Canadian co-pro 'Amreeka' wins prize in Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 8:42 AM - 0 Comments

Hiam Abbass (left) and Nisreen Faour in 'Amreeka'

Although Canada had no presence in the main competition in Cannes, Amreeka, a Canadian co-production playing in the Directors’ Fortnight has won the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize. The movie, which first caught fire at the Sundance festival, is an an exotic breed—a Canada-U.S.-Kuwait co-venture. It drew a rapturous standing ovation in Cannes and I suspect this crowd-pleaser will charm audiences where ever it plays. But it’s usual that such an obvious crowd-pleaser would also seduce a jury of international film critics.

Amreeka is a heart-warming comedy-drama about the ordeal of a Palestinian single mother, Muna (Nisreen Faour), and her teenage son, Fadi (Melkar Mouallem), who emigrate from Ramallah to begin a bumpy new life in small-town Illinois with her sister (Hiam Abbass) and her family. The story is set in the early stages of the Iraq war, not the best time for Palestinians to try assimilating in Middle America. Muna is mortified when she realizes that her savings, stashed in a cookie tin, have been confiscated by at the airport by U.S. Customs. A former bank employee, she tries to find similar work in America to no avail—then ends up working in a White Castle burger joint while pretending to her family that she’s found a job in the bank next door. Fadi, meanwhile, is harassed as school with Arab terrorist stereotypes. Continue…

Through the looking glass in Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 9:47 PM - 0 Comments

A scene from Alain Renais's 'Wild Grass'

Aside from inventiveness with which filmmakers portrayed brutal violence, the other prevalent trend in Cannes this year was the camera’s tendency to turn on itself. So many movies contained references to cinema, and quite a few had stories that revolved around a film within a film, or at least a show within a show—notably Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Tsai-Ming Liang’s Visage, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It makes you wonder if world cinema is fleeing the world, and happy to lose itself in its own reflection, like the characters who plunge through the funhouse mirror of Gilliam’s Imaginarium. Quite the vicious circle. You’ve got several thousand film critics obsessively watching films that are obsessed with film. One of the French soldiers in Tarantino’s movie is a film critic. And Isabel Coixet’s Map of the Sounds of Tokyo drew a big laugh from a mass audience of critics with this line: “How can you trust a guy who spends all day in a cinema?” Precisely.

In this incestuous mix of art and life, nothing was spookier than seeing Heath Ledger’s last performance in Imaginarium. His character makes his entrance dangling from a noose. And the film contains references to dead movie stars like Valentino and James Dean finding immortality on the silver screen—allusions that now seem like morbid premonitions. But then movies lend themselves to meditations on mortality. And these days, when every auteur seems obsessed with the Death of Cinema, it was thrilling to see a film by an old man that celebrates its life—Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass), a gem by 86-year-old French master Alain Resnais, who’s most famous for Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais’s movie emerged as the festival’s sleeper hit, and after catching up to it late in the week, I can see why.

Continue…

The Art House of Horror

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 9:09 PM - 0 Comments

A scene from Brillante Mendoza's 'Kinatay,' which portrays rape and dismemberment with snuff-film realism

Cannes is the world’s most opulent art house. And as if the festival is thumbing its nose at the recession, the bounty unveiled at this year’s edition has been exceptionally rich. Among the 20 films in competition, there are as many as half a dozen that many critics, myself included, would consider worthy recipients of the Palme d’Or. This is highly unusual. The leading contenders are: Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Jane Campion’s Bright Star, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Eli Suliman’s The Time That Remains—and Alain Renais’ Wild Grass, which is one of my favorites (I’ll get to it a later blog. Also, Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds cannot be entirely counted out.

In the bubble of the Cannes art house, however, you start to take for granted what a exotic world of movie-going this is compared to the daily grind of the North American multiplex. Once you’re here, it’s easy to become blasé about it. But as I look back at what I’ve seen in the past ten days, some striking trends emerge. And perhaps the most insistent is cinema’s ability to imagine new acts of violence and transgression that we’ve never seen onscreen. Forget the Hollywood fireball, the car chase and the shootout. Here are a few of the more striking images of violence in what we’ve seen (spoiler alert!): Continue…

EI-EI-uh-oh?

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 8:42 PM - 52 Comments

In today’s FP, Michael Ignatieff (or, more likely, a committee of flacks writing under his name) makes the case for a nine-week qualification period for EI. 

