Will Smith’s recession proof, Mickey Rourke’s not

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

While Hollywood studios are preceding cautiously with their 2010 and 2011 lineups, stars are feeling the pinch with inflated paydays a thing of the past. According to Variety, Disney asked Nicolas Cage to cut his price on the next “National Treasure” sequel. And comeback kid Mickey Rourke was given a lowball opening offer of $250,000 by Marvel to play the main villain in “Iron Man 2.” Such tactics already prompted Samuel L. Jackson  to swear off playing Nick Fury in the sequel. Meanwhile, the red-hot Twilight stars will likely cash low-seven-figure upfront paychecks for sequel “New Moon” but won’t sink their fangs into first-dollar gross as they hoped.

Variety

Heading back to Texas with George W.

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 6:54 AM - 0 Comments

Former Bush advisor Mark McKinnon joins the outgoing administration on the final flight back to Texas. He files a series of candid photos from the trip and writes wistfully of the end. “While I expected the president’s mood to be defiant, bitter, defensive, or vengeful toward his critics, he was anything but,” McKinnon writes. “As he toured the cabin of the airplane throughout the flight, visiting with old friends, family, and staffers, he was filled with equanimity, grace, and a generosity of spirit.”

The Daily Beast

'The Dark Knight' duels with ‘Gran Torino’ for Oscar’s wild card slot

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 6:30 AM - 0 Comments

With the Oscar nominations due tomorrow morning, Hollywood insiders are weighing the odds. Indie sensation Slumdog Millionaire may be leading the pack, but for once studio films are in the game, including the Batman blockbuster and Clint’s elegaic ode to his American machissmo. The best actor race come down to a cage match between Mickey Rourke (‘The Wrestler’) and Sean Penn (‘Milk’). And the only sure thing is that Oscar will give the late Heath Leger the last laugh as the Joker.

CNN

Change has come to the coalition's polling numbers

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 1:01 AM - 62 Comments

The coalition may be dead. But it’s now more popular than the current government.

Can we really spend our way out of this mess?

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 12:00 AM - 87 Comments

The phrase “paradigm shift” was coined by the historian Thomas Kuhn to describe the process by which an old belief system, long entrenched and widely shared, is suddenly overthrown by a new one. But how to describe the sudden revival of an old belief system to replace the new?

How, in particular, to explain the remarkable re-embrace of deficit spending (“fiscal stimulus,” in the phrase of the moment) across much of the developed world—not only by the political class, for whom its appeal is obvious, but by much of the economics profession? How, when so little fresh evidence has been offered of its effectiveness, and so much of the original critique that first discredited it remains intact? And how, in Canada of all places, which suffered more than most from a previous generation’s experimentation with deficit finance, and where the case for Doing Something would seem less pressing than elsewhere?

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Paul Dewar, poetry lover

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 11:32 PM - 2 Comments

The Citizen’s Joanne Chianello reports from the US Embassy.

The guests, largely Canadians invited by the embassy staff, burst into applause after every song and speech, and then the oath of office. Only Mr. Dewar, though, applauded the inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander.

In her liveblog, Kady reported that the NDP’s Dewar was “leading the applause.” Maybe she was being kind.

Dave MacKenzie, party pooper

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 11:26 PM - 4 Comments

The Conservative MP extends his empathies to President Obama.

Oxford MP Dave MacKenzie worries there is too much “hope and expectations” for the new president, whom he describes as “bright, intelligent and personable.”

“I’m not sure the man can fulfill the expectations,” he said. “I’m not sure any man could. He is human and hampered by the times he is in.”

MacKenzie warned that while the economic downturn was triggered by the subprime crisis in the United States, it is now global. ”The U.S. alone won’t be able to fix it,” he said.

