Reading between the lines of Harper’s fifth anniversary speech

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 45 Comments

Friends, today we celebrate our fifth anniversary!

The traditional gift to mark a fifth anniversary is wood, so I brought along my natural disposition. Enjoy!

So, it’s been five years! What a day. What a time. And what a journey it has been, my friends, since the people of Canada gave us their trust!

Throughout this speech, I’m going to persist in referring to you as “my friends,” even though we all know I would sooner stab myself in the face with a fork than have a 20-minute conversation with any of you. I therefore say in conclusion: My friends, please do not attempt to make eye contact.

•••

It’s almost hard to remember what Canada looked like that winter.

Was it triangular? Paisley? Only historians can be certain.

Back then, back in the winter of 2006, the sponsorship scandal hung heavily in the air! Lobbyists ran Ottawa! People had lost faith in the ability – and in the integrity – of their national government!

There was blood in the streets! The only clothing at our disposal was burlap and wet newspaper! Cats and dogs were living together, and it wasn’t nearly as adorable as you might at first imagine!

You could almost say that it really seemed like Continue…

Toyota ends 2010 as world’s largest carmaker

By macleans.ca - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

Toyota finished 2010 as the world’s largest carmaker even though it went through a series of recalls and safety issues, the BBC reports. The Japanese car company sold 8.42 million vehicles, beating General Motors, which sold 8.39 million. The company’s sales (including truckmaker Hino and auto maker Daihatsu) went up eight per cent from 2009, much of that due to growth in China and other Asian companies. In 2010, Toyota recalled more than 10 million vehicles worldwide for a variety of issues, including faulty floor mats and problems with computer software. In North America, its sales reached 1.94 million vehicles, down two per cent from 2009.

BBC News

Jack LaLanne was Right

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 1 Comment

Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru who died yesterday at 96 years young, wasn’t only a workout expert and TV personality since the kinescope era. He was a prophet. He was telling us (loudly) that we were too fat and sedentary — perhaps from watching too much TV — before we really thought that was a problem.

Hiding from the sunlight

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:02 AM - 29 Comments

Tabatha Southey watches the Conservative ads.

Bright light pouring in through the arched stained-glass windows suggests that either it’s daylight outside or an alien invasion is under way. Either way, our Prime Minister is unperturbed. He makes his way upstairs to his office, where, with the wooden blinds on the windows drawn fastidiously against the light, he works from a few tidy files, writing things on papers – according to the closing shot (Exterior: Night, Parliament Hill), all night long …  The message seems to be: One man, and one man alone – entirely alone – can be trusted to protect Canadians from the marauding stock footage that is shown at the top of the ad.

In conversation with Mia Bloom

By Kate Fillion - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 13 Comments

Photographs by Mick Quinn/Getty Images

Mia Bloom, a fellow at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism, currently teaches at Penn State University. In Bombshell: The Many Faces of Women Terrorists, she explains why so many more women now play active, operational roles in terrorist movements.

Q: What do female suicide bombers bring to the table that male terrorists cannot?
A: The element of surprise. We’ve come a long way, baby—women are secretaries of state and prime ministers—but people still don’t expect women to be involved in violence. Second, women tend to infuse a movement with enthusiasm and a great deal of momentum. Third, a lot of movements use women’s involvement to shame men when recruitment is sagging. They say, “Your sisters are fighting for you.” Finally, acts perpetrated by women, particularly attractive women, get far more media attention.

Q: Are they as effective as male suicide bombers?
A: With a civilian target, female bombers tend to be more successful and cause more damage. When you have a soft target—a Shia mosque, a shopping centre, a restaurant, a disco—women are less likely to be stopped at the entrance. They get further inside, where they have a more deadly effect. It’s physics: the further you can penetrate an enclosed space, the more damage explosives do.

Q: Do terrorists resort to suicide terrorism when they’re desperate, or is it strategic?
A: We tend to think of terrorists as being kind of crazy because they kill people and put bombs in their underwear or, in one case, up their ass. But the leadership are very calculating. And when the other side increases the level of technology—using drones, aerial bombardments, aerial gunships—to protect their soldiers, the terrorists say, “How do we make this personal again?” Also, because the technology is far less precise than a targeted assassination, it increases the number of civilians who are killed, which usually results in an increase in recruitment. Now the movement has cannon fodder. Palestinian terrorists have repeatedly told me, “With Israeli bombs dropping from the sky, I feel I could die at any moment. If I choose to be a suicide bomber, at least I have a choice of time and place.” It’s a weird, take-back-the-night attitude.

