appreciate when A Simple Plan makes "music" that is both easy to listen to and ignore?

Artists that transcend popularity from generation to generation like Bob Dylan also have a signature sound. The difference -- besides talent -- is artists like Dylan never stay in that comfort zone for very long and always push the boundaries of their art, or in other words they take risks (see: Neil Young, 1980s).

While I am not a fan of her sound, Pink portrays the image that she is not a mindless diva controlled by her producers. She seems to break the mould or at least tries to convince you she is an individual in control of her creative process. Whether this is a further ploy by the studios or an honest depiction of her is up for debate, but it is a much better image than the boy band era of the late 90s.

The music industry is safe; and by safe I also mean boring. MuchMusic and MTV no longer play uninterrupted music videos, at least not at great length. These stations employ robotic yes men and women with no personality to shill their wares. They tell people what is "cool" and what should be popular and every high-schooler in North America who wants to have a social life listens. How else can the popularity of Avril Lavigne** be explained?

People do not buy music for the music, but for the image that lies in the perception of peers. The only way to truly appreciate the music is to wait for the hype to die and then give it a go. Maybe waiting seven years to listen to Kid A is extreme, but it has provided the opportunity for the music to sink in.

The paradox this creates is by finally breaking down, it may be perceived that you were, in the long run affected by the hype machine. Maybe even more than anyone else who listened to it and discarded it within a month of the initial release. This is a valid argument.

Both angles are stubborn when all that really matters is the music, not the image. Ignoring or buying into it because of what the album represents socially amounts to nothing, and I learned this the hard way.

My Kubrickian fantasy of a dream-world where time overlaps continues through the second half of Kid A and I can't help but wonder what my thoughts would have been had I listened to it in 2000. The important thing is my record collection needs some diversity and my own copy of Kid A will soon make an appearance.

* It is still not in my collection but I do have my old roommate's copy of it, though I'm not sure if he's aware of it. I have however seen Radiohead in concert. This past summer with a few friends I travelled to Montreal for a beautiful show with the opening act Grizzly Bear.

** Walking through the Regent Mall a little while back, I think it was the end of summer just before school, I couldn't help but laugh at a poster in the store. There was this cautionary poster about staying in school. Of all people to be on the poster was Avril Lavigne.

I said to the clerk, "it's a bit ironic when a millionaire high school dropout is telling kids to stay in school."

The clerk kind of chuckled probably wishing the customers would all just go away quietly without sharing their inane observations. I remember those days well.

#175: Say Anything...

2009-01-09T21:04:00.005-04:00

Say Anything... (1989)
Written and directed by Cameron Crowe
Starring John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Lili Taylor

John Cusack is the man. This is an indisputable fact. He is a legend in 80's culture and not only from Cameron Crowe's directorial debut either. Sure, his Lloyd Dobler singlehandedly made every woman under 30 swoon in 1989 -- and most men too, though most won't admit it. He continued through the 90s and while his awesomeness has somewhat cooled in the last couple years, don't be surprised if Cusack happened to rebound.

While he had already developed a reputation from films like Better Off Dead, The Sure Thing and Eight Men Out it was Say Anything that cemented his status as not only a hearthrob but something more than a one-dimensional character in a film. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him and whatever other cliche about lust and envy you can think of. Lloyd Dobler was a unique character.

Dobler represents the best and worst of us at all times. He's a hopeless romantic and he breaks convention -- kickboxing is his biggest ambition -- and yet he's a bit too much at times. Why he works so well is because he isn't perfect, he's trying to find his way just as we all are both romantically and in our own individual life's purpose. He's almost like Ferris Bueller only less cartoony and less Broderick.

I didn't grow up in the 1980's so my hyperbole about the Dobler effect stems mostly from contact with women in more recent years. It's a popular choice of a film among the circle of female friends I have obtained in solely platonic fashion over the years. Like Dobler, I have a vague idea of what I want to accomplish in life but I can't quite figure it out 100 per cent.

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. "

Admirable, but what does that really say? Is it a stance against capitalism in general or is it just the infantile musings of an immature and naive man? My own opinion changes by the day. Some days I don't think pursuing any kind of career is in my best interest. Who wants to be bogged down to do one thing every day or every week for the rest of his or her days? Obviously there are few days where every day is exactly the same but the mundane nature of office work isn't my cup of tea. In a sea of bureaucratic jobs, this way of thinking limits one in terms of financial stability.

My friend CT says he has seen the light. He has done the anti-establishment thing for years. He grew the mohawk, spiked it in the air, wore torn clothes and wrapped a dog collar around his neck. He was what many would refer to as a freak, he broke the mold.

Now he wants to sell out. His words, not mine.

In his point of view, the life he's led hasn't been the most comfortable. Living from paycheck to paycheck and taking the jobs that will hire someone who would scare most everyone above the age of 40 not named Iggy Pop just got tiring.

He hasn't quite discovered where he wants to go, but he knows he doesn't want to be broke for the rest of his life and compromise seems to be his only choice. But at the same time his goal and my own is vague, just like Dobler's.

I don't need the biggest television possible and I don't need a fancy car. I don't need a big house or a house of any kind. All I need is a method to pay for food, pay off my student loan debt and have fun with my friends. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

Sadly, most jobs starting out of university don't exactly light up the old bank account. I'd be shocked if any journalist fresh out of university is making any more than $15/hour. That might seem like a lot, but it would be difficult to pay off debt, eat properly and still have a social life on those wages while paying rent. I don't know about most of you but living with my parents until I'm 30 is not an option.

So as a journalist I might be forced to either freelance or take an internship to work my way up in the writing world. I understand climbing the ladder but starving yourself to do that is unreasonable. You likely have to work a second job and even then it might not be enough.

No, money doesn't buy happiness but it's not quite the root of all evil either. Falling in love would be wonderful and so would having enough money to live happily ever after. To cap it all off is it all that selfish to want to like what I end up doing to make ends meet? Is that just too much of a pipe dream? I sure hope not.

I might have no choice but to sell out...problem is, like the affable Lloyd Dobler and my friend CT I have no idea who to sell out to.

AQ REDUX: Thirst is nothing, image is everything.

2009-01-07T20:51:00.008-04:00

Going to St. Thomas University has been a mixed bag. Through a strike and some course requirements (fine arts credit) and lackadaisacal professors (not all) there have been some bumps in the road.

Rarely, I have contributed actual pieces of journalism to the school newspaper, the Aquinian -- or AQ as it is known in hipster circles and the cover of the paper itself. Luckily I have been able to weasel my way into the position of columnist.

Arts editors have for whatever reason given me a forum to ramble on about whatever pops into my head. I am in the process of finding copies of each of the columns I've written over the last few years and will be posting them here for your reading pleasure. I think there's one that was never published, but it will also make the grade.

Since this is the last semester at the great school of St. Thomas, it seems fitting to make this my requiem of my time spent there.

Thirst is nothing, image is everything...
by Jason Wilson

I am not cool.

The reason I am not cool is not because I lack certain qualities that create "cool." Instead, I see cool as nothing more than an abstract concept, unattainable by everyone...even the cool.

High school is a time where the segregations of social cliques hits a peak. You join the group that most closely resembles who you are on the exterior. If you have long dark hair, listen to Marilyn Manson (so 90s) and wear eyeliner...you're a "goth". If you play sports, wear polo shirts with an alligator on them (I give Lacoste a hard time), you're a "jock." If you wear vans or airwalks with baggy pants you're a "skater" even if you don't own a skateboard or have the dexterity and balance to operate one.

In each group (several go unmentioned, including sub-groups of the aforementioned) a different definition of "cool" is created and interpreted. If you don't belong, well you're uncool.

University and alternately, the working world does it in a different fashion. You strive to meet like-minded individuals you relate to on a conversational basis, but only if they wear something tasteful and to your liking.

When you meet someone, what do you talk about? The conversations tend to be simplistic and open because no one wants to be alienated and you don't want to alienate everyone you meet. Most, maybe...but not all. Simplistic equals common and common equals accessible and accessible equals popular.

What movies do you like?

What bands do you listen to?

What sports do you watch?

Books, television, celebrities, video games and products of the like all work as ice breakers and if you agree with the people you meet, the idea that that particular person you just met is cool sticks with you. If you disagree, you have no reason to extend the relationship.

Sprite lied. Their old slogan was "image is nothing, thirst is everything" and it had to be a conscious lie. It would have professional athletes like Kobe Bryant making mad dunks and cooling down with a bottle of Sprite with the label pointed perfectly at the camera. Kobe drinks Sprite and shoots threes, you can too if you buy our product!

Yes, it constantly said the opposite of what the images said and that's probably why the campaign succeeded as much as it did. It tricked people into buying the product by acknowledging the truth that Sprite would no sooner make you the next Kobe Bryant than consuming enough LSD to kill an elephant would make you the next Hunter S. Thompson or Aldous Huxley.

The pictures, however, give that glimmer of hope that maybe...just maybe you could be the exception to the rule. If you drink -- and buy -- just the right amount of Sprite then you will make the NBA and come up short for the MVP just like Kobe does every year (note: this column originally ran in spring 2007. Kobe won the NBA MVP in 2008). I wouldn't know. I've always preferred 7Up.

The image you portray, whether you do it by drinking carbonated sugar-water or if you dress like a hipster will directly and indirectly determine your social status. It doesn't matter if you're nice or a huge prick but what you look like and say.

Are you cool? Probably not because cool is not tangible. It is broad and abstract. A party girl once told me that I seemed like the kind of guy who would rather sit at home on a Friday night and read a book instead of heading out to one of the many trashy bars in Fredericton. I know she wanted to make a cutting jab at what she thought to be my lifestyle but instead I took it as a compliment.

When Lester Bangs says "I'm always home, I'm uncool" to William Miller in Almost Famous, I see myself. Granted, I am not the publisher of my own music magazine (SOMEDAY!) but I can relate to that aspect of the character.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all influenced by advertising and the ethos of image. We all portray an image and many will label you as "cool" of "uncool." Ask those people to define what they mean and a common response will be "cool" and "uncool." They are self-defining words, so how can they represent anything real?

"Oh, you just know cool when you see it" is bullshit or maybe I just haven't seen it, especially when I look in the mirror. That's not a bad thing.

Now excuse me, I need to take my Tommy's out of the dryer.

*I took the liberty to re-write this instead of copy and paste directly. It's mostly the same with some of the tense cleaned up. It turns out my schooling actually has taught me a thing or two.

#176: Thank You For Smoking

2009-01-02T13:45:00.007-04:00

Thank You For Smoking (2005)
Directed and Written by Jason Reitman
Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley
Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, David Koechner, Cameron Bright, William H. Macy, J.K. Simmons, Rob Lowe, Katie Holmes, Sam Elliott, Adam Brody and Robert Duvall.

It has been four weeks since my last cigarette. My quitting expedition has so far been a resounding success. Does that mean I no longer want the taste and feeling only a death-dart can achieve? Not at all...in fact I want one every day and most hours and minutes of those days.

You can call it addiction if you want, though I would never label it as such. Smokers don't only smoke because of an inherent need to fill their lungs with tar and a darkness that eats at the very core of their beings. No, smokers tend to enjoy smoking...believe it or not.

Why?

Cigarettes are murderers. They are in no way good for you and can be of no conceivable benefit in the health and well-being of your person. It's easy for non-smokers or former smokers to spout that rhetoric...and well it's true. Smoking does not improve your lifestyle or your breathing. It eats away at your wallet worse than your lungs and in most public places you turn into an outcast.

Smoking, while unhealthy, gave me an outlet...a common connection with other people of the same ilk. Working at the paper this past summer, whenever a bulk of us needed to get away from the office without leaving the work premises, CC and I would just bolt out the back door, light up a couple nails and commiserate about the day or talk about golfing or poker.