Directorial Touches In TV Comedy

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 8:08 PM - 9 Comments

Last night’s episode of  The Big Bang Theory had some nice examples of how the show’s regular director, Mark Cendrowski, has helped keep these characters from becoming cartoons. One bit that I liked was after the Elmer Fudd speech-impedimented Kripke makes a crude pass at Penny. Howard, who’s usually the one making the crude passes — that was the subject of last week’s episode — walks by Penny, leans over to her, says something like “Suddenly I don’t look so bad, do I?” and then keeps on walking. As he walks away, Penny laughs at what he just said. I thought the way the actors played the moment was a nice call-back to last week’s episode, as well as a quick reminder of why Howard really isn’t such a bad guy to hang out with. (And I like it, in general, when characters actually laugh when another character says something that’s intended to be amusing. A lot of shows will have every single wisecrack followed by complete seriousness from the other characters, even in light moments.) It wasn’t a big moment, but the little moments are what make TBBT work even though the stories sound generic when described; the best moments of almost any episodes are the small ones, like the three non-Sheldon guys whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown” last night. And Cendrowski, who directed most of the first season and all of the second season so far, clearly deserves some of the credit for executing these seeming throwaway bits so well. Directing the series is not a glamour job compared to directing the pilot, but in some ways it’s more important; once the series gets going, the regular director — if there is one — is overseeing the development of how the actors play their characters and how they function as a unit. It’s his job, in other words, to make them better than they were in the pilot.

The position of a multi-camera sitcom director is an odd one, because he can simultaneously do both more and less than the single-camera director. The visual opportunities of a multi-camera show, compared to single-camera, are absurdly limited; lighting for four cameras and shooting in front of an audience pretty much takes away any ability to do anything interesting with camera angles, composition, etc. (This is why you will often see long, complex takes in a single-camera show, but almost never in multi-camera. The single-camera director can plan the shot and maneuver the actors and the camera and lighting to get the whole thing in one take. The multi-camera director can’t do that because he or she has to make the actors visible to the audience as well as the home viewer, and the set and lighting are locked down; all he or she can do is make sure we see the face of whoever happens to be talking.) The upside of directing multi-camera is that because it’s all shot in the studio, it’s possible for one person to direct every episode, or almost every episode, of a multi-camera show.

On a single-camera show, there is no such thing as “the director.” There may be a director who also produces and sets the visual style of the series, like Tommy Schlamme on Aaron Sorkin’s shows, but no one can direct every episode of a single-camera series, because there’s so much preparation involved; someone else has to be shooting the current episode while a director is getting ready to direct the next one. (The exception is a single-camera show like Green Acres, which was done entirely in studio and shot in about three days. Richard Bare, who is now in his ’90s, directed 160+ episodes of that series.) A multi-camera show has the option of hiring one person as the regular director, to guide the actors week after week; in single-camera, they’re more on their own. Some multi-cam shows have been able to use that to their advantage, to compensate for the visual limitations of multi-camera by having the actors more at ease and consistent than they might be with a rotation of directors.

Many current multi-camera shows do exercise the option to have one regular director. TBBT and How I Met Your Mother, I think, both benefit from having one person doing most Continue…

Sweet redemption

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 7:50 PM - 9 Comments

Bob Rae’s current Facebook status.

Bob Rae is listening to President Obama “the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose a job” and shouting “Rae Days”!

The Obama Standard

By John Parisella - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 7:42 PM - 8 Comments

We are becoming accustomed to the high rhetoric of this new president. Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can”-speech in New Hampshire and his speech on race in Pennsylvania have already been deemed classics. Add to them his speech in Berlin in the summer of 2007, his speech at the Democratic convention in Denver last August, and his victory speech on election night and it was easy to assume the bar would be impossibly high come inauguration day. But Obama has once again passed the test.

While this address was more sober in tone and delivery, it was a speech that will be remembered for its vision and its audacity. Obama expressed confidence in America’s promise, but he also called on his fellow citizens to become more engaged and responsible, and emphasized the need to restore America’s moral leadership in world. Obama chose to deliver a message that change is on the way—that it will be transformative and his presidency will be proactive. Clearly, this man has an eight-year agenda.

