The Great TV Episode Burn-Off
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 16, 2009 - 1 Comment
The saga of Dollhouse‘s 13th episode is one of the more amusing TV-scheduling issues of recent months. According to the schedule, Fox only needs 12 episodes of the show before the season ends. But the deal between the production company and the network — that is, between one division of Newscorp and another — was for 13 episodes, and the original pilot doesn’t count because it never became a completed episode. (After the network rejected it, scenes from the original pilot were used in subsequent episodes.) So they wound up shooting an extra, half-budget episode that could be a selling point for the DVD/Blu-Ray release:
Whedon said Episode 12, titled “Omega,” does serve as a season finale but that the birth of the 13th episode was “very strange and they (the network) said, ‘Can’t you do a clip show?’ and I said, ‘That seems lame.’ [Laughs.] And they said, ‘Can’t you just show the pilot?’ And I’m like, ‘Not only would it make no sense but we’ve cannibalized it for parts and it appears in almost every episode.”
Ending the season with an episode or two unaired isn’t at all new, but it’s a bigger quandary for serialized shows that need to end the season with a bang, and therefore can’t usually afford to show “extra” episodes after the regular season ends. Whedon seems to imply that the extra episode they shot could serve as a coda to the regular season if Fox chooses to show it. But they might be better off leaving it for the DVD; the “season finale” carries a lot more weight than it used to, and we’re a long way away from the time when a show could afford to end the season with a throwaway episode (and usually did).
As the network’s first suggestion implies, there’s also a traditional way to handle things when a production company has an order for 13 of episodes and only enough money for 12: do a clip show. Doing a new episode on a low budget is probably a better solution, though, so it’s a good thing that that tradition is dying out.
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Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal ‘tax grab’
By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 26 Comments
With harmonization Ontario Grits finally get it right – and the Tories don’t like it
In the course of his 5½ years as premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty has made any number of missteps, wrong turns, and downright pratfalls. He has raised taxes (when he promised he wouldn’t), ramped up spending at an alarming rate, and repealed rather than obey the province’s balanced budget law. He has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to failing automakers, picked pointless fights with the feds, and overseen the province’s decline into have-not status.And through it all, the Progressive Conservative opposition was largely docile. Oh, it would throw out an attack line here, promise to get tough on crime there, but in the broad strokes there was very little to distinguish the Conservatives under John Tory from the McGuinty Liberals, and the whole province knew it. McGuinty’s policies were the Conservatives’ and vice versa.
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Econowatch
By Steve Maich - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 2:15 PM - 2 Comments
The Sunshine Gang vs. The Legion of Doom. PLUS: The geography of job cuts
There are two dominant schools of thought emerging in the economy today. They agree on nothing and they’re making quite a racket.The first group we shall call the Sunshine Gang. After watching stock markets rise 20 per cent in the past month, they’re feeling good. Every piece of economic data that is slightly less awful than it was last month only bolsters their enthusiasm and their oft-repeated mantra that “the worst is behind us.” U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke bought his membership in the Gang Tuesday morning, telling an audience of college students that he sees “tentative signs” that economic activity is “levelling out.” Continue…
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Our funny Shirley Valentine. Stay.
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments
The brilliant Nicola Cavendish is back as that hilariously husband-shucking housewife
Last year, Roy Surette, the artistic director of Montreal’s Centaur Theatre Company, called Nicola Cavendish to see if she’d star in a co-production he wanted to mount with Toronto’s Canadian Stage Company. “He said, ‘I’m going to ask a favour of you, Nicky,’ ” the Vancouver-based actor recalls. She knew what was coming. “I said, ‘Roy, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare ask me if I’ll be Shirley Valentine again. You know how much I love her. You know how I much I value her words. But I don’t want to. It’s too much work. I’m too old.’ ” -
In which I spring to the Prime Minister's defence, as if my name were Ari
By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 66 Comments
My colleagues are already making extravagant fun of Stephen Harper’s decision to reach out to the American people, and in particular those American people named Ari Fleischer and Mike McCurry, as a first step to reaching out to those other American people, the metaphorical American people who go by the name Mr. and Mrs. America, via the magic of newspaper and broadcast interviews with the Wall Street Journals and the Fox News and the Washington Post or Times or what-have-you-got and the Fox Cable and the Fox Cable Business News and the Fox News on Business Cable and the Boston Globes other surviving news outlets of our great neighbours to the south.I too must confess that my feelings on this are mixed. When I hear about a Canadian prime minister bending himself into pretzels to get U.S. press coverage, I feel two very different feelings, and I feel them both fairly strongly but not necessarily simultaneously. Here are my two feelings, in the rough order in which they occurred to me:
(a) Hooray, for now I get to mock him.
