Do it for your country

By Jenn Cutts - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

What’s Vladimir Putin got on his mind ahead of next year’s elections? Babies. In a speech last month, the prime minister pledged $51 billion for “demographic projects” meant to raise the country’s birth rate by up to 30 per cent in less than five years.

Russia’s population has dropped by 2.2 million people in the last eight years, to just under 143 million. Putin calls the decline Russia’s gravest problem. The billions will fund incentives such as free land for families with three or more children, and increased child-benefit payments. It will also support existing schemes, such as one-time $13,000 payments for mothers of two or three children, and medals for women with many children (a Soviet-era practice Putin rekindled in 2007). In the past, youth roused by Putin’s message set up “sex tents” at summer camps and wore T-shirts declaring, “I want three children.”

Though Russia’s birth rate is comparable to those of many Western countries, it’s compounded by a high death rate. Drug and alcohol abuse has increased sharply since the collapse of the Soviet Union, taking a toll on men in particular.

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Opening Weekend: Iron Man 2, Banksy, Babies and Please Give

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 7, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 2 Comments

Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. in 'Iron Man 2'

This weekend at the movies, we’ve got  a shooting match of iconoclasts. Take your pick: Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener or Banksy. They’re all first-class provocateurs, but each is working on a different scale. As the star in Iron Man 2, Downey Jr. proves that his Hollywood rehab is now more than complete. He proudly sports his shiny new franchise like a post-modern pimp in a cheap suit, even if it did cost US$140 million. And as his nemesis, another iconoclast cashes in his notoriety, Mickey Rourke. Iron Man 2 may well be the summer’s biggest blockbuster, but here’s the catch: there’s something funny about an action movie when the acting is so much better than the action. Going to an action movie for the dialogue is like reading Playboy for the articles. It’s just wrong. For a real-life renegade superhero, check out Banksy, the legendary British graffiti artist who has made his first film without surrendering his secret identity—a marvelous documentary called Exit Through the Gift Shop. Catherine Keener is an iconoclast of a different kind.  And she’s in her element in Please Give, Nicole Holofcener’s wry, note-perfect movie about love, deception, greed and self-esteem. There’s no comic book posturing here, just a shrewdly observed drama with a keen wit. It’s a rare gem. And finally, for something completely different, there’s Babies, a lavish documentary about human wildlife that is all babies all the time. This post ends with an update of the Babies review that was first appeared in a BDJ Unscreened blog about Hot Docs, Documentary Tourism.

Iron Man 2

The first Iron Man had the excitement and velocity of a thing being forged from scratch. Not just Iron Man, but Robert Downey Jr.’s comeback. Now it’s just the thing replicating itself, as these things do. Another movie about a man and his gear. A playboy tycoon and his iSuit. It’s the ultimate toy, a wearable computer/weapon/rocket/uniform. We pick up where the last movie left off. Tony Stark announces to the press that yes, he is Iron Man.  He makes his entrance as the star of a vulgar trade show at his dad’s old theme park, cavorting with a chorus line of showgirls.. Pretty soon, he’s like a parody of the old Robert Downey Jr. on a bender. Outta sight and outta control. Like a drunk at his own wedding.  He’s also dying from toxins, from that palladium disc he uses as a heart. (Palladium? Rhymes with Avatar‘s unobtainium. And it’s what ever A-list guy is dying to have—his very own element.) Stark’s arch-enemy is a ghoulish Russian scientist played by Mickey Rourke, who is fashioning his own wearable military hardware. Rourke looks like more of a wrestler than he did in The Wrestler: a greasy, toxic, tattooed by guy with stringy dreads and a sloppy grin full of metal teeth. He seems to be smothering in his own flesh and you can practically smell the sweat coming off him. Continue…

Documentary tourism

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

Ponijao, a Namibian child in 'Babies'

There’s a popular genre of documentary that’s part travelogue, part anthropology lesson. It visits far-flung corners of the world to explore cultural variations on a theme in, fulfilling two of the most basic documentary mandates: transporting us to an exotic location, and drawing universal truths from global diversity. Babies and Dish: Women, Waitressing and the Art of Service— both showing this week at Toronto’s Hot Doc extravaganza—are two such films. They’re very different. Babies, directed by French filmmaker Thomas Balmès, simply lets the camera dote on four babies from four wildly dissimilar cultures without comment or analysis, although a covert message lurks beneath the cuteness. Dish, directed by Toronto filmmaker Maya Gallus, makes its viewpoint explicit in exploring the sexual politics of female servitude in restaurants of all classes around the world.

