May, 2009

Back by popular demand, it's . . . the ITQ Committee Lookahead!

By kadyomalley - Monday, May 25, 2009 - 9 Comments

Gosh, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Fortunately for all of us, most committees are much like long-running soap operas — even if you tune out for a few weeks/months/years,  it usually doesn’t take too long to get all caught up on the current plot twists and story arcs. Thank goodness J.J. Abrams isn’t the show runner for the House of Commons. Anyway, enough chitchat — let’s get parliamentary, y’all.

MONDAY:

A typically leisurely slow start to the week — thank goodness, for those of us still suffering the effects of inquirylag — with one noteworthy exception: the Subcommittee on Food Safety, still, apparently, immersed in its investigation into last year’s listeriosis outbreak, which meets tonight for a four-hour primetime special. On the witness list:  Bob Kingston, president of PSAC’s Agriculture Union, which has just come out with a study that claims there is a “critical shortage” of frontline inspectors at meat processing plants, as well as senior officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency – who, ITQ suspects, will almost certainly dispute the union’s conclusions. The subcommittee will also hear from two retired federal meat inspectors turned industry consultants: Paul Caron and Nelson Vessey. On Wednesday, they’ll hear from the Toronto Public Health Department, as well as the Ontario Ministry of Health.

Continue…

  • Degrees of deceit

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:33 PM - 0 Comments

    Hundreds of U.S. soldiers buy bogus university transcripts

    When U.S. soldiers can’t be all they can be, they fake it. At last count, more than 200 service members, army civilians and defence contractors bought bogus university degrees in order to snag promotions and boost their paychecks. One especially sneaky major rose through the ranks with the help of eight fake degrees, including a bachelor’s in Business Management, a master’s in Management and a Ph.D in International Management Strategy. “To have someone who would go and do something like this, it sickens me,” said one defence department spokesman. “Each case, it is significant, it is egregious and it just smacks right at those core values that we live by.” The U.S. army has launched its own internal investigation.

    WHNT NEWS 19

  • Omar Samad leaves Canada, after five years as Afghanistan's ambassador

    By Michael Petrou - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

    Omar Samad, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada, is leaving this week after almost five years in Canada to become his country’s ambassador to France. My interview with him, on the eve of his departure, can be read here.

  • 'He drinks espresso'

    By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:18 PM - 44 Comments

    Rick Mercer talks politics, the Mercer Report and those ads.

    “Have you gone to the website?” Mercer asks. “They have stuff in there like ‘He lives in a building, not in a house. He drinks espresso. Can regular Canadians understand a guy like that?’I mean, espresso? Really, it’s nothing to do with anything except the guy is well-educated and well-travelled. I don’t think Stephen Harper will be upset if his son is so academically inclined that he can study at Harvard and then could possibly teach at Harvard. I don’t think anybody would say ‘Oh my God, we’ve raised a terrible child. What a terrible road he’s gone down.’ I would think they’d be proud of that. It’s just a bad message.”

  • Iranian democrat beaten, on hunger strike

    By Michael Petrou - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 1 Comment

    I’ve written about Iranian democratic activist Behrouz Javid Tehrani several times since meeting him in Tehran five years ago. He was first arrested during the Iranian student uprising of 1999 and has been in and out of jail ever since – always because of his protests against Iran’s illiberal theocracy and his efforts to bring a his country a greater measure of freedom. Tehrani is still in jail, in Section One of the Gohardasht Prison. A family member who met with him last week says that he has been on a hunger strike for more than 16 days and his been blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten with batons.

  • Getting in Brad Pitt's face (with a camera) at Cannes

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

    A CANNES VIDEO PRESENTED BY CANON CANADA

  • A better bailout

    By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:15 PM - 12 Comments

    Could a tax credit for advertising rescue the media industry?

    A better bailoutOttawa is abuzz with speculation that the Conservative government may be preparing to selectively bail out Canada’s troubled private broadcasters. Tanking ad revenues—partly the result of the shakeout in the auto and financial sectors, two of the largest advertising categories—are threatening to sink parts of the industry. Rumours have swirled that a fund, said to be as large as $150 million, is being prepared to benefit CTV Globemedia and Canwest Global, the country’s two biggest private broadcast networks. For months, the broadcasters have complained to the CRTC that the industry’s revenue model is broken.