(b) Actually, this makes perfect sense and is probably, marginally, good for Canada.
Since sentiment (a) is already well canvassed elsewhere, here’s more on (b). Continue…
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Epilepsy drug hurts babies’ I.Q. scores
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:41 PM - 3 Comments
Pregnant women on drug had children with lower I.Q. scores, study shows
Children born to women who took a popular epilepsy drug while pregnant had significantly lower I.Q. scores than those whose moms took a different drug, according to a new study. The drug, valproate, which is sold generically and under the brand name Depakote, is the second-most popular antiseizure medication for epilepsy; it’s also often used to treat migraines, pain and psychiatric disorders, the New York Times reports, although earlier studies found that use during pregnancy increased the risk of developmental delays and major malformations. According to the research, which appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, three-year-olds whose mom took valproate during pregnancy had I.Q. scores nine points lower, on average, than kids whose mothers took a different antiseizure drug, lamotrigine. Their scores were also lower than those of kids who took two other antiseizure drugs. Children’s I.Q. scores were strongly related to those of their mothers, except for kids whose mothers took valproate, the study found.
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If you can’t fit in one seat, airline will charge for two
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:39 PM - 0 Comments
United cracking down on obese passengers
For the more rotund among us, the days of spilling innocently into the adjacent plane seat are over. United Airlines is the latest U.S. carrier to demand that those who can’t fit into a single seat pay for another or risk being pulled off the plane. According to Slate writer William Saletan, it was a calculated business decision: “The wrath of passengers on whom these people encroach now exceeds the expected wrath of the fat people themselves. The cost of being nice to oversize fliers has become too high.” But is there a better way? Most fat people only need a few extra inches, not an entire seat. Instead, Saleton suggests offering thinner seats at a discount.
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Michael Edward Hamilton 1962-2009
By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments
A funnyman and confessed ‘mama’s boy,’ he landed 2,500 parachute jumps with never a hint of fear
Michael Edward Hamilton was born on Dec. 11, 1962, in Halifax. He was the second of four kids—including Lorraine, Lenora and James—born to Gerald, a member of the Canadian Forces, and Greta. A base brat, Mike bounced from Gagetown, N.B., to Baden-Soellingen in Germany, to Calgary, Edmonton, then Petawawa, Ont., before returning to Nova Scotia, where he graduated high school at Cobequid Educational Centre in Truro. Changing schools, teams and friends every three years didn’t phase Mike, a “good-humoured,” natural athlete, says Greta. “He loved moving around.”His parents pushed hard to dissuade Mike from following in his father’s footsteps: “You know the service life. Go and get a taste of civvy street,” Gerald advised. But two weeks after picking up his diploma, Mike—a confessed “mama’s boy”—signed up. At first, Greta didn’t believe him: “He was always clowning around,” she explains. Before her head stopped spinning, Mike was off to basic training in Cornwall.
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In Ottawa, at the Berlin opera, live
By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 2 Comments
With this Digital Concert Hall, viewers have advantages over those attending in person
It was a quiet Friday afternoon the other day at the Maclean’s Ottawa bureau, so I closed my office door, turned up the volume on my computer speakers and tuned in, live, to a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. Sir Simon Rattle was conducting and Schumann was on the program. Continue… -
Woody Allen on Larry David
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments
He’s just like Diane Keaton
Fans of Woody Allen have been anxiously awaiting Whatever Works, which opens the Tribeca Film Festival next week, Allen’s first New York-based film in years and his first ever collaboration with Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Happily, David, who at first looked a stretch to fit Woody’s cerebral, romantic, if kooky sensibility, is something of a homecoming for the writer-director. “It used to be Diane Keaton with me–she always used to tell me, ‘I’m terrible, I’m awful, I can’t do it, you should get someone else.’ And she was always brilliant. Well, Larry is like this,” he tells The New York Observer’s Sara Vilkomerson. “I gave him every opportunity to get someone else,” says David, whose turn with Allen, it must be said, is reminiscent of and as apparently unlikely as his role in a Martin Scorsese film in the third season of Curb Your Enthusiasm . Happily too, the partnership is, according to Vilkomerson, a success: “Whatever Works is Woody Allen exactly as you want your Woody Allen to be. It’s witty, dark, poignant, zany and hilarious, and showcases a New York filtered through the Allen lens as we’ve never seen it before.”
