TriumphAnt

What’s the difference between a Canadian national crisis, a British national crisis and an American national crisis?

Well, in the US, the Bush administration has finally called off its search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, having found none and, in fact, only grudgingly admitting that there probably never were any to be found. Essentially, it also means that up to half a dozen key political figures surrounding, and including, the “Nigerian yellow cake” President baldly lied to the world about circumstances – although they’ve now blamed “faulty intelligence” – used to justify an invasion that so far has caused tens of thousands of deaths, and reduced a foreign country to ruin. It’s doubtful it will ever lead to a Nixonian outcome, but among people who use their entire sense of ethical dimension to evaluate a President’s integrity, Bush’s credibility is simply no more.

In the UK, scant weeks before national observances commemorating the Holocaust, the 20-year old third in line to the Throne (apparently bereft of a public image counsellor) decided that a costume appropriate to a “Natives and Colonials” themed masquerade party was the summer uniform of the German army, complete with swastika armband. The British media, indeed the international media, erupted in shock and somewhat justifiable dismay. Germany has called for an EU-wide ban on public displays of the swastika, and it seems their call has a very good chance of resulting in just such a ban throughout the European Union, spurred by the public media whipping of the Crown Prince, twice removed.

Meanwhile here in Canada, it is “alleged” that a temporary-status immigrant who owned a pizzeria, but who also has a less than stellar record of integrity* and who was seeking asylum in this country, was approached to provide pizzas for campaign workers in the election office of a candidate who went on to become, as luck would have it, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Someone from among her staff, so goes the rumour (for all the accusations are so far unfounded) and perhaps the minister herself, promised that the pizza provider’s magnanimity would not go unrewarded and indeed, in return, the would-be electée would do everything she could to block his scheduled deportation. (Does this sound like the famous Seinfeld “You are a veddy, veddy bad man” episode featuring a hapless immigrant named Babu, http://www.seinology.com/epguide/55.shtml or what?)

* The Globe and Mail summed up the man’s rather checkered background in a paragraph recently:

“Mr. Singh has spent 16 years in Canada, using the country's immigration system and its numerous loopholes in an unsuccessful attempt to stay. Mr. Singh has also been in trouble with the law in Canada: An Ontario Court judge ruled in a civil suit last July that he and his three adult children must repay $900,000 to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Canadian Bank and Toronto-Dominion Bank for their involvement in a massive credit- and debit-card fraud.”

But the biggest difference, of course, is that despite the continent-wide scope of the wayward Royal’s story, and the (pick your travesty) scope of the US administration’s web of lies, it is the Canadian crisis that is the only one of the three, so far, to have resulted in the resignation of the principal, in this case the Minister. “Canada Immigration Minister Quits In Pizza Scandal” was how Reuters broke the story online. So far, thank goodness, “pizzagate” hasn’t yet made it into press.

Oh damn! Spoke too soon: from The Seattle Times, January 15, online edition:

“Canadian politician quits over pizzagate
By Beth Duff-Brown
The Associated Press
TORONTO — A Canadian Cabinet member who once called herself the ‘minister of hopes and dreams’ resigned yesterday amid allegations she promised a pizzeria owner asylum in exchange for free pizza…”

Let’s see: thousands of military and civilian dead, vs a well-educated potential future monarch’s adolescent humour in “colonializing” the deliberate extermination of upwards of 13 million people, vs wangling a couple of free pizzas.

Sigh…

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Recently I took a sick day off work. At our department, we’ve now instituted a hideously cumbersome computer program that bears the environmentally correct name, “The Paperless Office”. Essentially, it compels you to seek leave approval, report absences, and do anything else you can possibly think of under what used to be called “Personnel”, not by actually speaking to a person who works in the Personnel department, but electronically.

Including, in my case, reporting an absence due to illness.