Anyone who says smoking is good for you is an idiot...but no one would say that. Non-smokers though seem to think that smokers have no idea about the risks involved in smoking. Far from it. Most every smoker I have come into contact with has alluded to the fact that he or she needs to quit. It doesn't mean that person will, but to think smokers somehow missed the life lesson that sucking a dark cloud of poison into your lungs is bad for you...well come on. Uppity non-smokers need to pull their heads out of their asses.

What I've discovered is that harrassing smokers to quit will not accomplish a thing. Usually when someone tells a smoker they should quit, it comes across as some kind of sanctimonious sermon. Self-inflicted death may be the price smokers pay, let them do it to themselves peacefully without any further pain. If someone is going to quit, he will likely do it on his own terms...unless money is involved.

Thank You For Smoking has an anti-smoking message but it's clever and not a morally self-righteous lecture on the perils of tobacco. In the end smoking is a choice, one that should be accepted in places where lighting up is still allowed. Like it or hate it, smokers are one dedicated lot because who else would step outside in 30-below temperature by choice for seemingly no good reason?

I like smoking, it's a fact. In August, when Horatio, Veda, Arlo and I travelled to Montreal to see Radiohead, I had been off the cigarettes for a week or so...a pretty big accomplishment. For the trip, I bought a pack of du maurier's and hit the highway smoking one after another until I had finished the pack by the time we hit the city. I bought another and I stayed with a friend who smoked like a chimney. It was fun. Smoking while driving takes the edge off and if you're driving an automatic transmission it makes the drive a little less boring and gives you something to multi-task with. Somehow I've never caused an accident.

But I do feel better since I've quit. Come May, when the bet is through and I've proven to myself and others that it can be done I may spitefully buy a pack of some cheap cigs and smoke all night. That or I may never smoke again...or maybe from time to time...who knows really? It's a habit, but unlike some people would have you believe it's not evil and it's not the end of the world if your 16-year old has a smoke. Most likely, we know the risks just as much. Does that make smokers stupid? Maybe...or maybe we're just stubborn.

* Sorry for no embedded links today...lazy and kind of busy...no just lazy
**Juno was weak. This was a better film from Reitman

#177: The Elephant Man

2008-12-26T14:23:00.002-04:00

The Elephant Man (1980)
Directed by David Lynch
Screenplay by Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren & David Lynch
Based on the books by Sir Frederick Treves & Ashley Montagu
Starring Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft and John Gielgud

If you have never felt like an outcast, you've either lived a life of privilege beyond anyone's expectations or you were too stupid to realize that things weren't always hunky-dory. In Lynch's The Elephant Man it takes the idea to the extreme physical nature of being an outcast, which makes it easier for the viewer to understand why Merrick was treated as a circus sideshow. It doesn't make it right, but because he looked so different...deformed even, his status as an outsider was sadly more believable.

In early grade school, I lived in Saint John and then Fredericton. After the fifth grade I moved to the town where I was raised through kindergarten, Woodstock (all in New Brunswick by the way). I had a lot of friends in those early days, was affable and kind and generally popular. In fact the only time there was any real rift at all was in the fourth grade when I had taken a baseball bat to school one day and accidentally hit a classmate upside the head. Needless to say, I was banned from bringing the bat back.

Returning to a place of familiarity didn't seem like a daunting task, but it was soon apparent that it wasn't a cake walk either. Shyness was never a weakness of mine, but in the sixth grade it slowly crept into my worldview. The kids were not as accepting or welcoming as I was hoping. By this time, they had their cliques and friends all locked down and had no room for a guy like me. I guess I was a sensitive child as I did end up crying once or twice due to peer criticism. It was a shock to me, how was I any different? Why was I being treated like an alien?

This isn't to say the entire school shunned me, no, I made some friends but nothing substantial. Joey was the best friend I made at the time and he was treated worse than I was. He wore jogging pants and was subjected to name-calling and taunting from classmates. If I remember correctly, the insult of choice was "grub" to indicate a child of poverty.

After the sixth grade and a few weeks before summer vacation ended I received a phone call from someone at the Woodstock Middle School where I was enrolling that fall. I had signed on for the french immersion program and it was apparently full. I had been in french immersion before and they offered to skip me a grade.

This didn't help my popularity with the classmates from a year earlier. And I wasn't exactly propelled into stardom in the eighth grade either. It was an adjustment but not entirely a bad one. Luckily I met Arlo at this time. A story we've told many times when people ask is summed up like this: I brought supplies for a project and he didn't. He mooched off me and a friendship was born. I consider him my closest friend more than a decade later.

High School was better but there was still a sense of criticism from people that didn't make any sense. Obviously every student goes through that and some say the ones dishing out the pain are the least secure with themselves of all students. The point is, this rejection from my peers helped me in the long run and it wasn't apparent until the last couple of years. I'm comfortable in my own skin and can make it on my own without the constant company of others. I still seek approval but am not devastated when I don't get it.

Merrick was hideously disfigured but was a human being underneath it all. It's a shame he was treated as such. Even the charity given on to him made him feel marginalized. He didn't want special treatment, he just wanted to be treated like a person of equal value. It is well done and is likely Lynch's most straightforward film (other than The Straight Story) and it has obvious parallel's with adolescence and the pains of growing up under the microscope of your peers.

In any case, I survived and am a better person for it. We're all outcasts, let's not make others feel that way.

Pseudo-resolution: read at least 30 books in 2009.

2008-12-20T15:09:00.007-04:00

I consider myself to be a voracious reader. I don't remember the full tally from 2007 but it was around the 25 mark. Not shabby, I thought.

Coming to the end of the year, I expect I could burn through a couple more books and I wanted to see how I did in expanding my mind through reading this year.

To my dismay, I realized I haven't read even 15 books as of today for the entire year. I have been slacking, some would say. It would be easy to blame my old job or my classes but that's hardly fair. There have been many hours of sloth-like behaviour and poker-playing online that could have been used in much better fashion.

Here's the list of what I've read:

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
It by Stephen King
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Watchmen by Alan Moore

Not a bad list. I could tentatively include The Stand by Stephen King as well as I read the second half of it this past summer. I had started it about five years ago, put it down and plum forgot about it until this summer.

Within the next day or so, The Poisonwood Bible will be complete and I'll likely move on to another to devour in the coming weeks, not sure yet what it will be.

Due to my lack of reading accomplishment -- 13 is paltry -- I am making my sole New Year's resolution. I will read at least 30 books next year. Luckily, quitting smoking does not have to be a resolution as I am two weeks into that project and have suffered no setbacks as of yet.

I am looking for suggestions of what to read in 2009. Believe me, I'll read pretty much anything. It doesn't have to be fiction, it can be politics, travel, sociology, etc. Here are a few titles I plan on reading (all for the first time...some should have been read years ago):

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Cocksure by Mordecai Richler
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

So if you have any other suggestions, please comment here or let me know in any way you can figure out.

Also, if you're looking for books to read, check out the following lists:

50 Greatest Travel Books
Books that induce a mindfuck
Time Magazine's top 100 novels

Cheers,

JCW

#178: Nightmare Before Christmas

2008-12-18T20:19:00.007-04:00

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Directed by Henry Selick
Written by Tim Burton, Michael McDowell and Caroline Thompson
Starring Danny Elfman, Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara and a slew of other voice actors.

Merry Christmas everyone! Okay, so I'm a week early but I'm sure everyone has been cramming full of Christmas movies, music and fruit-themed cookies/cake that you likely want to murder your entire family. It's a pleasant time of year.

Brace yourself for this one folks, I have never seen A Christmas Story and I have been informed of exactly how deprived that makes me. It's the go-to Christmas movie for my cousins. Their family watches it every year or did when they all lived in the same place. My family has its own rituals of staying out of each other's way while secretly wondering why everyone is so pissed off.

I get the gist of it, honestly I do. But it's now at a point where I've heard people building this movie up year after year that it would not live up to the expectations, it's impossible. Most of these people saw it when they were kids too, so they have the whole nostalgia factor working for them. I'd be seeing it for the first time through adult eyes. If I had kids of my own (crosses heart) I may have some benefit from it. As it is, I'd be a cynical twenty-something wondering why it isn't better than it is and I'd be chastised forever for not thinking it's the best Christmas movie out there. So instead of risking the backlash, I'll forever avoid watching it just in case.

That's probably really stupid, but for the most part I am not interested in Christmas any more. Santa Claus doesn't capture me in his mystique any more. In fact if I did awake to some bastard breaking into my house in the middle of the night any time of the year, bad things would happen. And since I went to a liberal arts university, I have developed an anti-materialism sentiment over the past few years. Luckily I haven't been completely poisoned by my peers as I haven't accepted Plato, Aristotle or Dante as my personal lord and saviour. Jesus Christ neither.

Here's the deal. I'm not religious, I don't have money and I don't need to stockpile a bunch of crap I don't need. The only thing that would be really beneficial to me as a gift would be a new camera. As an aspiring writer-at-large, taking your own pictures can really save time and effort. Alas, I know that isn't happening. The next best thing would be an ass load of books. I don't even really care who writes them, I'll read it. But other than that, what the hell do I need people spending money they don't have on things I don't need or even want? If it's the thought that counts then the gifts aren't necessary.

So that's where movies like Nightmare Before Christmas* and Bad Santa come in. They don't force the message of Christmas down your throat. It's there, sure but it has to be or someone will get pissed that the number one shopping (and shopper's death) season was sullied by cynicism. The only sappy Christmas movie that I can stomach** is Christmas Vacation, but the Griswold's are anything but wholesome.

Despite being a sarcastic ass hole in many respects towards people and things I deem as ridiculous, one of the best things about Nightmare Before Christmas is the soundtrack. In high school I was in musicals...yes...musicals, three of them to be exact. I couldn't skate - well I could, but I couldn't stop - and I was short so the sports scene wasn't very welcoming.

In my senior year I finally got a semi-prominent role. We did Jesus Christ Superstar and I starred as Pontius Pilate. On the Friday night show - the third of four - I took the stage with bravado for my first song singing about a dream. So Pilate had a vision in his sleep that Jesus would come and he (Pilate) would end up being responsible for his death.

Midway through the song I've already performed twice - not counting rehearsals over the previous two months - I freeze. My whole family chose to come on Friday for some damn reason and they see their stocky Pilate crash into the side of the stage more or less. The video, which has long since been lost, went in for the close up at the moment of truth. My eyes glazed over as I was obviously trying to find my spot. With the camera still on close-up (bastard cameraman should have gone wide!) I looked down into the front row where the director of the play was watching in horror. I smiled at her and shrugged.

This whole debacle lasted maybe thirty seconds but it felt like an eternity. I found my place, finished the song and stomped backstage cursing up a storm. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to turn the microphone off.

I channeled the rage for the rest of the shows you might say. Two of my closest friends, Arlo and DP played Jesus on alternating nights. I was the only Pilate. For four nights straight I had my best friends/Jesus whipped and crucified. Old ladies looked at me like I was the devil as they left the theater.

After you've killed Jesus four times in a week, Christmas just isn't as special...

* Tim Burton did not direct this movie...please stop saying he did
**The Muppet Christmas Carol is also acceptable

#179: A History of Violence

2008-12-16T12:09:00.005-04:00

A History of Violence (2005)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Screenplay by Josh Olson
Based on the graphic novel by John Wagner & Vince Locke
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt.

Two Cronenberg flicks in relatively quick succession, score!

A History of Violence is still probably his most mainstream effort to date even though it has many of the same quirks and deadpan performances seen in most of Cronenberg's catalogue. The kids' performances were jarring but they weren't so bad to deter my overall enjoyment of the film.