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The Parade That Will Not End

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 6:53 PM - 2 Comments

CNN has had the “Now: President Obama Watches Parade” on for what feels like three millennia. Remember all those zombie movies where you eliminate the first group of zombies only to find a second group of zombies behind them? This is like that, but with marching bands. Bands with baton twirlers, bands with flags, bands with frilly costumes and bands with bayonets, but they just keep coming.

On the bright side, we now know why Obama won’t be able to fix any of the world’s problems (which officially became his fault at noon today): he’s trapped watching marching bands for the rest of his life.

Update: Wait, could it be? Yes! The President and his wife have escaped to their home, with the marching bands in hot pursuit. Tonight they’ll be awakened by the faint sound of “Stars and Stripes Forever…” and they’ll open the Oval Office door and legions of trombone players will leap out at them in a shocking twist. You know how these stories work.

On the subject of marching bands, I had a dispute with a co-worker about whether it’s dangerous to arm these kids with batons and solid metal instruments, or whether giving them these things distracts them from the gun violence they’d undoubtedly be committing if they didn’t have these marching-band gangs to work off their hostility.

The Commons: How it looked from here

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 6:11 PM - 4 Comments

In the main ballroom of Rideau Hall, the DJ was spinning a track by Gil Scott-Heron, a man who said the revolution would not be televised. In the middle of the room, a giant TV screen showed images from Washington, former presidents taking their respective places on the capitol’s massive stage.

The Governor General was throwing something of a party, inviting 150 young people to sit underneath a crystal chandelier and watch what was unanimously considered history before it had even officially occured.

She offered a few opening words, Her Excellency Michaelle Jean speaking in that way she does, as if from the deepest part of her chest. She talked of slavery and indignation, joy and hope, suffering and freedom. She spoke of Barack Obama as he must seem to her—a living embodiment of the ideals she holds tightly.

“In these times, when the most fragile among us are threatened by an uncertain economy, by the folly of war and the tension born of prejudice, let us all rejoice in the wave of hope that is filling our hearts,” she said. “It is the hope for a world where human beings will at last find their place at the centre of the systems they have created to make life the most wondrous of adventures.”

She turned the proceedings over to the show. Continue…

The Year of the Mall Cop

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 5:27 PM - 3 Comments

Days after Paul Blart: Mall Cop demonstrates that we still can’t get enough of the “Funny name, wacky job” formula, Fox announces that one of their new comedy pilots is Walorsky, the story of… a fat, lazy guy working as a mall cop. The pilot must have been pitched to them and written before Paul Blart came out, so the question is, does the simultaneous development of two mall-cop-related projects indicate:

a) Nostalgia for the endangered world of multi-story shopping malls;

b) Budget-cutting consciousness that setting most of the story in a mall cuts down on the number of locations you have to scout, or

c) Belief that “mall cop” just sounds funny? (And, unlike “Male Gigolo,” it’s not a redundancy.)

The other news out of Fox’s recent batch of pilot announcements is that while (like all networks) they’re trying to increase their quota of half-hour comedies, Fox president Kevin Reilly claims that the network needs to move away from multi-camera shows — after flops like Back to You and Do Not Disturb – and back to the broad, cartoony, quirky single-camera comedies that gave the network its comedy identity in the early part of this decade. It’s not a bad strategy considering that Fox has traditionally been most successful with comedies when they do whatever the other networks aren’t doing (giving us Married… With Children at the height of the Cosby boom; giving us Malcolm in the Middle when everyone else was trying to come up with the next Friends).

UPDATED: From across the aisle, mixed reviews

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 4:39 PM - 47 Comments

Andrew Sullivan rounds up U.S. conservative commentators’ reaction to the Obama inaugural address. Most found some to like and some to dislike. I’d be really thrilled if our own political debates were more often like that.