Babies

I saw the much ballyhooed Babies at the opening night gala of Hot Docs last night, and there’s no doubt this is a crowd-pleaser par excellence. It’s telling that it comes from France, the country that gave us March of the Penguins, Winged Migration and Microcosmos, because Babies is basically a gorgeous wildlife documentary about very young, very cute  humans in their natural habitat. The babies are adorable, the photography is seductive, and the film, which opens commercially May, should do well. The filmmaker, who finds his unwitting subjects in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco,  tracks them from birth to their first steps. Stringing together pearl-like moments of real-time wonder, the film taps into the most primitive form of family voyeurism—staring at babies as they try to invent themselves, and master their bodily functions, one embryonic thought at a time. Baby Porn! The narrative logic is pretty straightforward as the filmmaker intercuts scenes of breast-feeding, crying, peeing, crawling, falling, babbling, playing, standing, stumbling, etc. And teasing cats. There are a lot of animals in the movie. In Africa we learn that although a calf may accidentally kick a baby, cattle tend to walk around them. The filmmaker doesn’t need narration to assert his bias. He makes it pretty clear that he thinks the most toxic environment for an infant is not the African mud hut where the kid is surrounded by flies and sticks a dirt-covered bone into his mouth. It’s in San Francisco, where the baby leads a coddled, antiseptic existence of plastic-sheathed strollers and New Age infant yoga classes.

When I came out of the premiere, I bumped into a Canadian film producer who was appalled by Babies, which he dismissed as a vapid exercise in cutespoitation. He was also amazed by how much money it must have cost. But no matter what you think of the filmmaking, or the agenda behind it, the result is something we’ve never seen before: a feature-length spectacle devoted to babies. There’s a reason people are mesmerized by them in real life. And for the same reason, Babies will be a hit when it opens commercially next week.

Jane at Toronto's George St. Diner in 'Dish'

Dish: Women, Waitressing & the Art of Service

Maya Gallus kicks off her stylish, well-crafted documentary with a marathon tracking shot that follows a waitress with a formidable stack of platters on a multi-storey trek through a large and lavish Paris restaurant. The opening sets the pace for a fluid hand-held camerawork that keeps things cooking along and becomes a conceit unto itself—just keeping up with a waitress is no mean feat. Gallus travels far and wide to dish the dirty little secrets of the restaurant biz from the female point of view, and they’re are not all that surprising. In confessing the black art of extracting tips, Waitresses explain how a judicious smile or a hand on the shoulder will inspire generosity from a male client. In a diner or truck stop, a waitress can play a gestural role as a kind of surrogate wife or girlfriend for a regular client. Those fantasies remain largely unacknowledged. But in some eateries they become more explicit—from weird “maid cafes” in in Tokyo where men are served by fawning servers in French maid uniforms to a seedy Quebec joint where the women slinging the burgers go topless. The film examines the class structure of the service industry, showing that at the summit of fine dining, in the gourmet restaurants of France, male waiters rule and waitresses are considered an aberration. Gallus, however, does find a French waitress who holds her own in an army of men—she’s the one hauling that mountain of platters in the opening shot.

For capsule review of  BDJ’s favorites at the festival go to: What’s Hot at Hot Docs

The problem with not having kids

By Mark Steyn - Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 6:30 AM - 204 Comments

Anything happen while I was gone?

Oh, yeah. The collapse of the global economy. Armageddon outta here. The ecopalypse is upon us. Down south, President Obama has abandoned the gaseous uplift of “the audacity of hope” and warns we’re on the brink of the abyss. In the old New Deal, FDR warned that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” For the new New Deal, President Hopeychangey says we have nothing but fear itself. Get used to it. In Russia, the nation’s wealthiest oligarchs have seen their net worth decline by two-thirds. They can’t steal it as fast as it depreciates. Even yard sales of Soviet nukes to chaps with Waziristani business cards won’t make it up.