    Last week, Canwest was granted yet another two-week extension from lenders, as it races to restructure its crushing debt. The Canwest-owned National Post had already announced that it would not print a Monday edition this summer in a bid to slash costs. The Canwest-owned Victoria Times Colonist will scrap its Monday edition altogether. CTV Globemedia, meanwhile, is not expected to renew the licences of several money-losing local stations due in August, and many believe this is just the start of a larger trend.

    Continue…

  • The world responds to North Korea's nuclear test

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:06 PM - 1 Comment

    The rogue nation seems to be hardening its confrontational position

    North Korea’s apparent underground detonation of a nuclear bomb has elicited outrage around the world. Seismologists reported an event with the power of a quake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, and several external agencies confirm an explosion that likely resulted from a nuclear device. The explosion appears to have been more powerful than North Korea’s first nuclear test, in October 2006, and suggests that the rogue Communist nation is hardening its confrontational position against the outside world. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council is being convened by Russia, which currently occupies its rotating presidency. American President Barack Obama described the event as a threat to international peace.

    BBC News

  • JFK's secret mistress ends 45 years of silence

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

    Former intern is publishing book on the affair

    Mimi Beardsley Alford was 19 when she began working as a White House intern in 1962. Now retired and twice married, she is publishing her story of a “sexual relationship” with former President John F. Kennedy, and is rumoured to be receiving nearly $1 million for the book. Beardsley kept the one-year affair, which ended suddenly when Kennedy was assassinated, secret for 40 years. The relationship was brought to light in a 2003 biography of JFK, but Beardsley is only now speaking out herself. The book will chronicle Alford’s life before, during and after her time with the president; examining her loss of innocence and the impact of keeping such a secret. Alford’s publisher said the book will not discuss any “intimate” details.

    The Telegraph

  • Russians turn to spoiled food again

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

    Hearty traffick in moldy cheese, grey sausages and the like

    As the economic downturn bites hard in Russia, what’s old is new again. Trafficking in spoiled food, a familiar racket during the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union, is making a comeback in both markets and wholesale Internet shopping, reports the Los Angeles Times. Most of the buyers are pensioners, trying to eke out a living on their tiny Soviet-era stipends, and are willing to take a chance on moldy cheese, grey sausages and the rest of the disgusting wares.

    Los Angeles Times

  • Borderline breakdown

    By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 19 Comments

    Border security is still a very sore point in Canada-U.S. relations

    Borderline breakdownThe greatest test of whether the election of President Barack Obama will really repair the strains in Canada-U.S. relations gets under way this month when the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, comes to visit. The transformation of land border security over the last eight years came to symbolize the tense relations between Ottawa and the Bush administration. The almost 9,000 km of friendly frontier, and gateway to $1.6 billion in trade per day, turned into another front in the war on terror, patrolled by now-armed guards and unmanned drones, riddled with new regulations that business complains tie up trade, and as of June 1, a passport requirement for the first time. From the Canadian point of view, it was the work largely of an overzealous American administration and Congress taking a series of unilateral actions. “The previous attitude was that any additional step that could be taken should be taken without regard for trade,” Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan told Maclean’s. Like many Canadians, he hopes that will change under Obama. “Now we want to focus on security that is actually effective, and addresses real security threats—counterterrorism, the drug trade, organized crime, immigration issues—and we want to find ways to improve the flow of goods across the border.”

    But from the U.S. point of view, the last eight years looked rather different. The world changed on 9/11, and Americans and Canadians reacted with what Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who worked on border issues under George W. Bush, diplomatically refers to as “a different sense of urgency.” He suspects Ottawa and Washington will find it just as difficult to resolve their differences under Obama as they did under Bush. “One of the things I’ve learned is that there is this myth that Canadians and Americans are a lot alike in how they view things like trade and terrorism,” Rosenzweig said in an interview. “And they simply are not.” Where Canadians saw U.S. unilateralism, Americans saw Canadian complacency. On both sides, there was an erosion of trust. Can it be rebuilt? “My advice to Secretary Napolitano,” says Rosenzweig, “would be to explore how much of our inability to achieve common objectives with Canada was the product of political issues relating to the Bush administration—and how much of it was fundamental.”