As for my own reaction, I’m surprised, on re-reading the speech, at how un-pretty, even inelegant its prose is. (“All this we can do. And all this we will do.” That was uncomfortably reminiscent of a few dozen speeches I heard around Ottawa in the ’90s.) Surprised because I found it very moving in the delivery, and I’ve tended to be a hard marker of Obama speeches. This one didn’t seek to sum up the whole presidency in one speech. George Stephanopoulos was reminiscing about Bill Clinton staying up until 5 a.m. on his inauguration day, re-writing the speech. That’s just dumb, and Clinton was, usually, not a dumb guy. It’s what you do when you want the speech to be the whole four years. A nail doesn’t have to be the house, David Mamet likes to tell film students. It just has to be a good nail.

Obama needed to introduce his mandate, not tell us how it went before it’s even begun. His speech delivered three important messages. The country is in a fix. Responsibility for the mess and the repair does not lie elsewhere, but with each citizen. And clues to the remedy can be found in the country’s founding documents and ideas. He made a sturdy start of things, it seemed to me.

UPDATE: Former presidential speechwriters, including the great Safire (greater for what he’s done since he left the White House than for what he did in it, but still) check out the new guy’s moves. Tremendous fun.

PBOWatch: A little light weekend reading for parliamentarians

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 4:27 PM - 3 Comments

Not quite as efficient as an RSS feed, but it keeps ITQ from having to remember to check the website every few days to make sure she doesn’t miss out on any shiny newly released analysis:

From: LOP Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer/Bureau du directeur parlementaire du budget BDP
Subject: PBO to Release Pre-budget Briefing Note Wednesday, January 21 / Le DPB publiera une fiche de breffage prébudgétaire le mercredi 21 janvier
Sent: Jan 20, 2009 3:44 PM

For your information, before noon tomorrow the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), Kevin Page,  will be posting a pre-budget briefing note prepared by his office for parliamentarians and Canadians.  You will receive an email once the document has been posted.

Thank you,

Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer

Canada wins the war on frozen fingers

By Emily Burke - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:37 PM - 23 Comments

An amazing new invention by the Canadian military could mean you’ll never suffer from frozen fingers again.

Researchers at the Department of National Defence have developed the Torso Heating for Dexterity in the Cold system, a close fitting battery-powered vest with a built-in thermostat. Rather than covering the hands with a heated glove, the vest increases the wearer’s core temperature to the point where the body can keep fingers warm on its own. It’s the first of its kind in the world, says Darren Menabney, business development officer at Defense Research and Development Canada. “There’s nothing out there that really does the same thing.”

The vest uses a built-in control system to monitor the wearer’s finger temperature, and turns up the heat when they’re chilly. This fools the core into thinking that the body is overheating, triggering an automatic response to send warm blood to the extremities.

Continue…

Google turns the tables on Microsoft

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:35 PM - 3 Comments

Google has kicked off a new battle with Microsoft, and it’s borrowing a weapon from the computer giant’s own war chest. Users of Gmail, Google’s popular email service, are being told that older versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are “unsupported,” and if they want to use all of Gmail’s features—and double its speed—they should switch to Chrome, which happens to be Google’s new browser.

Internet Explorer 6 users are reporting that when they sign into Google’s online email application, a “Get faster Gmail” message pops up in the menu bar. Clicking on it takes them to a page that promotes Chrome (which launched in September), and Firefox (which Chrome recently replaced in the Google Pack application bundle), saying the two browsers are “twice as fast” at running Gmail.

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Cashing in on mail

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:32 PM - 7 Comments

Jean-Claude Parrot, the president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers for 15 years, was a most unusual kind of public figure: a celebrity mailman. Parrot made headlines in the ’70s and ’80s, negotiating the public sector’s first paid maternity leave and spending two months in jail for opposing back-to-work legislation. Then, postal strikes were big news.

