Nick's Café Canadien

Remember what I wrote in The Gateway a few weeks back? The experts agree. I’ve been validated.

Let’s go over few news items that have been simmering since Friday. So it looks like the stars decided it would be a good idea to stay in alignment, and presto – Toy Story 3 is out the window. Does anyone still have doubts about the Pixar buyout? I didn’t think so. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

In the isolated world of obscure comic book anthologies based on Pulitzer-winning novels, Dark Horse has cancelled The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. This is a landmark in that I now unexpectedly own every first-printing issue of a comic book series. It’s also too bad, because in the last few issues, the series was just beginning to show some of its true potential.

I haven’t mentioned how a little over a week ago, I saw the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra perform a night of sacred music with pianist Kevin Cole and Vancouver-based singer Denzal Sinclaire. By “sacred”, I mean George and Ira Gershwin, and I mean it in earnest. There’s not much to say about it aside from the fact that it was an exhilirating night with the American canon thanks to interpreters who are best described with the word clarity.

Listening to Mr. Cole dance on the keys is a lighthearted reminder that speed isn’t created by cranking up the metronome: it’s an illusion generated by what you play, and the cleanliness with which you play it. Budding pianists would do well to remember this, especially when it comes to ragtime. It’s all about control with the illusion of freedom. That’s magic, isn’t it?

As for Mr. Sinclaire, who has seen a lot of airplay on CBC for as long as I’ve listened to jazz, I’m enjoying his latest album, My One and Only Love. (The title track has been moving up and down the stuck-in-my-head playlist since the opening credits of Leaving Las Vegas.) It’s heavy on ballads of mellow disposition, but listening to him run the gamut from Hoagy Carmichael to Stevie Wonder makes it easy to place the disc in a grand tradition of song displaced by half a century. In person, Denzal was a littler guy than I expected, but mass-over-density has minimal bearing on presence when it comes to voice.

Speaking of jazz, I’ve always been a little baffled at the lack of dynamism in how jazz is filmed. I harbour a deep admiration for music videos on a purely technical level, as a person who takes pleasure in watching moving pictures for that elusive logistical how’d-they-do-that. I can’t stand to watch a lot of them, though, because generally, the music sucks. Were it not for A Hard Day’s Night and Fantasia, I’d almost posit a systematic inverse proportionality between the quality of music and the quality of a film constructed upon it. And there’s a gulf of difference between Walt Disney’s dream of the “concert film” and the modern music video, even though they share a common heritage.

There are some great videos that aren’t just a mask for a lack of musicality – consider Stars in “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”, an ostensible tribute to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and a pretty good song). But not in jazz. Recent years have seen Diane Reeves’ contextual insertion into Good Night, and Good Luck and Diana Krall’s Chrysler commercials, but that’s a very specific type of jazz, the mellow strain.

So it’s with reinvigorated joy that I present this Wynton Marsalis iPod advertisement. This is probably the best visual representation of the bebop aesthetic’s latent dynamism that I’ve seen since Michal Levy’s animation of Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Pity it’s so darn short.

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

The National Scrabble Championship is no more. Starting with this year’s event in Phoenix, Arizona, its moniker is now the U.S. Scrabble Open, or maybe the Scrabble U.S. Open (they’re not wholly consistent). It makes a lot of sense, since for years, Williams and Edley have responded to questions about why Americans don’t have an invitation-only regional championship like us Canucks with the vision statement, “It’s like the U.S. Open.” Unfortunately, I don’t think the T-shirts will make for great conversation pieces like the ones with alluring words like “national” and “championship” written on them.

The official transition to the Second Edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL2) isn’t until March, but this weekend I played the last-ever Calgary tournament with the old book, so for all intents and purposes I’m finished with l’ancien régime. It’s going to be an interesting change of pace to throw defensive strategy out the window now that Q and Z are a palpable threat, which leaves C and V as the only foolproof blocking tiles, but also means that I won’t have to fret so much about botching an endgame on account of drawing an unexchangeable Q. Bring on the QI and MBAQANGA!

