'I would like the firing squad please. There are no mistakes.'

By Rachel Mendleson - Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 26 Comments

Francisco Kjolseth/AP

Update: Ronnie Lee Gardner’s execution went ahead and he was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. on June, 18 after being shot by a firing squad.

Just before midnight on June 17, barring any successful last-minute appeal, convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner will be strapped to a chair in the special execution chamber in Utah’s state prison. A black hood will be placed over his head; a white target pinned above his heart. At 12:01 a.m., five anonymous sharpshooters will cock their .30 calibre rifles, and open fire.

The execution, if it goes ahead, will be the third by firing squad in the U.S. (and Utah) in more than 40 years. And it will have been Gardner’s choice.

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Don't shoot anybody well-dressed

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 2:33 AM - 23 Comments

On Thursday, Miss Universe Canada contestant Tiffany Munro wedged a big Miu Miu mule into her mouth while trying to encourage self-awareness about body image amongst some Oshawa high-school students. The pageant, she blurted out, didn’t want its competitors to look “like some little African child with the ribs going on.” Ouch. The crowd reacted with derision and anger while pageant rival Solange Tuyishime, who fled the Rwandan genocide as a child, crumbled in anguish. What might be easy to overlook is that Miss Tuyishime appears to know exactly who is to blame for Miss Munro’s gaffe, and it’s not (primarily) Miss Munro. It’s the media environment in which she was raised.

“I was hurt” by the reference to “stereotypical images they show on TV,” [Tuyishime] said in an interview. “It’s very sad that in 2010 when we make references to the poor, we think of African children, because poverty is everywhere.”

That’s obviously a bit of a stretch—if you’re looking for legitimately intense absolute poverty, Africa really would be the right place to start—but it’s true that we have all been deliberately stupefied by decades of development-industry marketing that hardly ever presents Africans as anything but fly-gnawed, pellagrous wraiths. Munro’s comment, certainly not meant to harm or demean anybody, reminds any young African who hears it that they are further decades away, perhaps generations, from persuading Westerners to cast off the accumulated horrors of do-gooder propaganda—all of it constructed by people who, collectively, could hardly have done more net harm to Africa if they were the inventors of HIV—and to see them as something other than victims. You’d get upset too.

But maybe we’re building a different, more rationalist and critical kind of do-gooder these days. Check out this little experiment by Canadian engineer Duncan McNicholl, who asks the radical question “What happens when we ask Africans how they want to be depicted in Western media?” (þ: Kottke)

BP Spill = more Alberta oil stateside? And more Canadian energy promotion

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 5:08 PM - 4 Comments

Gary Mar, Alberta’s envoy in Washington, is telling lawmakers that it’s likely that the BP oil spill could result in more Alberta oil coming stateside. The reason is that President Obama’s six month moratorium on deep-sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will likely translate into a longer de facto interruption since rigs will not sit idle but move elsewhere to drill, says Mar. Getting them back will take time – perhaps a year or more. In the meantime, Gulf area refineries will need to get their feedstock from somewhere.

Meanwhile, the Alberta government wants to make sure that American states which are studying the adoption of a Low Carbon Fuel Standard will not follow in the footsteps of California and design one that Alberta considers discriminatory. On Monday, Mar and Alberta’s environment minister, Rob Renner,  are traveling to Boston to press their case at a low carbon fuel standard forum of NESCAUM and on Tuesday and Wednesday are meeting with governor’s staffs and lawmakers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Trenton, NJ, to argue that the existing environmental regulations of the oil sands are stringent.

Meanwhile, there will be more Canadian energy promotion in DC on Tuesday when Robert McLeod, the Minister of Industry, Tourism & Investment for the Government of the Northwest Territories, gives a speech on “The Role of Arctic Gas in North America’s Transition to a Cleaner Energy Future” at noon at the University Club.

Re-branding Muhammad

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 5:03 PM - 44 Comments

The “Inspired by Muhammad” poster campaign was launched in London this week in a bid to improve the religion’s image among Britons. Images that will be spread around the city include the “eco-Muslim” poster featuring the blonde Kristiane Backer, a former MTV Europe host and convert to Islam. It reads: “I believe in protecting the environment. So did Muhammad.” A YouGuv poll released last month found half of Britons associate Islam with terrorism, 69 per cent believe the religion encourages the repression of women, and 41 per cent don’t feel Muslims have a positive impact on British society.

The Globe and Mail

Is Japan the new Greece?

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:48 PM - 12 Comments

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan says his country could become the next Greece if it doesn’t reduce its current debt load. Unlike Greece, Japan’s debt is held mostly domestically, which should assure it a greater degree of stability than the nearly-bankrupt Mediterranean nation, but Kan says Japan needs to rein in spending before things spiral further out of control. “It is difficult to sustain a policy that relies too heavily on issuing debt,” he said. “As we have seen with the financial confusion in the European community stemming from Greece, our finances could collapse if trust in national bonds is lost and growing national debt is left alone.” Kan is expected to impose austerity measures in Japan, whose debt, worth 218.6 per cent of its gross domestic product in 2009, is the highest among the world’s industrialized nations.

CBC News

Liberals utter the dreaded ‘C’ word

By John Geddes - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 47 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Alfred Apps is fed up with all the talk lately about his Liberals forming a coalition with the NDP. “This whole discussion is inane,” the Toronto lawyer and Liberal Party of Canada president groans when asked about it by Maclean’s. “This is the stupidest political discussion that the media has promoted that I have ever seen.”

Apps doesn’t think the discussion is inane because a coalition is an outlandish idea. On the contrary, he argues that the stupidity of this line of inquiry rests in the fact that a coalition should be such an obvious and uncontentious possible outcome of the next election that the prospect isn’t worth fussing about—until after the votes are counted. “There is no coalition discussion,” he says. “You have a discussion about a coalition after an election or when a government falls.”

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Afghanistan Update

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:33 PM - 3 Comments

The first quarterly report of 2010 on the Afghanistan mission was posted today. Colleagues Geddes and Wells are going over it and I look forward to their thoughts, but my initial impression is that it is even thinner and more unhelpful than the last one. The main report is full of assurance that progress is being made on most fronts, underwritten by indirect and flossy prose that uses phrasings such as “Canada continues to support” and “continues to implement” and “continues to provide”, but it’s never really clear what that support or implementation or provision is achieving.

Going by the benchmarks in the Appendix, things do seem to be progressing on one key aspect, and that’s the training and mentoring of the ANA kandaks (though they remain woefully under strength) The polio vaccination program seems to be doing well also, even if it hasn’t achived its objective of complete eradication. But most of the other successes are in the land of low-hanging fruit — building things, giving money to people, organising meetings, and so on. The crucial aspect of the COIN strategy – security for the population of Kandahar — remains a long way off.

But probably the most misleading part of the report is the status of the Dahla Dam project, Canada’s largest and most important signature project. The quarterly report says that “significant progress” was made on the rehabilitation of the dam, with 85000 cubic metres of silt removed from the canals, and preliminary engineering work completed. That may be so, but for a more complete version of events you need to read the investigative work done by the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter, and published this week. Far from “significant progress” being made, he reports that the project is headed toward disaster. I won’t even try to summarise the report — read it for all the gory and unhappy details details.

Canadian officials, especially from CIDA, have been telling journalists for months that everything is peachy over at the Dahla Dam, while rumours that it is turning into a s**t show have been circulating for just as long. This is outstanding work by the Star, and it puts the lie not just to the blandly pleasant quarterly report on the Dam, but also calls into question the report’s alleged progress on almost every other front.

If the project is really in as bad shape as the Star has reported, it is bad enough. The real scandal though is that the opposition did not think it worth bringing it up in the House of Commons this week.

MPs taste wine!

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:30 PM - 5 Comments

The Canadian Vintners Association was on the Hill to allow MPs to sample some wine. There were wines from Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and one table from Nova Scotia. Below, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson (right).

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Bloc MP Christiane Gagnon.

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B.C. energy minister quits

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 15 Comments

Blair Lestrom, B.C.’s minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, announced his resignation Friday, citing widespread opposition to the HST. “The people I represent say we want to talk to you about this,” Lestrom says, “we want you to put the brakes on the HST.” Lestrom also criticized B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s government for pushing ahead with the tax despite the public outcry. Opponents of the HST have collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition to protest its implementation, but Campbell remains unswayed by the outpouring. The premier says he has no plans to drop the HST, which is set to come into effect July 1.

The Star

Douglas Coupland, fashion designer?

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:04 PM - 3 Comments

On July 8, consumers across Canada will see Douglas Coupland’s latest creations: clothing. The author of JPod and Generation X has collaborated with Roots on a limited-edition clothing and accessory collection themed “Canada Goes Electric”, which will tie-in Coupland’s interest in web technology and pop culture. This is Coupland’s debut as a fashion designer, and the first time Roots has left design to an outsider. “For more than 10 years I’ve been intimately exploring what it means to be Canadian,” says Coupland. “This partnership with Roots is an amazing opportunity to keep that dialogue going with an even wider, more diverse audience.”

CNW

100 Ways To Ruin a Decent Script

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 3:30 PM - 1 Comment

Sometimes I get the feeling that a boring show might have an interesting behind-the-scenes story. Such a show is NBC’s crummy summer burnoff 100 Questions. This was a show that started with a good script, and an original pilot that was well-received enough to get a pickup. Then the network went to work on it. They changed the title from the delightful “100 Questions For Charlotte Payne” to the boring, generic “100 Questions” — any time a title change like that takes place, you know the show is probably doomed. (Cf. “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger” became “Knights of Prosperity.”) And they ordered a completely re-shot pilot with new cast members and a new look. The show that finally emerged was a dead-on-arrival flop.

The eeriest thing about the show that finally aired is that, as Todd VanDerWerff noted in his review, it’s shot and lit exactly like a single-camera show, but it has little bits of multi-camera look thrown in, plus of course there’s a laugh track. What I’m assuming is that most of it is, in fact, shot single-camera and then played back to an audience. You can’t do this kind of lighting with an audience present. The episode I saw last night had even harsher lighting than this, the re-shot version of the pilot, and it abandoned all pretense of trying to look like a regular sitcom.

[vodpod id=Video.3814659&w=640&h=385&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

If NBC thought this was their way of mimicking the “hybrid” style of How I Met Your Mother, they got it desperately wrong. How I Met Your Mother doesn’t use an audience, but tries to look as if it uses one. As directed by British single-camera veteran Alex Hardcastle, 100 Questions has the lighting and look of a movie, albeit a low-budget one. Yet the actors are trying to pretend they’re on Friends, and the laughter on the soundtrack clearly doesn’t belong in this world. It’s a mess, because it’s not a multi-camera show, not a movie-style show, and not even the old-school single-camera with laugh track. It’s just a slightly creepy mess.

In the scenes from the original pilot, which appeared in NBC’s trailer for the show last year, we see that the show didn’t look like it was living up to the promise of the script, and perhaps it needed a re-shoot. But what clearly happened is that the network, in ordering changes, ordered all the wrong ones. It’s like they thought a show would have a greater chance of success if it looked more cinematic and less sitcom-y. (This is the opposite of the truth. In fact I’m starting to think one advantage mock-documentaries have over their single-camera compatriots is that they’re free from the pressure to “look like a movie” — except a Christopher Guest movie.)

[vodpod id=Video.3814652&w=640&h=385&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

So the network decided that the way to fix a pilot was to make it look and feel more like their little-watched movie-style comedies. That’s a bit weird. But I think it’s symptomatic of a generation of executives that doesn’t understand the advantages and disadvantages of certain types of shooting styles. There’s always a trade-off with TV comedy: you lose the energy of the audience, but you gain subtlety and the ability to do non-hackneyed jokes; you lose the ability to go outside of the studio, but you gain a certain focus on the story and characters. That’s why the decision to shoot multi-camera or single-camera is an important one that depends on what’s right for the material, and changes the nature of the show that emerges. But I get the impression with this show, that NBC thought they could have it all without any trade-offs: the final version of 100 Questions seems to be based on a theory that they could combine the greater accessibility of multi-camera/live audience with the cinematic look and feel of modern single-camera. It can’t happen. You gotta choose.

Back to the brink

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 3:23 PM - 22 Comments

Meetings this week failed to produce an agreement on the release and review of documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees. The next meeting is apparently scheduled for Monday.

With the House due to rise on Thursday, the NDP now says that their deadline for an agreement is Monday. If no agreement is reached then, they say they will seek to return to the House to pursue a resolution there.

It’s not clear exactly what form that resolution could conceivably take. When the Speaker ruled in April he advised that “if … the matter is still not resolved, the Chair will return to make a statement on the motion that will be allowed in the circumstances.”

***

The government’s response, via the Justice Minister’s office: “Meetings with the Opposition have shown positive signs and will continue in a spirit of cooperation.”

And from the Liberal side, via a spokesman for Ralph Goodale: “Speculating on strategy is not productive. What we’re focusing on is getting an agreement signed before the end of the session. Lines of communication remain open and progress is being made, though admittedly all sides are feeling more pressure as the end of session nears.”

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The Canadian Press counts the Bloc with the NDP and explores the myriad hypotheticals now back in play.

What happened and why (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 2:28 PM - 12 Comments

From the CES survey, the stuff of Stephane Dion’s nightmares.

The Liberal Party’s Green Shift will really hurt the Canadian economy.
Strongly agree 16.8%
Somewhat agree 22.9%
Somewhat disagree 26.0%
Strongly disagree 13.4%
Don’t know 20.0%

The Liberal Party’s carbon tax will really hurt the Canadian economy.
Strongly agree 28.3%
Somewhat agree 25.2%
Somewhat disagree 17.9%
Strongly disagree 11.9%
Don’t know 16.1%

This week's travel news

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 2:11 PM - 4 Comments

Why Robert Milton Made $14.7 Million In 2009
Robert Milton’s legacy at Air Canada may be hotly debated, but there’s no question Milton’s long association with the airline has left a lasting legacy in his bank account. While long since departed to England, Milton is still president and CEO of ACE Aviation, AC’s parent company and 35% shareholder in the airline. As Canadian Press reported this week, thanks to a ‘rationalized’ compensation structure, Milton received close to $15-million from ACE in 2009 – not bad compensation for a part-time job. In reality, Milton’s big payday has more to do with the ‘value-enhancing transactions’ that have enriched shareholders in the past five years, namely spinning off Aeroplan and Jazz Air. In actual compensation for 2009 Milton received a base salary of just over $500,000 and consulting fees of $157,500. Milton also received severance compensation of $7.62 million and a “last payment” of $5 million in ‘incentive awards.’ This year’s $14.7-million in compensation should be the last of the big windfalls for Milton – he made $39-million in 2006 and 2007, again mostly in cash bonuses for engineering the asset sales that warmed the hearts of investors and enraged unions. Going forward, Milton’s paycheque will be held to $270,000 per year – unless he works more than 40 days, at which point he’ll get a per diem of $8,000 per day.

Versailles No More: Pearson Named World’s Most Improved Airport
Once derided as the most expensive place in the world for airlines to land, Toronto’s Pearson International has been honoured by the International Air Transport Association as the world’s ‘most improved’ airport. Over the past three years, Pearson has decreased various charges by 13 to 15 percent. The fee cuts come in the wake of an IATA campaign to get the Greater Toronto Airport Association to lower costs. As IATA director general Giovanni Bisignani puts it: “They built a monument with no notion of how to fund it. We called it Versailles. We had to get rid of a [federal] minister and the [GTAA] CEO. Then we started to work closely together.” As Doug McArthur reported at TakeOffeh.com this week, whether or not passengers are benefitting from lower costs is an open question. Asked if the savings are being passed on to passengers, Bisignani replied cryptically that “the money doesn’t stay in the airlines’ pocket.” Asked the same question, Marilynne Day-Linton, chair of the GTAA board, said she didn’t know. Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu came closest to giving a clear answer, saying cost reductions are reflected in Air Canada’s fares, which are lower “on an absolute basis” than they were a decade ago. IATA says the big benefit of the reduced costs is that fewer airlines will pull out of Toronto and more new airlines will start flying there.

More Profit, More Planes for Emirates
A day after announcing that it is on track to earn more than $1 billion in profits this year, Dubai based airline Emirates placed an $11.5 billion order for 32 Airbus A380s – the world’s largest passenger aircraft. Emirates now has 90 of the big birds on order, over 40% of the entire A380 order book for Airbus. A380s aren’t the only planes in Emirates’ future - in total the airline has contracted for 150 wide-body aircraft worth more than $40 billion, including 70 A350s and 18 Boeing 777-300s. It’s all part of of Emirates’ ambitious strategy to act as a global hub, joining previously unconnected city-pairs around the world through just one stop in Dubai. Emirates is currently flying 10 A380s, with Toronto one of the stops on its route map. The airline was founded just 25 years ago and now ranks among the top 10 in the world in terms of revenue and international passengers. Profitability and a reputation for first rate onboard service has earned Emirates 8^th place in this year’s Skytrax ranking of the world’s best airlines. To put its $1 billion profit projection in perspective, the world’s airlines are expected to earn a total of $2.8 billion this year.

By: Bruce Parkinson
Bruce Parkinson is a travel industry journalist and regular contributor to Takeoffeh.com as well as sister company, OpenJaw.com

Photo Credits: aceaviation.com, gtaa.com, emirates.com

Luggage Logic and the Giant Floating Chandelier

By Takeoffeh.com - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 1:57 PM - 1 Comment

With the summer travel season almost upon us, airports will be filled with frazzled folks flitting far, far away. There’s nothing like a lost bag to put a cramp in your visit to the in-laws, so here are a few tips to help you avoid luggage letdown.

Do You Need It?
This is a two-part question. Part One: Most people pack way too much. Try to remember what you took last time and didn’t use, and eliminate it this time. Part Two: If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t bring it. Leave Grandma’s pearls at home.

Don’t Check It:
Let’s be honest. All those people who tell you they pack 10 days worth of stuff in a carry-on are rumpled, dirty and far too ascetic for our taste. They also clearly don’t have kids. That being said: take anything valuable as carry-on and a throw in a change of clothes too, along with medications, electronics and travel documents. With checked luggage couples and families should definitely cross-pack, so if a bag goes missing, they’ve all got something to wear.

Bag It & Tag It:
You want your luggage to be distinctive, so make sure it is well identified with ID tags and a sticker or ribbon so you can pick it out on the carousel. Don’t rely on old baggage tags as ID, or your bag could end up back at your previous destination.

Eyes on the Prize:
Don’t dawdle while heading to the baggage claim. Sometimes bags come remarkably quickly, and you don’t want someone else walking off with your stuff. Many people also prefer to keep their bags in sight as much as possible when checking in to a hotel or boarding a cruise ship. It’s often easier and more reassuring to carry your own luggage or accompany it to your room or cabin.

Spotlight on Norwegian Epic
What’s a new cruise ship without a superlative or two? Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Epic will set sail this month, and final fittings included installing the largest LED chandelier at sea. The massive piece is the focal point of the ship’s atrium and the Epic Casino — also the largest at sea.  But they don’t make chandeliers like they used to – this one features 10,000 LED diodes allowing it to project all colours of the spectrum through 40,000 glass crystals. The monster light is the product of Vienna’s Kalmar, a leading glass crystal maker and specialist in chandeliers that make statements in hotels and palaces around the world. The 21-foot tall, 11-foot diameter chandelier weighs two metric tonnes and took a team of people three weeks to install.

Photo Credits: jocic, epic.ncl.com

What happened and why (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 1:45 PM - 16 Comments

Some more numbers from the Canadian Election Study’s 2008 surveys, this time on party feelings and allegiances.

In federal politics, do you usually think of yourself as a:
Liberal 23.8%
Conservative 23.0%
NDP 9.6%

Is there any Federal political party that is just too extreme for you?
Liberal 4.1%
Conservative 16.1%
NDP 7.7%

Continue…

AT&T security flaw leads to iPad data leak

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

Approximately 114,000 iPad subscribers’ email addresses, including CEOs, military officials and top politicians, were leaked to hackers because of vulnerabilities on the AT&T network. The subscriber data was accessed by Goatse Security, a group that has highlighted other security vulnerabilities in Firefox and Safari web browsers. Apple remains mum on the problem, while A&T reports that the security breach has been patched. The FBI has opened an investigation looking into the threat level. “Spammers could, in theory, use these email addresses to target iPad users with specific junk email, selling cases or accessories for this device,” said Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant to The Telegraph. “But there’s no evidence that any malicious third parties have accessed this data.”

Telegraph

Gawker

This Sporting Life

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 8 Comments

So Wayne went a bit crazy and put up fivecountemfive posts about what we can learn about sports, ethics, and life itself from the call that cost Galarraga a perfect game. Give them a read while you’re waiting for France-Uruguay to start, it’s all really interesting stuff.

And since you might have some time left over, why not read Declan Hill’s submission to the Council of Europe about how to save the soul of sport as we know it. Hill, you’ll recall, is the author of the acclaimed book The Fix. Acclaimed, that is, everywhere except the pages of the Globe and Mail, where John Doyle dismissed it as “lacking credibility”. Speaking of credibility, Doyle also believes that concern over diving in soccer is nothing more than a sign of North Americans’ “small notions about manliness and sportsmanship”.

Right. That would explain why, since 1999, FIFA and Uefa have been on anti-diving missions, with both organizations asserting unequivocally that diving is cheating. It’s because they are in the thrall of small-minded Don Cherries in North America.

Tattoos on the soccer pitch

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:29 PM - 1 Comment

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:13 PM - 42 Comments

Here is a story about the exact type of portable toilet used for the Stornoway garden party.

Mandela in mourning

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

Nelson Mandela, the 91-year-old former president of South Africa, has missed the opening of the World Cup in his country because of the tragic death of his great-granddaughter. Zenani Mandela, who just turned 13, died in a single car-collision Thursday night. An unnamed driver, who police say was drunk, has been arrested in connection with the accident and may face homicide charges.

CTV News

Opening Weekend: Retro kicks in ‘Karate Kid’ and ‘A-Team’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 11:13 AM - 2 Comments

Karate Kids: Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith; (background) the original's Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita

The ’80s are back with a vengeance. This weekend offers reboots of two franchises from that era, with a remake of The Karate Kid and a movie adapted from The A-Team TV series. The Karate Kid is the better movie, with a higher martial arts pedigree than the original. It’s also the unplugged alternative, with the accent on physical stunts and uncynical sentiment. But if you’re looking full-bore blockbuster with a fireworks show of special effects, The A-Team offers the purest blast of action-adventure trash that we’ve seen so far this spring. I’ll get to The A-Team later in this post, but first my piece on remakes, sequels and The Karate Kid, which appeared in the magazine this week:

Karate Kid’s a remake with muscle—no kidding!

If you’ve seen a Hollywood movie this spring, chances are it was made from recycled material—a sequel, a prequel or a remake. The tally so far: Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Robin Hood, A Nightmare on Elm St., Iron Man 2, Sex and the City 2, Shrek Forever After. Next up are The A-Team, The Karate Kid, Toy Story 3 and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. It’s hard not to get cynical about this glut of born-again blockbusters.

But what’s most irritating is not the slavish cloning of brands; it’s the contortions filmmakers go through to give them a novel twist. Do we really need to see a pre-Sherwood Forest Robin Hood defend Britain from an armada of medieval landing craft in a war movie that plays like Saving Private Ryan unplugged? And do Sex and the City fans really want to see their post-feminist icons recast as Barbie-doll drag queens, mocking Islamic dress codes while being pampered by Arabic slaves on a sheik’s junket?

Inbreeding has become Hollywood’s preferred business model, and the progeny just gets more and more grotesque. But on rare occasions, in the desperate effort to reboot old brands, filmmakers actually improve on the original. Notable examples are Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale and last year’s Star Trek. That’s also the case, in some respects, with The Karate Kid remake and Toy Story 3.

The ingenuity of The Karate Kid, which opens this week, lies in the casting. Ralph Macchio, who starred in the 1984 original and two sequels, was already in his 20s when he was first cast as the Kid, a New Jersey teen who moves to California with his mom and trains like a mini-Rocky to defeat a gang of blond bullies. The remake stars Jaden Smith—the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith—who is a mere 12 years old. He plays Dre Parker, a mouthy brat from Detroit, who moves to Bejing with his mother (Taraji P. Henson) when she’s transferred to a new job.

Shot in China, the fable plays out against a much broader cultural divide than the original—a breakdancing African-American child with cornrows is persecuted by Asian thugs twice his size. And the spectacle, fortified with Chinese pageantry, unfolds on a grander scale. It’s a virtual helicopter tour of breathtaking locations, from the Forbidden City and the Great Wall to the monastery peaks of the Wudang mountains.
Smith’s tender age makes his character’s romance—with a Chinese violin prodigy—painfully precocious. But it also makes his eventual prowess as a fighter more miraculous. And this impudent kid with charm to burn has an ideal foil in martial arts legend Jackie Chan—the remake’s other casting coup. There’s no karate in this Karate Kid, just kung fu.

Which is cooler. Taking on the role of the wily teacher created by Pat Morita, Chan not only proves himself as a character actor, he raises the bar for the fight scenes, which are tougher, more dazzling and more convincing than before. Chan rebrands the role with deadpan wit from his first appearance, as he tries to catch a fly in mid-air with chopsticks. The scene is almost identical to the one in the original—until he nails the bug with a fly swatter. A textbook case of creative cloning.

Toy Story 3 is a sequel, not a remake. But each movie in the Disney-Pixar franchise conforms to a strict narrative template: led by Woody (Tom Hanks), the vintage cowboy doll, a clan of animated toys get separated from their beloved master, Andy, and have to fight their way home. In Toy Story 2, the enemy was a venal collector. In Toy Story 3, Andy is off to college and his toys are once again playing dodgeball with oblivion. Will it be the attic? A yard sale? No, they’re donated to a daycare centre—a prison camp ruled with an iron paw by a strawberry-scented stuffed bear.

While the franchise’s sentimental mould is inviolable, this sequel has a darker, more satirical edge. Some of the Orwellian daycare toys are quite scary, like the mad-eyed, cymbal-crashing monkey on surveillance duty, or the big, blank-eyed baby doll. And in an apocalyptic set piece, the toys are sent on a harrowing flume ride through trash shredders to landfill hell. Of course, this Toy Story, like the others, ends happily. Some things will never change.

The A-Team: (from left) Face (Bradley Cooper), Murdock (Sharlto Copley), Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and B.A. (Quinton "Rampage" Jackson)

The A-Team

This kind of thing doesn’t usually appeal to me—a mindless action movie jam-packed with absurd stunts and bloated effects that are strung together by an utterly implausible plot. But The A-Team is . . . well, not so bad.  I can’t compare it to the TV show. (I had better things to do in the early ’80s, although Mr. T was an inescapable pop icon.) So for me, this kind of genre piece calls to mind countless Dirty Dozen-style commando, heist and caper movies. The A-Team does not aim high. The script is closer to B-grade fare. But it achieves exactly what it sets out to do. The cast seems overqualified, especially A-list thespian Liam Neeson. Talk about range: for Neeson this is quite a jump from starring in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe. And even he appears to be having trouble buying himself as Hannibal Smith, the squad’s gruff, cigar-chomping leader. But he does look to be having a lovely time, like an actor on holiday. In almost every gesture you can see him thinking, “Oh, why the hell not!”  (I also kept thinking he resembled  Alan Alda in M.A.S.H., a notion that was impossible to get out of my head once it was stuck there.)

Bradley Cooper in 'The A-Team'

Bradley Cooper, however, looks utterly at home in The A-Team. He makes a meal of his role as Face, the charming con man. Cooper (Wedding Crashers, The Hangover) seems bent on usurping Matthew McConaughey’s title as the Man Who Always Acts With His Shirt Off (as parodied by Matt Damon on Letterman). It’s as if he’s on a one-man mission to turn an action movie into a chick flick. This rising star, who has forged a career from a shit-eating grin, is also endowed with a romantic subplot: his character is chasing an old flame (Jessica Biel), a military cop who becomes the team’s military nemesis. The troupe’s real surprise is Sharlto Copley, the South African star of District 9, who delivers a deliriously unhinged performance as Murdoch, the crazy chopper pilot. Copley carves out corners of scene-stealing brilliance in this script, elevating every scene he’s in. Rounding out the cast is former UFC light-heavyweight champion Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, who fills Mr. T’s shoes as B.A. Baracus, a hapless, thick-headed muscleman who’s afraid of heights. In the Age of Obama, this Black Power bruiser who discovers Gandhi in prison is a real throwback—not just retro, but retrograde. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend too much time over-thinking a movie that is styled as a self-conscious guilty pleasure.

What about the plot? I’m not sure if it matters to anyone. But it starts out as an origins story, showing how the quartet comes together as a brotherhood of former Army Rangers whose paths collide. The setting is updated, with the Iraq war providing the backdrop and a private military contractor named Black Forest—an obvious reference to the real-life mercenary army, Blackwater—serving as the villain. There’s even a dash of political content as Face greets the Black Forest operatives: “I thought you boys would be busy installing a dictatorship or overthrowing a democracy. . . You’re not soldiers, you’re assassins in polo shirts.”

The military, the mercenaries, the CIA and the A-Team square off as four corners of a ramshackle intrigue that revolves around the theft of U.S. dollar counterfeit printing plates. But it hardly matters if the plot is comprehensible, or credible. Not when the stunts include the men bailing out of a transport plane in a tank held aloft by parachutes.

What’s most unlikely, however, is that this story of global conflict, which is set in six different spots around the world—from the Iraq desert to a Frankfurt train station—was shot entirely in the Vancouver area. Talk about suspension of disbelief.

Waking up earlier leads to more teen accidents: study

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 11:04 AM - 1 Comment

A study suggests that schools with earlier start times show an increased risk of teenagers crashing their cars. It all boils down to the requisite hours of sleep needed to function, say researchers. On average, teenagers need over nine —an amount that many teens don’t even come close to getting. The study took 2008 data from similar U.S. cities—Virginia Beach and Chesapeake—which have similar demographics but different school start times. The results of the study showed that accident rates were 41 percent higher in Virginia Beach where schools started earlier. Since teens are biologically programmed to go to sleep earlier, the amount of sleep teens get depends on what time they wake up in the morning. “Younger, inexperienced drivers don’t fare well with additional handicaps such as impaired alertness caused by having to get up earlier than is natural for them,” says sleep expert Dr. Barbara Phillips.

Business Week

Tony Clement behind festival funding cuts

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 10:52 AM - 8 Comments

Turns out it’s all Tony Clement’s fault if a variety of events didn’t get the funding they were expecting from the federal government. Richard Dicerni, deputy minister of Industry Canada, told a parliamentary committee on Thursday that Clement gets to pick who gets to dip into Ottawa’s controversial marquee tourism events program. So far, under the industry minister’s stewardship, funding to to popular festivals like Montreal’s FrancoFolies and Gay Pride in Toronto has been cut dramatically. Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez worries Clement’s role in attributing the funding comes with too little oversight. “We found out that the minister had carte blanche on nearly $100 million of public funds and he didn’t have to justify his decisions regarding these funds,” he said. “That is very worrisome.”

CBC News