Tag: movies

What’s your point?

So I finally got my Scene card replaced.

I lost it quite some time ago, and I always found it irritating that I had to make a phone call—rather than fill in on some kind of online form—to get it replaced. So I didn’t bother. I don’t really go to Cineplex theatres all that often. I don’t like them. They’re tacky and crowded. Most of their movies play either too early, or too late. (6:45 or 10:00? These are my choices?) After charging me too much, they play too many commercials and movies. (The “pre-show”, they call it. Ha!)

But, if you want to see 3D or big-scale epics—and I sometimes do—they’re the only game in town.

And it would niggle at me that I’d have to say “No” to the “Do you have a Scene card?” prompt. So, having formed the plan to see The Social Network this weekend (review soon, but in short, it was good) I made the phone call and a new card is on its way. So someday, I may earn a free movie. At the theatre I hate going to.

Apparently Canadians are world leaders in having and using loyalty cards. Why just shop, when you can shop and earn points?

In fact, points accumulation is our cornerstone of our family budget. We have a joint MBNA TravelRewards card, and we use it as much as possible. Because we have family in Timmins, and it’s far to drive there, but expensive to fly. With this card, a mere 15,000 points gets you there by air, for only the cost of the taxes on the ticket. Yes, it has an $85 annual fee, but trust me, we save quite a bit more than that on each ticket. And yes, the interest rate on it is appalling, so it’s absolutely critical to pay it off in full each month. But so far, that’s not been a problem. And the points have also taken us to Boston and San Francisco.

But why stop there, eh? (That would hardly be Canadian.) So despite the resulting bulging wallet, I also carry:

  • Air Miles card. Though I get the majority of my Air Miles by paying my Primus phone bill, and few more from shopping online through their portal, I still carry the actual card around in case of stops at LCBO. Of course, I don’t use these points to travel—they accumulate far too slowly for that. Mostly, I cash them in for Chapters or iTunes gift cards. Which take three weeks to arrive, and then you have to go through the bother of redeeming before you have any actual free stuff in hand. Kind of an exercise in patience, this card.
  • Shopper’s Optimum card. Because I do go to Shopper’s semi-regularly. I don’t have much strategy here. I usually just wait until it gets to $10 off, then cash that in the next time I spend at least $60 there. I have no idea if that’s a wise approach.
  • Club Sobey’s, because it’s the nearest grocery story to my house, and actually, points accumulate pretty fast on this puppy, at least if you spend as much on food as we seem to. Strategy here is to redeem $15 once it reaches $30 off. (Because it’s faster to get from $15 to $30 off again than to start from $0.)
  • Beat Goes on card. A retro card, matching the retro products they carry (physical CD, LPs, and DVDs): Made of paper, you get a stamp with each purchase; when it’s full, you get a free CD or DVD.

Then there are all those stores who track your points for you, at the store, sans plastic. Meaning that I’m currently also accumulating points at:

Is that a lot? Am I a points queen, completely typical, or just a lightweight?

Apparently, I don’t see much of a downside to these reward programs. I did hear that those who are savvy about using points credit card (meaning they always pay them off, but also accumulate enough points to get rewards) have a slightly inflationary effect for everyone else who doesn’t do that. That is, prices rise slightly for all to help pay for my rewards. Umm, sorry about that, I guess.

And yes, there probably are times I’ve selected a particular product or even store because I get points there. But I don’t think it’s out of control yet.

Then, finally, the whole privacy issue. But really, given how much Google, for example, knows about me, what’s the big deal about Sobeys Inc. knowing that I buy food? Or Air Miles thinking I’m a wino with a modest phone bill and occasional online shopping habit? And Cineplex? They must think I haven’t been to a movie there in three years, when The Social Network caused me to break my fast.

Weekend viewing

In preparation for Tuesday’s concert by one of those Queen tribute bands, I re-watched my Queen Live at Wembley DVD, otherwise know as The Last Concert Ever by the Original Four Members of Queen.

Talk about going out on top. This late in their career, it’s just wall-to-wall hits… so many they can’t include them all, since they also want to include some surprises as well. It’s the end of a long tour, so the set is well-honed; they sound fantastic. The massive crowd is adoring and lively.

Most awe-inspiring: The part where Freddie does these solo gymnastics with his voice, teasing around his highest register, demonstrating why he’s the best rock singer ever. Then followed by Brian May pyrotechnics on guitar. Then “Brighton Rock.”

Most fun: When all four members of the band gather at the front of the stage and swing through a medley of early rock classics: “(You’re so Square) Baby I Don’t Care”, “Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)”, “Tutti Frutti”, and “Gimme Some Lovin’”. Then BoRhap.

Most heartwarming: The crowd singalong during “Love of My Life”. I love the British fans—unlike the North Americans, they know all the Queen songs, not just the greatest hits.