The only thing booming is declinism. In Britain, the Baby Boomers are now “Baby Gloomers,” according to the Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice, who gives the impression she’s working it up into a book proposal for one of those slim volumes of contemporary manners one keeps in the guest “loo,” amusingly illustrated with line drawings of once prosperous middle-class couples reduced to trawling the supermarket shelves for bargain “wine boxes” and microwaveable “Italian-style” focaccia. In the U.S., Steven Kotler thinks this is no time to get hung up on details. The planet is going to hell. So what’s the big picture? The rooty-tootiest root cause of all?

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Feeling the burn

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 5 Comments

When Cooper Olsen was four weeks old, he started to projectile vomit. Soon, he was crying through every feeding: “He’d arch his back, throw his head back and scream,” says his mom, Julie, who lives in the affluent L.A. bedroom community of Valencia. “Then he’d gulp from the bottle and cry.” It went on like this—gulp, scream, gulp, scream, gulp, scream—“over and over again,” says Julie, who works in the L.A. office of a New York-based consulting firm. After one horrible night, “over three hours of constant, bone-chilling screaming,” she and her husband, Bob, a pilot with a large U.S. airline, took Cooper to the hospital; by then, he’d stopped gaining weight. There, a doctor diagnosed him with gastroesophageal reflux disease, commonly known as “GERD.” Since he started taking Prevacid, Cooper’s become a different baby.

Yes, chronic reflux, that almost quintessentially Auntie May disease, is now hitting North Americans at every age. Indeed, the uptick of diagnoses in kids and babies is “really scary,” says Seattle physician Tom Vaughan, an expert on acid reflux and professor at the University of Washington. Two decades ago, it was almost unheard of. Now the use of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), the strongest acid-blocking drugs, for infants like Cooper—who might once have been dismissed as “colicky”—has soared by 750 per cent in the U.S. in the past decade; a range of reflux drugs have been approved for use in kids under age 11. This year, a lime-flavoured, “kid’s-strength” version of the GERD prescription drug Nexium will hit the market. “More and more kids are being treated with PPIs and getting anti-reflux surgery,” says Dr. Douglas Corley of Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland, Calif. “And no one has any idea what the long-term effects are.”

Unfortunately, ignoring the symptoms—which for kids can include coughing and tummy aches—has its perils too, notes Gail Attara, executive director of the Canadian Society of Intestinal Research. Six years ago, at age nine, her son was diagnosed with acid reflux. “He didn’t feel the effects of reflux,” says Attara—“or he wasn’t expressing it.” She took him to the doctor because she couldn’t figure out why he had such terrible breath: “He’d never had a cavity. He ate well, and was healthy in every other way. Somehow, his esophageal sphincter was open,” she explains, “and it was letting [stomach acids and] those odours up.” After being on acid suppressant medication for one day, she says, his breath was “as sweet as when he was a baby.”

The numbers among children mirror a wider trend; researchers say GERD, which only appeared in medical literature in the 1930s, may be on its way to becoming the epidemic of our times. Almost everyone has heartburn now and again, often after pigging out at Thanksgiving or Christmas. But chronic reflux—caused when digestive acids routinely splash the upper chest or throat—affects close to six million Canadians at a cost of $670 million to the health care system every year. Drugs to combat it are among the most-prescribed pills in North America, neck and neck with those used to treat high blood pressure, cholesterol and asthma. And the incidence of reflux is increasing by five per cent a year, according to a 2007 study in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is following our lead: Europe is roughly 10 years behind North America in the incidence of GERD; Asia is 10 years behind them, says Dr. Ernst Kuipers, chair of the department of gastroenterology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. “It’s the downside of development,” says Kuipers.

One issue that researchers, led by microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University, have narrowed in on is the eradication of Helicobacter pylori, a once-common bacteria known to cause ulcers and stomach cancers. It turns out H. pylori—which has been virtually eliminated from industrialized countries—may have been protecting the body from GERD; it did this by slowing or decreasing the production of acid, particularly with age, says Kuipers. “As rates of H. pylori go down, GERD rates go up,” he says. “We think that relationship is causal.”