Nick's Café Canadien

Predictability is an accusation of unpredictable relevance. When applied to literature, and film in particular given its inherent linearity and tempo, you often hear it used as a pejorative term. Apparently, stories are no fun if you can see the ending a mile away. Sometimes this is the case: the appeal of M. Night Shyamalan’s terribly overrated The Sixth Sense rests so completely on the wallop of its final revelation that for the perceptive types who pay attention to the clues before them, the movie is over as soon as they figure it out.

We like it when movies creep up behind us and smack us upside the head. We like it when gaps are filled in ways that surprise us. For recent examples, see Memento, Minority Report and A Very Long Engagement. For classic examples, see Citizen Kane and The Empire Strikes Back. But we remember these movies for their crazy twists not because of the shock value that comes of each successive discovery, but because every twist makes the story all the more compelling. You can go into Kane knowing full well what Rosebud is, or Empire knowing that Vader is Luke’s father, as I’d wager almost everybody does nowadays given how those epiphanies have become a part of our cultural consciousness – and the curious thing is, the film is all the better for it.

But that does not give us adequate grounds to say that predictability is necessarily something to avoid; again, it’s not about shock value. If you take a look at film adaptations of popular material, the most difficult thing to get over the first time through is what you can’t predict: deviations from a story with which you are already familiar. Here, we seek the comfort of a story we already know.

My point is, you can’t open a can of plot twists, sprinkle it all over a story and call it compelling. Sometimes you get an otherwise masterful film like House of Flying Daggers where the plot twists feel like chores that have to be done in order to lay out all the necessary elements of understanding that make the character dynamics work. When everything is on the table, it all makes sense; but here, unpredictability is not the source of causation. The film becomes compelling; the twists do not make it compelling.

I argue above that it cannot be universally considered a fault for a story to let the audience outpace it within reason, and nowhere is that clearer than in Million Dollar Baby.

If you have watched a lot of movies, boxing or otherwise (and truth be told, even if you have not), you will anticipate every single thing that happens in this movie. You will know exactly who wins every fight, who lands every punch, and every outcome of every critical decision the characters make, well before it happens. Part of it may be because the boxing movie has become such a defining subgenre of American film that we are all well aware of its techniques – not just how the director and editor time the punches, but how they build up to them in little spurts of tension and release.

How is it, really, that a boxing scene makes you, an audience member, feel like you are “part of the action”? I would posit that it involves a lot more than how visceral it is, how close the camera gets, and how resonant the bone-crunching sound effects are. To be a part of the fight, to be part of the experience of the boxer, also involves a replication of a certain anticipatory spider-sense. And in Million Dollar Baby, this is what happens both in and out of the ring. The sense of anticipation extends to the overall narrative flow.

But if you can see everything coming, how does the film keep you hooked?

Well, there’s the rub. You can see everything coming, but as a passive filmgoer in a darkened theatre, you are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. And in much of the film – particularly its final act, which is very much about helplessness – you can see it heading somewhere very uncomfortable. Here’s a movie where everything follows the natural progression of events that you should and do expect. You cheer for Maggie as she delivers a first-round knockout match after match, because she does what you expect of her, and more. You cringe as you perceive just how much harm is about to be done to her, but have no way of warning her of anything.

At the same time, that makes Frankie, Clint Eastwood’s character, an easy elicitor of audience sympathy. He is very much the same familiar character that Eastwood has defined for himself in his self-directed period, the William Munny archetype of an aging senior haunted by regret and seeking repentance. Like boxing, you’ve seen him before. But there are moments in the film where, as the cutman in the corner, he is just as helpless as the audience. Great storytelling, or what?

It is difficult to pinpoint how Eastwood pulls off this anticipatory elegance. Maybe it comes from a natural technical aptitude for foreshadowing. Maybe it comes of experience. In any case, Million Dollar Baby presents a curious contradiction – everything about it feels so familiar, every element feels borrowed (which is mostly the case), but the story draws you in anyway.

Curious, too, that in spite of its apparent predictability, I have been reluctant to speak of it in terms that are anything less than vague. But go discover it for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

I quote Adam Ferland’s letter in today’s issue of The Gateway in response to Gaumont’s channeling of Mark Twain last Tuesday:

When, exactly, is being able to articulate how an author suggests the motivation for a character through symbolism and irony going to help me in whatever my area of interest is, be it agriculture, chemistry, or economics? Add to this the fact that an abysmal performance in English 101, due not to horrific spelling and grammar, but to a lack of literary analysis and a lack of artistic ability as a writer – because, yes, literature is art – could keep me from gaining entrance to a program of interest. Is failing to realize the irony of Kafka really a grave enough shortcoming that I shouldn’t be allowed to study what I want?