Most chilling: Freddie, the only man in the room with an inkling that this might be the band’s last concert ever (he hadn’t yet told his band mates of his HIV-positive status), explaining how rumors of Queen’s breakup are highly exaggerated, and that the band is going to be together “until we fucking well die—I’m sure of it!” Then launching into “Who Wants to Live Forever?”.

And then for something completely different…

Jean and I watched Lisztomania, director Ken Russel’s 1976 or so film, very loosely based on the life of pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Definitely one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen. It starts as a kind musical comedy-romance, then gradually becomes this sort of gothic horror movie with vampires and demons, and then there’s kind of a bit with war and Nazis, and finally there’s a space ship. And some singing.

It’s hard to believe this thing was ever made, because it’s not some B movie thing. It’s a high-budget picture with cinematographers and famous people in it. Must have been some really good drugs in the 1970s. And so, while it’s certainly not a good movie, it’s definitely an interesting failure.

Most awe-inspiring: Awe-inspiring? Geez, I don’t know. When Listz sprouts a giant penis for the four ladies to ride? When Richard Wagner sprouts vampire teeth and drinks Listz’s blood? The demon-worshiping scene with all the naked girls and the candles? So many options…

Most fun: The opening scene really is hoot. Liszt and the contessa’s fun romp to the ever-increasing beat of a metronome is rudely interrupted by her sword-bearing husband, leading to duel featuring chandelier-swinging, banana-eating, and a quickly improvised loin cloth made of sheets.

Most heartwarming: Well, the Chaplinesque scene where Liszt thinks back on his romance with the contessa actually is kind of sweet.

Most chilling: You know, when the dead Wagner rises as a zombie Hitler and starts mowing down the Jews—that really is kind of chilling. Especially as it’s intercut with Liszt being tortured, then killed, by his daughter, wielding voodoo pins on a “tiny daddy” doll.

Weekend update

We’ve had varying success with recent weekend activities.

Failures:

  • Ben Heppner, who failed to show for the Grand Philharmonic’s performance of Edgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. If you’ve never heard of this work, don’t worry; neither had we. I don’t know if having the big star there would have made a difference, but we had to conclude that we aren’t necessarily fans of all great choral works. Cause we seemed to enjoy this way less than the rest of the audience, though the quality of performance was clear.
  • Avatar, because it sold out before we got there. Seven weeks later and it’s still that popular, eh? Guess for next time, we’ll order our tickets online in advance.

Successes:

  • Up in the Air, well-attended but not difficult to get into, and quite a good movie, to boot. No 3-D extravaganza, but a clever script and compelling characters.
  • The Waterloo anti-prorogation rally! Yes, we went. Pleased to see a good turnout. Hadn’t been to a political protest in decades. Wasn’t sure what would happen. Mostly, we politely listened to speeches of varying quality. Found the whole thing kind of heartening.
  • Participated in an unofficial canoe club gathering around the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Only we skipped the Film Festival part (one grows weary of watching short films about people doing risky stuff outdoors) and just joined in on the preliminaries of a hike and dinner. Made for a good day in this surprisingly mild January we’ve just had.

Upcoming:

Sigh. Though I’m kind of grumpy about it, I feel somehow compelled to watch next Sunday’s Superbowl halftime show, to see how The Who does. I’ve actually never watched any part of the Superbowl before. Obviously I saw the Janet Jackson thing afterward on YouTube, and I’m a bit sorry now that I didn’t take the time to watch Prince’s half-time performance, but there you are. This will be a first.

So now I have to figure out things like, when is half-time, anyway? (My husband is absolutely no help in these matters.) OK, I do realize it’s a live sporting event, so the exact time halftime begins will vary, but around when will it be? Online TV guide has some pre-Superbowl thing happening from 2-6, with the game from 6-10. (And here I thought the game was actually played in the afternoon, not at night.) So am I naive to think halftime will be somewhere around 8:00, then? And they aren’t going to interview Townsend and Daltrey during the pre-Superbowl thing, are they? I really don’t want to PVR that whole thing, nor do I want to lurk in front of the TV all day.

Ah well. I suppose if I somehow miss it, I can still catch it on YouTube later…

Three books, five days

… And that’s pretty good for me. The key, I’ve found, is trains. And given what’s currently happening at airports, more of us may be taking trains. At least take comfort in knowing it’s good for literacy.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

… even though, I have to confess, two of the three books were consumed in Audible form, on my iPod. That way you can also watch the scenery. And the snow-covered trees were really pretty.

OK, the most important thing about finishing Oryx and Crake is that I’m no longer in the embarassing position of never having read a Margaret Atwood novel. Yes, I know. You’d be amazed at the great authors I’ve yet to read. Though, to be fair, I have tried reading Margaret Atwood before. I just had to give up about a third in, due to incredible lack of enjoyment. (Not even sure what book that was, anymore.)