Over at the best economics blog in the country, Stephen Gordon thinks it’s a crazy idea:

The Harper government has provided a broad range of targets for intelligent criticism for their policy choices over the past years. But the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois have instead chosen to focus their attention on advocating one of the few remaining dumb ideas that the Conservatives haven’t already jumped on.

The German Question

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 8:26 PM - 0 Comments

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

Playing catch-up, I’m posting a bunch of blogs today, most written on the flight home. The festival officially ends with the awards Sunday, but by now it’s effectively over, as all 20 features in competition have screened. Among the more high-minded entries, one of the favorites is The White Ribbon by Austrian director Michael Haneke. Set in a Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War—and shot in forbidding black-and-white—it has the austere look and moral gravity of an Ingmar Bergman film. The village has become cursed by a contagion of strange and violent acts, beginning with the local doctor being thrown from his horse by a wire strung between two trees. A field of cabbage is chopped to bits. A retarded child is viciously mutilated. But there’s also systemic abuse in this corrupt domain. Children are beaten, a daughter is molested, a midwife abused. So we assume the mysterious crimes are acts of punishment. Various patriarchs—a baron, a steward, a pastor, and the doctor—emerge like suspects in a Germanic game of Clue. As with Haneke’s previous film, Caché (2007), this is a whodunit that’s never clearly resolved. But with the children somehow implicated in a cycle of abuse and retribution, Haneke appears to hinting that these are the future architects of the Third Reich.

Quentin Tarantino’s, Inglourious Basterds (sic) is radically different from The White Ribbon, but it’s another picture that doesn’t exactly make one predisposed to love Germans. Tarantino concocts a Jewish revenge fantasy that rewrites history, immolating Nazis in an eye-for-an-eye conflagration, a mini-Holocaust. At the film’s press conference, pulp filmmaker Eli Roth (Hostel), who plays one of the Tarantino’s avenging “basterds,” gleefully called it “kosher porn.” Although Tarantino’s fantasia exists in a world quite divorced from history, it makes flamboyantly explicit what is darkly implied in Haneke’s film—that the Nazis’ crimes are rooted in some sort of original sin.

More Coyne, more Wells: Kind of a mixed blessing when you think about it

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 2:55 PM - 12 Comments

Andrew and I did a record-breaking second podcast this week. Because we got so excited about some op-eds by the Cato Institute that we couldn’t contain ourselves. Go look. We spoil you because we love you.

Anatomy of a Prime Minister

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 12:22 PM - 8 Comments

Kevin Gaudet is unimpressed. And your Saturday morning Globe gets a bit racy.

Mr. Gaudet was particularly critical of Mr. Harper, who started his political career as a Reform Party MP and served as the head of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition in Calgary before becoming Conservative Party leader.

“Mr. Harper may left his balls out West when it comes to taking a principle stand against bailing out this industry like he used believe in,” he said.

Cannes con artist

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 4:24 AM - 0 Comments

A scene from Xavier Giannoli's 'In the Beginning'

As the festival winds up, it’s becoming clear that this has been one of the strongest competition selections in a while. More good stuff than I’ve had time to blog, so it’s catch-up time. A couple of days ago, I saw a “movie movie,” a terrifically entertaining picture that jumped out of the high-art fray without a shred of post-modern pretense. We’ve seen a lot of films about filmmaking, and this is not one of them, yet it could serve as the ultimate metaphor for the business of film.

Written and directed by French filmmaker Xavier Giannoli, A l’Origine (In the Beginning) is one of those Build it and They Will Come tales. It’s based on the stranger-than-fiction true story of an con man who posed as a contractor for a company that didn’t exist and convinced a town to build a highway. I love imposter movies, and this is one of the best. Francois Cluzet stars as Phillipe Miller, who gets out of prison, makes a a futile attempt to find a job, then creates one out of thin air. He invents an imaginary subsidiary of one of France’s biggest construction companies, then plants himself in a small town that’s been depressed ever since a highway project got shelved. This is a community that wants to believe in something, and soon Miller is raking in a fortune in commissions from companies that want to serve as his suppliers. The town is desperate for a saviour, and Miller is happy to oblige. But as he becomes a local hero, and actual construction gets underway, it becomes clear that his motive is not primarily financial. The guy wants to be somebody, and to build something. And he starts to believe in his own fiction.

Giannoli directs In the Beginning with a kinetic dynamism. He originally was going to shoot on a real construction site. But when that prospect fell through, he had to build his own highway. And it appears that the production of the film—which was rescued by Gerard Depardieu (who plays a supporting role)—was as precarious as the project it portrays. So there’s a very concrete, and delicious, harmony between the protagonist’s industrial-scale scam and the business of making a movie: both are acts of monumental folly, in trying to create an entire world based on something that doesn’t exist. In that sense, the art of the con and the art of Cannes are not so far removed.