It was one of those theatrical releases that you wouldn't have expected when living in Fredericton. The theatre in Fredericton in notorious for not playing independent films of any kind. Even beyond indies, the Coen Brothers were greatly ignored until Intolerable Cruelty (wha?). Fredericton's Empire Theatres didn't get The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn't There. So you can understand why I was shocked when this one came to town.

So Arlo Newton and I hit up the movies before it drifts off for the six months or so before a DVD release. I'm fine with watching a movie on DVD, but if I have the chance to see it on the big screen I will. Sure, Arlo was keen on it too but if he wasn't that wouldn't have stopped me.

Go to a movie theatre sometime and think about how many people are there all alone. There aren't many are there? I've never understood this. Back in 1997 I went to a birthday party for a friend of mine that ended up going to the movies. Kyle and his other buddies wanted to go see In and Out, otherwise known as Kevin Kline slumming it for a paycheck.

I bailed at the theatre for The Game, David Fincher's pre-Fight Club mindfuck. It was the first time I ever went to the cinema by myself and it wasn't as sad or lonely as I was expecting.

Over the years I've been looked at sideways by many people, mostly women, who find it odd that I go to the movies all by my lonesome. My reasoning is that it isn't exactly a social experience until afterwards. It doesn't work well as a date because there's no interaction except for "putting the moves" on her with the old yawn and swipe. The only differences between watching a movie at home alone and in the theatre alone are the big screen and the fact that other people can see you.

Choosing people to go to the movies with is a tricky process if you actually care about the movie you're going to see. Ask the following questions:

1) Will this person talk or constantly ask questions?
2) Will this person sit still or will he/she disrupt the theatre with antics?
3) Is this person prone to inoportune fits of laughter?
4) Does the type of movie you're planning on seeing fit into his/her realm of understanding or interest?

Believe me, these are important questions. In the end, it's the safest bet to go alone if you really want to absorb the film.

With Arlo, I knew this wasn't a problem. The guy has been my closest friend since the eighth grade and so we know each other better than most people. A couple other people may have gone with us, but Arlo and I really connected with this film.

On the walk out of the theatre we started discussing the idea of violence and whether violent tendencies can be inherited genetically or if we're more a product of the environment surrounding us. Nature versus nurture type of discussion. Also, as is plain from the trailer, Tom (Viggo) has tried to escape his past. We talked about how this could be representative of him trying to break away from what he naturally is, trying to force him to be someone else, someone better.

This brings me to the most important question when finding someone to join you on your theatrical experience: will he/she be willing to actually discuss the film or will he/she focus on only the superficialities instead of diving deeper into the subject matter?

This isn't exactly a deal-breaker and it shouldn't be. But if you find someone willing to go further with the film, it makes the experience that much better. Watching a film is so much more than mindless entertainment, or at least it can be. It's the aftermath that makes watching a movie with others worth it, it's a sense of community.

Of course if you're going to see a Michael Bay movie, all bets are off. Go with the circus, it's going to be two hours of ADHD explosions anyway and there won't be much to talk about afterward. Basically, Bay is the fast food equivalent of filmmakers. While it may be somewhat gratifying at first, by the end you realize you've made a huge mistake.

Conversely, filmmakers like Cronenberg might not be fine dining, but it certainly is an acquired taste. In any case you're likely going to get more out of it than your dirt-variety fast food assembly line. But if you're diet consists completely of McDonald's, that might be all you want and anything else is strange and terrifying. For many reasons this is depressing.

If only Horatio had been part of our lives at that point. He has a man-crush on Viggo Mortensen that dwarfs any man-crush that any heterosexual man I've ever met has ever had.

Mets = choke artists according to Hamels

2008-12-12T11:52:00.005-04:00

As the New York Daily News had shown in 2007 on the front page of their paper, the New York Mets had indeed thrown away a division lead only to miss the playoffs. History repeated itself in 2008 as once again they squandered a late season division lead. Now the lead wasn't as big as the one they let slide the year before, but still.

This week, a story that has been getting a ton of press is Cole Hamels, aka best pitcher of the Philadelphia Phillies, saying the Mets are choke artists. If this causes an uproar it's one of those head-scratchers. Mets fans know better than anyone, even Hamels, that their team is almost on par with the Cubs in terms of pathetic losers...okay, no one is even close to the Cubs losing ways.

So when the Mets saw seven...count em, seven late inning leads for pitcher Johan Santana be squandered by their bullpen this past season, they needed to adress the issue. Without so many words, GM Omar Minaya admitted they were choke artists by signing one top closer and trading for another.

Great news! Oh shit, what do you mean we only have three starting pitchers with major league experience? Uh-oh. If Johan could start all 162 games I'm sure the Mets would do fine, but sadly it's not the case. Sure Mike Pelfry started to show his potential in 2008 and John Maine can certainly toss a solid six or seven innings from time to time, but they are in trouble if they think that's enough.

Minaya has decided against pursuing any of the remaining top free agent pitchers like A.J. Burnett, Derek Lowe or Ben Sheets in lieu of either finding cheaper options or building from within the organization. One NY Post columnist thinks Lowe is still an option though, attributing it to rope-a-dope strategy. I'm not sure if this has anything to back it up or if it's just speculation.

Not to bring up ancient history, but trading Scott Kazmir all those years ago must really sting now.

The Putz trade doesn't make sense, at least not the timing of it. Sure I'm no MLB GM but there are warning signs abound in this. Putz missed a ton of time this season, and my fantasy team suffered because of it. Incidentally my other closer was Francisco Rodriguez...but I digress.

So trading for Putz raises the question of whether or not he's healthy or if he'll even be half the pitcher he was in 2007. As a mid-season acquisition it would have worked. Minaya could have monitored his progress and see if he was worth acquiring at all. Of course it appears that Putz was on the move regardless as the Detroit Tigers were pushing hard to land him. It didn't work and the Mets appear to have been forced to jump the gun.

Spending big money on relievers is a crapshoot. The Mets have had bad luck and poor performance in the bullpen for a couple years and now they overcompensate for it without addressing a glut of other problems. Other than Jose Reyes, David Wright and maybe Carlos Beltran, the team doesn't have a reliable offense. Sure, Carlos Delgado had a nice comeback year and Ryan Church when he wasn't suffering from concussions did a fine job too. Even if you count those two, the Mets still don't have a full lineup and the rotation is worse.

So Cole Hamels has every right to call the Mets out, because he's being truthful if a little malicious at the same time. It adds a little fuel to the fire and it gives Mets fans another reason to hate Philly (as if stealing two consecutive division titles wasn't enough).

If the Mets land Lowe like Joel Sherman of the Post pontificates about, then maybe my tune will change. Until then they're still the second unluckiest team in baseball.

The fine art of quitting smoking

2008-12-09T10:23:00.005-04:00

The city of Halifax is cold, rainy and some would argue pretentious in attitude. I love it there.

School had finished for the semester and being unemployed at the moment it seemed only logical to hit the road and b-line it for the port city. Ruddiger and I sat up the night before waxing philosophic about friendships and so we woke up a couple hours later than expected. We didn't make it to Halifax until after 6:00. Considering that we were only staying until Sunday morning means we have little time.

We hit up the Agricola LC where I reunited with my old friend Baron Philippe in Pinot Noir glory. After a flurry of Rock Band excitement at Chris and Bree's while downing the whole bottle of wine in a matter of an hour or so, we put on our suits and were set to hit the town.

I called a mutual friend, Travis. When he picked up I asked for him and he acknowledged that he was indeed the Travis I was looking for you.

"I'm going to punch you right in the face," I said.

"Uh..." he didn't know what to say and then I started laughing and told him who I was. I told him Ruddiger and I were in town and asked if he wanted to meet up. He asked where we were going and I told him the Pogue Fado.

"Uh, that place? No thanks. Gross."

I had never been there but figured he had good reason or had been denied by whatever lady conquest he was on at the time.

The Pogue Fado is advertised as an Irish Pub but it's a pretty poor excuse for one. The food was fine. The chicken wings were some of the best I'd had in a long time and the Guinness flowed for me. Decked in our suits, there were five of us at this time, we were having a good time. The worm turned then and there.

As I bit into a wing the music morphed into the heavy repetitive beat associated with seedy dance clubs the world over. A supposed Irish pub piping dance music in as loud as can be. Lame.

It was maddening. But we stuck it out, the food and beer was worth it to a degree, clearly we wouldn't stay the rest of the night but we figured we'd give it another hour or so.

Bree hates cigarettes, I mean she loathes them. For the last few years I have been a casual smoker who sometimes goes on a week or two long binge. Basically there were days I didn't smoke and there were days I smoked at least once an hour while I was awake.

By Friday I was in the midst of one of these extended binges where I smoked regularly. I hadn't bought a pack in quite a while but I had mastered the art of bumming. Either that or my friends are just very generous people.

After a few beers and that bottle of wine from a couple hours earlier I was feeling boisterous.

"I bet you I can quit smoking right now. I'll go the next six months without a smoke, guaranteed."

Bree was hesitant. She looked around and asked Ruddiger and company if I smoked a lot. He said I did and he wished he had taken that action.

"How much?" one of them asked...remember the Guinness and the wine.

"$100 each on the condition that I get to have one more before I drop them."

They agreed but no one we were with smoked or had smokes on them. Ruddiger did occasionally much like me. He saved it mostly for when he was driving.

I jumped from my seat and left the bar for the cold and bitter street. The first person I saw smoking was a husky guy right out the front door to the right. He was huddled against the wall and I figured I'd give it a go.

"Excuse me, could I grab a smoke off ya?"

He looked at me and smiled. "For sure you can, sure." He dragged it out in what I thought was a Scottish accent. He gave me a cigarette.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Glasgow man. Working the docks here."

"How do you like Halifax?"

"Oh man it's a right good town, reminds me a lot of Glasgow."

Of course this is the best I can do to decipher what his exact words were as I was inebriated and he was Scottish. Good chap, name of John. We shot the shit for a while, I told him about being an out of work writer and he humoured me, which I appreciated. We went our separate ways and my last cigarette has a story behind it. A brief one, but a story nevertheless.

While I was outside, Ruddiger had gone to the bathroom. On his way back to the table he tells me a group of guys in one of the booths he passed had called him a fag. If you know Ruddiger, you know that a few years ago he would likely have stopped in his tracks turned with a sly smile and shot some choice words back at these douches. Instead he returned to the table without causing a scene, he was the better man, matured...it's somehow depressing but he did the right thing.

The dance music turned into a cover band playing radio hits from the 90's. We left and I haven't touched a cigarette yet. Sure it's early, but it's a step in the right direction.

#180: Night of the Living Dead

2008-12-07T17:49:00.005-04:00

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Written and Directed by George Romero
Starring a bunch of people you've never heard of

I'm not what you'd call a horror fan. Don't get me wrong, every genre has something worth offering but there is so much crap to sift through in the world of horror it's almost not worth trying. Luckily for me, my friend Isaac went through all that trouble so I didn't have to.

Video Stop, the same place my folks rented $1.00 seven-day rentals, is where he lurked. See, along with a ton of classics, Video Stop also seemed to stock-pile every awful horror movie known to man. And he kept going back for more.

Because of our friendship, I developed a knowledge of horror somewhat against my will but in the end it was worth it. If a horror movie was good he'd watch it again, if it wasn't he would just warn me against the real terror behind it...that it was a complete waste of time. Time we wouldn't get back. The horror...

He's a horror nut. For a while he had every intention on becoming the next Romero or Sam Raimi. At the time I had my sights set on the marquee. And seeing how he could have become the next master of horror I figured I'd be his Bruce Campbell.