    Continue…

  • Television Cartography

    By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:29 AM - 4 Comments

    This has been around for a while, but the sitcom map is a useful guide to where TV comedies take place and which areas of the U.S. have the highest concentration of comedy. (New York, obviously, is where most comic characters would rather stay). There’s also a list at the bottom of comedies that don’t take place in any particular geographic area, like The Simpsons and The Donna Reed Show.

    The map does not include Canadian or Mexican television shows, conveying the impression that North America is two-thirds barren wasteland. I suppose if someone tried mapping out Canadian shows, Toronto would be the setting for a lot of shows, but TV comedy wouldn’t be quite as concentrated in Toronto as U.S. comedy in New York, or British comedy in London. But I might just be getting a skewed impression because there are a bunch of shows around today that are set outside Toronto (Winnipeg for Less Than Perfect Kind, for example).

    In some ways, the setting of a comedy is essentially pointless, because most comedies are shot in the studio, and no matter where the show takes place, they’ll hardly ever leave L.A. But that creates a certain amount of freedom in choosing the setting. A show that goes out on location has to either pick a place they can shoot in, or a place that Vancouver can be dressed up to resemble. But a studio-based sitcom can choose to pretend that it takes place just about anywhere. That’s why it’s odd that so many multi-camera, indoor comedies automatically choose to take place in or near New York. Besides the fact that they think New York is cooler and that Seinfeld and Friends cast a long shadow, setting a show in New York means that the characters can have access to just about any place or event, and the writers find it easier to bring in a guest star or guest character (lots of people unexpectedly pop up in New York, or move to New York on a whim). But a show that takes place in a less cliche’d city can sometimes come up with interesting new reasons for guest characters to turn up, or things the characters might do with their time that they might not do in a New York or L.A. show.

    However, if you’re going to set a show in Portland, Oregon, please do not have Meadowlark Lemon move in next door.

  • Attack ads? What attack ads?

    By Martin Patriquin - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:29 AM - 13 Comments

    surprise(1)

    Wee bit of news on the political front. As this corner wrote a few weeks ago, Ignatieff continues to make inroads into Quebec, where up until a six months ago the Liberal brand was a just a tad more popular than Herpes though not nearly as infectious. Dead in the water. Finito. Salut la visite.

    Er, no.  

    The newest Rad-Can poll has the Libs about where they were before–four points ahead of the Bloc, and 23 above the Cons.

    The tea-leaf readers seem to think that the English voters are trickling back to the Liberals, where they’ve lived since forever, but are having a tougher time with French voters. Still, the Bloc is only eight points up on the Liberals amongst Francophone voters, which is but a mosey away from margin of error territory. The Bloc is at its happiest when the two federalist parties (or three. Hi Jack!) are neck-and-neck. Having blowout Liberal or Conservative support in Quebec queers the soup for Gilles Duceppe’s party. And that’s the thing about the last federal election, as far as Quebec was concerned. Harper had a blowout within his grasp, and a Quebec majority was his to lose. And he lost it. It was the worst $45 million he didn’t spend. As one Liberal put it to me recently, “Harper couldn’t even beat Stéphane Dion.”

    All is to say that the sudden onslaught of negative attack ads from the Cons feel a bit like closing the barn door after the chickens have roosted, or whatever that hoary analogy is. The French attack-y website is less about Ignatieff’s cosmopolitan nature–In general, Quebecers don’t have as much of a problem voting for vaguely arrogant politicians, cough cough Trudeau, cough cough Parizeau–and have more to do with how Ignatieff remains an unknown quantity. It’s also peppered with Iggy’s past bon mots about Quebec (it’s like Minnesota with French signs!) and harps on his role as a Ottawa-centric centralisateur. Unlike my confrère, I think the site is decent as far as these things go. It’s slick, pithy, pretty in its ugliness. And unfortunately for the Conservatives, it doesn’t seem to be working in the least.

  • He buried the lede. Ed Greenspon's for the high jump; Stackhouse is the new Globe editor

    By Paul Wells - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 19 Comments

    Office email from wordy Globe publisher Phil Crawley:

    The need to restructure our business, to meet the challenges of the current economic environment and the rapid changes in media consumption habits, has been our overarching goal during FY09.

    As we head towards FY10, that evolutionary process takes a leap forward today with the reorganization of our senior executive team.

    Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business.  By drawing on the collective strengths of the team, we are all better able as individuals to contribute to the success of The Globe and Mail.  With that objective in mind, I have reviewed the composition of the Executive Team, and identified priority areas for improvement.

    New skills and different styles of leadership are needed to take The Globe and Mail to levels of achievement which meet the ambitions of our shareholders, to cement our standing as the best in Canada at creating high-quality content for consumption on whatever platform is most desirable for our readers, users and advertisers.

    We are building on a position of strength not enjoyed by many of our competitors. The executive changes outlined below are intended to ensure that The Globe and Mail is in the prime spot to take advantage of the market opportunities that will arise when the recession eases.

    To deliver the required results, I am adding one extra position to the senior team and changing responsibilities and reporting lines in three other parts of the business.

    Ed Greenspon, who has been our Editor-in-Chief for almost seven years, is stepping down and is succeeded by John Stackhouse, the Editor of Report on Business since 2004.

    Continue…

  • I'm an exempt staffer subject to a five-year post-employment "cooling off" period – get me out of here!

    By kadyomalley - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 11 Comments

    Just taking a quick break from writing up this week’s ITQ committee lookahead — I know, I know; it’s been ages — but I wanted to point y’all at this little item that I dashed off  for our regular Need To Know feature earlier this morning. Go read it — I’ll wait. Anyway, while writing it up, it occurred to me that it, in some cases, it may be just a teensy bit — I dunno, is ‘unseemly’ the word? — for Conservative staffers to be lobbying lobbyists for work, no matter how discreetly, while still gainfully and exemptedly employed in a ministerial office.

    Now, before hitting the reply button to descend upon the comment thread en masse, armed with that classic, if slightly cliched anticipated defence that “The Liberals Did It Too, Only Worse!”, I’d just like remind everyone that I have been a card carrying Accountability Act sceptic since before it even came into force, at least as far as the five year ban on lobbying after leaving government, which really is overkill, in my opinion. As such, I’m definitely willing to entertain arguments as to why this sort of thing may be entirely appropriate. But at the moment, there’s just something that doesn’t sit right about the prospect of senior aides and staffers playing footsy with potential future employers at the very same time that they’re supposed to give objective advice to their bosses – ministerial and otherwise – on how the government should respond to any lobby campaigns that those potential future employers may be mounting on behalf of their clients.

    Maybe I’ve just been spending too much time listening to tales from the good old days of the late 80s/early 90s, but it seems to me that one of the unintended consequences of tightening up the rules as far as what staffers can do after leaving office – voluntarily, or by act of the electoral gods – was to put even more pressure on them to set up an FAA-sanctioned escape plan well before they’re actually planning to leave.  But I’m fully willing to admit I may be overreacting. Thoughts?

  • "Spongeworthy" birth control back on store shelves

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:02 AM - 0 Comments

    Contraceptive sponge set to make a comeback

    It was made famous in the 1995 episode of Seinfeld when Elaine stockpiled it for boyfriends deemed “spongeworthy”—and now, the contraceptive sponge is set to return to store shelves in the U.S. Introduced in 1983, the Today Sponge, a spermicide-coated polyurethane barrier placed in the vagina to inhibit sperm, was once the most popular over-the-counter birth control for women. It was removed from pharmacies in 1994 after manufacturing problems, then reintroduced in 2005 under new ownership. After the new owner went bankrupt in 2007, the Today Sponge went out of production. Repackaged for a younger generation, it will be sold by a new distributor as of this weekend. Despite its pop culture bankability, the New York Times reports, the Today Sponge might generate comparatively little revenue: its failure rate can be over 10 per cent, and it doesn’t protect against sexually transmitted diseases. 

    The New York Times

  • Understanding Google

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

    Look no further than the company’s chief economist

    Hal Varian, a 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley, is Google’s chief economist. Why, you might ask, does a company like Google need one of those? Varian is the brains behind Google’s complex and revolutionary AdWords system. AdWords is the method that Google uses to sell ads online and it is what Wired describes as possibly “the most successful business idea in history.” It earned the company $21 billion last year. But it is also incredibly complex, and based on some groundbreaking economic ideas. Basically, it’s “the world’s biggest, fastest auction.” Every time someone searches—millions of times a day—an automatic auction takes place, matching advertisers to search results. It’s a system that Varian helped hone to near-perfection, and one that’s feverishly analyzed by Google (which has even developed a Keyword Pricing Index to help track  the auctions). It has turned the ad business from Mad Men glamorous to flat out geeky.