Weekend Viewing: HEAD OF THE CLASS

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 10:33 PM - 1 Comment

The show I was thinking of writing about appears to have been banished from YouTube (that happens), so here’s something else I found today, the pilot of a show I loved as a callow, or at least callow-ish youth. Though oddly enough, despite being a geek, I didn’t identify with the geeky kids; I identified with Howard Hesseman’s teacher, Charlie Moore. (This was the first thing I had ever seen Hesseman in, and even now I instinctively think of him as a career teacher who happened to play a bunch of hippie types on the side.) And as I said in an earlier Weekend Viewing post, the name “Arvid” is just fun to say. But to this day, I don’t know if Charlie Moore is named after the mediocre Milwaukee Brewers player. The creators of the show, Rich Eustis and Michael Elias, were veteran comedy writers; you may recognize Eustis’s name from the credits of Scrubs, where he was a consultant for a while and scripted one episode.

For the ’80s nostalgia factor, I love the fact that the first person he meets in the entire series is a woman with big hair, a slit skirt and shoulder pads. 20+ years ago, this was thought of as the look of a serious professional.

And on a technical note, it seems like a lot of videotaped shows used to have their main titles shot on film, to create a classy look that might rub off on the cheaply-shot episode, or to use techniques (in this case, outdoor shooting) that work better on film. The British practice of doing hybrid shows, with the indoor scenes on tape and outdoor scenes on film, never really caught on in America — except in main title sequences.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2577796&w=425&h=350&fv=m%3D42942964%26type%3Dvideo%26a%3D0]

Coyne v. Wells on Canada: It’s like America, only more conservative

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 7:19 PM - 1 Comment

HQ Version and Comments here

Coyne v. Wells on Canada: It’s like America, only more conservative

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 7:11 PM - 17 Comments

Download | Feed | iTunes

Michael Ignatieff & People Like You (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 6:06 PM - 21 Comments

The next day, Iggy went to Hamilton and spoke to three or four dozen people standing outside a riding office by the highway. Not quite as curious as watching him stand outside a Shopper’s Drug Mart, but close.

Anyway. Someone taped that speech by the highway and put it on YouTube. Full video after the jump. Make of it what you will. Continue…

The Macleans.ca Weekly News Quiz

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 5:39 PM - 0 Comments

Click here.

Cheney’s Impact

By John Parisella - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:59 PM - 20 Comments

As expected, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama squared off on Gitmo and national security on Thursday. Obama focused on fleshing out his plan for the coming weeks, standing resolutely behind his decision to close Gitmo while acknowledging there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the inmate problem. ‘Obama the teacher’ was on display, as the president made the case for his decisions by appealing to reason and depending on facts. It is likely that his address reinforced in his voters the belief that closing Gitmo and ending torture is the right policy. Yet, Cheney’s continued crusade in favour of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and keeping Guantanamo has led to a substantial increase in the former vice-president’s popularity (up eight per cent to 37 per cent, according to CNN). Never mind that Bush and a significant number of Republicans—including John McCain—were leaning in the same direction as Obama on those issues.

Rising support among stalwart Republicans is likely behind Cheney’s increase in the polls. He is not certainly not prompting any widespread nostalgia for the Bush-Cheney years. However, the question now is whether Cheney might be motivating Obama’s policy on national security. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd seems to think so, and an increasing number of left-leaning Democrats are becoming concerned about some of Obama’s Gitmo-related policies. If Dowd is right, it would seem to have exposed a serious flaw in the White House’s planning process. There is an air of improvisation being detected by some observers. At first, it was Limbaugh, and it now seems to be Cheney that is driving the Obama agenda on national security. Continue…

Rwandan convicted of genocide in Montreal court

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments

In the first conviction under a Canadian war crimes law introduced in 2000, Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan who moved to Canada claiming to be a refugee in 1997, was convicted on seven charges relating to the 1994 genocide. Munyaneza, a Hutu son of a wealthy businessman, was 27 when the genocide took place. He was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for participating in murders and rapes in the Butare resion. “The accused’s criminal intent was demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, as was his culpable violence,” wrote Justice André Denis of the Quebec Superior Court, who added that Munyaneza “generally treated Tutsi inhumanely and degradingly.” Under the war crimes law, Canada can prosecute residents for acts committed in other countries. Munyaneza, a father of two children, will be sentenced Sept. 9; he faces up to life in prison.