Speaking of the Q, I’ve always wanted to play ENQUIrES on a double with the Q on a TLS for 122 points, and this weekend, I did. That made for a good $10 in addition to the $50 in third-place lunch money I earned with my 9-5 record.

Not so hot was when I tried to play APHORIsT on a triple in another game, which in my excitement I placed as APHROIsT*, losing both my turn and my spot. I think it’s the Scrabble nerd’s equivalent of shopping at FCUK.

The Students’ Union Webboard has returned. This is a public service announcement and not in any way an unrelenting squeal of joy. In the months leading up to its disappearance back in early 2005 the Webboard’s utility and entertainment value were already in decline, but the new registration policy (requiring members to provide a unique university-affiliated e-mail address) is a sound one that will hopefully keep a lid on the overabundance of anonymous sockpuppetry that plagued the establishment prior to its subsequent implosion.

I’m glad to see that existing user records and the posts of the old regime have been preserved in full… or not. One notices that my triple-crossing Diplomacy victory as Italy is conspicuously missing. I demand answers.

It’s official. That’s the capsule summary, anyway; here’s the full press release.

There’s a lot of optimism bubbling everywhere, even in auspiciously-titled pre-announcement commentaries like “Will the great big Disney destroy little Pixar?” But it looks like it’s Pixar’s positive energy spilling over onto the House that Walt Built.

Have a gander at this. It’s the day of the deal, and they already got rid of David Stainton. The same David Stainton who reportedly had the tact to tell all the newly-fired Florida animators that “the public couldn’t really tell the difference between the direct-to-video stuff and the films that Feature Animation actually produces.” Disney’s on the up-and-up.

Harry McCracken sums up the open questions pretty well, though he doesn’t address what I alluded to in my previous post as my biggest source of curiosity: creative control over sequels to established Pixar hits. But I’m sure there will be no shortage of commentary on every aspect of the deal in the days to come, so I’ll leave further comment to the experts.

On a related note about moving pictures: last year, and the year before that, I wrote about the touring selection of short films from the annual Ottawa International Animation Festival. The 2005 programme didn’t impress me as much as the last two, though that’s not to say the films weren’t good. There were a few standouts, and there are two in particular that I think I’ll remember for some time to come: Morir de Amor, Gil Alkabetz’s film starring two singing parrots in a birdcage, and At the Quinte Hotel, Vancouver animator Bruce Alcock’s interpretation of Al Purdy’s poem about beer and yellow flowers (set to the poet’s own reading). They’re marvels, and I want to discover them all over again.

And now for something completely different.

Everybody in the country has already said something about the outcome of the federal election in their own blogospherical cubbyholes. I normally either avoid discussing politics altogether or reserve it for rare cameo appearances at Points of Information, as a fiercely unaffiliated citizen whose interest is not in policy but in the dynamics of political gamesmanship. However, this time I have a few words on the subject.

Generally speaking, I like the final result, at least on the seat-count level of analysis. The Conservatives don’t have a majority to abuse, the Liberals don’t have a government to corrupt, the Bloc doesn’t have its former sovereigntist momentum and the NDP doesn’t hold the balance of power. Everybody lost in exactly the right ways, with the prominent exception of election MVP André Arthur.

Many have already pointed out that Stephen Harper’s victory speech is a contemporary classic as far as Canadian political rhetoric goes. I certainly don’t remember anything else of that quality from his party since its Frankensteinian reincarnation in 2004.

There’s one specific thing the incoming Prime Minister said that partisan sycophants of all colours (including his own) needed to hear, and I’m delighted he said it. I’ll highlight the relevant passage, and include the crescendo that precedes it for dramatic effect.