The program, however, is just not geared to allow reporting your absence after you’ve returned. Because the department in which I work is such a hierarchical environment, you are required instead to obtain approval – after the fact – for having been sick. So you fill out the online form that is a “Request for Leave”; you select “Sick Leave – Uncertified”, (Its opposite, “Sick Leave – Certified” is when you’re away so long, you need a doctor’s note.) and you hit “Send” to dispatch it to your supervisor. But before the system allows it to actually go, you are required to click “OK” in a little box after the following statement:

“I declare on my honour that due to illness or injury I was incapable of performing the duties of my position during the entire period of absence for which the leave is requested as indicated.”

I’ve always wondered about statements like that. It seems to me to be both redundant and oxymoronic. Redundant in that, if you’re an honourable person – a Klingon, say – you’re not going to abuse a sick leave allowance. And oxymoronic if you are a dishonourable person, when the statement might just as well read, “I declare on my honour that I slept in, stayed home and watched TV all day,” for all the personal integrity that you will attach to endorsing a statement that begins “I declare on my honour…”.

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I think we can now safely add to the list of words that have completely lost whatever import they might once have had, the phrase “Special Edition”.

DVD movies have killed it.

As it relates to movies, it wasn’t too long ago when the “Special Edition” was indeed an edition that was special. Its release on home video meant that a successful director was able to return to the raw material from which he had first crafted his movie, before it was savaged by the sponsoring studio’s money people for any one of a hundred non-creative but more commercially viable motives, and produce the version he really wanted to make.

And if that Director is a genius, the resulting new “Special Edition” might indeed be special.

Now admittedly I haven’t seen enough videocassette or DVD “Director’s Cut”s of theatrically released movies to make the application a universal truism. But recently, what I have noticed is that the flag “Special Edition” means simply that, “We’re releasing the home version of this movie this in a medium with enough resident memory to include every single scene deleted in the editing process, storyboard drawings of scenes we decided were so bad we never even bothered to film them in the first place, theatrical trailers promoting the very movie you’ve just watched! (You sucker!)”

Not to forget, of course, the ubiquitous “Outtakes and Bloopers”, which almost without exception are repeated takes where one or the other of the movie’s stars breaks up laughing or, if he’s Jackie Chan, inadvertently lands on his crotch on a prop he was supposed to clear in the course of doing one of his own stunts.

The exception is in the happy case of funny animated movies where the “outtakes” are mini animated cartoons in and of themselves. (The “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” “outtakes”, for example, are hilarious.)

What? Oh no! You mean you thought computer-generated animated characters actually did make “mistakes” during the filming…?

But so as not to diss entirely the questionable value of the live-action “Director’s Cut”, and to take just one example where I have seen both, I stand in awe and approval of the home-release version of “Blade Runner”. If what Ridley Scott was able to restore to his vision of this dark story is any indication, there’s something to be said for allowing the creative juices to flow freely when the end product is in the hands of a competent and confident visionary.

Here are the essential differences between what was largely a bust in the theatres, but has since come to be seen by many fans as a science fiction classic in the home video “Director’s Cut” release, as outlined in one online summary.

(SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen “Blade Runner” and think you’d like to some day, SKIP RIGHT PAST THE FOLLOWING ITALICIZED PARAGRAPH.):

“The film's screenplay (originally titled Dangerous Days and Android) by Hampton Fancher, and later supplemented by David Peoples, was based on science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Originally filmed without a monotone, explanatory voice-over in a somber, Raymond Chandler-like manner, two elements were demanded by the studio after disastrous preview test screenings: a noirish, somber, flat-voiced narration (written by Roland Kibbe) to make the plot more accessible; a tacked-on, positive, upbeat ending (using out-takes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)), added to the 1982 release (of between 113-117 minutes) Since that time, the 1992 revised 'Director's Cut' (of 117 minutes) was released to mark the film's 10th anniversary with a new digital soundtrack - it dropped Harrison Ford's mostly redundant voice-over and restored the film's original darker and contemplative vision. Many Blade Runner afficionados prefer the subtlety of the film's images in the restored version rather than the slow and monotonous tone of the earlier film with voice-over. The 'director's cut' also substituted a less upbeat and shorter, more ambiguous, non-Hollywood ending, and it inserted a new scene of a 'unicorn reverie' at the end. It also emphasized and enriched the romantic angle between Ford and a beautiful replicant played by Sean Young, and more clearly revealed that Harrison Ford's character was an android himself.”

“Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut” is well worth the viewing and I think I might get it and trundle over to my friend-with-the-home-theatre’s house some day.

But it’s an exception -- and I suspect finds itself in a very small minority, to a generally diluting trend in making the home release version “Special”.

“Bigger vision” does not always mean “better movie”, and if the subject of getting a major studio movie from the brain to the screen explored in all its minutiae really interests anyone, I commend to you a book entitled “Final Cut”, by Steven Bach. The story documents the monumental disaster that can be visited on a movie when a primadonna director, fresh from a major box office success, is given free rein when much clearer studio heads know better that he should be held in close check. (Key words: Michael Cimino, “Heaven’s Gate”, bomb.)

And much to my surprise, Googling it turned up (for me) the hitherto unknown discovery that it apparently spawned a 2004 limited release, but favourably reviewed, film documentary entitled, “Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of 'Heaven's Gate'”.

Of it, one reviewer said, “Even for those of you who do not care much for film or film history; even for those of you who have never seen Heaven's Gate and never want to; the film is about failure, personal and financial, on a grand scale. Though seeing someone flounder miserably is not often fun, shaking your head in hindsight can be.”

Having read and enjoyed Bach’s book, I am definitely putting that one on my “someday” list.

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And finally…

Are we becoming a nation of weather wimps?

On a recent morning of forecast temperatures that were “unseasonably warm” (hovering about the freezing mark), I awoke to a clock radio’s warning that the day carried a “risk of freezing rain”, along with the news that several school boards across the region had already cancelled their bus services even though not a drop or a pellet had landed anywhere within a hundred miles.

If you’ll pardon a “Why, in my day…” indulgence, when I was but a school lad, we used to go to school in all but the most extreme weather – and even then suffered cancellation only in those very rare cases where a large overnight snowfall had not yet been cleared away by morning. If the day’s forecast included a “risk of” anything, up to and including wayward comets, we went to school anyway and if it did turn out the day started delivering “iffy” weather, it meant only that the kids who were bussed in got to leave a little earlier to enable the drivers to complete their routes during winter’s shorter daylight hours.

(Cue the stuffy old club members: “Arrr… Luxury! You ‘ad busses. We used to walk 11 miles, up’ill… all the way to bloody school, then 11 miles back ‘ome, all of it up’ill too!”)

Maybe it’s the advent of a 24-hour national weather channel. You can be watching in Ottawa as the announcers talk in crisis tones of a major winter storm blasting Atlantic Canada. And if, in the very next breath, they talk about a forecast 10-centimetre “blizzard” en route to Ottawa, your brain still hasn’t flushed those Atlantic images so maybe your mind immediately shifts to “OmiGAWD!” mode. I don’t know. (I do know I like this guy! – from The Globe and Mail online, January 17):

“’Fierce storm blankets Atlantic’ (Canadian Press): Halifax — His beard encrusted in a layer of ice, Brian Ferrier snorted with disdain at the latest winter storm to hit Atlantic Canada. ‘The big deal they've been making of it? That's bull,’ Mr. Ferrier said Monday as he dug out his Halifax driveway.’ They must be from the States or pampered all their bloody lives.’ Traffic was light on Halifax streets after up to 39 centimetres of snow fell on the region, disrupting travel and forcing the cancellation of schools, flights and a major political visit.”

Even locally, radio talking heads who’ve probably been watching the same weather channel will often express astonishment when no major closures have been announced despite, “10 centimetres are on the ground and the forecast is for another five before this blows itself through the national capital!”

It’s Canada, people! And it’s January! Get a good pair of boots and a warm coat. And if you’re driving, give yourself a little more time and a little more room between your front end and the guy in front of you’s butt. Stuff like this is why the Good Lord made some boys and girls answer, “snowplow driver”, in response to their Grade 4 teachers' asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up.