The similarity in Jean’s reviews here are both due to the same cause: His looking more at the computer than the TV screen. Star ratings are therefore mine, since I actually watched both movies in full.
*** The Secret Life of Bees(October 2008) – Rental
Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah. Young teenage girl leaves her abusive father to explore her late mother’s past with a group of bee-keeping sisters.
She says: A pretty good adaptation of the novel. Performances were good and though the “critical consensus” said it was too sentimental, I didn’t find that to be the case. And I hate sentimental. He says: I didn’t pay enough attention to have an opinion of this one.
***½ My Kid Could Paint That(October 2007) – Rental
Documentary look at four-year-old painting sensation Marla Olmstead.
She says: Really fascinating documentary. Starts off as a look at the nature of abstract art, taking as a given that even a four-year-old can produce works in high demand. Then a 60 Minutes report on the young artist changes the story: is this really her work, or has her father assisted? Finally, the documentarian, realizing he hasn’t really captured any great footage of her painting (despite months of work on the film) reluctantly becomes part of the story himself, and the story evolves again, to his role and the appropriateness of such a young child getting so much adult attention. So many layers. The DVD includes a worthwhile additional set of follow-up footage, scenes deleted from the original, and additional discussions about the many questions raised by the film. He says: It didn’t quite hold my interest.
Thirty-five women, with chains hidden in their purses, infiltrated the public galleries of the House of Commons. They shackled themselves to their chairs. During Question Period, they started to shout. The business of parliament came to a halt. It was the culmination of what became known as the Abortion Caravan, a defiant country wide trek aimed at putting the issue of abortion access on the national agenda. It called to mind some of the more audacious tactics of the suffragettes more than fifty years earlier – in the first wave of feminism. But this was very much a “second wave” event, in which abortion on demand symbolized a fight for women’s autonomy on every front.
Listening to a documentary about this on CBC Radio’s Sunday Report a few weeks ago was pretty riveting. First of all, I hadn’t heard of this event before. Secondly, it was quite extraordinary to hear so many women proclaim, so loudly, the importance of choice. Everyone seems to tiptoe around the subject these days. Ssh. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.
One of the most striking clips was one of the women speaking with one of the male (of course) politicians—I didn’t catch who. She pointed out that he, being a privileged, wealthy man, would be able to arrange for a woman in his life to have a safe abortion, if she wanted one. But other Canadian women, those of lesser means and lower social standing, could not do this.
“So?” he replied.
“I couldn’t believe it, ” she recollected, this many years later. “It was so arrogant, so dismissive.”
International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said the government would consider funding family planning measures such as contraception, but not abortion under any circumstances.
“They just reopened the abortion debate,” [Bob] Rae told reporters outside the House of Commons. “We are saying to the countries that are the poorest: ‘We won’t apply the law that we have in Canada’.”
(RDtNVC: Reason of the day to not vote Conservative)
I think I finally understand the fuzzy blue sweaters now.
Harper in fuzzy blue sweater
Because, when I thought the Conservative were going to run on the “Canada is strong” theme, I didn’t see why they wanted the leader to appear more soft and fuzzy. Seemed incongruous.
But, that’s actually not their theme, is it? It’s more like, Canada is weak. Canada is in danger. And only the Conservatives can protect you.
For that message to come across, they have to totally that old “Harper is scary” thing. He has to look safe and reassuring. So Canadians are ready to bury our heads in the sand and join them behind the barricades.
Safe. Safe from crazy-ass, risky ideas like taxing pollution instead of income.
And of course, safe from the bad guys. The criminals. The gangs.
Only the Conservatives can protect us. “Soft on crime does not work.”
I like how he says “Soft on crime” as though it’s actual thing, and not just a cliché. As though the Liberals had previously passed the famous “Soft on crime” bill, or something.
Anyway, whatever “soft on crime” is, apparently that’s what we have now. And I guess it’s just not working.
Wait, what’s that flying by there? Is that an actual fact?
Canada’s overall national crime rate, based on incidents reported to police, hit its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006, driven by a decline in non-violent crime.
The overall crime rate fell in every province and territory in 2006.
Police reported 605 homicides in 2006, 58 fewer than in 2005. This resulted in a rate of 1.85 homicides per 100,000 population, 10% lower than in 2005. The national homicide rate has generally been declining since the mid-1970s, when it was around 3.0.
Virtually all provinces and territories reported declines in their homicide rate in 2006. The most notable occurred in Ontario, where there were 23 fewer homicide.
Statistics Canada
Boy, yeah. We sure don’t want to keep that up!
But wait, wait — buried in there — what’s that about youth crim?. Up 3%? 3%! Now there’s your “soft on crime”. It’s that darned young offenders act. Because, really, until we start incarcerating 14-year-olds, how are they going to learn to be better criminals?
Oh, pesky facts, stop telling me that youth offenders actually get incarcerated at much higher rates than adult offenders, and are much less likely to be released early (per John Howard Society).
Instead, I’m going to take a Conservative tack and tell you a story. If they were to tell you one, it would be about some hideous youth committing some appaling crime. Mine will be a little different.
At 15 years old, Ashley Smith was arrested for throwing crab apples at her post man and was placed in youth custody.
Throwing crab apples.