Not anymore. For almost five weeks last autumn, 2,100 people were on strike, fighting for better sick leave and disability benefits, but those talks and the Dec. 21 settlement went unnoticed. Canadians’ waning affections for the institution won’t be helped by a recent report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses that showed Canada Post workers earn on average 16.9 per cent more annually than comparable private sector employees, even though they work 10 hours less per week. “With better control over spending on wages and salaries,” the report read, “the organization has the potential to reduce prices, improve service and give taxpayers a higher return on their dollar.”

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You call this a showroom?

By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

Strolling through the Detroit auto show feels a bit like wandering through a half-empty, carpeted parking garage. Gone are the audacious auto-show concept cars that look like they were made by NASA. The Cobo Center, on the bank of the Detroit River, is instead dotted with conventional-looking cars and trucks—most with hybrid badges slapped on the back. Aside from the occasional splash of thumping music, there’s little trace of the glitz and glamour that were once the hallmarks of this show. This year in Detroit, sex appeal is out, replaced with what seem like cries for help. At General Motors, that meant no pretty models in low-cut dresses, but rather some raucous auto workers and dealers waving signs that read “Here to Stay” and “We’re Electric” as they showed off the latest product line.

It was, if nothing else, a fittingly austere presentation for an industry that’s fallen on the hardest of times. In the U.S., already abysmal sales fell off a cliff last month, dropping 35 per cent. In Canada, where the industry was surprisingly resilient for much of 2008, things have started to crumble too, with sales falling over 20 per cent. Auto analysts say there’s little worth celebrating. “If there’s any optimism it’s just that the market hasn’t gone into total collapse,” says Dennis Virag, president of the Automotive Consulting Group, Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich. He, like many others taking in the show, predicts things won’t start to turn around until mid-2010.

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It just came out of nowhere!

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:17 PM - 8 Comments

For some reason, the last line of this story made me giggle. It makes it sound as though Flaherty is going to trip over a pile of budget documents on the way to his desk and land spread-eagled in the centre aisle of the House of Commons, blinking confusedly. Then again, that’s not a bad description of what happened with the fall economic statement, come to think of it.

Time the Decider

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 2:57 PM - 20 Comments

Going broke is good news?

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 1:19 PM - 1 Comment

Going broke is rarely considered a gift from the gods, but it’s possible that Nortel Networks has just been blessed. The telecom titan recently filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada, the U.S., and Europe—and a recent study shows that may have been exactly the right thing to do to finally turn the company around. “It gives them some breathing room to reorganize and focus on the business changes that might need to be made,” says Mike Lemmon, a finance professor at University of Utah and a one of the study’s authors. “Rather than worrying about having to generate enough cash just to make next month’s interest payment.”

The study, published online by the Social Sciences Research Network, looked at 530 companies that declared bankruptcy between 1991 and 2004, and classified each in one of two ways. “Financially distressed” companies were good businesses that would be profitable if their debt were removed. “Economically distressed” companies wouldn’t be. The study found that 80 per cent of the former group emerged from bankruptcy with only seven per cent fewer assets—so they were the stronger for it. Meanwhile, only 37 per cent of the economically distressed companies managed to reorganize with less than half of their original assets. The rest were liquidated or bought up. “The bankruptcy process seems to be doing what it’s supposed to do,” says Lemmon, “which is allowing good firms with financial problems to restructure and keep their businesses going. And getting rid of bad firms.”

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Obama's speech and the environment

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 1:03 PM - 10 Comments

A number of references to tackling climate change in Barack Obama’s historic inauguration speech. Obama has long made climate change a key part of his program, with his stimulus package, creating green jobs, and the incoming cap and trade program. In his words:

- He talked about “restoring science to its rightful place;” likely partly a veiled reference to his appointment of Nobel prize winner Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, who is regarded as a key player in the administration’s climate change program.

- “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” Obama’s $875 billion stimulus package is hoped to create 3-4 million jobs, many of them in clean tech.

- “Nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”

-”Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

A good crazy

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 12:38 PM - 19 Comments

Oh, Rev. Lowery, were we ever glad to see you after that lettuce poem. Here’s a clip that (despite its poor video quality) shows what he can do when he’s on top of his game: