Quips Notes - 25.03.05

An example of how I rarely stay annoyed enough about things to take them further than writing a letter that never gets submitted to the source:

Open Letter to the Editor (Re: Ho-Hum, We've Seen This (Canadian) Movie Before by Susan Riley, The Ottawa Citizen, Wed., March 23, 2005)

Susan Riley's job can't be that hard, judging from her March 23 editorial column. All you need is a good idea - strike that - a lazy, opinionated idea of what you're writing about, and six columns worth of space to fill with a head full of as many words as will fit them. I suppose this is called journalism at The Ottawa Citizen. Few beyond your Baxter Road bullpen would likely agree. I certainly don't.

In the typical fashion of somebody grasping at thin air for copy text before deadline, Riley complies to intellectually slothful, knee jerk supposition, expressing her soap box complaints about Canadian movies without actually bothering to look beyond her neighbourhood video store's shelves to find out what's actually out there these days. Turning her eyes to the glitter of Hollywood and its legions of stars and its glut of blockbusters, and then casting her disapproving glare at Hollywood North, easily resembling somebody who would probably do the exact same thing if Canada actually did foster a similarly hyped and obsessive celebrity making industry that enjoyed the same strong distribution network on a national and international level as the US does. If that time ever came, I suppose readers wouldn't need to wait too long before they turned the page to find Riley pining for the good old days, when Canadians barely knew about each and every must-see, adrenaline pounding and heartwarming, star studded film being cranked out of Toronto and Montreal. Back when Genie Night didn't grip this entire nation with pervasive chatter about who's who high fashion and red carpet star spotting, and wasn't so heavily commercialized. Long before everything about Canada's rising and elite constellation of screen idols was relentlessly piped into households as late breaking news for a ravenous homegrown culture of Canadian movie fans.

Back to reality, where's Riley's big news that Telefilm's directorship has changed hands, applauded at this year's Prime Time conference and heralded in the Spring 2005 edition of Canadian Screenwriter as ringing in what looks to be a much needed nurturing paradigm shift for Canadian Cinema from Vancouver to Halifax and all points in between? Not in her column. Where's the remotely indepth reporting on what the National Film Board and the Canadian Film and Television Production Association - both with office addresses here in Ottawa - have done or failed to do to promote Canadian cinematic releases to the general population of this country? Never mentioned. Where's the positive spin regarding the Commons Heritage Committee's reported study on the Canadian film industry that Riley does decide to touch upon, burying it several paragraphs in? Bah, positive, shmositive. Riley's fluff piece instead falls back on a hollow, over used statistic: Most Canadians watch more American movies than they watch Canadian movies. Hardly a captivating scoop worth the price of ink on newsprint, let alone the front of any reasonably established newspaper's section. All this does is clearly demonstrate that rudimentary math skills weren't a prerequisite for Riley being hired on at your paper. Canada doesn't produce as many movies annually as the United States does. Canada never has. Is this Riley's first stab at writing about this topic? Be ready to hire a team of researchers and a ghost writer, if she decides to turn her shallow gaze to sports or politics.

What's truly distressing is that Riley chose in her poorly spun, pseudo exposé to completely negate accessibly worthwhile, high quality and audience pleasing Canadian offerings such as nine-time Genie nominated The Snow Walker and four-time Genie hopeful Owning Mahowny - both shown widely in Canadian and foreign theatres during 2003 - as well as five-time Genie candidate Rare Birds (2001), the hilarious The Delicate Art of Parking (2004) and The Seduction of Dr. Lewis (2003), and 2005 Genie Award nominee judged top choice documentary The Corporation (2003). None worth mentioning, according to this Ottawa Citizen contributor's standards. In her column, Riley instead rhymes off Canadian film titles from a decidely weird, truncated list that strangely focuses on the banal and the bizarre: Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and Kiss (2001). This appears to be a fascination for her, vaguely tossing out a couple of notable exceptions that appear to have been grudgingly thrown in simply to fill space. Granted, perhaps those sex obsessed flicks are the only types of movies that manage to tantalize her moviegoing tastes. Maybe the naughty promise of catching a glimpse of raw Canadian nudity while sitting in the dark with a theatre full of strangers tops her priorities along with, oh, I don't know, making a joke that's probably only funny to her ("That's where I can help. Big Happy Family. An antic romp featuring an attractive Indo-Canadian RCMP sleuth...") or seeing her byline in print three times a week without really earning it. Gee, what fun. For Susan Riley anyways.