She proved to be a less than compliant inmate, though, and her original sentence was extended repeatedly in response to her behavior, which included many incidents of self-harm. Although she showed clear signs of mental disturbance, she received no consistent psychiatric treatment. She spent two-thirds of her sentence in a nine-by-six-foot isolation cell.
At 18 years, she was transferred to a federal prison. There she was subjected to pepper spray and a stun gun. And she was kept in segregation for nearly a year. She filed a grievance against conditions in segregation, which included inadequate protection against cold. But, against federal regulations, the grievance was ignored.
Ashley Smith committed suicide on October 19, 2007. She was 19.
Postscript: I wrote this in 2008, originally. In 2013 there was an inquest into Ashley Smith’s death. It was ruled a homicide. “She had tied a piece of cloth around her neck while guards stood outside her cell door and watched. They had been ordered by senior staff not to enter her cell as long as she was breathing.”
Being childfree, this isn’t a big issue for me personally, but from living in the world, I know it’s a big issue.
Back in 2006, the Martin Liberals brought in a national child care program.
Upon taking office, the Harper Conservatives promptly cancelled it, amidst protests of the provinces, and individual citizens, who argued that $100 per child tax credit being offered instead wasn’t enough to help, and that the corporate tax credits weren’t enough to generate the predicted 125,000 new daycare spaces.
This proved prophetic, as the program has yet to create a single new daycare space [edit: I had reference for this at the time, but it’s now a dead link], and the OECD now ranks Canada last amongst industrialized nations in spending on early learning and child care programs.
The reasons the Conservatives gave for giving a tax credit instead of honouring the child care deal was “choice” and “fairness”. Creating daycare spaces helps only those who want their preschool children to have quality daycare; it doesn’t help those who make other choices: staying at home, or using a babysitter or nanny.
Isn’t that rather like saying that governments funding new programs in colleges and universities is unfair, because it doesn’t help young people who make other choices, such as getting a job right out high school, or backpacking through Europe?
In fact, isn’t it exactly like that? Universities and colleges provide post-secondary education. Not everyone attends a post-secondary institution. Still, those are largely tax payer funded. Canadians know that having a well-educated population is beneficial to the country in the long run, and therefore worth funding.
Colleges and universities are optional young adult education opportunities; quality daycare provides optional early childhood educational opportunities. The idea of replacing college/university funding with giving all 18-year-olds $100 a month for their “choice” of education options is clearly absurd.
But that’s exactly the policy the PCs are running on, except for preschool children rather than young adults.
There just aren’t enough daycare spaces in Canada to meet the demand. That is the problem government needs to address. Parents are not, currently, “free to choose” quality child care, because too many of them can’t find it at all, or they can’t afford it when they do (yes, it’s typically quite a bit more than $100 a month). The $1200 credit does you no good whatsoever if all available daycare spaces are gone.
The PC’s have been this week try to “scare” Canadians into thinking the Liberals will cancel the child tax credit; the Liberals have been busy denying it. And adding, in small print that I think should be large headlines, “Liberals do intend to replace the Conservative plan to create child care spaces, because their plan didn’t work.”
So I leave this with a few fast facts on child care in Canada [edit: another reference lost to time. This page was previously full of links!]. It’s from 2004, but unfortunately, I don’t think too much has changed.
Estimated amount that work-life conflicts cost Canadian organizations each year in time lost due to work absences: $2.7 Billion
Percentage of children aged 3 to 5 whose mothers work in the paid labour force: more than 70%
Compared to 12-year-old peers in New Zealand who received top-quality early childhood education, difference in Canadian scores on literacy and numeracy tests: 12 percentage points lower
In a 2003 poll, percentage of Canadians who:
agreed that Canada should have a nationally co-ordinated child care plan: 90%
agreed that there can be a publicly funded child care system that makes quality child care available to all Canadian children: 86%
[Edit: I have no idea what today’s stats are. But (writing this in 2023) the Liberals have been rolling out a funded childcare plan in the last few years. I believe a complaint is that demand exceeds the supply.]
So I just finished Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. It’s a novel about three beautiful women who all become rich and famous—but not without being victimized, betrayed by love, and addicted to valium (sedatives, the “dolls” of the title). It’s an addictive read, and while certainly not literary, I was left pondering just what the message was supposed to be here.
The novel is set between 1945 and 1965, or so, and the portrayal of women is something to behold. Like the assumption, throughout the novel, that a woman should quit her job—no matter how fabulous—the minute marriage or even just engagement is on the horizon. Pile on the more dramatic horrors of involuntary incarceration in a mental institution and choosing suicide over the potential loss of fabulous breasts to cancer, and you’re left feeling rather glad to be living in these times.
One gets a similar sense from the much-hyped TV series Mad Men, set in 1960. One character, Peggy, becomes the first “since the War” to do any copy-writing for the Stirling-Cooper ad agency feature. “It’s like watching a dog play piano” says one of the men, of Peggy’s writing abilities.
The most recent episode I watched focused on the Nixon-Kennedy election. The firm—which the creator notes is a “dinosaur”, destined to be rocked by the changes of the times, not participating in them—is backing Nixon. And having to accept that their man has been bested by the young, charismatic Senator from Massachusetts.
And here we are, with the year’s US election, and the old man of the Republican Party figures his best chance of defeating the young, charismatic Senator for Illinois is to put a young, dynamic woman on his ticket.
Good thing she didn’t quit her job when she got married.
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