    Wired

  • Toward a unified theory of American Idol and Canadian politics

    By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 10:44 AM - 2 Comments

    Doug Bell attempts to make the connection.

    If that’s the idea, the ads do the trick. Ignatieff ‘s suggestion that the ads are anti-immigrant because they question Ig’s loyalty to a country he’s spent half his life avoiding misses the point. It’s not that he wasn’t in the country for 34 years, it’s what he was doing. Egghead, pointyhead, poindexter – call him what you will, Ig’s an exotic, a rare bird. And while that shouldn’t be any kind of disqualification it often is (see Stevenson, Adlai). It’s all particularly hilarious since if “ordinary” Canadians actually got to know Steve-O, they’d realize that in his own way he’s more of a nerdling geek that Ig. But guess what – Canadians aren’t going to get to know the real Stephen Harper because he’s got that Timmy-Ho, hockey-dad bit down pat. I pray I’m wrong about all this, but then again I actually did prefer Kris Allen to Adam Lambert so it looks like another season in Dipper hell for me.

    See also, Frank Rich on American Idol and the slow march towards gay marriage.

  • Conservative party starting to crack?

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 16 Comments

    Tory flacks polishing resumes, cold-calling lobby firms

    Forget the polls and the attack ads—the surest indication yet that the Conservatives may be hitting the panic button at the prospect of facing a reinvigorated Liberal Party on the hustings comes in today’s edition of the Hill Times, which reports that some ministerial staffers have already begun preparations for life after government. The paper reports that several lobby firms have been fielding calls from (unnamed, of course) Tories “sending out feelers”—not quite asking for a job, but checking out the possibilities for future employment in a post-Harper Ottawa. It could be a bleak landscape for suddenly unemployed Hill climbers, however—not only has the recession taken its toll on public affairs firms, but many will also be hamstrung by the draconian “cooling off” period imposed by the Federal Accountability Act, which would prevent them from actively lobbying government for five years. 

    The Hill Times

  • Top general says U.S. must beat back rising Afghan violence

    By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 10:38 AM - 1 Comment

    U.S. also wants Canada to stay past 2011

    Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declares that in this year and 2010, with many more American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the tide must turn—after three straight years of rising insurgent violence. “We’ve had an increasing level of violence in the last three years in ’06, ’07, and ’08,” he said, “and I think in ’09 and ’10, we have to start to turn that around.” Mullen’s statement comes at the same time as reports that Washington will be pressing its allies—including Canada—to ramp up contributions to Afghanistan and maintain commitments. That could me renewed pressure on Ottawa’s to rethink its plan to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan in 2011.

    AFP

  • Brad and Quentin, basking 'basterds'

    By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

    A CANNES VIDEO PRESENTED BY CANON CANADA

    At a festival loaded with heavyweight auteurs, and light on Hollywood celebrity, Brad Pitt was the designated superstar. But at the Cannes press conference for the premiere of Inglourious Basterds, he held off his entrance with noblesse oblige, and let his chuffed director, Quentin Tarantino, soak up the spotlight —flanked by leading ladies Diane Kruger and Mélanie Laurent

    And you have to wonder, what deal with Brad’s English garden-party get-up—the cream jacket and the ascot-like scarf? All that’s missing is a shooting stick. Did Angelina dress him in the morning as a joke? You’ll notice, by the way, that in Cannes the press turn into fans in the presence of celebrity. Snapping photos I can understand—everyone, myself included, wants visuals for their websites—but the notion of journalists scrambling for autographs is downright embarrassing.


  • Don't make Iggy angry

    By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:48 AM - 17 Comments

    You wouldn’t like Iggy when he’s angry. Just ask Peter. Very briefly at the 1:48 mark (Peter reappears again for a second or two at 1:52).

    And now, lest you think the Late Show was all about British people getting cross with each other… Blur! Continue…

  • UPDATED: Conservative ads succeed in moving the numbers!

    By Paul Wells - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:39 AM - 122 Comments

    harper-queNew large-sample Quebec poll, taken during the first four days of the Conservatives’ new ad campaign, shows the Conservative party has fallen to fourth in Quebec, behind the NDP. Stephen Harper’s party is now polling about as well as the sum of the performance of Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance and Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in 2000. So it’s going pretty well, really.