He made a couple horror movies in high school, and considering his budget of zero and household appliances they weren't too bad. The one he made for his Media Studies class in his senior year, Revenant was pretty damn good. It was about a group of convicts trying to break out of prison. For one reason or another one of them had this spell that brought the dead back to life and obviously the dead wreaked havoc on the inmates.

I was one of them. My death scene was excellent. I was in a bathroom during the breakout and Isaac tried to jimmy-rig a rope system to jerk me around the room. An invisible entity was supposed to be thrashing me around.

After a couple run-throughs it just wasn't working.

"How about I just do it myself?"

"Uh...okay."

The end result had me screaming as the toilets flushed and the taps turned on by themselves and then my body flailed around the bathroom until I smeared my blood on the wall*. I cracked my head off the toilet in one of the stalls and I biffed my shoulders off the wall a couple times. It's amazing no bones were broken.

The film was finished, and I had lived my own Bruce Campbell moment for Isaac. Bruce has been beaten up and has the scars to prove it working on the Evil Dead series and I did the same on a scaled down level for Revenant.

Isaac shifted gears though after that. He graduated high school that Spring and moved to Halifax. He ended up focusing more on music and a couple years after high school he was the lead singer in the band The Search for Alexander and later played with groups The Magnetic Lines and Tattered Black Dress.

After a disillusioning experience at Dalhousie University and their theatre program I was done with acting, at least as a profession. Writing was eventually my decision. But those days of horror films have not gone unforgotten.

A couple years ago, Isaac and his friend Terry wrote Play of the Living Dead. It was an homage to Night of the Living Dead and zombie movies everywhere. Isaac showed me the movie in high school and I knew he loved it dearly. He did it justice in his own take on the zombie mythos. It won Fringe hit at the Fringe Festival in Halifax and broke attendance records at the Neptune Theatre.

Even now, Isaac and I are working on a novel together that brings together his horror sensibilities and my own active imagination. And instead of trying to be the equivalent of someone else creatively we're finding our own voices in the collective experiment. Yes we're influenced by Stephen King, George Romero and Sam Raimi, but we're trying to bring something fresh to the table. Whenever that happens, the horror fans know it and appreciate it more than the average fan. Horror lovers are rabid and while they may watch a lot of crap, they are extremely hard to please.

Night of the Living Dead and the stories of Stephen King have been inspirations to us. No they aren't the only ones but without them would we have the ideas we have today? Likewise if Romero and King hadn't read the books they read or watched the movies they saw they probably wouldn't have done what they did the way they did it. We all have our influences and it's best to embrace them instead of push them away.

*Above I mention my death scene where I spray my blood on the wall. Well I worked at a Tim Horton's around this same time in high school when we were shooting Revenant. One day my supervisor went in the bathrooms to do a check/cleaning. To his surprise someone had smeared blood all over the wall in the woman's stall. Somehow that's only the second most disgusting story involving a bathroom from my days at Tim Horton's. It's also only third in the top 3 gross bathroom stories of all time. But that's for another day.

#181: The Fly

2008-12-02T10:22:00.001-04:00

The Fly (1986)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Charles Edward Pogue
Based on the short story by George Langelaan
Starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

Cronenberg is hit and miss. His pseudo-sexual thrillers (Crash) and some of his really early work (Scanners) are pretty awful. Even his adaptation of The Dead Zone is weak. Critics seemed to like it but other than Christopher Walken's performance I don't see what was so good about it.

Cronenberg was able to generate enough buzz though with his early films to get a bigger budget this time around and stars who at the time were up and coming fresh faces. Oh Goldblum where art thou?

No real story around this one when I think of it, it's just a good horror movie that hits all the hyperbolic notes. Who wouldn't want to watch a movie about an obsessed scientist who accidentally mutates into a giant fly-man (man-fly?) when tinkering with his nifty matter transporter? In fact who wouldn't want his own matter transporter? Sure if something as tiny as an insect jumps in with you, you're likely going to suffer some horrible mutation, but that's worth the risk as far as I'm concerned.

It could be different anyway, because this is just a movie. In real life I imagine there would be no awful side-effects, only the bliss of having superpowers should my body mix with the DNA of a fly or spider perhaps.

Okay, it's a pipe dream but super powers regardless of the terrible and inevitable repercussions are a dream to any comic or film geek, guaranteed. See by the time Star Trek is set, science has reached a point of near perfection so the matter transporters don't destroy every particle of your body accidentally. You just have to hope you don't get transported inside a rock.

Now a dream of mine for years and Drew can attest to this is the eventual development of rocket boots and my inevitable acquisition of said rocket boots. Super powers are one thing but what side-effects would rocket boots have? Only one. Greatness.

The technology is not researched or perfected enough and with the use of rocket fuel it's doubtful one would get very far with these boots in the initial prototype. I am ready, willing and able to test rocket boot technology. Any government out there with a rocket boot development program would do themselves a favour by bringing in this strapping young lad and fellow rocket boot enthusiast.

Eagerly I will await my day in (or near...natch!) the sun. Who wants to turn into a fly anyway? Certainly not after seeing poor Brundlefly in action.

Bleed by Adam Atherton

2008-12-01T14:08:00.000-04:00

All artwork below belongs to Adam Atherton

Adam Atherton, a good friend of mine just so happens to be a phenomenal artist. He's a comic book nut and now he's possibly on the verge to be a comic book writer.

Check out Zudacomics.com, his comic Bleed is on display there. Sign up for a free account, read his story and vote for it. If he wins the competition he will get to publish the thing.

Zudacomics isn't just a rinky dink operation either. It was set up by DC Comics. That's right, the birthplace of Batman, Superman and Watchmen!

It's a start and I wouldn't schill for his work if I thought it was crap. It's moody and well drawn. It's more of a little taste than the full gamut of what's to come but it has the potential. It's a pretty cutthroat competition so he needs all the help he can get. Take a couple minutes out of your day and vote for him, it means the world to him.

Also, check out his blog. It's hard-linked in his name and is in my bloglist at the bottom of this page but hey, a third way wouldn't hurt. It's AdamAthertonPresents.blogspot.com.

Cheers.

#182: True Romance

2008-12-01T12:55:00.000-04:00

True Romance (1993)
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Michael Rappaport, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Bronson Pinchot, James Gandolfini, Saul Rubinek, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Samuel L. Jackson

After my parents got me hooked on movies I spent hours on this new fandangled invention called the internet looking up actors I had recognized. Goodfellas put me into the world of Robert De Niro. I had to scoop up everything I could get my hands on from Raging Bull to Taxi Driver (much harder to find at the time than expected) to Heat.

After my friend Jeremiah lent me Pulp Fiction I had to learn more about Quentin Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs came first and then looking at Tarantino's imdb page I saw he had written True Romance. What this film ended up doing above entertainment was broaden my film exposure to a slew of actors I had never seen before. This was before Gandolfini was Tony Soprano and it was just a small role, but his scene in the motel room with Patricia Arquette now seems like a precursor...Soprano training wheels perhaps.

I had seen Gary Oldman in Dracula because to most youngsters, monsters (much like naked women) were awesome. Because of his Drexl Spivey character I discovered one of the most talented and chameleon-like performers that would impress in any role. This guy is one of the best ever.

True Romance is a bloody and vulgar pseudo-action movie but it's more than that. It is a love story and the most unconventional romance you'll ever see. Clarence and Alabama get into drug dealing and murder and drag everyone they meet into the fray in an effort to escape and make it to their own paradise together. They need only each other. So while the execution of the story is somewhat unconventional, the themes at the core are of the oldest ilk imaginable. Melding the traditional with flash-bang modern style (and before Tony Scott got jittery with jump cuts).

It's been a while since I've seen it. The last time came when I was dating a girl -- let's call her Amber -- in Halifax while I was living in Fredericton. It was the first weekend I was spending with her in Halifax. We had started dating after we met one weekend a month earlier when my good friend Amanda introduced us. We hit it off and everything seemed great. We borrowed a copy of True Romance from our mutual friend Adam and that was our Saturday night.

While the relationship ended a month later due in large part to distance and some miscommunication, that night was pretty cool. There is a distinct joy I have when introducing someone to a movie I love. Like my parents showing me Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, I was opening someone's eyes to a new film in their mind's catalogue of viewing.

The weekend was awkward otherwise, it had been a while at that point since my last relationship and well in part due to my awkwardness it didn't go as smootly as hoped. True Romance wasn't the theme for the weekend unfortunately. While it seemed that we were both compatible over our many phone conversations leading up to our first couple days together in person, it wasn't the case when put into practice.

This wouldn't be so bad if we lived in the same city. In some cases, you are either compatible or not, case closed. This was one I thought could be improved over time...she thought otherwise. The end of this story is actually a brain dead moment on my part.

Amber was moving back to Fredericton the following autumn. We had expressed interest in rekindling our brief relationship and we even had a moment when she was visiting one weekend when I pulled her aside and we kissed on her way out of the party for the night.

Fantastic right?

Well it would have been if another ex hadn't recently steamrolled back into my life -- let's call her Claire. In the month following my kiss I had started dating Claire, a girl I had been with a couple years prior, incidentally when she was also living in Halifax with me in Fredericton. We got back together and my next meeting with Amber was really terrible.

"You suck," she said. She said it playfully enough but I realized that any chance of ever being with her again was dashed. I got drunk and it vanquished the feeling for the night...no, it didn't, it made it worse.

Claire and I broke up a week after my birthday and I have been single ever since except for a month this past summer. Sure it's not like that whirlwind was a living hell, it was fun, awkward and by and large a learning process. True romance only exists in the movies, it never comes easy.

Luckily that weekend in Halifax with Amber also started a romance of a different kind. I had bought a bottle of wine that weekend, you know trying to set the mood. A Cabernet Sauvignon called Baron Phillipe de Rothschild.

It's still my go to wine, but it opened my eyes to a world beyond beer. So despite the turmoil of these two failed relationships I came away acquiring a taste for wine. So I got that going for me.

#183: Carlito's Way

2008-11-30T19:25:00.000-04:00

Carlito's Way (1993)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by David Koepp
Based on the novel by Edwin Torres
Starring Al Pacino, Penelope Ann Miller, Sean Penn, John Leguizamo, Viggo Mortensen, Luis Guzman.

I'm not one to hate on sequels for the sake of hating a sequel. Most movies should be given a chance to be as good or better than its predecessor. Remakes are the same way. A good movie is a good movie.

But sometimes a movie is released that makes absolutely no sense at all. More than a decade after De Palma's crime masterpiece a prequel called Carlito's Way: Rise to Power was released straight to video relying on the drawing power of Puff Daddy.

Who in their right mind would greenlight that idea? Yeah the market is demanding Puffy star in a prequel to a movie barely anyone remembers, yeah, great business sense. It went right to video so it's in movie purgatory anyway so the mystery behind this movie's existence is even more baffling.

Honestly, Carlito's Way is a great film and it's a shame more people haven't heard of it or seen it. All the gangster wannabe's make Scarface their Pacino film of reference and it's terrible. Come on, have you even watched Scarface all the way through? It's painful. It's long and boring with a few over the top catchphrases near the end. Oh and don't forget the mountain of cocaine, that was pretty stellar. And Cuban Pacino doesn't hold a candle to Puerto-Rican Pacino.

Pacino had more to work with in general on Carlito's Way. No, a coked-out Oliver Stone wasn't penning the script but he had a much better supporting cast and a less bloated run-time. Dave Kleinfeld is the reason I don't think Sean Penn is a hack. Well, he's been good but he's done some trash. I Am Sam was a pandering emotional flick about a handicapped Starbucks employee (redunant?) with a lame soundtrack of mediocre Beatles covers.