Continue…

Clash of the conservative titans

By Colby Cosh - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 20 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP; Ted Rhodes/Calgary Herald;

As a University of Calgary political scientist, Ted Morton was famous for criticizing the role of the courts in post-Charter Canadian politics. Politics, he argued, belong to the sovereign people, and should not be confined to some remote, sterile bullring for litigators. Democracy in action may be noisy and sluggish, but it is the teacher and nurse of reason.

Yet the devil, as always, is in the details; and the former theoretician, now Progressive Conservative finance minister of Alberta, is in a tight fix as the province prepares for a probable 2012 election. The PCs are barely keeping pace in the polls with the surging Wildrose Alliance; according to an Environics survey released in December, the Alliance is actually ahead (37 per cent to 33 per cent) outside Calgary and Edmonton. Morton has been discussing the possibility of seeking a head-to-head showdown with Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, who is already nominated in Okotoks-High River. It would be an audacious move, but the risks are daunting.

The province had new electoral boundaries drawn up last summer, and the commission reined in slack limits on the range of population differences between ridings. For 2012, all votes will be created a little more equal than before in Alberta, where the countryside, much like the slower-growing provinces on the federal scene, has tended to be chronically overrepresented. Unfortunately for Morton, the commissioners left his scenic Foothills-Rocky View riding looking like a slab of peanut brittle shattered with a hammer, with large chunks handed to the neighbours. Morton has said he prefers to hold onto the nucleus of his old riding, the County of Rocky View on Calgary’s western fringe. The county has been joined with the northern edge of Calgary and its eastern suburbs to form a new riding, so even if Morton were to “stay,” he would have handshaking and chicken-dinnering to catch up on in the eastern half while still shouldering ministerial responsibilities.

Continue…

No longer reporting for duty

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 6 Comments

Pawel Dwulit/CP

His trial made headlines around the world—and sparked a fierce debate about mercy killing in a combat zone—but Robert Semrau’s final day in uniform passed without any publicity at all. He arrived at CFB Petawawa on Jan. 13, enjoyed a farewell lunch with fellow officers, and after many hugs and handshakes, left the base for the last time. As a civilian. “He certainly didn’t leave under a cloud of shame,” one soldier told Maclean’s. “Everyone wished him the best, and told him how tough it was to see him go.”

For Semrau and his family, tough doesn’t even begin to describe the past three years. In the summer of 2008, the Moose Jaw, Sask., native deployed to Kandahar as a respected infantry captain assigned to mentor Afghan troops as they hunted for Taliban. By December, he was on a plane back home, accused of putting a gravely injured insurgent out of his misery with two bullets to the chest.

Never before had a Canadian soldier been charged with battlefield murder, and when his court martial finally began in March 2010, Semrau was staring at a possible sentence of life behind bars. But his lawyers—knowing full well that compassion is not a legal excuse for murder—never conceded that their client committed a mercy kill. In fact, the defence offered no alternative version of events. They simply attacked the credibility of every Crown witness, hoping to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt.

Continue…

The godfather

By macleans.ca - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

FRED CHARTRAND/CP

If Canada’s natural governing party in its heyday had a godfather, it was Keith Davey, the former Toronto advertising executive who died this week at 84, after an extended battle with Alzheimer’s.

The ultimate backroom functionary whose strategic advice and organizational skills fuelled the reigns of two prime ministers—Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau—Davey virtually invented the modern Liberal party. He pioneered the creative applications of polling and the uses of electronic techniques to reinforce his intuitive wisdom that perception had become reality—a shift that signalled a fundamental reworking of the rules of engagement.

A big, hunched Eagle Scout in politics, Davey was the most widely liked presence in the cold capital city of Ottawa and bounced his enthusiasms off its icicled back. As the long-time national director of the Liberal party, he supplied the Rotarian energy that kept the political machine functioning at its best, under Trudeau, and its most useful, under Pearson. Pearson’s legislative achievements were unparallelled, but his hesitant electoral approach barely managed to eke out two slim minorities from the barely coherent John Diefenbaker.