“Today, for the 39th time in 139 years, Canadians have elected a new Parliament. And as we have done many times before, Canadians have selected a new government. Let me say here tonight and to remind all of you that through all these different governments with their different priorities in their different eras, one constant binds us from MacDonald’s coalition of Tories and Reformers to the modern Conservative Party I lead. Canada: strong, united, independent and free.

“To those who did not vote for us, I pledge to lead a government that will work for all of us. We will move forward together. Our national identity was not forged by government policy; it does not flow from any one programme, any one leader or any one party. Our Canada is rooted in our shared history and in the values which have and will endure.”

One last thing that nobody noticed or cared enough about to remember: a little after the stroke of midnight, CBC had a live report at the Liberal Party headquarters in British Columbia, where the mood certainly wasn’t that of a defeated party. Their correspondent had to speak up to hear himself above a jazz band they’d rented for the evening. They commented on the hot jazz and the cocktail party feel of the whole shindig.

What they didn’t point out was the song the band was playing: “Freddie Freeloader”. How appropriate. Doubly appropriate that like almost everything we consider jazz, most of the song is just a bunch of guys making it up as they go along. (The original recording on the seminal Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue features some of the most legendary blues solos you or I will ever hear.) The difference is that jazzmen improvise on chords and scales, and Paul Martin improvised on the notwithstanding clause.

I know there’s an election going on. I also know Canadian politics hasn’t been this interesting in over a decade. I’ve been following every step and misstep, every hysterically impassioned partisan discussion board, and every noteworthy article up to this morning’s Edmonton Journal where Will McBeath is quoted on about three or four different pages including the colourful one on the front. And tonight’s result, whatever it is, is still only going to be the second-biggest story of the week.

The megaton hasn’t officially dropped yet, but the rumours have been steeping for some time now, and the emerging reality looks like one where the Disney-Pixar feud is settled by way of a merger in the ballpark of $7 billion. Never mind the implications for Apple, discussed everywhere from The New York Times to this blog, gargantuan as they are. As much of an expat Apple loyalist as I am, my primary concern is what the effect will be on what we see on the consumer’s side – the animation itself, in which Pixar has excelled without exception thanks to non-interference from upper management. I think Jerry Beck from Cartoon Brew, who is a lot more qualified than yours truly when it comes to dissertating about such matters, said it best:

I would have preferred that Pixar create its own distribution company and compete with the industry as a full-fledged stand alone player—but this possible buyout by Disney may be the next-best thing. (The worst scenario would’ve been for Pixar’s films to be distributed by another studio—Universal, Sony, or heaven forbid, Warner Bros.). Disney may be buying Pixar—but Pixar will be running the show—at least creatively, from the feature animation point of view. The optimist in me is delighted to have a visionary (Jobs) emerge as Disney’s largest stock holder. An innovative risk taker and business leader, Jobs could truly reinvigorate the studio. The optimist in me is thrilled that an animator (Lasseter) will likely be head of Feature Animation. With a proven love of the medium, and as a skillful filmmaker himself, Lasseter will no doubt push the studio forward and, at the same time, surely find a place for traditional (hand-drawn) animation at the studio that mastered it for so long.

There is an opportunity here for an incredible Disney renaissance—as the creative reins are handed, for once, to the right people at the right time. In this age of big corporations (and Disney is one of the biggest) and “bottom line” thinking, it’s easy to see how this can all go wrong. But I think the pieces are in place for an exciting new era in animation. At least, I hope so.

If my understanding is correct, it certainly helps resolve the property rights dispute. Disney can keep selling Pixar merchandise and developing Pixar-themed theme park attractions like the phenomenal “Turtle Talk with Crush” (as it would have been allowed to no matter what deal was worked out), but the critical benefit is that hopefully, we won’t see any direct-to-video hacks pissing on the gospels with some half-assed Toy Story 3 or Finding Nemo 2. What I fear is a dark, apocalyptic future where another Michael Eisner comes to power and stamps on the big P. Lord knows that every Disney renaissance had an antithetical dark age playing yang to its yin.