And Mystic River was not that good, especially his performance. He had no nuance, it held the emotional water of a bad Panic at the Disco song (redundant again?). He was yelling and crying, that's it.

But he hit one out of the park as a sleazy coke-addled attorney. His look was the inspiration for Ken Rosenberg in GTA: Vice City. Coke-heads aren't just a waste of space after all!

I remember watching this for the first time as a teenager. Mom and dad used to rent a bunch of old rentals at Video Stop (now Movie Experts). It's because of this that I was exposed to Goodfellas and other violent movies that most parents wouldn't let their kids watch at the time. My folks understoond the concept of context. They explained to me clearly that just because it was a movie didn't mean I should behave like the monsters portrayed on screen.

"No shit, I'm not an idiot!"

In hindsight I could have used a little more tact when coming up with a response. But my parents, whether they realize it or not are largely responsible for my love of film because of watching $1.00 rentals on the weekends when I was 12 or 13. Because of Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, I watched the Coen Brothers and Kubrick. And even though I could distinguish good storytelling from bad, I was also impressed by Penelope Ann Miller's nude scene. What can I say, for a 13-year-old to see any kind of boobs it's exciting...and awkward in the presence of family.

This American Life...listen to it!

2008-11-27T17:50:00.000-04:00

As my university career comes to an end I have been wondering exactly why I had chosen journalism as the major of my eight-year BA. After several false starts I enrolled at St. Thomas University in Fredericton in a pursuit to be a professional writer, or in a more exciting title, a professional storyteller.

While in recent months my desire to be a journalist has waned a bit, my desire to tell stories is as strong as it has ever been. My first year class with Michael Camp focused on great storytellers and the eras of strong journalism specifically. From the war years to the civil rights movement to Watergate, etc. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Ernie Pyle, Hunter S. Thompson inspired me and caused my general exuberance regarding writing.

The biggest problem is it seemed like we were studying history as opposed to current events, which are the core of journalism. My detachment is understandable considering my feeling that my colleagues and I were entering a world where we would be stuck reporting on procedural happenings like the courts and council meetings.

Until recently, this still seemed like the most likely way of achieving my goal and it wasn't very appealing. Philip Lee showed us a documentary from The Wire detailing the death of newspapers.

"Great," I thought. "I have chosen the hindenburg equivalent of a career."

Then a couple weeks later -- yesterday -- he showed us a brief clip from the television version of This American Life. My friend Veda Stelmanis had told me about the show and its host Ira Glass. She told me it was the best show or one of the best -- I really should avoid hyperbole as much as I use it.

The clip he showed was about inner city kids in North Philadelphia who owned and trained horses. They rode horses throughout Philadelphia. It was beautiful and deliberate. The clip wasn't put together with quick cuts, it was picturesque.

I went online. This American Life has radio podcasts available for free download and I have placed links at the bottom of this page. Check it out for humour, information and even just a way to kill an hour in a semi-productive way.

Also, in case you didn't notice, I have a pod-list of Definitely Not the Opera there as well from CBC. Another good way to kill some time through entertainment and information. Shows like this have rejuvenated my desire to tell stories, but not necessarily in a journalistic forum although it is no longer ruled out either.

Enjoy.

#184: Night on Earth

2008-11-25T19:24:00.000-04:00

Night on Earth (1991)
Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Isaach De Bankole, Roberto Benigni
Original music by Tom Waits

Jim Jarmusch is an odd duck. A very creative and sometimes off-putting odd duck. I can easily see why his films are not everyone's cup of tea. They don't have a strict narrative in cases like this and Coffee and Cigarettes or they move slowly focusing more on character instead of plot.

Jarmusch is certainly a virtuosic filmmaker. His work is hard to swallow and to this day he has not made a film designed for the popcorn munching crowd. Some could call him elitist or snooty, but his films are undeniably fascinating whether you like them or find them to be pretentious drivel.

Night on Earth was a great experience. Because I was a fan of his more recent work I ordered Night on Earth from the Criterion collection website last summer when I had a job and thought I would have disposable income for a while.

"Why not invest in my film collection?" I asked.

So I ponied up the cash and waited.

Working at the newspaper, I didn't exactly have fixed hours when I had to be working. If nothing is going on or nothing is scheduled we didn't have to be at the office non-stop to save face with management. At the time, the arts scene in Woodstock was one of my main beats. Like any arts scene, what was going on usually happened at night.

My afternoons were filled by reading at Fusion (the local coffee shop where a bunch of live music happens, usually on Saturdays) and watching movies. Night on Earth was a pleasant surprise. It's really five movies taking place in the same night in five different taxis across the globe.

Two in the USA -- LA and New York, so they might as well be different countries -- one in Paris, Rome and Helsinki. The beauty in the film is Jarmusch doesn't just put a jumble of comedic stories together. They're all slices of life but none are quite like the one preceding it.

The best of the five is the Helsinki short. It's tragic and moving without the melodrama that ruins many of the mainstream big budget tear-fests. It works so well because the characters are realistic and earnest and it bookends the lighter fare.

As we delve deeper into the night across the globe as the viewer the subject matter gets deeper and has more weight to it. There is a progression like any night or any week or any lifetime. This film lives and breathes with its characters.

The setting of the taxi cab is particularly effective because we take the role of passenger. I'm sure you've all been in a cab. And since you've been in a cab you've likely had a conversation with a cab driver. I bet it was at least interesting if not a bit disturbing.

In the spirit of the film I will share two quick cabbie stories...neither of which happened while I was in a cab but a cab driver was involved. Both involve my friend Garrett.

A few winters ago I was in Halifax. Garrett and I went to Bayer's Lake for a double feature. I think it was when The Ring came out or something, but that was October 2002, and I'm pretty sure this happened in February 2003. In any case we get out of Bayer's Lake and it's late, close to midnight. We think the buses are done but we see one coming around the corner.

We raced for that sucker and just barely got on and paid the fare. I think he paid the fare for both of us because I had no change on me. One of my worst habits is using my debit card for everything.

The bus took us to two stops and the driver turned around and said "end of the line." The bus had taken us farther away from the end destination of Seymour Street in the city so we were left with a choice, hoof it or cab it. I discovered I had left my gloves in the movie theatre but we decided to walk anyway. I had this irrational fear of cab drivers at the time, don't ask me why.

So we walked through Mount St. Vincent University. The air was deathly calm and the mid February night was chilly but there was no wind. On the bare tree branches surrounding the campus were hugs black clouds. Well, they weren't clouds. The branches were full of crows. I was a bit uneasy when I said "a murder of crows" so we hustled out of there.

After two hours of walking and some getting lost in some shady looking neighbourhoods -- Halifax can be a daunting place late at night -- we finally reached a familiar territory, Quinpool Road. Walking down a side street parallel to Oxford I saw a parked cab with a cabbie sitting in the front seat leaning back. As Garrett and I walked closer we saw a girl's head pop up from the cabbie's lap and she got out of the car and ran into the house it was parked in front of.

I smiled at the driver and gave him the thumbs up. He turned on the car and drove away. Nothing like catching a cabbie collecting payment orally.

The second story is from just over a month ago when I was in Halifax again, this time for my friend Bill's wedding. I agreed to help Garrett take some sound equipment to the hotel where the wedding was being held. Garrett was doing sound and taking care of the music but had no car, so I decided to help him avoid cabs for the day. Yeah, sure.

The street where the hotel is on is narrow. There was a parked cab in front of the hotel and I was coming from the opposite direction. To park legally I would either have to drive around the block and come in the opposite side or do an illegal u-turn in the narrow street. I elected for the u-turn.

I thought if I pulled the nose of my car in behind the cab and backed up we'd have time. I swung nose first in and then the cab started backing up. If I tried to swing out it would have caused a bit of damage to both of us. I honked at the last second and he bumped my fender. I backed out.

Then out out of the cab climbs this 6'6" monster of a man with a scowl to match. He looks at his bumper and looks at me and nods. I roll down my window and ask "we good?" He nodded again and got in his cab and drove away. I drove around the block and came in the opposite side.

In any case, watch Night on Earth and think about interesting encounters you've had with cab drivers. Share them with me if you like.

#185 & 186: The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day

2008-11-23T13:14:00.001-04:00

Directed by James Cameron
Written by James Cameron with Gale Anne Hurd (T1) and William Wisher Jr (T2)
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong

Basically, I can't decide which Terminator film I prefer. They're completely different styles and one will be more suitable depending on what mood you are in.

Somehow I escaped high school without seeing either one. I remember being in Halifax my first year of university and a few of my friends were talking about Terminator 2. The specifics of the conversation are lost, but they focused their attention on me.

"What did you think" or "remember that, wasn't that awesome?"

I shuffled in my seat a bit, embarrassed that I had never seen either movie.

"Actually I haven't watched it."

No one said anything right away, they looked at each other and I didn't know if they were going to laugh, cry or hit me. Eventually, I think it was Bill who said "well damn, we have to watch it right now."

"Well shouldn't we watch the first one first?"

"You haven't seen that one either?"

I shook my head. What followed was basically me being tied to a chair not allowed to leave until I had seen both movies. It's probably why, despite the differences between the two movies, I consider them to be one. The memory of that night is so strong, not from specifics but from the interactions and the joking friendship that are connected to a night so simple.

All we did was watch a couple of movies and I was accosted at first because they couldn't believe I had gone a full 17 years of life without seeing these movies. From the dank and noir-like part one to the bright and action packed part two, the Terminator movies will always be close to my heart. And despite Titanic, James Cameron is one of the best filmmakers of all time.

All right... Titanic wasn't the worst movie but I still never want to see it again. But give me some Terminator (not the show or part 3) and we'll roll.

(note: a similar showdown happened when this same group of friends found out I had never seen RoboCop. Those movies must be the most watched R-rated movies by kids and somehow I missed out. Probably because I was busy watching gangster movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas. I was a warped child, I had many enthusiasms.)

Let's hit the road!

2008-11-16T18:33:00.000-04:00

Okay, it's November. The days are shorter and the darkness is engulfing everything. It's no shock that by 9:00 pm it's pitch black out, but you can't see a thing at 5:30 anymore! Soon the snow will hit and we'll all be going stir crazy. There is only one surefire solution to the growing anxiety and stress of the season.

Escape!

My good buddy and pal Horatio Faust and I are planning a road trip in my trusty automobile, a Cabrio nobly named Rocinante. Where we will travel, we do not know, but it is not the destination that makes the voyage. You see the destination is only a section of the greater whole. It is a neccessity, but it should represent equal value with the rest of the trip.

When planning a road trip I am of the opinion that it should have a very loose itinerary. Set nothing in stone and leave pretty much everything up for debate and make it easy to change at the drop of a hat. If you plan on going to Toronto and you meet someone suggesting a side trip to New York instead, why say no to an impromptu adventure?

It's time that I put my desires to rest and act upon them. Reading On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, Death in the Afternoon, Tropic of Cancer among other books has driven me nearly mad with curiosity and an inherent need to see more of the world than I have. The solution is to simply do it.

So Horatio and I will embark on a journey, hopefully to last a week. We do not know exactly where the road will take us but it will whisper the direction into our ears and our minds as the days go by. The road is life dear travelers, let us discover it together.

#187: Predator

2008-11-16T16:21:00.000-04:00

Predator (1987)
Directed by John McTiernan
Written by John and Jim Thomas
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Elpida Carrillo, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura.

This begins the leg of Ahnuld flicks. Three in a row on the countdown to basically prove my everlasting love for Arnold Schwarzenegger and everything he has done in the realm of action movies.