CBC News

Quebec's HPV 'experiment'?

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:44 PM - 0 Comments

Recently, Dr. Francoise Baylis, a professor at Dalhousie University and Canada Research Chair in bioethics and philosophy, published a column at The Mark news website entitled “Why Girls Shouldn’t Be Guinea Pigs.” In it, she criticizes Quebec’s school-based vaccination program to prevent the human papillomavirus, which is the most common STD and can cause cervical cancer.

In August 2007, Maclean’s published a report on the scientific and medical concerns of health experts in North America about the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccine. It was entitled, “Our girls aren’t guinea pigs.” Some readers said the article helped them consider all sides of the debate over whether to administer the vaccine, at what age, in what context and with what hopes. Others condemned the story, including the federal chief public health officer, who called the suggestion that girls and women were being put at risk “irresponsible.”

And yet, in her column, Baylis concludes that “the concern about ‘our girls’ being used as ‘guinea pigs’ now appears to be well-founded, at least with respect to thousands of girls in Québec.” The province is vaccinating nine-year-olds, even though the original clinical trials only included 100 girls that young, a small number that Baylis believes provides very limited data on the safety and efficacy of such immunization for that age. What’s more, Baylis says that Quebec isn’t vaccinating these girls in a timely way. Rather than administering three shots of the vaccine to female students within six months, as is recommended by the Canadian National Advisory Committee on Immunization and the manufacturer, the province inoculates them once in the fall, then in the spring; the final dose is given five years later, notes Baylis.

The column ends with an obvious question by Baylis: “Do parents in Québec understand that, in consenting to HPV vaccination for their nine-year-old daughters, they are in effect consenting to their daughters’ participation in an experiment?” Baylis suspects the answer is no. The debate continues.

The Mark

Maclean’s

Michael Ignatieff & People Like You

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 4:26 PM - 11 Comments

The last year and a half has included numerous opportunities to watch Michael Ignatieff in public. The most interesting moment remains a scene last fall outside a strip mall in Etobicoke, Ignatieff, then deputy leader of the Liberals, standing at the entrance of a Shopper’s Drug Mart, trying to engage voters as they attempted to go about the business of buying toilet paper, shampoo and such.

I find that’s the day I come back to most, in conversation with other people, when trying to sort out who Michael Ignatieff is. I usually bring it up with all sorts of caveats about a politician’s inherent need to perform and the possibility it was all put on for my benefit, though I doubt they’d bother and I tend to believe I wasn’t being entirely snookered (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?). In general, I suppose I initially approach politicians with the best of hopes, bothered only slightly by fears of the worst. So judge my eyewitness account accordingly.

Anyway. For whatever it’s worth in figuring out Mr. Ignatieff, a reprint of the sketch that appeared here afterwards. Make of it what you will. Continue…

'Dead malls'

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 2:48 PM - 8 Comments

In countless movies and video games, when the dead rise from their graves, the living invariably make their way to the local shopping mall for shelter. But while the un-living and those enclaves of consumerism have long gone hand-in-hand, the deep U.S. recession has produced a new variant — the “dead mall.” Shoppers are staying home in droves, and as a result at malls throughout the country, outlets are closing their doors. According to the Wall Street Journal, by the end of the year there could be as many as 100 “dead malls,” or retail centers left empty by plunging sales and high vacancy rates. Pray the dead remain six feet under.

The Wall Street Journal

A useful reminder

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

Jeff Tietz, who previously profiled Omar Khadr for Rolling Stone in 2006, is going back over the story. Part one is here.

Exclusive: The Liberal plan to respond to the Harper ads

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:43 PM - 327 Comments

The Conservative advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff has spurred the federal Liberals to sharply accelerate their fundraising activity so they can pay for a “focused response to the personal attacks” on the new leader, Maclean’s has learned.

The Liberals are rushing ahead with a major change to the party’s organization, which only two weeks ago they had planned for the autumn, so they can be ready for a much more robust summer of activity. Emergency meetings of the Liberals’ various governing bodies are underway, with more planned for next week. The goal: a $25 million annual war chest and a vastly expanded grassroots organization to pay for it. Continue…

Chalk River redux

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:14 PM - 20 Comments

Stephen Harper on Linda Keen, Dec. 11, 2007. “What we do know is the continuing actions of the Liberal appointed Nuclear Safety Commission will jeopardize the health and safety and lives of tens of thousands of Canadians. We do not have the authority to act as an executive, but we do have the responsibility to demand that Parliament step in and fix this situation before the health of more people is put in jeopardy.”