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Star Trek’s perilous enterprise
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 2 Comments
With a record budget, the franchise’s much-ballyhooed reboot invades ‘Star Wars’ territory
Believe it or not, there are inhabitants of earth, including at least one editor at this magazine, who still get Star Trek and Star Wars mixed up. But who can blame them? Both franchises are space operas with fanatical cult followings, and, for the uninitiated, it may be hard to keep it all straight—to tell your Romulans from your Rodians and your Klingons from your Kowakians, never mind whether you should slice your aliens with a hand phaser or a lightsaber. So patiently you explain that these worlds are polar opposites. Star Trek is techno science fiction set in a foreseeable future; Star Wars is mythic fantasy set in a past. Star Trek is an expanding universe, a promiscuous TV franchise that’s been cloning itself for over four decades, while spawning a string of ho-hum spinoffs for the big screen; Star Wars is a finite saga that George Lucas has forged into a monumental series of blockbuster epics, all bigger and more lucrative than any of the Trek films. -
Shh: more proof asbestos kills
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 2 Comments
A secret year-old report further shows that asbestos causes cancer
You’d think a report showing a “strong relationship” between chrysotile asbestos mined in Canada and lung cancer would make headlines the minute this news broke. But it’s taken a year for the findings to come to light. A panel of international experts made the conclusion in March 2008, but Health Canada refused to make the findings public. The panel’s chairman called this “an annoying piece of needless government secrecy.” CanWest News Service finally received the report by filing an Access to Information request. The hazards of asbestos are acutely controversial, especially in Quebec, where the industry is headquartered. Even though asbestos use is banned in Canada and throughout Europe and Australia, we still export $100 million of the stuff to developing countries. Politicians have been reluctant to cut off the industry altogether, opting instead for “safe use” policies, because it would compromise their popularity in Quebec. One of the experts on the panel says the most important thing about their study is what it doesn’t say: “that exposure to chrysotile asbestos is safe.” Health Canada isn’t releasing the report to the public at large, but will send a copy to interested citizens upon request.
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Outside the box
By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment
Who knew the world of theoretical physics could be so exciting?
Photograph by Simon Hayter
“It’s an odd story,” Howard Burton said over the phone from his country home in France. If anything, that was an understatement. Burton’s new book, First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science, tells at least three odd stories.
Mostly it’s about how Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, came to launch and substantially bankroll the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. It’s also about how Lazaridis came to hire Burton, a random guy with a PhD in physics who had achieved no great distinction in the world of science, to run this odd new behemoth. And near the end, it turns into a book about how Burton left Perimeter, on very short notice, in 2007.
The short version is: his contract wasn’t renewed. But in the book and in conversation, Burton comes as close as he can to saying he was fired, and that the book itself is the reason.
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Mad Mel has at least one fan left
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:29 AM - 0 Comments
Former Variety editor on Mel Gibson at his best and worst
Peter Bart, the former editor of Variety, weighs in on the billion-dollar divorce of Mel Gibson, who he describes as the most “tortured soul” he’s ever met. Writing on his blog, Bart reveals he has seen the actor at his worst: “out-of-his-mind drunk, shouting denunciations of Vatican teachings. I’ve also been with him when he was subdued and sober, and full of remorse for his anti-Semitic blatherings.” Yet he remains sympathetic; “there is something downright poignant about anyone as messed up – and as talented – as Gibson,” he concludes.
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How the Nazis made Germans complicit in the killing of the Jews
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM - 2 Comments
A review of recent breakthrough historical writing
How culpable are all Afghan men for the misogyny of religious zealots among them? How widely were Canadians responsible for the harm done to native children in residential schools? Were nearly all Rwandan Hutus implicated in the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis? Whenever the extent of group guilt is at issue, the ur-question lurking in the background is, How much did ordinary Germans know about the Final Solution? This review of recent breakthrough historical writing suggests a nuanced answer, perhaps best summed up as “enough to know that it was better not to know more.”