If there are only three Arnie movies on here, it's probably fairly obvious what the next two will be, but what's important is you realize the magnitude of what this guy brought to cinema. He is a musclebound mongoloid, or at least he seemed to be, probably why politics ended up being his game later on. It pains me to not include Conan the Barbarian on this list because it is in the same league as Predator, but just not quite up to snuff.

Predator was the first Arnold movie I saw, well the first one that had any lasting impact. Kindergarten Cop was trash and I knew it as a child. True Lies was pretty good, but not great. Predator cut out the crap and sent a troupe of bad asses into the jungle to battle an unstoppable foe. Set it up with a bit of exposition and character development and then hit the audience with everything you've got.

Granted, Arnie wasn't required to do much in the way of acting, but when has he? The Predator is just a cool villain and a fun action flick that requires no thought to watch. Elitists should take a minute and reflect and just try to have a good time at the movies for once. It's all about balance.

The one-liners rule all. Jesse Ventura is actually better than Arnold in that department despite limited screen time.

"I ain't got time to bleed." and "Bunch of slack-jawed faggots in here! This stuff will make you a god-damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me."

The effects aren't quite up to the level of today, but I loved the 80s because filmmakers were forced to use makeup and props and innovation to create their creatures. There is something soulless in CGI monsters. This version of the Predator is the best you'll find.

#188: Boyz N The Hood

2008-11-11T10:02:00.000-04:00

Boyz N the Hood (1991)
Written and Directed by John Singleton
Starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Nia Long, Regina King.

A few years ago, journalism became the focal point of my life. I consumed everything I could get my hands on to further my understanding of the world, give my point of view added perspective. I read about Vietnam, the Holocaust, Watergate and the Civil Rights Movement.

The thing about journalism for the most part is the story-teller is often distanced from the story itself. It's professionalism. It's objectivity. And in some cases it fails to tell a story properly, sometimes emotion and understanding are necessary for the story to have impact even if it shows a slight bias.

John Singleton essentially filmed a documentary but it was scripted and acted. Everything in Boyz N The Hood stems from what he witnessed in California. He was 23 when he directed it and he was telling the story from fresh eyes.

It's almost Shakespearean in a way watching Tre (Gooding) struggle against what his gangster friends are falling into -- their pre-determined spot in poverty and gang violence -- and what his father Furious (Fishburne) preaches to him about rising above it.

Yes it's about race, but -- and pardon the pun -- it's not just black and white. This is about the cycle of violence. It's a mature concept tackled professionally by a young first-time director. Furious speaks to the point that it had gone beyond racism and the cycle had been completed and inner city African American kids were slowly sliding into violent lives and their kids were too. These people fought other gangs, and those gangs were made up of people very similar in life cycles. On an individual basis a decision is needed in order to get out. This is Tre's dilemma; escape and abandon his friends or join him and eventually kill or be killed.

Boyz n the Hood is a phenomenal film. It's got strong performances, a good script and a clear and crisp message with force behind it. It's never convoluted, it just simply is what it is. Almost like a documentary.

#189: A Fish Called Wanda

2008-11-04T15:25:00.000-04:00

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Directed by Charles Crichton
Written by John Cleese
Starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin

"Asshole!"

Otto is hilarious. Kevin Kline as sophisticated as he has been and as clean cut as he appears in some of his films, he shines brightest in the absurd, idiotic characters like Otto. He's not the only reason A Fish Called Wanda is a great movie, but without his iconic moron, it might not have made the grade.

The vignettes with Michael Palin as a stuttering buffoon provide nice breaks from the central plot and Cleese and Curtis provide their own share of laughs through their awkward romance, but it is Kline that holds it all together.

A Fish Called Wanda has elements of every style of comedy, whether it's dry, slapstick, witty, etc. I don't want to get hoity toity with my analysis, but it's a different kind of comedy than Caddyshack for instance.

I originally caught it on a Sunday afternoon in high school playing on A&E. Chuckled a few times and never thought much of it. The next time I saw it was without commercials but still on television. It was one day when I either didn't have class or I skipped them. Might have been inebriated in one way shape or form... but I digress.

It was a revelation. It was sharp, funny and entertaining. It was unable to achieve its full effect before due to censorship and commercials, two of the most purely evil inventions of the human race. In it's true form, A Fish Called Wanda is phenomenal. If you catch it on tv, be sure it's on a movie channel and not basic cable where a term like "asshole" will be dubbed into "jerk" by some guy who sounds nothing like Kevin Kline.

#190: A Simple Plan

2008-11-03T14:56:00.000-04:00

A Simple Plan (1998)
Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by Scott B. Smith based on his novel
Starring Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda, Billy Bob Thornton, Brent Briscoe, Gary Cole.

A couple years ago my criminology professor played A Simple Plan in class. To this day, her reasoning is unclear and no one really paid attention in class, which was a shame. It's Raimi's most mature and developed film he's ever made.

Similar in basic premise to the Coen's No Country For Old Men it asks what someone would do if he or she found a bunch of money in the woods with no one around. Sure, immediately you'd think it's so easy just to take it and no one would ever know, but then you wouldn't have much of a movie on your hands. Pretty much just a masturbatory fantasy of escaping responsibility.

This is a bleak film. And some people hate bleak, for much of the same reason why I love it. Movies aren't just about escaping to a magical happy world. A Simple Plan could happen. It takes place in a small town where everyone knows one another. Those who find the money have managed their lives without it for so long but when it enters the equation, it drives obsession and madness into the quiet life of the small town between three acquaintances.

It's a slow burn of a movie, with communication falling between the lines of dialogue. How Hank looks at his brother or wife conveys more of his intentions than what he says. It's a great performance by the underrated Paxton.

Raimi may be bogged down as the director of the Spider-Man movies now, but he has a style and an eye for detail that will be noticed again. He made a couple great superhero movies and one terrible one and is on the verge of starting a fourth. If only he would return to his bread and butter of horror or subtle thrillers. Go low budget Sammy!

Have you seen A Simple Plan? It seems to be a forgotten gem now. It came about to solid reviews but is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the other great films from the 90s. 1998 was a great year for cinema, and if you haven't seen this one yet, do yourself a favour.

Philadelphia sports fans are the equivalent of a crap salad

2008-10-23T12:42:00.000-03:00

One of my favourite sports sites is deadspin.com. I have its blog roll at the bottom of my page here, but I feel the need of promoting this story they ran yesterday.

The Angryville Chronicles is a compilation of stories from Deadspin readers discussing various encounters with Philadelphia sports fans over the years. Some of it is disgusting, some vile, some offensive...well mostly all of those things. But it's also hilarious in the "thank God it didn't happen to me" kind of way.

It makes me understand what my friend Kris was saying when he said he can't get excited for the World Series this year. He hates the Phillies with every fibre of his being. While I don't get his loathing for Jimmy Rollins or Pat Burrell, the Philadelphia fans by and large have a history of ass-holish behaviour.

Tampa Bay is a horse of a different colour. The Rays have no fans, or at least very few. It doesn't matter that game one sold out in 61 minutes. Of course it sold out! It's the World Series. Now if the Rays have more fans than their visiting opponents regularly in the regular season, they are a legitimate fanbase. The team deserves its spot in the World Series, the fans do not.

That stadium was a ghost town all year and with the team's depressing history, who can blame the fans for staying away. At least in the beginning. But as the season wore on, no one showed. Similarly, the Florida Marlins have won two championships and still can't find a consistent crows at its games. For some damn reason, baseball doesn't thrive in Florida.

Game one was a decent affair, but I'll admit I watched more of the movie Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in their prime. I've seen it before and yet I was more involved with that movie than the first game of the World Series. It's a shame, because I was amped for it beforehand, but then I got easily distracted as Scott Kazmir pitched sloppily and the Rays bats couldn't generate much of anything. Watching Dan Aykroyd go from a snooty millionaire to a degenerate drunken Santa Claus waving a gun was much more entertaining.

What will be most disappointing is if this series goes out with a whimper. A four-game sweep that everyone forgets and writes off. I'm a Cardinals fan but even I can agree the series where St. Louis defeated the Tigers in five games was a dull series. It could be the championship series games for each league will be more interesting than the World Series...which has been the case the last few years.

Bit of a hiatus on the list

2008-09-15T10:52:00.000-03:00

Well it appears as though my laptop has gone kaput. Sadly along with it is my top 200 list.

So if you were wondering why I hadn't updated the countdown, that is why. Hopefully I'll be able to get the computer fixed with all my files in place. The damn thing won't turn on so I have no idea what happened. No warning, nothing. Very strange.

I'll be taking it to Future Shop tomorrow or so and get it back asap, I think it's still under warranty. Then we'll be back in action!

JCW

#191: Field of Dreams

2008-09-08T13:29:00.000-03:00

Field of Dreams (1989)
Written and Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Based on the book by W.P. Kinsella
Starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta, James Earl Jones, Frank Whaley, Timothy Busfield, Burt Lancaster

Field of Dreams is a very sentimental film, and usually the overly sentimental rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the combination of baseball and fantasy that reels me in, but I can watch this movie any time and it always makes me feel great.

Costner isn't the cesspool of cinema a lot of people make him out to be, I think he's much more consistent than Nic Cage for instance. And when he does anything related to baseball it's a winner.

Ray Kinsella (Costner) is just so damned likable. He seems crazy and if you met anyone who said they heard voices telling him to build a baseball diamond in his corn field, you'd have that person committed.

But Kinsella is portrayed in an endearing way. It helps that the story is told from his point of view, but when other characters are telling him he's crazy, I root for him. Obviously in reality Kinsella would be nuts, but for the two hours this film is on it's magical.

The first time he sees "Shoeless Joe" after the field is built shows it's all worthwhile even though the road is long.

Field of Dreams represents the magic baseball has had on a nation of people. It may be tainted due to cheating and steroids in recent years but at one time it represented purity and hope. I think in some ways people still think of it in that way. When I watch Field of Dreams I certainly forget about all the bullshit accompanying professional sports today.

More importantly it's about family and second chances. Kinsella never had the chance to connect with his own father, until he built the field...the field of dreams.

#192: Big Fish

2008-09-06T20:30:00.000-03:00

Big Fish (2003)
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by John August
Based on the book by Daniel Wallace
Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Alison Lohman, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, Steve Buscemi.

I should start by saying that yes I notice that only one movie on the list so far came out before 1980, and only three before 1990. There will be a greater diversity in aged films. Those like a fine wine. So do not fret elitists, Casablanca may follow!

Tim Burton is so inconsistent for me. Lately he has more misses than hits. A lot of people I know liked Sweeny Todd, but I was really let down. I thought Depp had one face and went with it. Somehow, Sacha Baron Cohen was the best part.

But I digress.

Big Fish was so far away from Burton's typical gothic atmosphere. It was bright, lavish and uplifting. As much as I like his partnership with Depp, it's nice to see Burton work with other people.

He proved that he could use fanciful imagery in a wild fantasy that wasn't cloaked in smoke and shadows. It was the most brilliant use of colour of every movie he's made.

I remember seeing it in the cinema when it finally came to Fredericton and just soaking it all in. It unfolds like one of Ed Bloom's tall tales, because that's what it is...only it's Bloom's whole tall tale of a life.

Big Fish works as a series of vignettes building to a whole. This is a film where not only are flashbacks well done, they are necessary to the story. It's about a son discovering the truth about his father, piece by piece. The audience has to figure it out along with him.

As the relationship develops, and Will Bloom (Crudup) fights the fantastical and eventually forgives his father for his faults, it's a touching but not overly pandering emotional climax. Big Fish may be about tall tales, but it's emotion is genuine.

Burton needs to do more...well not exactly like this but to break his norm once in a while proves he has more in him than the dark, brooding melodrama. This and Ed Wood do it proper.

#193: Saving Private Ryan

2008-09-06T17:27:00.000-03:00

Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Robert Rodat
Starring Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Jeremy Davies.

Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time, no doubt about it. Every time he releases a stinker it still usually looks good and is put together in a professional manner. So when he releases one that is good, it sometimes feels great just from the sheer mastery he brings to a production.

Then he will make a great film almost superhuman. Saving Private Ryan is one of them, but certainly not the only one.

Think back to when you first saw the opening sequence. If your jaw wasn't on the floor then I question your expectations or what more you could have wanted. It's raw and gritty, more in your face than any scene of warfare ever shown in a film. Yes, some war movies did a better job of putting faces to the characters and showcasing theme but none of them have the adrenaline of Saving Private Ryan.

It's an adventure movie set in World War 2. Spielberg straps you in, gives you a moment or two to catch your breath while the soldiers pontificate about their lives back home and then it's back into the shit.

It's like a well written pop song. There are verses and choruses and it's very straightforward but because it has the hooks (in this case the entertainment value) it's a wonderful achievement.

It's also the first movie where I thought Matt Damon was anything more than a pretty boy. I liked Good Will Hunting fine enough, but as he's gone through his career he keeps proving to me that he is not a one-trick pony and this is where all that started.

This is the first Spielberg flick on the countdown, but I assure you it's not the last.

#194: Into the Wild

2008-09-05T20:18:00.000-03:00

Into the Wild (2007)
Directed by Sean Penn
Screenplay by Sean Penn
Based on the book by Jon Krakauer
Starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Jena Malone, Hal Holbrook

Anyone with an inherent desire to leave home, to just get up and leave will love Into the Wild.

Despite the tragic circumstances to which the film is based, it represents hope and longing to belong to a different code than capitalist North America. It's about self discovery, understanding of the universe or at least the attempt. It's about freedom, and the fallout of achieving your dreams.

And it's beautiful to boot.

Everything works. The soundtrack by Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam), the performances and especially the cinematography. Penn did with this movie what Chris McCandless (Hirsch) would likely have wanted. He stripped it away from society went into the wild to understand where McCandless was coming from.

Into the Wild could not have been filmed on a soundstage. For it to be worth its salt, it needed to feel real. And the best way to accomplish that is to be real.

AAfter reading Krakauer's book, the film is still just as breathtaking as it was the first time I saw it, but the book was superior as is often the case. It's worth picking up for anyone who wants a great story or is thinking of going off the grid.

I was bumbling through Halifax when it was released. Without anything to do for a few hours I popped into the Spring Garden movie theatre to see what was playing. I walked in five minutes before it started and figured it was meant to be.

I was the only person in the theatre, I think it was a Saturday afternoon late in its run, and it felt even more intimate because I was in a cavernous theatre all by myself watching a very personal film.

It was a powerful two hours.

While I'm not the biggest fan of Penn as an actor (though Spicoli does rule) he really hit this out of the park.

#195: Punch-Drunk Love

2008-09-04T15:07:00.000-03:00

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman.

I'm not the biggest fan of Adam Sandler. He's been in some funny movies but even Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison have lost some of their appeal as I've gotten older. Don't get me wrong, I'd take them over anything Andy Dick or Rob Schneider does any day but it just doesn't make me laugh any more.

So imagine how I felt when I first heard about his invovlement with Paul Thomas Anderson. The director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia teaming up with a guy who usually plays rage-filled man-children. In a sense he does so here as well but with Anderson at the helm it is less cartoonish, humbler and even beautiful.

This is a well shot film. The transitions and the simple music help create a different kind of love story and Sandler excels with the material. His showdown with the phone sex kingpin is the highlight of his performance. He goes all the way to Utah from Los Angeles in the same suit he's had on for days and telephone receiver in his hand to get out from under this guy's extortion racket.

It's a fun bit part for Philip Seymour Hoffman who is one of my favourite actors in Hollywood. He had been in every Paul Thomas Anderson movie until There Will Be Blood, hopefully he returns in the next project.

Emily Watson is so adorable in this. Her wide eyes, curious about the brother of her best friend. She helps him discover that he isn't the only one in the world with problems or screwed up thoughts. They complement one another and not in the conventional way.

It's a short and sweet romantic film with a sense of surreality floating over it. While Magnolia likely proved Anderson was a filmmaker with some resilience, Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood have shown he is not going to repeat himself.

#196: Caddyshack

2008-09-04T13:57:00.001-03:00

Caddyshack (1980)
Directed by Harold Ramis
Written by Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis & Douglas Kenney
Starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Michael O'Keefe, Bill Murray

"Rat farts!"

Caddyshack is one of those movies you see as a kid and while you laugh you're not quite sure why. Cue a few years down the road and it all makes sense.

Contrary to popular belief, Chevy Chase was actually funny once upon a time. This is the best film he was ever involved in, with Fletch being a close second. He had the deadpan delivery that very few can match and it was only one style present in a melting pot of comedy.

Rodney Dangerfield is thankfully not the center of attention save for his few scenes so he doesn't overstay his welcome. In fact when he's playing the foil to stuck up crumb bumb Judge Smalls, he is a riot. "Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!"

You get a before he was a huge star Bill Murray in one of his iconic roles as Carl Spackler, the stoned, half-retarded groundskeeper tracking down a troublesome gopher. His scene in his shack where he discusses life with Ty Webb (Chase) is gold.

Caddyshack makes golf interesting and I think it's the only movie to ever accomplish that. Sure, Tin Cup wasn't terrible but Costner has better sports-themed films.

Caddyshack is a fun time, and sometimes that's all that's needed for a movie to be good. Yes being deep and thoughtful has its place but if that was the only kind of movie someone loved then I imagine they'd be a pretty big asshole. Is it perfect? No. Is it groundbreaking? No. Is it hilarious? Every time I watch it.

#197: An American Werewolf in London

2008-09-04T12:03:00.001-03:00

An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Directed by John Landis
Written by John Landis
Starring David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne

Horror is probably the trickiest genre to get right. It's usually panned by critics universally because they judge horror films on the same meter as the hoity toity classics and art films they masturbate furiously to.

Horror fans will forgive faults of a horror movie if it's at least entertaining, or fun in a "so bad it's good" kind of way.

An American Werewolf in London appealed to both sensibilities. It's well written, has a sharp story and great characters.

Notice a theme yet? Regardless of the genre, a film will not work if the characters are completely unsympathetic or portrayed in a way that they aren't relatable. Someone can be a total scumbag on screen, but if he or she is given depth and understanding it will come off much better.

The real star of London is the makeup. Before SFX went digital, makeup was king especially in horror films. As unrealistic as it looks from time to time, it beats the hell out of a CGI monster any day of the week.

The transformation sequences may look a little hokey at first, but it doesn't remove the human aspect, the terror David Kessler (Naughton) goes through when he discovers that "holy crap, I'm a werewolf".

Landis, who directed Animal House, sprinkles in humour to balance it out, but it's never awkward. Jack Goodman's ghost, the friend hiking through the Moors with Kessler, haunts him as he slowly decomposes in the afterlife.

Sprinkle a little love story and voila! A well rounded horror-comedy hybrid that will entertain critics and horror buffs alike.

Harmony is nice.

#198: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

2008-09-03T23:55:00.000-03:00

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Directed by George Roy Hill
Written by William Goldman
Starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross

The buddy movie owes a lot to Butch and Sundance.

Maybe it's not the first of its kind, but it had a joy absent from most westerns, even with the inevitable finale. It's fun above all else. It's also an example of how to write a screenplay.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of the most well written movies ever made. The narrative is simple, direct and linear. It's exactly what it says it is, this isn't a David Lynch film. It's the perfect portrait of a couple of friends made for each other. One couldn't exist without the other.

I would even suggest that people who don't particularly like westerns should give this a shot. It's better than watching buddy crap like Nothing to Lose or Another 48 Hours. Hackneyed garbage like that can make you forget about the gold. Everything now is a fish out of water scenario with two wacky ass hats - complete opposites - are thrust into some unlikely series of events with a few "awww hell naw"s and "I'm getting too old for this shit"s. Take some lessons from the master, it can be simple and smart. Simplicity does not automatically correspond with Rob Schneider.

So what are you waiting for, go watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and think of the great Paul Newman on his death bed.

#199: The 40-year Old Virgin

2008-09-03T22:15:00.000-03:00

I would like to preface this by saying what I meant to say before the first entry. This list is my top 200 as of Sept. 2, 2008. Any films I see after that date that would likely get a slot will not count. Also I will go one by one, some days submitting more, and sometimes I'll likely go a week or so without posting at all. Some posts will likely be random musings about things other than movies. And without further ado, here's #199.

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
Directed by Judd Apatow
Written by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell
Starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Romany Malco, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen.

One good comedy deserves another.

The 40 Year Old Virgin hit like wildfire a few years ago. It was fresh, well written and endearing. As vulgar as some of the lines were, every bit of dialogue came off as authentic and real. None of this film was contrived and it was all set in a rather realistic world.

Too many comedies operate in absurdity. Apatow and Carell wrote a script about a guy who could be real, and it's an age old archetype: the nice guy finishing last.

What makes the movie stronger is the cast of characters around Andy (Carell). Without Cal, Jay and David it wouldn't be much of a movie. Simple lines of dialogue like when David walks up to his boss and says "If I have to hear "Yamo Be There" one more time, I'm going to "Yamo" burn this place to the ground" are great because you can relate.

When I worked at Chapters, they played this damn Michael Buble record over and over again for months on end. It was driving me insane. And every time I heard the record I thought of that scene and that line.

I was talking with my friend Isaac the other day about what you remember from film. From truly great cinema you tend to remember every aspect of what you watched even long down the road. It just stays with you.

Well I haven't watched the 40 Year Old Virgin in over a year and so many lines come to mind. So many scenes. It's one of those hilarious movies that is so easily quotable, but no one seemed to over-quote it like people did with Napoleon Dynamite and Borat. Maybe it's because it's better and the jokes aren't one note.

At least those are the reasons why I can still enjoy it after multiple views. I certainly never want to see Napoleon Dynamite again, but I wouldn't refuse to watch The 40 Year Old Virgin many times over.

TOP 200 Movies Countdown: #200 - Tropic Thunder

2008-09-03T17:37:00.000-03:00

Tropic Thunder (2008)
Directed by Ben Stiller
Written by Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux
Starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Jay Baruchel, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan and Tom Cruise.

Yes, it's recent.

It's been out only a couple weeks and it has made my top 200 list. It's that funny.

It's a spoof that doesn't rely on constant references to pop culture. It doesn't take itself seriously but it isn't a lazily written or conceived comedy. Stiller and Theroux wrote a sharp script satirizing celebrity neuroses and lampoons our obsession with celebrity culture.

Stiller's schtick has been hit and miss for years. He has good (There's Something About Mary, Zoolander), the great (The Royal Tenenbaums) and the rest (A Night at the Museum). This is his best film since Tenenbaums, no question. But he isn't even the brightest light.

Robert Downey Jr. as I'm sure everyone knows by now, steals the show. His depiction of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who goes through a medical procedure to portray a black sergeant in a Viet Nam movie is so over the top but never seems out of place.

Jack Black is at his manic best. He's on edge and vulgar, not family friendly. This is just the way he should be. I thought he had lost his comic senses from Tenacious D, but apparently not.

Tropic Thunder is the biggest surprise of the year so far. I think everyone knew The Dark Knight would be pretty damn special, but this came out of nowhere. It's a good mindless comedy - remember that when you see activists getting up in arms over the liberal use of the word 'retard'. It's one scene, lasts a minute and is over. Go watch House Bunny and Pineapple Express, it's used in both of those movies at least once and in derogatory fashion at a different character, but neither of those movies are labeled as intolerant.