Continue…

'The stock market is for suckers'

By Jason Kirby - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 52 Comments

Justin Sullivan/GETTY IMAGES

Were it not for the source and recipients of the email—From: Goldman Sachs, To: Our most outrageously rich clients—it would have read like one of those Nigerian investment scams that slip through spam filters now and then. “When you have a chance I wanted to find a time to discuss a highly confidential and time-sensitive investment opportunity,” the secretive missive began. But this was clearly no shady dispatch from Lagos. What investment bank Goldman Sachs offered by way of the emails, sent out to thousands of its most valuable high-net-worth clients in early January, was the chance for them to buy a piece of the hottest company in America: Facebook.

Since the social networking site infused itself into every facet of our lives, investors have anticipated the day when the company would take its place in capitalist folklore beside Microsoft, Netscape, Apple and Google. Everything seemed to be in place—the phenomenal growth, chief geek Mark Zuckerberg’s rapid ascent to Bill Gates-ian prominence, The Movie!! It all suggested we were about to witness one of those rare moments when the spark of innovation meets the greatest wealth-creation machine the world has ever known: the American stock market.

Only that’s not how things have unfolded. In its email to clients, Goldman wasn’t talking about a public stock offering for Facebook. Instead, the bank, along with a Russian investment firm, injected US$500 million into Facebook’s coffers by way of a purely private transaction. Goldman, in turn, set up a fund through which wealthy clients could own those Facebook shares themselves, for a minimum of US$2 million. Based on that valuation, Facebook emerged a colossus worth more than US$50 billion.

Continue…

'Canada is, and always has been, our country'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 9:04 PM - 46 Comments

The prepared text for the Prime Minister’s remarks to supporters this afternoon to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his government.

Friends, today we celebrate our fifth anniversary!

So, it’s been five years! What a day. What a time. And what a journey it has been, my friends, since the people of Canada gave us their trust!

It’s almost hard to remember what Canada looked like that winter. Back then, back in the winter of 2006, the sponsorship scandal hung heavily in the air. Lobbyists ran Ottawa. People had lost faith in the ability – and in the integrity – of their national government. Parents were disrespected, thought more likely to spend money on beer and popcorn than take care of their children. Provinces were denied the resources to properly deliver the services they were bound to do by federal law. The votes of New Canadians were taken for granted. Victims of crime were ignored. In Quebec, support for sovereignty was surging. Our Canadian Armed Forces were neglected and demoralized. No one in the world knew where Canada stood. You could almost say that it really seemed like a Canadian winter!

So, five years ago today, on January 23, 2006 Canadians gave our Party a mandate to shake up Ottawa. We have been faithful! We have kept that trust! And we have delivered!

Continue…

TV Pundit Keith Olbermann Resigns

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:27 PM - 68 Comments

I thought the on-air personality who resigns on the air and never comes back to the show was something we only see on fictional TV. But tonight it happened on (technically) real TV. Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s star personality, announced a few minutes ago that this would be his last episode, and NBC confirmed it.

The reasons for his departure will start to be talked about soon, but for now, given the timing, he has to be considered the first casualty of the NBC/Comcast merger.

(Update: Comcast says it had “nothing to do” with forcing him out. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in response to the merger, though. Also, Olbermann said he was “told” to leave, but it’s still unclear whether this means he was fired or simply that NBC wouldn’t let him stay past this episode once it was decided that he was leaving.)

[vodpod id=Video.5397852&w=640&h=375&fv=launch%3D41201922%26amp%3Bwidth%3D420%26amp%3Bheight%3D245]

I have no idea if the new NBC management wants to move the network to the right, but the idea of MSNBC as a liberal equivalent of Fox News — it wasn’t, but it was the only thing that resembled a liberal U.S. cable news network — seems to be over.

Olbermann’s impact has dulled somewhat since the Bush administration ended, or maybe even before that. Countdown was a fresh and surprising show in the mid-’00s, simply because it was doing something nobody else was doing on U.S. news. Battered by competition from Fox News and reading Bush’s re-election (as well as the disastrous launch of Air America radio in 2004) as proof that the U.S. mostly wanted conservatism, CNN and, yes, MSNBC generally moved to the right, or at least away from having anyone who was too “shrill” in criticizing the Bush administration; you could turn on cable news and see a mix of conservatives and mushy centrists.

I don’t know what Olbermann’s ideology is, or even if he has one, but after Bush got re-elected he recognized that there were a lot of people out there who really didn’t like the Bush administration and wanted to hear “shrill” criticism. So he did it, and people watched — not as many as on Fox, but enough to improve MSNBC’s performance. He was a key figure in making it acceptable to engage in criticisms that many “respectable” pundits dismissed as uncivil, and to criticize Democrats and liberals from the left rather than the right.

I think Rachel Maddow, whom he supported, does it better, partly because she actually is an open ideological liberal and therefore, like many Fox pundits, she has actual policy positions you can agree or disagree with; Olbermann’s schtick is largely about emotion. But he really did do some important work in helping to revive the possibility of actual liberal media, as opposed to “the liberal media.”

Mako, Tough Guy and Musical Leading Man

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 6:51 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t have a Filler Clip™ right now that’s specifically TV-related, so here’s one that was at least broadcast on TV. I mentioned the musical Pacific Overtures in my post on Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday last year; since then, someone uploaded a clip of the opening number that’s in much better quality than any other I’ve seen from this broadcast — I wish I knew where the uploader got this copy. (Pacific Overtures was taped in the theatre for broadcast not on U.S. TV, but in Japan, where the show has been popular as one of the few U.S. musicals about Japan.) Like most opening numbers from Stephen Sondheim/Harold Prince musicals, it tells us the premise of the show and presents the “order” that will soon be undermined: eight minutes of exposition, in song and dance, about Japan before the arrival of Commodore Perry.

The clip shows off the choreography by Patricia Birch, who did Grease and staged the dances in Boardwalk Empire (this was one of the last musicals by Sondheim or Prince to have a really strong dance element) and the costumes by Florence Klotz, but mostly it shows off the lead role of Mako as the narrator/reciter/guide to history. Is Mako one of the coolest, toughest guys to be the lead in a major musical? He’s got to be up there. He was up for the Best Actor Tony that year against another incredibly cool lead, Jerry Orbach in Chicago. Both of them lost to a guy playing the supporting part of Alfred Doolittle in a revival of My Fair Lady. So the Tonys can be as inexplicable as the Golden Globes sometimes.

TV critic Jaime Weinman on the Conservative attack ads

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 6:01 PM - 3 Comments

Play us out, musical tie guy

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 5:50 PM - 8 Comments

Whatever the moaning about how much more civilized and mannered and eloquent is the British House, we can at least say that our Houses is free of musical neckwear.

Thirteen arrested in counterfeit textbook ring

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 9 Comments

Thirteen people were arrested in Montreal Thursday after police uncovered a large textbook-counterfeiting ring. Police uncovered 2,700 photocopied textbooks at four copy centres near McGill University. “It was well done; it was like they were real,” RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Luc Thibault told CBC News. The fakes were being sold at roughly one-quarter of their value. Those found had a cover price of $540,000. The people arrested could face fines up to $1-million or five years in jail under the Copyright Act.

CBC News

For the good of the country, won't you please submit to Tony Clement's personal and intrusive questions?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:09 PM - 34 Comments

Tony Clement appeals for your help.

“I am pleased that Ms. Finley did not receive a formal sentence. It’s our government’s position that there are other ways to collect useful and usable data than by threatening Canadians with jail time,” Mr. Clement said in a statement. “That is why we will be introducing legislation to eliminate such threats.”

“However, completing the census is important for data purposes so I do encourage Canadians to comply and to participate in the National Household Survey in the coming months.”

Harkat fighting deportation order

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:05 PM - 9 Comments

Mohamed Harkat, the Ottawa resident who was arrested eight years ago under suspicion of terrorist activity, was served with deportation papers on Friday. Harkat was apprehended under a security certificate, a controversial legal tool that allows the detainment of suspected foreign nationals considered to be security threats based on secret evidence that is unavailable to the accused. The deportation order, which would return Harkat, 42, to Algeria, comes at a time when his lawyers are still appealing the security certificate ruling, arguing that it may violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Harkat’s lawyer, Matthew Webber, said “while they may be serving the paperwork, we fully expect and are confident the Canadian government respects due process.” Harkat, who worked in Ottawa as a gas station attendant and a pizza deliveryman, claims he fled Algeria and worked with a Pakistani aid organization before immigrating.

CBC News

Blair ‘regrets’ loss of life in Iraq

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:03 PM - 10 Comments

Tony Blair appeared on Friday for the last time in front of the Chilcot inquiry, which is investigating the lead-up to the Iraq war. The former British PM said he “regrets deeply and profoundly the loss of life” during the Iraq war, clarifying previous comments he made during his previous testimony in which he expressed no regrets in taking the decision to go to war. His statement was met with cries of “too late” from the public gallery. Blair’s testimony revealed that he had told George W. Bush that he could “count on us,” and admitted disregarding Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s warning, which the former Prime Minister called “provisional,” that invading Iraq without the backing of the UN would be illegal. Blair also took the opportunity to warn about the destabilizing threat presented by Iran, saying the West has a “wretched policy, or posture, of apology for believing that we are causing what the Iranians are doing, or what these extremists are doing. The fact is we are not.”

BBC News

In the balance

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 2:27 PM - 56 Comments

Errol Mendes figures the vote subsidy is part of a delicate balance.

There could well be an argument that limited forms of financial contribution to political parties by trade unions are a form of political expression that may be protected by our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms — and indeed by other entrenched rights documents around the world. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision last January ruled that “political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation,” thereby allowing corporations to engage in political spending in elections.

Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed that, like individual Canadians, trade unions and corporations are guaranteed their freedom of expression under the Charter. The court will most likely strike down total elimination of such expression without some balancing reasonable limit under section 1 of the Charter. That section allows governments to impose reasonable limits on Charter rights that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. This balancing allows governments to impose the present limits on financial contributions by individuals.

Meanwhile, WT Stanbury does the math and comes up with the following. Continue…

Google CEO steps down

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 0 Comments

In a wholly unexpected move, Google’s Eric Schmidt has announced he is stepping down as CEO and handing over control of the company to co-founder Larry Page. Schmidt was originally brought aboard in 2001, when Google was still in its infancy. Along with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Schmidt helped turn the company into a tech behemoth with $25 billion in annual revenue. Schmidt will stay on Chairman of the Board, with Page as CEO, and Brin as co-founder in charge of new initiatives.

Wired

Clement urges Canadians complete census

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 12:39 PM - 18 Comments

Industry Minister Tony Clement, who sent the country into a heated debate over statistics last summer when he made the mandatory long-form census voluntary, is now is urging Canadians to voluntarily complete the new National Household Survey. Clement touts the fact Canadians will no longer face jail time for not answering “personal and intrusive” questions. At the same time, the industry minister praised the decision of a Saskatoon judge to let Sandra Finley go without jail time for her refusal to complete the census, on the grounds that StatsCan had purchased software from Lockheed Martin. Census-takers are expecting that, at best, only 65 to 70 percent of Canadians will complete the questionnaire, prompting the Industry Minister to remind Canadians that “completing the census is important for data purposes.” At 35 pages, the National Household Survey is still a fairly long and extensive questionnaire that asks Canadians about their religion, ethnicity and financial information.

The Globe and Mail

B.C. meat plant covered up E. coli contamination

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 2 Comments

A meat processing plant in Pitt Meadows, B.C. will not be required to test for E. coli even though plant officials were recently caught covering up evidence of contaminated meat. While testing for E. coli is required for meat plants that are federally licensed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, provincial regulations are not mandated to do the same. A spokesman for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control says testing at provincial plants isn’t required because “the likelihood of finding a contaminated sample is very low.” Nevertheless, plant officials at the Pitt Meadows plant failed to report test results showing the presence of E. coli after an employee brought positive test results to their attention. After being told to stay silent about the results, the employee, whom company officials accuse of trying to “sabotage” the plant, contacted CBC News about the discovery.

CBC News

CRTC wants 'Money for Nothing' ban reviewed

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 7 Comments

The CRTC is stepping into the debate over the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council de-facto ban of the Dire Straits hit ‘Money for Nothing’. Canada’s broadcast regulator says the Standards Council should reconsider its objections to the song and its use of the word “faggot,” citing the “strong public reaction” as well as the “uncertainty” it has created for private radio stations. The Standards Council is an independent body created and run by radio and television broadcasters, however the CRTC says it has received some 250 letters about the ban.

Montreal Gazette

Opening Weekend: No Strings Attached, Incendies, The Company Men, The Way Back

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

Lubna Azabal in 'Incendies'

There’s a profound discrepancy in the quality of movies these days, between the calibre of the acting and the calibre of the scripts. Film actors just seem to get better all the time; it’s hard to find an unnatural performance. But so often good actors are hemmed in by contrived scripts and formulaic direction. That’s the case with Ivan Reitman’s new romantic comedy, No Strings Attached. Ashton Kutcher looks right at home in this glossy vehicle, but Natalie Portman and a dream team of supporting players seem grossly overqualified. While they eke out gem-like performances, the movie almost gets in the way.

Also opening this week is The Company Men. It’s a fine piece of ensemble acting that elicits unlikely sympathy for the plight of laid-off executives. A novel premise: pity the man who loses his Porsche. But the sharp grain of the drama is betrayed by the romantic gloss of the ending, which undermines everything the actors have been working to achieve. The movie is still worth seeing, it wouldn’t lose much if you waited to catch it on video. The Way Back, on the other hand,  has the kind of spectacular vistas that demand to be seen on the wide screen. Directed by Australia’s Peter Weir, it’s a survival epic about prisoners crossing a vast landscape after escaping a Siberian Gulag. Some may find it a slog, but I’m a sucker for these kinds of expeditionary ordeals. (I’ll elaborate on The Way Back below; and for more on The Company Men, go to my piece in this week’s magazine: Feeling the pain of rich alpha males.)

Ivan Reitman is not the only Canadian director with a new movie out. While Reitman’s Hollywood romcom opens “everywhere” this weekend, Incendies by Quebec’s Denis Villeneuve, already a hit in his home province, begins a staggered release with openings in Toronto and Vancouver. But Reitman and Villeneuve might as well be from different planets. And Incendies is one of those rare films that fires successfully on all cylinders. Although it’s adapted from a play, the script never seems stagy. Villeneuve scales the precipice of high tragedy without sliding into melodrama. He directs with a keen eye for both visual poetry and stark realism. And the acting is uniformly superb.

It was just announced that Incendies has made the Oscars’ short list of nine films in the foreign-language category, and we’ll find out Tuesday whether or not it will snag a nomination. It should. It’s not only the most powerful Canadian film of the past year—which the Toronto Film Critics Association recognized last week by giving it the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award—it holds its own against other intense foreign language fare such as Biutiful and Of Gods and Men. (There was understandable outrage when the Academy failed to include Of Gods and Men on its short list, while finding room for Algeria’s Outside the Law, a more lurid tale of French-Algerian strife. While including some titles we’ve never heard of, the Academy also snubbed Cannes Palme d’Or Winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.)  For more on Incendies, go to my recent piece in Maclean’s, which includes an interview with Villeneuve: Oscar buzz for a Canadian director.

As for Ivan Reitman’s new romantic comedy, as much as I’m happy watching anything starring Natalie Portman, any recommendation from me would have to come with strings attached. Sure, if you want to shut off your brain, snuggle up with Natalie and Ashton, and take the laughs where you can find them, you may want to write it off as a guilty pleasure. But the pleasure is intermittent. And besides, I have to keep reminding that myself that, while I see movies for free, others don’t.

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in 'No Strings Attached'

No Strings Attached

In the past few years, Ivan Reitman has kept busy as a producer, putting his weight behind his son Jason’s Up in the Air, and Atom Egoyan’s Chloe. Both were sophisticated dramas, grown-up stuff far removed from the high-concept studio comedies that Reitman is famous for. Now with No Strings Attached, he directs his first movie since casting Uma Thurman in My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006). But while it’s R-rated, and involves no cartoon-like special effects, No Strings is not as sophisticated, grown-up or even credible as we might wish.

The R-rated romcom is rare, something we don’t see that often outside the gross-out genre, although we did see one just recently with Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. In fact, the premise of No Strings, is pretty close to that of Love and Other Drugs. This is another story of a guy who falls in love with a girl who wants him only for sex and has a deep fear of emotional commitment.

The conceit, of course, is that it’s reverses the usual male-female stereotype. And as the hero’s buddies are quick to point out, it’s the ultimate male fantasy: meeting a woman who wants unadulterated sex, and nothing in return. No sweet-talking. No spooning. No flowers on Valentine’s Day. And no jealousy if competing sexual objects loom into view. There’s nothing wrong with the premise per se. Every full-fledged romantic comedy needs a hook, a mighty obstacle that has to be overcome. As the movie’s twentysomething screenwriter, Elizabeth Meriwether, has pointed out, there’s something modern about “a love story that starts with a kiss instead of ending with one.”

For the two characters in question, the sex-buddy arrangement makes some sense. Emma (Portman) is an overworked ER doctor whose insane shifts allow her no room for a life, and Adam (Kutcher), a TV floor director, is wary of commitment after being shocked to find his ex-girlfriend is dating his father (Kevin Kline), a former TV star with a prescription for medical marijuana who’s a few tokes past his prime. But Adam is the one who caves first, and starts demanding emotional commitment. And as he tries to break through Emma’s defenses, we know that she secretly wants it just as much as he does; she’s in denial. It’s a simple story courtship arc—how do you win her heart, now that you’ve won her body, especially when she’s calling the shots?

Both Portman and Kutcher are easy to watch, and they display a natural chemistry in a couple of frisky sex scenes. (Though his nudity clause seems looser than hers—and given that Portman is the Oscar-level actress and Kutcher is the lightweight hunk, that imbalance seems part of the film’s role reversal.) The leads, meanwhile, are flanked by some strong supporting players, including the wonderfully off-kilter Greta Gerwig (Greenberg), who plays Emma’s best friend; Lake Bell, who harbours a crush on Adam as a neurotic associate producer on the teen musical TV series where they work as crew members; and Kline, who makes a meal of his one-note role as the narcissistic dad.

What’s frustrating about the film is that all its actors seem cramped by Reitman’s slick, claustrophobic direction. A fairly simple romcom premise has been tarted up like an ice-cream sundae, right up to the cherry-on-top epilogues that litter the closing credits. The comedy is so over-produced, it leaves little room for spontaneity. And in this Apatow Age, that just won’t do. Virtually every scene seems calculated to punch a gag, or underscore a stereotype—and the stereotypes include a rainbow coalition of gay and racial clichés that are awfully old, despite the screenwriter’s credentials as a hip young female playwright from New York. Even when scenes draw a laugh, they seem inauthentic. When Adam crashes a get-together of women (and a token fat gay guy) commiserating over their in-sync menstrual cycles, he offers them a mix CD of songs about bleeding. Sure it’s a funny gag, the super-sensitive guy coming up with a period playlist, a menstrual mix. Cute. But like so many clever comic moments in the movie, it doesn’t ring true. The story is not only set in Los Angeles; it seems saturated with a myopic phoniness that is the city’s showbiz life-blood. I couldn’t believe half of what was happening in No Strings Attached, and felt it was not the fault of the actors. Especially Portman. She’s is as good as she could possibly be in this candied confection. I just hope it doesn’t hurt her chances in winning Best Actress for Black Swan.

Colin Farrell in 'The Way Back'

We don’t see enough of Peter Weir. He’s a six-time Oscar nominee. His films include some of my all-time favorites—The Year of Living Dangerously, Fearless, The Truman Show. But The Way Back is the first picture from this Australian director since Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2004)—a swash-buckling naval adventure that for some reason failed to spawn a franchise while Pirates of the Caribbean did. Weir’s latest film is the kind of honest, old-fashioned spectacle that Hollywood doesn’t make any more, and that’s a shame.

Inspired by first person accounts and a novel by Slavomir Rawicz called The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek To Freedom, this epic tale of wilderness survival follows a group of prisoners who escape from the Soviet Gulag in 1940, and trek across Siberia, Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and the Himalayas in a search for freedom. They’re a Dirty Dozen-style international ensemble. Ed Harris plays a despondent American engineer who got stranded behind the lines; Jim Sturgess is a Polish soldier who was falsely accused of being a spy, and whose skills as a woodsman prove crucial to the group’s survival; Colin Farrell is cast as a treacherous Russian thief, a lone-wolf who might betray the group at any moment. Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) portrays a young refugee who joins them along the road. The dialogue is in English, with a bazaar of accents that sound surprisingly credible. The film was shot in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, locations that effectively double for those in the story, which spans 12 months and 10,000 km. The Way Back combines breathtaking vistas with the visceral thrill of a survival ordeal and the satisfaction of a well-tooled character piece of character acting. It’s been largely ignored by the various awards so far, and this is exactly the kind of stoical, well-crafted filmmaking that, these days, may never find the audience it deserves.