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Gambling on a favourable same-sex tide
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:21 AM - 0 Comments
New York Democratic governor David Paterson hopes to ride the momentum
New York Democratic governor David Paterson, a consistent supporter of gay rights, is hoping to ride the momentum building in other states by introducing legislation to make marriage between same-sex couples legal. The step would be a political gamble, because any legislation would face an uphill climb in the State Senate, where Democrats do not have enough votes to get the measure approved, meaning that its chances will rest in the hands of a few Republicans.
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Let the recycling begin
By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 4 Comments
Vancouver’s Olympics get serious about the Games’ environmental and social impact
Upon entering for the first time the magnificent 2.6-hectare sprawl of the Richmond Olympic Oval, most people look upward in awe at the glorious arc of its wooden ceiling—a million board feet of timber reclaimed from forests decimated by B.C.’s mountain pine beetle infestation. And then there are those of a more base nature who look downward—in puzzlement—at the facility’s toilets. Well, not at the toilets so much as the signs above them: “Non-potable water. DO NOT DRINK,” they warn. One’s initial response is, “Well, duh!” Or, “Can’t be worse than American beer.” Or, “Someone should tell them that dogs can’t read.”Still, a sign like that gets a body thinking. The fact is that most potties in Canada are charged with perfectly sweet, municipally treated drinking water—quite a waste. The state-of-the-art Richmond oval, site of next year’s Olympic long-track speed skating events, is a rare exception. Its toilets are charged with rainwater funnelled off its arching roof. This explains the pro forma health warnings, certain to give Olympic visitors a curious impression of Canadian bathroom habits. The rest of the rain runoff, used to irrigate trees and landscaping, flows into a picturesque outdoor retention pond surrounded by walkways and public art. Viewed in that warm green light, the inability to drink from the toilets doesn’t seem much of a sacrifice.
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Yes, they really do have snakes on planes
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments
A Qantas airliner was grounded after four baby pythons escaped
A Qantas airliner was grounded after four baby pythons escaped from their container in the aircraft’s hold. Just 15 cm long, the snakes were among 12 Stimson’s pythons being flown from Alice Springs to Melbourne in Australia. At first handlers thought the missing reptiles may have been eaten by the other snakes, but this was discounted after the remaining eight were weighed on landing. Passengers were then transferred to other aircraft. No one has any idea yet how the snakes—which can grow up to a metre in length—escaped from their container. The airline decided to fumigate the jet because the species is not endangered. “If these snakes turn up they will be very much dead snakes,” said Qantas spokesman David Epstein. Good to hear, since their bodies have yet to be found.
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Octomom™
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 1 Comment
Nadya Suleman has had enough of people calling her the “octomom” without paying for it
Nadya Suleman has had enough of people calling her the “octomom” without paying for it. The world’s most famous mass-mother is seeking to register the term as her trademark, with her lawyer saying that she “has the rightful claim to the name ‘octomom.’” Either she doesn’t realize the word isn’t a compliment, or she doesn’t care as long as she gets paid.
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Spring cleaning
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments
Police arrest nearly every member of the Hells Angels in Quebec
Police in Quebec completed the second part of the spring cleaning they started in 2001 yesterday, arresting nearly every remaining member of the Hells Angels left in the province. In all, 1,200 SQ officers, with help from local police forces, fanned out across Quebec, New Brunswick, and even France and the Dominican Republic, to round up 156 suspects beginning early Wednesday morning. Among those, 111 are “full patch” members of the Hells Angels (of 113 total members in Quebec), four are prospects, one is described as a “hang-around,” 11 are retired members and 29 others are associates of the biker gang. Police hope the arrests will close investigations into 22 murders dating back to the biker war that raged between 1994 and 2000, as well as a variety of other crimes committed over the past two decades.