Is there a quota that has to be filled? How many times can retard be said in a movie before it's deemed offensive? 3? 2? Criticizing Tropic Thunder because of that is sillier than the movie itself. And it deserves this spot in my list. It's a great comedy.

Woody Allen: prolific beyond words

2008-08-31T12:56:00.000-03:00

Bored at work the other day I was reading about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen's new film with Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson. I took a look at Allen's filmography and gaped.

The man has made a movie every year since 1992. 1991 was the last year which did not see a feature film directed by Woody Allen hit the big screen. Before that it was 1981. Since 1977's Annie Hall, there have only been two years without an Allen film.

Say what you will about his films, he's been busy and just keeps trucking at a breakneck pace despite the fact that his best known movies came out before 1985.

Even so, he has branched off away from his trademark neurotic humour (except flicks like Scoop and Small Time Crooks where he remains in the cast). Instead he has taken on thrillers (Cassandra's Dream, Match Point), dramedy (Melinda & Melinda) and even absurdist mock-umentary (my favourite Allen film, Sweet and Lowdown).

Nothing seems to phase him. He writes and writes and puts it to celluloid, he's mass production on the indie scale! Not all of it is quality but it's all original, he's the closest thing going to a filmic novelist.

The sad part is that his films are always in limited release. Vicky Cristina Barcelona will be available on DVD down the road but I won't have the choice to see it in theatres before then. New York, Los Angeles...no doubt, but certainly not New Brunswick.

Maybe theatre bosses don't expect his films to make money, that would make sense especially in a small market like Fredericton.

In fact last weekend Vicky Cristina Barcelona was only playing on 692 total screens. Somehow it made more money in receipts than The Rocker with Rainn Wilson - and that did come to Fredericton. Where's your messiah now?!

Woody Allen is not a perfect filmmaker, I bet he'd even admit that. His films, however offer something off the beaten path more often than not. Independent cinema is also not perfect, but everyone should have the opportunity to see these films with the same amount of ease as it takes to see Disaster Movie or any number of lame soulless films that grace our cinemas on a weekly basis.

I may be an elitist, but damn it, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Top five Woody Allen movies (keep in mind I haven't seen a lot of them...not even Annie Hall):

1. Sweet and Lowdown

2. Hannah and Her Sisters

3. Bullets Over Broadway

4. Match Point

5. Manhattan

Discuss rather than state

2008-07-27T20:45:00.000-03:00

The term overrated is itself overrated, or at least over used. It's snide, and self aggrandizing.

After reading The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac I was perusing online reviews and eventually was reading reviews of Kerouac's most well known novel On The Road.

Most of the reviews were poorly punctuated one sentence bits of finality.

"I loved it.

Hated it.

Pretty good inspirational read

And the dreaded OVERRATED"

I I don't understand why anyone would even bother to post an opinion on something like literature or a film if they weren't going into detail about why they liked it or not. It doesn't add anything to a discussion, and usually these boards are anything but discussion, and it only acts as an outlet to express a limited opinion. One word/sentence reviews, while succinct, are a waste of time and effort for both the author and writer.

Instead I would like to promote actual discussion online. Explain your reasons for why you loved Kerouac's prose or thought it was hamfisted and plotless.

An interesting occurrence on this particular board was the complaints that Kerouac didn't use a plot. I wonder if they understand the definition of the word. Plot = storyline. There is definitely a narrative flow, albeit untraditional there is a story.

Retire the term overrated, because enjoyment is still subjective. You don't like something that so many others loved and were affected by personally? Using the term overrated comes across like you are invalidating all those people's opinions. Maybe I'm stretching a bit, I simply don't like that term, it's lazy.

No more one word/sentence reviews. If you like something do not be afraid to break down the reasons why! The same must be true if you didn't like a film, an album, a piece of literature and so on. If you only have the time for a brief spot, just don't bother.

I don't want to be negative all the time with these diatribes and I assure you that I am very much at peace and would simply like to spark discussion! No more blanket statements! I would be a happy camper.

Criterion DVDs on nice discount!

2008-07-20T14:01:00.000-03:00

I hate to shill for any company. I am not getting paid to advertise but any film lover should check this out if they are a collector.

Deepdiscount.com has a temporary promotion on where if you purchase a Criterion Collection DVD you get another Criterion of equal or lesser value for free.

What is a Criterion DVD you ask? Well, Criterion is a company in the States that acquires the rights to what they feel are artistic accomplishments in film history, digitally restore them and put together a slew of extra features. Without Criterion I likely would not have seen Seven Samurai, The Wages of Fear or several other fantastic films.

Many great auteurs are promoted through Criterion. Terry Gilliam, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Jarmusch, and Federico Fellini are but a few.

Although mostly out of print and very difficult to find, there are several old Alfred Hitchcock films outside the pantheon of his work. Instead of Vertigo and Psycho, Criterion released titles like The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes (both of which are still available), Notorious, Rebecca and Spellbound.

Recently I tried to convince myself that I was no longer buying DVD's because my collection is pretty stellar in my opinion. That quickly went out the window because I admit I am an addict of cinema. It is my biggest vice along with literature.

So I ordered six titles...Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Battle of Algiers, Solaris, Man Bites Dog and Brief Encounter. Likely you've heard of a couple of these and Solaris is the original Russian version, not the Clooney one.

So I urge any and all film fans to embrace Criterion if you have the cash to shell out. It is pricey but it's worth it if you love cinema. You end up paying for quality and deals like this are rare.

I wonder if I can collect a commission from either Criterion or DeepDiscount. Hopefully I just don't get sued.

Out of frustration...

2008-07-20T11:10:00.000-03:00

Previously I made some choice comments directly about journalism. And I realize I spoke somewhat harshly about teachers. This was entirely inappropriate on my part and while I can't undo what I said, I hope I can genuinely display a bit of humility and regret.

I had a few moments where I contacted people and they downright refused to talk with me about a specific controversial topic and the article didn't get done. I vented out of frustration when I could have easily just kept trying to contact more.

What I did was lump every teacher in the area into my disappointment and that just isn't right or fair. For this an apology is definitely deserved. Teachers have been so important to me in my life, and some are still my friends and it would be devastating to lose that from idiotic comments I made out of frustration.

You forget sometime that people will read what you write and they will care and it took someone I respect and care for to point out my error and I would never want to insult or upset him in any way.

It also took another colleague of mine to point out how my jaded view of the world of journalism was a bit overboard because it isn't overly accurate.

I don't want to bore people with the details of disappointment in my life because I don't particularly like airing out my problems in public.

The job I have has been constantly promoted to me as a great thing and I feel obligated to feel privileged to have it...and yet I don't. Every time I chose a path I end up stepping back and second guess myself to the point where I convince myself that it's the wrong choice. Eventually I am going to have to just buckle down and tough it out.

Journalism (this might contradict what I said previously) does indeed offer a lot of positives. Being that I displayed disappointment about lack of balance, I myself was unbalanced in my approach. I was completely negative with no optimism.

Every day in journalism, you meet someone new, you hear a new perspective on life. You travel even if it within a small local area. You will become familiar with an entire area that otherwise you may have been unaware of.

My disappointment is likely due to the fact that I do feel boxed in because, well I haven't been anywhere. I probably shouldn't have read On the Road, Catcher in the Rye or other books about people who have no idea where their place in the world is.

I never want to be considered a jaded, bitter individual and I certainly don't wish to alienate anyone because of overt negativity. There is so much beauty in this world that to act nihilistic is to lose sight of the purpose of life.

The only thing I guess I should clarify is that I have realized that a career in print journalism as in the newspaper is likely not for me. I love writing and hopefully will find a way to pursue it successfully in some capacity. For now I will stick it out...I hope this wasn't too long winded.

Myths of journalism

2008-07-16T21:00:00.000-03:00

"Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."
- Hunter S. Thompson

I'm quickly learning that journalists are not exactly the revered and respected societal group that I once thought.

The reason I became interested in the vocation was to pursue the truth, an honourable goal. Sadly, it all seems to be about the quick hits of pseudo-information that passes as news.

Because of the value placed on ad revenue and getting the story first instead of getting it right, the news industry is in shambles...and that is not news. As someone in the business, albeit on the entry level, I am becoming more disenchanted with it every day.

Myth: The truth matters above all else.
Fact: The truth only matters if you get it first, and even then getting a story expediently, right or not is always preferred. A retraction, while messy, can always be printed and in most cases will go unnoticed anyway.

Myth: Balance is required.
Truth: The story is only as good as its sources. If one side of a story doesn't talk or is late getting back to a reporter, chances are the story will run as is. Who's fault is this? The reporter is working on a deadline and needs to file but the story will read like a one-sided editorial. In a medical story for instance, if you interview a patient who claims to be cured of an incurable disease from a naturopathic doctor, the reporter should ideally have a response from the medical community.

It's still a human interest story regardless, but since naturopathy isn't exactly recognized my the majority of M.D.'s it could be interpreted as 100% fact.

I wrote a story like this and couldn't get an M.D. on the line, not even a specialist until after the story went to print. I even pushed the story off a week to try further to get someone on the phone. When my call was finally returned it was the day the paper ran with the story. I was pleased with it, but it could have been better and more balanced

Myth: Journalists are noble creatures
Truth: Reporting in many cases is just a job

This is the worst realization I have ever come to and it's why I'm not as excited about my career path as I was a year ago. Much of what I write is mundane and of little interest to me but I tough it out anyway so I can collect a paycheck. I am ashamed to say that money is part of my motivation, or even on some days my primary motivation.

Investigative journalism is a dirty job, and if you're going to go that route in a community newspaper, chances are you'll piss off someone you care about. My values and my dedication align more with my friends and relationships than my job. I will not sacrifice friendships to get a story. If that means I end up writing fluffy feature pieces almost exclusively, so be it.

There seems to be little trust of journalists or newspapers now. With characters like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, why should the everyman trust what's written? Well I don't think the writer should be given carte blanche, but the cold shoulder is not the answer either. Question everything, but understand that the journalist has a job to do and when the whole story isn't there, try to ask why that is. Some blame should land on the writer, but not all...in some cases anyway.

Like with anything, you can find both good and bad in the world of professional journalism, you just need to dig. The worst part about it now is that there are very few in the mainstream that break convention, bend the rules and keep it interesting. Did Gonzo die with Hunter S. Thompson?

I'll rant on the news aesthetic a different time.

An outlet

2008-07-14T13:19:00.000-03:00

The blogosphere is a mixed bag. Too often it's filled to the brim with celebrity crotch and pot shots or mundane recaps of the everyday routine. They act as little more than trashy entertainment or published diaries when there is an opportunity for a fair bit more.

No wonder the world of journalism looks at blogs as a waste of space...even though most online newspapers have blogs from their featured columnists.

A lot of bloggers are self-referenced "journalists" and this is not exactly accurate. No, you do not need to be employed by a paper or a magazine to be a journalist, but ideally you will have access to sources and not simply post an opinion.

Blogs provide a more open opportunity to editorialize content and that's not exactly journalism in the purest sense of the word. Remove opinion, replace it with researched facts and sources and then you can call it journalism but why bother?

The point being is that while the world of professional journalism offers little opportunity to express character or creativity, blogging is the opposite.

This is an outlet, a chance to vent, be creative and find a way to comment on life without being mundane. Not always the case, but blogging has that opportunity. As a journalist, I am excited about the prospect of voicing my opinions online as a break from what I consider the bland existence of "proper" reporting. It's fun on occasion, but much of it is terribly banal.

Welcome to my mind...tell me if it's boring.