The answer, as it happens, is yes.

This is no more than the old “But critical reading skills aren’t useful!” canard. Now, as someone who bypassed the entirety of 100-level English, I can’t speak firsthand as to the quality of the curriculum. I’ve heard it said even amongst English professors that quite frankly, it is deficient, especially in repairing the existing writing deficiencies in what qualifies for a high school diploma. It is no fallacy and no joke to say that the value of a post-secondary education has become tremendously inflated, and a lot of it has to do with English, which is put in the unenviable position of trying to justify its own existence with technical writing skills whilst not actually teaching them in first-year courses.

An English programme that fails to reinforce the rudiments of grammar – or worse, does it and does it wrong – may be deficient. But that does not render it inconsequential. The ability to read analytically is fundamental to all disciplines, even if it is not “productive” in keeping with today’s utilitarian prejudices.

In mathematics, this is the equivalent of demanding a formula sheet and scoffing at the gall of the suggestion that an undergraduate student should have to derive anything on the page. What influence we provide the sinister anti-learning cabals that seek to reduce our universities to vocational schools.

I am aware that at least some of my readership first arrived here by way of some involvement or interest in the campaign to oust Rob Anders in the federal election last June. If you fall into that category, it may interest you to know that earlier today, the University of Calgary Speech and Debate Society alumnus, Diplomacy player and current sitting Member of Parliament delivered a keynote as a guest speaker and adjudicator at the McGoun Cup (Western Canadian Debating Championships), this year hosted by his alma mater.

Some brief observations are in order, as Mr. Anders said a number of things that were, to say the least, intruiging. Mind you, it was neither as amusing as Gary Mar doing impressions of Belinda Stronach at last year’s McGoun, nor unorthodox as Dr. Juris Lejnieks delivering a crash-course analysis of A Canticle for Leibowitz at Hugill ’02, but it provided some valuable insight into Anders’ approach to political discourse.

The speech began with the standard recognition of the tendency for debaters to be Leaders of the Future involved in all manner of political muckraking; nobody ever pays much attention to those of us who do it not as a stepping stone towards enacting any tangible change, but for the inherent thrill of what is fundamentally a logic-driven word game. The utilitarian approach to debating naturally favours politics and law, and I would posit the conjecture that the predominance of those fields in the game’s culture follows as a direct corollary. I get the feeling that lot of seasoned competitors find that elusive love of the game and stay for precisely that reason, but even then, applicability prevails as an excursive justification.

Anders cited varsity debating as being an experience more valuable to him than his degree, which is probably very true. He then proceeded to criticize the House of Commons as not really being a forum for debate so much as it is a facility for the procedural exchange of reports – “going through the motions,” as it were – again, probably true. He went on to explain that he felt most at home whenever he was heckled, as he found it a rare moment of genuine interaction that reminded him of his debating days.

The question is this: which was it that induced his reminisces of rhetorical competition – the interaction, or the heckling?

It may, in part, be the latter. Anyone who has done a half-hour’s reading on Rob Anders knows that he has a reputation of being, in many ways pertaining to extroversion and tact, the Mike Hudema of the federal right. In other words, he is for all intents and purposes a heckler, though sometimes in a non-verbal way; and as we should all know by now, acts of discourse – especially heckles, which are really just performatives of dissenting interruption – are never limited to the realm of the verbal.

But how does this relate to debating? After all, are heckles not frowned upon at the upper echelons of competition?

Well, yes and no. If my understanding of Western Canadian debating history is correct, while heckling is now all but non-existent except for its occasional acknowledgment as a discouraged annoyance, it was once a far more prevalent factor. Over the years, and I believe for the better, Western Canada has been borrowing more from the inertia of an evolved Canadian Parliamentary convention and exposure to Worlds Style, and less from the high school environment. This was not always the case.

Observe the occasional Alberta high school tournament that is conducted in impromptu parliamentary style. Unless expressly instructed to do so, inexperienced debaters will heckle simply on the grounds that the rules say they won’t be penalized (and layperson judges may even be inclined to reward them for wrangling a provision of the format). Without a dominant inertial format, or better yet, a strong emphasis on substantive analytical matter, high school style spills over into university.

You can still see this happen today with something that feels uncomfortably different at first, but is at the end of the day hardly that big a deal: at the University of Saskatchewan, which is hosting the McGoun Cup next year, Points of Information are directed through the chairperson. As something that has been phased out of the rest of Western Canada, this procedural difference has actually become the distinguishing mark of what is a unique Saskatchewanian style. My understanding is that this is actually something carried over from the Saskatchewan Elocution and Debate Association, which governs all secondary school debate in the province – hence its usefulness as an illustrative example.