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Mitchel Raphael on Lisa Raitt’s tips for women
By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments
And the night they took back D’Arcy’s
A ‘pyjama’ party
Wear comfy clothes, Lisa Raitt told the dozen female Tory staffers she invited to her place for a casual night of finding out what it’s like to be a cabinet minister. The event was the “closest thing to a pyjama party,” quipped the natural resources minister, who offered the other women tips such as, “Be prepared—know your files,” “Do not trash other women—it reflects poorly on you, not them,” and “Wear high heels.” Pizza was served along with martinis—the rims of the martini glasses were dipped in candies such as Pop Rocks and sugary Fun Dip. Ahead of the event, Raitt started spreading a rumour that Defence Minister Peter MacKay would be coming since he lives in the same building. She later told MacKay what she’d done. “When should I drop by?” he asked. He had to play hockey that night but popped in before the game and was reportedly extremely bashful. One staffer was so touched by the party and the opportunity to talk to a minister that she proclaimed Raitt “my second-favourite minister now.” Her first-favourite, the staffer said, was still Peter MacKay. Raitt smiled and said she understood. -
Good luck, Hopeychanger-in-Chief
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 132 Comments
As it was for Belshazzar, the writing’s on the wall. Some don’t seem to be paying attention.
If you know your P. G. Wodehouse, you’ll remember the passage in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Tom Travers is much preoccupied by the Exchequer’s claim upon him:“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?” asks his nephew, Bertie Wooster.
“Upset is right,” replies Aunt Dahlia. “He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”
“What wall?”
“Old Testament, ass,” snaps Aunt Dahlia. “Belshazzar’s feast.”
“Oh, that, yes,” says Bertie. “I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With mirrors, I expect.”
A lot of writing on the wall these days. A half-remembered quatrain from Jonathan Swift has been dancing around my brain in recent weeks:
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I Think They Just Like the Title
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:55 AM - 1 Comment
Hard to know why a studio would want to make a movie out of Father Knows Best, especially when the plot doesn’t seem to have much to do with the original, but I suppose they just figure that the title is a known quantity:
New Regency and 20th Century Fox teaming to turn the classic TV series “Father Knows Best” into a feature…
The contemporized film will involve a father whose modern-day parenting displeases his more traditional father, who comes to live with the family. They clash over which father knows best.
The striking thing about watching Father Knows Best today (two seasons are out on DVD and another one is on the way) is that Robert Young’s Father was one of the least-likable parents in TV history. He was always insulting his kids, getting impatient with them, making jokes at their expense, telling them how to act, and putting down their tastes in clothes, music, whatever. It would be kind of a refreshing anecdote to all the gentle, live-and-let-live parenting we saw on other ’50s shows. But it can’t be refreshing, because he’s such a pompous ass that you want Jane Wyatt to conk him over the head with a stereotypical rolling pin and go back to her less emotionally-stifling husband on the planet Vulcan.
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Submitting to rule by Fiat
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments
Does Windsor have any other choice?
Imagine the reception in Windsor, Ont. two or five or 10 years ago had a foreign carmaker swept into Canada and demanded autoworkers slash their wages and benefits by up to a third. In that union town? Ha! Today, with a sense that the survival of the city is at stake, Windsor’s daily paper is urging the unions and bondholders to take Sergio Marchionne, at his word. The CEO of Fiat has warned that he’ll leave Chrysler to the bankruptcy wolves unless they capitulate to Fiat’s demands. Yesterday, Industry Minister Tony Clement said that means cutting workers’ wages and benefits by $19 per hour. The Windsor Star has long made an art of treading the line between management and labour in the car industry. But with the Canadian Auto Workers union stuck in denial, the paper worries this last opportunity
to save Chrysler will be lost. “Marchionne isn’t speculating about what someone else might do in the future,” it warns today in an editorial. “He’s telling us what he is going to do now. This isn’t theoretical–it’s real.”Ntk 3 and 4Windsor Star
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The lay-off guarantee
By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:46 AM - 1 Comment
Buy a suit. Lose your job. Get a refund
Hyundai was first out of the gates last year with an offer that lets buyers return their cars if they’re laid off. Suddenly, this novel form of guarantee is taking off, and not just among other car companies. One men’s clothing company, Jos. A. Bank, says it will refund the cost of a suit, and let the buyer keep the clothes, if he loses his job before July 1. The U.S.
airline JetBlue is promising to refund tickets purchased this spring for buyers who lose their jobs, while Bank of America says it will waive certain bank fees for three months. Companies hope these deals, which one analyst calls “altruism marketing”, will lure back recession-scared customers and build a little good PR in the process.