Gary Lunn on Linda Keen, Jan. 16, 2008. “In particular her lack of leadership during the extended shutdown of the NRU reactor at Chalk River, does not meet the very high standard of conduct the government and Canadians expect from public office holders who are responsible for the executive management of institutions charged with safeguarding the health and safety of all Canadians.”

Tony Clement on Linda Keen, Jan. 29, 2008. “I can tell you that I agree with the decision. I think it’s the right decision. I think it protects Canadians in the future. It’s not a decision you take lightly. You don’t fire heads of commissions every day of the week or every month in the year, but when it is for the health and safety of Canadians, you have to make those kinds of difficult decisions at times.”

So who gets fired now?

So this is how a prime ministerial legacy restoration attempt/public relations siege ends …

By kadyomalley - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 12:56 PM - 46 Comments

Not with a bang but a foot-shuffling apology:

Brian Mulroney’s spokesman apologized to Allan J. MacEachen on Thursday after the retired Liberal senator threatened to sue him for refusing to rule him out as the Cape Bretoner who Mr. Mulroney suggested received money in the 1990s from Karlheinz Schreiber. [...]

On Thursday, Mr. MacEachen’s lawyer, Ian Blue, wrote to Mr. Sears demanding that he exonerate Mr. MacEachen by 5 p.m. today or face legal action.

“By refusing to rule out Mr. MacEachen as the prominent Cape Breton politician that Mr. Mulroney was referring to, you implied by innuendo that Mr. MacEachen was the prominent politician in question,” Mr. Blue wrote. “Your innuendo is libellous.”

Mr. Sears wrote back, saying that he had in fact ruled out Mr. MacEachen.

“I can confirm that, in my public comments regarding the ‘Cape Breton politician’ in question in the inquiry, I did rule out Mr. MacEachen and in no way implied any reference to him,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sears apologized in the letter.

“I further offer my apologies to Mr. MacEachen for any difficulty caused him. I continue to have tremendous personal respect for Mr. MacEachen.”

As far as ITQ knows, no Searsian apologies have yet been forthcoming for the journalists he publicly accused of “giggling” during Mulroney’s testimony last week, despite the fact that, as the above story points out, both have categorically denied the allegations, and have been backed up by colleagues who were sitting near them at the time. Then again, they didn’t threaten to sue anyone, so they’re probably out of luck.

What gets me, though, is how perfectly this attempt at drive-by scattershot smearing encapsulates the strategy employed by the former prime minister throughout his appearance before the inquiry, which can best be summed up as follows: Never, ever miss an opening to launch into an attack on someone who, at some point in the last two or three decades may, in your mind at least, have done you wrong – or, at the very least, failed to do you right at a critical juncture — and bonus points if, at the same time, if you can work in a reference to one of your many political or personal achievements, your wide circle of world-renowned friends and admirers and/or evidence of your overall magnanimity.

Continue…

The Macleans.ca Interview: Omar Samad

By Michael Petrou - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 12:46 PM - 2 Comments

For many Canadians, Omar Samad has been the most visible face of Afghanistan ever since he was posted here as Ambassador in September 2004. Born in Kabul, he fled Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation began in 1979 and settled in the United States, but he remained actively involved in Afghan politics from abroad. Following 9/11 and the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban, he returned to Afghanistan to join the new government’s Foreign Ministry. He is leaving Canada this month to become Afghanistan’s new ambassador to France.

M: When the attacks happened on September 11, did you have an idea of what they would mean for Afghanistan?
A: I happened to be living less than a mile away from the Pentagon and was at home when the plane hit. I felt the shock of it. Within an hour or two, I was on the phone with some Afghans, including one of President Karzai’s brothers, Qayoom. We assumed that this was al-Qaeda related and then concluded that if it was al-Qaeda related, it is going to be a turnabout for Afghanistan and may signify the end of the Taliban. It turned out to be true. I decided that this was a momentous historic shift for my country, and this was the time to be there and to serve in any way possible. On December 22, 2001, I was back in Kabul.

M: How big of a decision was that for you to leave what had been your home?
A: It was a heavy decision, but one that was very simple to make. I felt that this was the natural thing to do. Afghanistan needed people like myself. And I had invested so much of my time and energy–during the Soviet occupation, the post-Communist period, the Taliban occupation of the country–trying to promote the cause of Afghanistan and also be an advocate for it. Continue…

Spring house hunting: What $1 million will get you

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Click below to see what’s available in some of Canada’s largest markets.