Oddly enough, chief Magic Kingdom pundit Jim Hill – who, unlike me, puts the Mouse House first – suspects Steve Jobs may be bad for Disney. I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, but then again, Jobs is an almost mythical figure. He’s the industry phoenix, if you will.

I saw Brokeback Mountain before Christmas, but my review was held off until last Thursday, since the paper was on hiatus. The problem with being one of the last people to write 500 words about Brokeback is that there is very little to say about it that has not already been said, to the point where one could probably devise some kind of systematic indexing scheme for stock criticism about how it’s not just a gay cowboy movie, but speaks universal truths about forbidden love. The claim is true enough, but so much of the movie’s assets lie in nuance and subtlety – specific scenes, and specific gestures in specific scenes – that to haul it back to the level of capsule summary and holistic judgment is like restating the parallel postulate for everybody’s benefit when what you really want to do is examine transformations on hyperbolic surfaces.

The film is likely to pick up a whole heap of Golden Globes tonight, which I’m not watching thanks to Scrabble. I’ve never been suckered into the faux prestige of the Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press has received a lot of undue attention by fortuitous statistical correlation to the Oscars alone – occasional, at that. And this year, they shafted both Munich in Drama and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in Comedy. I remember when they had the class and courage to shower quality animation on an equal level with live-action.

I usually don’t do a year-in-review of film until about February, and this will probably be the case again, though the only exciting omissions on the list of movies I watched in 2005 are Crash and Walk the Line. I’ll catch up soon enough.

But first, a few words about Memoirs of a Geisha.

Now, one might wonder why I’m drawing attention to such a middling melodrama of no great consequence. Indeed, I found Geisha to be terribly underwhelming, though only rarely outright terrible. (To its credit, it sports pretty pictures of cherry blossoms and a lush musical score that is unique in the John Williams oeuvre, though in the general case the instruments and pentatonic melodies of the Far East are nothing new.) I want to talk about it because it is receiving a lot of undeserved hostility from folks on high horses who haven’t earned their spurs.

First are the postmodern other-thumpers who wave their Edward Said in the air and dismiss offhand the validity of a story about sexualized foreigners told in the mode of western romance. I contend that this is a misapplication of Orientalism.

Orientalist critique serves to reveal unexamined prejudices that are specifically not contained in the text, and calling the artist on it. In Geisha there are many. That’s fair. But the danger that Orientalism counteracts is the possibility that some secluded bloke might take mythologized falsities for historical fact.

Orientalism is not a blanket injunction on all works of tourist’s-eye-view fiction. We make allowances for factual inaccuracy in fiction all the time if it contributes to good fiction. Once contextual correspondence is out of the way, and those inaccuracies have been identified, it’s the textual system that counts. I find it far more patronizing for western audiences to be prematurely offended on the behalf of other cultures without an understanding of the difference between inaccuracy and offensiveness. As a romance, the Geisha story as presented in the film is weak for a number of reasons, but its western perspective isn’t one of them.

Then there are those who are deeply offended by the casting of three high-profile Chinese actresses as the principal players in a story set in idyllic fascist Japan, whose soldiers were off raping and pillaging in Manchuria at the time. There’s no other way to put it: the claim that actors of one Asian ethnicity can’t play characters of another is flatly ridiculous. Nobody complained when House of Flying Daggers starred a Japanese actor – and that was in no less romantic a role (martial arts expert, passionate lover, you get the idea). Were Polish Jews offended when a big-nosed American named Adrien Brody was cast as the lead in The Pianist?

Heck, Canadian actors play Americans all the time, and we hate Americans. At least, that’s what the Liberal Party tells me… some of the time.

To defer to one of the greatest film directors of all time: if Anthony Quinn can play Auda Abu Tayi and Omar Sharif can play Dr. Zhivago, all bets are off. Does Auda Abu Tayi serve? No!