But Oryx and Crake, I found really interesting. It’s an Apocalyptic future kind of tale, taking place in a globally warmed future where a single remaining homo sapien coexists with “Crakians”, genetically engineered humans who lack humans’ more destructive impulses. A lot of the realities of the book—the bizarrely genetically engineered animal hybrids, the smart technologists locked away in compounds away from the “plebe-lands”, the reliance on medicine to treat everything—seemed somewhat plausible, only a little beyond what is actually going on.

So it was an unpleasant yet somewhat familiar world, and it was fairly engrossing uncovering the mystery of what led to this point.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

I had seen and enjoyed the movie, so I got curious about the book, which I did actually read, and without the benefit of train motion. Julie Powell had a blog that covered her efforts to make all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year. Though a personal strain (these are not easy recipes), the blog became very popular—ultimately becoming a book, then a movie (obviously).

Watching the movie, I somewhat related to Julie. She and I both like to write about food, for example. She and and I both cook from written recipes (as opposed to just whipping up your own thing, which is a whole other talent). She and I are both in a long-term, childfree marriages to really sweet guys.

And reading the book, I found even more similarities. Like—I kid you not—her total obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the most dire crises of the book is when CBS wants to interview her on the night of the very last Buffy ever!

So part of my brain thinks, geez, why didn’t I think of blogging about making all of Julia Child’s recipes in a year so that I could get a book deal, and a movie deal, and get to write another book?

But then I’m reminded that there are some key differences between Julie and me.

She’s much more open than I about writing about personal, embarrassing stuff, for example. And that is a big part of the charm and appeal of the endeavour, which made it a success.

There’s also the fact that she was really dissatisfied with her secretarial job, and her difficulties in getting pregnant, both necessary fuel for taking on and maintain this crazy project of hers. (Along with occasionally copious amounts of alcohol, cigarettes, and expletives.) Me, I don’t have quite enough angst to take on making boeuf bourgignon until 2:00 in the morning, sustained only by nicotine and rum.

And most particularly… Frankly, I would never do classic French cooking. Reading the book, even more than seeing the movie, made me realize I have no interest in this type of arduous cooking: Digging out bone marrow, making gelatin from a calve’s hoof (seriously! apparently smells like a tannery), chopping up a live lobster (all the parts squirm, it appears), boning an entire duck.

It was fun to read about, though.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

This was the return trip audiobook. I had downloaded Fahrenheit 451 as well, but that was starting to seem like a little too much apocalypse for one trip, so I dug around and stumbled upon this one, the first Sookie Stackhouse mystery. OK, vampire mystery. But the vampires are still incidental, even though I realize this is the second time they’ve been mentioned in this post.

And also, that all three books are from a single individual’s point of view.

Anyway. In this case, the point of view is Sookie Stackhouse’s, a telepathic bar waitress in a world where vampires exist and have just attained legal status. Sookie meets Bill, a vampire who sets her small Southern town a-twitter by deigning to live in it. She’s intrigued because she cannot read his mind; this comes as a major relief. But their path to true romance hits stumbling blocks in the form of the murder of women who have a sweet spot for vampires.

Jean declared this too much of a chick book for him, though not too much for him to listen from start to finish.

I found it diverting enough, but I’m not sure I’m compelled to read any more of these. Sounds a bit weird to say given that the main characters are a vampire and mind reader, but there were more supernatural elements introduced later in the novel than I wanted. Made it a bit harder to believe in the world. Sookie was a fun character, it had some nice sexy bits, and I was curious about the murderer’s identify. But it’s not something I’d say you’d have to go out of your way to read.

(In case anyone was wondering, I haven’t yet seen True Blood, which is apparently based on, but very different from, these novels.)

Defending Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock is a movie by Ang Lee that opened this weekend. Based on a true story, it features one Elliot Tiber (played by The Daily Show’s Demetri Martin), a repressed young man who has returned to his small home town to try and help his parents save their rundown motel. When he hears that another nearby town has banned a planned major music festival, he seizes on the opportunity to convince promoters to hold it in White Lake instead. Despite some bumps on the way, a deal is struck to hold the proceedings on a neighbour’s farm. Soon Elliot, his parents, and indeed the whole town are caught up in a tidal wave of history, as Woodstock brings thousands of young hippies to town.

I’d read about this movie a couple months ago, in the Princess Guide, and always planned to go, just because it sounded like something I would like. And that Jean might even enjoy. But then the day it opened, the critics starting commenting. The movie doesn’t work, they said. No magic. Too many characters; you don’t care about any of them. The main character is dull. The movie is dull. It’s too slow. The split screen only multiplies the boredom. The jokes all fall flat.

Geez.