As an online film critic and one of a small number of Ottawa-based members of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, which produces both the Genie film awards' and the Gemini TV awards' annual ceremonies, I was also surprised to read in her column that Riley seems to believe that all of Canada's cinematic successes have been modest ones. She points to 'Les Invasions Barbares' (2003) as an exception, apparently because of its wins at Cannes and at Hollywood's Academy Awards. As though seeing one of our movies praised in these ways beyond our borders is somehow the only sign that a Canadian movie is more than modestly successful in any sense. A quick look through the Internet Movie Database brings up several poorly made American releases and box office bombs that have won awards, including the Oscar. So, what does that prove? Porky's (1982), the infamous Canadian high school flick with an estimated budget of $4,000,000, managed to pull in a reported $7,623,988 US on opening weekend - a financial winfall that earned it the Golden Reel Award at the Genies in 1983 - before going on to gross $105,500,000 US to date. Almost twenty-three years after it first hit the big screen, Porky's is still considered the highest grossing Canadian movie of all time. Despite it being the kind of boorish, sex-filled grand daddy to Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Kiss that seems to attract Riley's attention, it didn't win a prized, gold spray painted figurine from the States or from France for anyone's mantle. Of course it's embarrassing that the bar is set fairly low in Canada. However, even world wide popularity and immense Canadian success are merely modest after-all, using Riley's logic.

All the same, the most outlandish claim that Riley makes is that "We haven't developed a pool of talented script writers." Really? Clearly, this must be sobering news to the 1,700 souls working in film, television, radio, and multimedia production who are registered members of the Writers Guild of Canada. Does this mean that Riley plans to crash the WGC's Canadian Screenwriting Awards in Toronto this April 18, and be the solitary voice of reason that muscles past security to single out Canadian movie script writers for an over due tongue lashing? Will she tell these so-called talentless professionals that they all may as well pack it in? That they've been found out and should quit pretending, go back to school or get a real job? If so, perhaps Canadian screenwriters could become newspaper columnists. Full of trite, narrow minded commentary, since they've apparently been wasting their time in the Canadian movie business. It doesn't seem too difficult finding that type of work. Susan Riley's managed to land a job doing it. So, it obviously can't be that hard.

Thanks for checking in.

Quips Notes - 15.03.05

This actually sounds like the start of one of those from-the-hip jokes that are told over beers: A guy goes to refer his website, signs up to make that happen, yada, yada, yada, badda-bing. Except that it's not one of those jokes. I'm the guy. And, I did go to the CIRA site to find out how to register a new URL for my site that could be used as a referal address. The current web addy for my movie reviews website, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips (http://www.geocities.com/iamstephenbourne/moviequips.html), is a long one, and likely tough to remember. However, I didn't really want to change it, considering that I've spent the past couple of years passing it along and posting it to various search engines. I don't want to lose those links, or have to go back and update them, if possible. I've got enough of a job ahead of me in updating the ones from about three years ago that cite pages at The Nail Online that don't exist anymore (sigh). So, I figured registering a shorter address and simply making that new URL a redirect to my site would be the best short term solution. Besides, I like the idea of staying with geocities, having been with them for about ten years.

CIRA (www.cira.ca) is the Canadian, government-run department for registering internet domain names. However, if you go to their site, you'll soon discover that they don't actually deal directly with you at all. You need to hunt through CIRA's list of authorized associate agents - mostly ordinary online hosting companies offering to register your domain for a fee as a sideline - and then contact them to do what you went to the CIRA site to do in the first place. Once again, my tax dollars hard at work...

At any rate, I did that. Figuring that going local would make common sense for my wants. Going so far as to set up a separate email address, when I discovered that the chosen company didn't like yahoo or hotmail email addresses. I registered my shorter domain name, with .ca instead of .com, and then prepared to pay the fee before their deadline. Well, payment didn't happen. It didn't happen immediately, because the 'secure page' for credit cards came up blank. And, it didn't happen through snail mail, as it turned out. It wasn't much of a monthly fee, but something else came up, and the fee didn't get paid. Stuff happens, y'know? However, the punchline is, I guess this local company owner wasn't too impressed with my non-payment. Seeing as the email address that I supplied has been inundated with over three hundred spams in the course of less than a week, I'm guessing he was a tad miffed. Upgrades, software, sex, drugs, music. You name it, I've probably gotten a spam email from somebody trying to sell it to me. Telling me that it's just as well that I didn't pay this local owner anything, if he's so hard up for cash that he'll sell my email address to spammers out of spite. Or, perhaps it wouldn't have mattered if I had paid on time. I might have been spammed like this anyways. It's sad, really. However, live and learn, right?

I'll still go ahead with registering a shorter domain name for my site - through a more reputable company, if I can find one - but, it'll likely take a little longer than I'd planned. More stuff has come up over the past week or so that needs sooner attention than that. Primarily finding additional sites where I can submit my movie reviews to as a regular contributor. It's tougher doing that, considering the glut of movie sites out there that appear to have been abandoned for one reason or another. But, finding at least one more good site is far more important to my plans than whatever ease of marketability that having a shorter URL might give me. We'll see.

Thanks for checking in.