If there’s any hump to get over at all once we’re past the biggest one (appearances), it’s not cultural consciousness or genetic heritage. It’s language. Sure, you can play it safe and genuine and go with an all-British cast for a British film, as was done to great effect in the Harry Potter films. But even Audrey Hepburn pulled off Eliza Doolittle the guttersnipe flower-girl and Eliza Doolittle the fair lady. Dialect coaching works wonders.

That’s probably the one aspect where the Chinese/Japanese discrepancy actually comes out in Geisha – language. Apparently, English in a sufficiently Asian accent was enough, and nobody took the care to note that there are actually noticeable differences between a Chinese accent and a Japanese accent. (It’s generally, but not always, in how they handle the Ls and Rs.) At any rate, it’s not a discrete either-or proposition, and if you listen carefully, even a Mandarin accent sounds different from a Cantonese one. Michelle Yeoh speaks in a sort of nether region that actually serves to make her character one of the more regal ones in the film. Gong Li, on the other hand, just sounds uncomfortable. But it’s not her fault she got horrible lines. “I will destroy you!” Yeah, whatever.

Here is a legitimate reason to subject Memoirs of a Geisha to endless mockery:

“Did Mother ever tell you about the eel and the cave? Well, every once in a while, a man’s eel likes to visit a woman’s cave.”

I’m told it’s straight from the book.

And you can stop giggling now.

In my article in Tuesday’s Gateway, “A poor 2005 hopefully means roadkill for contrived animation”, you’ll notice the glaring omission of any mention of Cars. This was, to the extent that I was trying to make an argument in a limited amount of space, intentional. To be honest, in spite of my pessimism about animation in 2006, I can think of maybe four feature films between now and December that I’m dying to see, and two of them are fully CG. In case you are curious, they are Cars, V For Vendetta, The Fountain and Flushed Away. On the first and the last: it’s clear to me that Pixar and Aardman are playing in a whole other league than virtually everybody else in the movie business, never mind the animated one. I don’t do their films the indignity of lumping them in categorical industry trends.

The Fountain is a sci-fi written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. He ditched the now-cancelled Watchmen to do it, and I mean, he’s Darren Aronofsky. Don’t argue with this one. As for V For Vendetta, the word from early screenings in December is that it’s everything a fan of the Alan Moore graphic novel hoped it would be, unless his name was Alan Moore. Beyond wanting to see a good movie based on a majestic fugue on fascism and anarchic terrorism, I want to see it succeed if only to get Watchmen back on the drawing board.

Only four? This would make 2006 one of the least exciting years in film I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing emerge from the horizon, but it is in large part due to lack of information. Movie seasons are so end-loaded now that August would be a much better time to roll out lists of the most anticipated films in the twelve months to come, since the December deluge has something to show for itself and next summer’s schedules are usually set by then.

There are a number of movies about which I am very curious, and in the absence of heartfelt anticipation I think I’ll list a few.

There’s Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio Del Toro as everybody’s favourite guerrilla T-shirt icon. I’ve always thought of Soderbergh as hit-and-miss, and to this day I maintain that Erin Brockovich is a piece of crap, but this feels like the perfect subject matter for a reunion between him and the star of Traffic. The way things are looking, though, this won’t make it to the screen until 2007.

Then there’s The Departed, the remake of the Hong Kong modern classic Infernal Affairs with Leonardo DiCaprio sitting in for Tony Leung and Matt Damon replacing Andy Lau (or maybe the other way around), and Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen as their bosses. I’d normally pay this no mind – Infernal Affairs is probably the best cop drama I’ve ever seen, and I’d much rather see it get an untampered distribution deal over on these shores – but on the strength of the cast, and with Martin Scorsese in the director’s chair, I couldn’t possibly neglect it.