    UPDATE: The new ads are working with unprecedented speed. Why, it took only days for the Conservatives to drive their numbers down to the same 15% level the Liberals were at in Quebec a year ago, after months of anti-Dion ads. And that’s what Harper wanted to do, right? Drive his party support down to Dion-like levels in Quebec, right? Yes? No?

    UP-IS-THE-NEW-DOWNDATE, Monday morning: Still, it’s important to keep hope alive. That’s why (both of these links are to Le Devoir articles in Conservative Party-approved Quebec-French) Chantal Hébert explains the Conservatives have hitched their wagons irrevocably to the Action Démocratique in Quebec. Super Mario’s old party “may be a shadow of what it once was,” Chantal writes, “it’s still in better shape than the federal Conservative party.” And how’s that working out? The rest of today’s poll shows the ADQ at 8%.

    So cheer up, Conservatives. The boss has a master plan to cut your party’s remaining Quebec support in half! I hear Dimitri and Leo are working on it full time.

  • Huppert hands Haneke the Palme d'Or

    By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 11:04 PM - 0 Comments

    A scene from Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon'

    A scene from Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon'

    The verdict is in. The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or and jury president Isabelle Huppert handed the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke personally. That’s not usually done. In the odd rigmarole of the Cannes awards ceremony, the jury president usually announces the decision, but the award gets handed out by an attending celebrity. Apparently Huppert wanted to break tradition and give it Haneke directly, which seems to underscore the fact that she may have had a certain bias towards him in the jury’s deliberations: she was, after all, the star of Haneke’s 2001 film, The Piano Teacher. Set on the eve of the First World War, The White Ribbon is the story of German village beset by a contagion of mysterious crimes. Shot in black-and-white, it’s a strong drama, though not my favorite of the festival. (For my thoughts on it, go to a previous BDJ Unscreened entry, The German Question.) By awarding the Palme to The White Ribbon, the jury chose an uncommercial film with high-art ambition and moral gravity, relegating the most critically acclaimed film of the festival, A Prophet, the second-place Grand Jury Prize. It was handicapped, no doubt, by the fact that it’s a genre movie, a prison drama. Huppert’s jury certainly saw fit to award some of the most trangressive films in the competition. Best Director went to Brillante Mendoza for Kinatay, which features a graphic real-time rape and dismemberment of a woman named Madonna. Inexplicably, best screenplay went to Spring Fever, Chinese director Lou Ye’s soggy, underwritten drama about a long-suffering woman whose husband betrays her for a gay lover. And best actress went to Charlotte Gainsbourg for expanding the frontiers of brutal torture in Lars Von Trier’s outrageous Antichrist. Personally I would have given that prize to Katie Jarvis, the 17-year-old British newcomer who starred in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, which was my favorite film of the festival, and received a minor nod with an ex-aqueo jury prize, whatever that is. No one, however, could dispute the decison to award Best Actor to Christoph Waltz for his trilingual tour-de-force as a Nazi “Jew Hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Continue…

  • MUSIC: Canadians in mid-air

    By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 12:52 PM - 14 Comments

    From the program notes to Toronto composer Gary Kulesha’s Third Symphony:

    Music can be dramatic and challenging, but can also be joyous and life-affirming. All too often, when composers try to compose music that is bright and positive, they turn backwards, and write poor imitations of older music, or, worse, they compose cheap music cynically calculated to “win over” an audience. I believe that we can move forward while at the same time recapturing the joyousness that drew us all, listener and musician alike, into music in the first place. This is what I have tried to do in this symphony.

    Let’s take that as our text for these three extraordinary recordings, which I’ve found on CBC Radio 2′s Concerts on Demand website, a gorgeous repository of recent recordings of live performances by Canadian artists in every musical genre. It’s fair game to get mad at Radio 2 for what they’ve done to their broadcast schedule — I’m hoping to run into Katie Malloch at the Montreal jazz festival this year, and after listening to Tonic a few times I’m thinking of bringing along a cake with a file in it. But the CBC remains unmatched as a forum for good music. It’s just that these days, you have to spend a bit more time foraging for it yourself online.

    Here are highlights of what I’ve found. Continue…

From Macleans