It could very well be the case that heckling was a commonplace tactic, albeit perhaps heavily abused, in the early 1990s when western integration into the CUSID environment was in its infancy at best. According to Alberta alumnus Martin Kennedy, who by my reckoning was around when Rob Anders was active at the UCSDS, western involvement in national-level intervarsity debating was practically limited to occasional appearances at Winter Carnival and Nationals.

At the tail end of the Anders speech when the floor was opened to questions, and afterwards, several of my peers commented that he perhaps put a disproportionate emphasis on the system of political parties. It is true that most of his speech was a case for political parties as the best, and indeed the only, medium by which one could ever hope to have a political voice. (In other words, if you ever get Rob Anders and Steve Smith together in the same room, bring popcorn.) A lot of people seemed to find these admittedly pragmatic remarks terribly interesting, and not just because Louman-Gardiner/Pauls had just defeated Kawanami/Kotovych in a quarterfinal on public funding of elections that covered exactly those issues of partisan imbalance. In the meantime, his aforementioned statements on the subject of heckling seemed to go largely unnoticed, but this here observer found them to be just as notable, if not more so.

But the great irony of all this ballyhoo about partisanship lies elsewhere. Of a panel of seven, Anders was one of four adjudicators in the final round who awarded the victory to Teddy Harrison and his partner, Spencer “Slate-Killer” Keys.

As for my own performance at the tournament, let it be known that it was less than spectacular. I credit the failure of Guillaume Laroche and myself to break to quarterfinals to a disastrous misjudgment of the depth to which Chris Jones had studied Alberta private investigation licenses in somewhat more rigour than yours truly. “I’m sorry to tell you, Nick,” he said, “but life is not a Philip Marlowe novel.” Lies, I tell you, all lies.

Enterprise has been cancelled. Jeopardy! aside, it was the last television series I bothered following until even that came to an end, when my schedule prevented me from keeping up as much as I would have liked. Apparently the Temporal Cold War is over and they were just beginning to work on some neat prequel concepts, too – transporters, eugenics, and all sorts of fun with Vulcans. A shame, a crying shame.

This pretty much spells the end of Star Trek for good. To borrow a hackneyed phrase, it’s dead, Jim. The movie spinoffs died with Nemesis, and now the franchise is coming off the air, too. I don’t envision it undergoing another revival anytime soon, if ever, though Berman and Braga tend to have occasional fits of desperation when pimping off Gene Roddenberry’s lovechild. I shudder at the imagined thought of them drawing up plans for a Starfleet Academy series to appeal to the O.C. crowd, an endeavour that would be as futile as resistance itself.

On the other hand, between Enterprise and hockey, now you can quite definitively say that there is nothing to watch on television.

In the meantime, take a minute to gawk over these Super Mario Bros. collectible dioramas. I want them. I want all of them.

Evidence, as it were, that Toy Story is quotable to the ends of the earth.

You will notice that there has been a marked lack of updates for almost two weeks now in spite of all sorts of dramatic and interesting happenings, from UBC students having the sense to elect Spencer Keys as their new Alma Mater Society President to this year’s round of Oscar nominations.

On the subject of the latter, I do have plenty of analysis on the backburner, but I am holding off on jumping to any conclusions until I have seen Million Dollar Baby, which opened in Edmonton this week. The reason is because there are already plenty of people out there making qualified, statistically-founded inductive judgments on the “will-win” question – Kris and Sasha at OscarWatch, for instance. As much as I feel confident in declaring that nothing can stop The Aviator this year, Tapley figures in his 31 January post that the post-nomination media-killing is setting it up for an upset.

And, well, we all know what media-killing did to my beloved Phantom.

But let’s not make judgments yet. In spite of the nominations being neither insipid enough to denounce or surprising enough to remark upon, there are a number of interesting inclusions and omissions to discuss. That’s where my personal brand of punditry comes in – the “should-win” discussion, you might say. Eastwood’s contender aside, I have caught up with film 2004 to my personal satisfaction. Catching up with writing about it is a different matter, and will probably not happen; paragraph-long capsule summaries will not do justice to the likes of Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Sideways, Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They deserve commentary of a more rigorous and piercing character. Thankfully, some of them have been sitting around long enough that there is little for me to add from a discursive standpoint, which means I have less to do.

The 2005 film season begins for real with a foreign release, that being Ong Bak starring Tony Jaa. It opens in Edmonton on 11 February. I am unfamiliar with the distributor, Magnolia Pictures, but I assume the release will be subtitled (which, in an ideal world, should be a given when it comes to any foreign release); if this is not the case, I welcome a correction. For those of you who are unaware, Ong Bak is the first major Muay Thai action picture to find its way here. Speaking as a Muay Thai aficionado of sorts, and one who has made the requisite Bangkok boxing ring pilgrimage that implies, this is a big deal.