Forewarned, forearmed, expectations lowered, we decided to go anyway.

And we really liked it. Both of us.

One useful point the critics made is that this is no re-creation of the Woodstock Music Festival itself. It really is a sideways, faraway view of that. It all swirls around Elliot; he is not, he wasn’t, at the center of it.

But that perspective worked for me just fine. It was exciting to see more and more, cooler and cooler, people come to town. It was fun to see the effects on the townspeople. Yes, there are a lot of characters, but I generally enjoyed my brief time with each. The main character may not have been the most interesting of them, but that was the point, and to me made him easier to identify with. The jokes did not fall flat; a lot of it was really funny. And it was quite the cast: Imelda Staunton, Eugene Levy, Robert Downie Jr, and newcomer Jonathan Groff (as Zen concert promoter Michael Lang), whom I expect we’ll be seeing more of.

The split screen, while making it a bit confusing what to focus on, did harken nicely to the famous documentary, as did the mudslide scene. Elliot’s one acid-fueled glimpse at the famous stage really is a gorgeous. And the whole thing was a nice reminder that it was pretty amazing that so many kids came together, in conditions so far from ideal (mud, rain, show stoppages, inadequate toilet facilities, inadequate water and food, traffic jams for miles), yet have the whole thing be entirely peaceful. It may not have been the dawning of the age of Aquarius, but it was still a really nice weekend.

So there you go. If this sounds like the type of movie you would like, if you’re not sick to death of boomers and their nostalgia for the 60s, then try it. I think you’ll like it.

Maple flavour films

Cultural lessons in three movies… (Links are to YouTube trailers of same)

1

Last Saturday we wanted to go see The Stone Angel, but it was on at 7:00, and we just couldn’t get ourselves organized to get there on time. So as a kind of boobie prize, we thought, we decided to go see the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Now, admittedly, that film had received pretty decent critical notices, which is why we considered it at all… But so did Knocked Up, and I was pretty underwhelmed by that one, with its many “man-boy” characters.

But Forgetting Sarah Marshall was different. It is what it is, which is unabashedly a sex comedy, but it rises above what I was expecting in that none of the characters were mere caricatures. Sarah wasn’t just a bitch. Her new boyfriend wasn’t just a stupid himbo. The main character wasn’t entirely blameless for the break-up. You kind of cared about these people. You kind of liked them.

We left the movie in a really good mood.

2

The next night we managed to get ourselves to The Stone Angel. It featured good performances (from the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Ellen Page*, and the yummy Kevin Zegers), moments of humour, and strong characters. But it is what it is, and that is a drama about a 90-year-old woman looking back at the tragedies of her life, and the decisions that led to them.

We didn’t dislike the film, but we weren’t in as good a mood afterwards.

3

By Thursday DH was a little movied-out, but I went to see Maple Flavour Films, a documentary about English-language Canadian movies, and why Canadians don’t go see them. (Ironically, very few people were there!) Various theories are put forward as to why that is—screens dominated by Hollywood movies; lack of star system; lack of promotion. But the director’s own view (he was there for the screening) was that Canadians make too many dramas, which never do as well as other genres. Why not make more of the types of movies people want to see—why not more comedies? Why wasn’t the low-budget, Scarborough-inspired Wayne’s World not made in Canada? “We need our Full Montey“!

And he may have a point. But I’m also thinking, even if The Stone Angel wasn’t a barrel of laughs, there are a number of Canadian movies that have a put big smile on my face. La Grande Séduction—OK, that’s a French-language film—but it’s still one of the damn funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Bon Cop, Bad Cop—bilingual—was rather a lot of fun as well. And Touch of Pink—all in English—was rather fun as well.

And—this sounds like damning with faint praise, but it’s not—some movies are lot more fun than their premise would make you think. Yes, in Saint Ralph, the boy is inspired to run because his mother’s in a coma… But the focus is on him, not her, and the journey is fun, funny, inspiring. Last Night is about the end of the world, but it’s Don McKellar, and to some extent, it restores your faith in humanity as you marvel at some of the absurd responses to this fact. Snow Cake begins with a terrible car crash (I’m maybe not helping the cause here), but gains considerable humour as the British driver involved (the lovely Alan Rickman) is thrust amongst Canadians in Wawa, of all places—including an autistic woman played Sigourney Weaver. And New Waterford Girl has overtones of Juno—a preternaturally smart and witty teenager finds pregnancy the only possible escape from her tiny home town, though in this case it’s a fake one (the pregnancy is, not the town).

And I’m not going to pretend that Les Invasions Barbares or Away from Her are anything but primarily dramatic, but they really do have a lot of humour, and they’re both just so good, everyone should see them.

Or maybe my tastes are weird. Certainly I see way, way more Canadian movies than other people do…

* In 2008, when this was written, this was the name of this actor.