Here’s another Watchmen connection: Paul Greengrass, who was slated to direct it before the project was canned, went to work on Flight 93. This is a dramatization of Flight 93 – which, if you don’t recall, was the one that hit neither the Pentagon nor the World Trade Center thanks to passengers armed with cellular phones and a hell of a lot of initiative. It comes out in April. No doubt comparisons will be made to Oliver Stone’s WTC fireman picture, September or something of the like, once it comes out in August. Apparently some folks object to the idea of 9/11 dramatizations out of taste, but it was going to happen eventually, and I’m grateful that it’s these two accomplished gentlemen in the vanguard.

None of the above are big franchise pictures, unless you count V For Vendetta as an adaptation of a twenty-year-old cult hit only comic book fans know about. Maybe this is why the feverish-anticipation roll call is so short this year: these lists usually consist of sequels, remakes and depictions of existing texts. So what of the big names?

Personally, the only ones that spark any interest at all are Casino Royale and Superman Returns. In Bond’s case, I think Daniel Craig fits the role in an appropriately old-fashioned way and I liked director Martin Campbell’s work in GoldenEye and The Mask of Zorro enough that I’m elated to see him back (with fingers crossed that the stinker that was Vertical Limit was a fluke). However, I’m disappointed they’re not doing it as a period film. If I had control over the Bond franchise, I’d take it right back into the Cold War era. Maybe this is one of the reasons I don’t have control over the Bond franchise. But half a kick in the ass is still a good kick in the ass, and it’s about time James Bond got back to doing some debonair espionage in the key of Fleming. Brosnan was probably the best Bond actor of them all – yes, better than Connery – but after GoldenEye, he was wasted on scripts that were consistently heavy on action and light on class.

As for Superman, again, I like the cast and director. The Man of Steel has always bored me – Clark Kent is the interesting one – but if he’s only ever as good as his adversary, then a Lex Luthor played by Kevin Spacey gives me hope. After Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, superhero adaptations have a whole new standard to live up to, and I think Bryan Singer knows it – just look at his exponential improvement between the horrid X-Men and its redeeming sequel. This one’s a gamble, and it’s all in the writing.

The last film I want to talk about, which necessitated the creation of a list I marked as curious, is The Da Vinci Code. I’m no fan of the book. Never mind that it’s a walking, perhaps even waddling cliché – it’s the writing that really stinks. Hereusement, ici c’est Ron Howard. The Howard/Grazer/Goldsman team knows how to make an exceedingly conventional film look good, and coupled with the exceedingly conventional all-star cast (Tom Hanks as a boring everyman professor! Audrey Tautou as a French girl! Jean Reno as an angry French guy named Fache! Ian McKellen as an old wise guy with a British accent and a walking stick! Paul Bettany as an evil albino assassin!) the film should actually be interesting. Or as I’d like to put it, curious. The story is thinner than a thread of yarn, but at least nobody will be able to claim the book is better than the movie… I hope.

I’m probably missing some. But I’ll talk about them in August.

Collegiate debating superguru Colm Flynn has been using the World Debating News blog to post live updates from Dublin Worlds. Seven Canadian pairs broke to octo-finals (all from the Central region), among them Carleton rookie Garnett Genuis, who spent the past three years stomping all over the Edmonton high school circuit on my watch.

Winners: Mike Kotrly and Jo Nairn. That’s two victories in a row for Canada, and a vicarious one for the West, with Mikey being an expatriate and all. Was I betting on them all along? Yes. Is it still a thrill to be acquainted with orators of this calibre? Yes. The highest congratulations are due, and I know they’ll receive it by one channel or another since I know Mikey has made fun of this blog in a round of debate on at least one well-earned occasion.

I wasn’t there, but I expect reports from readers like you and you and you.

And now, back to reading cross-tables.com. It has everything short of individual game scores, which are never officially reported for ratings calculations anyway. Avert your eyes from my five-year performance graph, or at least ignore the discouraging lack of a net rating gain in the past two years. And then there’s the mountain of statistics from the records of the Calgary club, but it’s missing everything from late 2003 to the relaunch of the website in October 2005. Did I really lose a game with a score of 506-190 back in September 2001? Yikes.