With that postponement of any and all discussion of recent film out of the way, let us proceed to what this post is actually about, which is Scrabble.

This weekend was, if anything, a recovery. A 8-6 record in the annual 14-round Winter Tournament in Calgary earned this here writer $40 and a possible trip back into the 1300 zone, ratings-wise. Then there was the $10 for QUASHING (a game-winning 122-point out-play in a spectacularly risky endgame), and the $10 for JAVA (an 88-point TWS with the J on a double and some fortuitous parallels). Jeff Smith took the divisional Bingo Ace prize with twenty-one of the coveted suckers; I fell one short, playing twenty.

Strange things happen when you deal with words, especially when they are flowing out like drops of rain into a paper cup, as a certain famous twentieth-century poet would say. Prior to Round 2 I passed the time by reading the sixth Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator, which sees the Baudelaire children end up in the custody of Jerome and Esmé Squalor. In the game that followed, Mike Ebanks played SQUALOR on me for 104 points. Well, that hurt. It held up as the High Turn for my division until Al Pitzel slapped me with AZOTISE for 121 a few rounds later. Of course, I gave that record a sound QUASHING.

The QUASHING play – and more importantly, the endgame move leading up to it – was such a convergence of strategy and undeserved luck that to attempt to describe it without a board diagram would be to do it injury. Unfortunately, the same goes for a crazy, stupid, game-losing play in Round 14 that was about as close to ritual suicide as one can possibly get in a game of Scrabble. There are reasons why you should never suddenly lapse into rank amateurism and play off your remaining vowels, in particular the last U, and draw to an all-consonant final rack with a Q on it. (Until the OSPD4 introduces QI*, anyway.) You should especially avoid doing this with a word like PURGE when there is a perfectly good triple word score behind ESTATES on A9 inviting a back-hook on 8A, that being an R. Or a G, but there weren’t any left. Or a T, but I didn’t know that one.

Paying attention to the board and not making stupid endgame plays is usually a good idea. I’m still not over this one. The overwhelming magnitude of self-defeating recklessness exhibited in that single play, PURGE on an enticing triple, defies proper description short of a reconstruction of the board position. I’ll not do that for the time being.

What I will do instead is close this post, one that a frequent reader would not be wrong to classify as a transitional potpourri – the recitative between the arias, you might say – with a mention of today’s Gateway. You might call this one the video game issue. There’s yet another review of Resident Evil 4; regular readers should be aware by now that I see positive exposure of the GameCube as a very good thing. Dan Kaszor warns the general public of the PSP defects – nothing new to anyone who has actually been following the handheld wars, but the same implicit affirmation as before: if you are the type to buy a portable system, buy a Nintendo DS instead. (Once there’s more than a game and a half for it, anyway.)

There’s also a review of Uwe Boll’s film of Alone In The Dark, which employs a bit of a faulty metonym in claiming that “you could say that 32-bit technology just doesn’t translate well to the big screen” when every cited example predates the 32-bit era. The point still holds, though. If you haven’t read The Foywonder’s interview with Uwe Boll, go take a look.

As much as I would like to see video games develop a reputation as being a substantial storytelling medium – a characteristic that finds reflection in adaptability – it really is quite amusing to see Uwe Boll define himself as “a machine that acquires rights to video game properties and converts them to utter dreck.” I am in a position to laugh because from everything I have read about Mr. Boll, his video game tastes – which, by no coincidence, largely revolve around blood, gore and not much else worth mentioning – are so distant from my own that I scarcely need to worry about him ever coming anywhere close to any franchise I actually care about.

But that’s only because I’m a snob, and he’s not. And for a measure of which camp ultimately comes out on top, I remind you that he is the one in B-movie hell.

I should add, though, that I can see why video game publishers are so eager to sell movie rights to this guy. First, he’s willing to buy them. And as in the case of the horrid misunderstanding of The Avengers back in 1998, an atrocious adaptation can draw attention to the superiority of the original material (where applicable). The murder victim in all of this is the viability of anyone in film, producer or consumer, ever taking video game adaptations seriously. But as a game publisher, why would you care?

The last thing I will point to in The Gateway is Ian Keteku’s debut in the Opinion section. While the article itself is not all that remarkable (especially from the point of view borne by this here zealot who thinks true black culture is Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, not this overproduced contemporary riffraff), my fellow Churchill alumni are always a welcome sight. The literate ones, at any rate.