All posts by Norm Wilner

Avery

It ought to be comforting to know the worst day of your life is behind you. It ought to be, but it isn’t.

I had a dog. She was a marvelous yellow Labrador retriever, and she was with me from the age of eleven weeks to thirteen and three-quarter years — more or less my entire adult life.

Thirteen and three-quarters is pretty old for any dog, and she was noticeably slower over the summer. Arthritis in the back legs, a tendency to rasp when her salivary glands overran her ability to clear her throat (and being a Lab, her salivary glands were pretty active), a bit of hearing loss. We scaled the walks back a little on really hot days, and put her on a couple of anti-inflammatory drugs to help with the soreness, and that seemed to help.

In August, she started to be a little wobbly, and her right hind leg seemed unsteady. My first thought was that she’d started to build up a resistance to her meds, and I checked with her vet — a very, very capable doctor named Larry Wilder, at the Lawrence Park Animal Hospital — to recalibrate the dosage. It seemed to help.

A couple of weeks later — on the first day of the film festival, as it happened — she tweaked the leg while we were out walking. Later that night, she fell off the bed and sprained it. She couldn’t put any weight on the leg at all, and hopped around for a few days while we waited for the sprain to heal.

It never did.

We took her to the hospital for X-rays on September 15th, and that’s when they found the tumor. Osteosarcoma. The same cancer that killed Terry Fox. The prognosis was two to four weeks, six at the most.

She made it to October 10th, and then, when standing up was harder work than it should have been, when her appetite was beginning to go, when she couldn’t quite find a comfortable position to sleep — when it was obvious that things were turning downward — I set up the appointment.

They do it with a barbituate overdose. It was painless and even peaceful: The dog literally goes to sleep, and a minute later her heart stops. We were right there with her; we cradled her head and told her we loved her, told her everything was going to be all right, told her she was the best dog in the world.

We were lying, of course.

Nothing will ever be all right again.

Inventory

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” wasn’t screened in time for reviewers to make their Friday papers, and it was a long weekend, so Metro and I have to weigh in a few days late.

And as long as I’m at it, here’s everything else that opened last Friday …

Employee of the Month“: Dane Cook is the Scarlett Johansson of comedy, in that every time I see him there’s a little less substance. But even he looks like Laurence frickin’ Olivier next to Jessica Simpson.

The Last King of Scotland“: It stumbles at a crucial moment, but Forest Whitaker never does. I hate the whole Oscar handicapping thing, but he sure looks like a lock from here.

Shortbus“: John Cameron Mitchell is a talented and compassionate filmmaker, and the idea of a New York relationship dramedy with actual sex is intriguing … but since he doesn’t choreograph the sex in a manner that drives the story forward, he’s just, well, jerking off.

Trailer Park Boys“: Yeah, it’s a feature-length episode of the show. What, you were expecting something innovative and daring? You might as well ask for a musical number.

The Dear “Departed”

He makes the best f**king films!

He makes the best f**king films!

If I ever meet him, I’m gonna grab his f**king neck and just shake him and say:

“Thank you. Thank you for making such excellent f**king movies!”

– King Missile, “Martin Scorsese”

It’s been a long, long time since a Scorsese movie has made me feel like spinning up that song … but “The Departed” is a welcome return home.

Now, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim Emerson would probably take issue with that — actually, there’s no “probably” to it; he goes after the “Marty’s back where he belongs” sentiment in the very first graph of this post on his Scanners blog — but for me, the glory of “The Departed” wasn’t that Scorsese was back in gangland … it was that Scorsese has stopped trying to win an Oscar.

I mean, we must be honest. Most of his choices in the last decade have been a little … well, craven. “The Age of Innocence”, “Kundun”, “The Aviator” — they’re all respectable projects that feel like someone else directed them.

“Bringing Out the Dead” and “Gangs of New York” have a jangled energy and a sense of purpose that makes them more immediately identifiable as Scorsese pictures, but they fall short of actually working.

“Cape Fear” and “Casino” are decent genre exercises with a couple of bravura set pieces apiece, but they’re just exercises … and it probably doesn’t help that both films are remakes. (Apologies to Nick Pileggi, but “Casino” is just “GoodFellas Go to Vegas”, and everybody knows it.)

“The Departed” is a remake, too, but Scorsese doesn’t let it feel like one this time around; he tackles the material head-on, without a hint of artifice or posturing, and with none of the affected, this-is-art-here pretense you could feel underneath all those self-important tracking shots in his previous pictures.

From beginning to end, it’s its own thing, with William Monahan’s screenplay taking the bones of the exquisite Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs” and rebuilding them into a shape that’s somehow burlier and meaner than the original, while staying just as light on its narrative feet.

And the director? He’s not worrying about which clip they’ll use at the Oscar ceremonies, or how the “For Your Consideration” ads will look. He’s actually excited about the movie he’s making. God bless him.

Just in case you’d lost your faith in the moviegoers of North America, the movie won the weekend, beating that pointless “Texas Chainsaw” prequel by almost eight million dollars — a feat that’s even more impressive when one considers that the “Chainsaw” prequel is over an hour shorter than “The Departed”, and can be shown more often in a day.

Also, there’s the small matter of it sucking. But we’ll get to that later in the week.

O Blogger

Sorry for the long silence; it appears Blogger and my webhost are no longer on speaking terms, so I’ve been unable to publish to the blog for the past week and a half.

In fact, the odds are slim that you’ll be able to see this post … but I’m hoping it can sneak around whatever issues are crippling my FTP servers.

Bear with me while I try to figure out a workaround. Anybody know any good blogging alternatives?

Version 2.0

So Blogger and my webhost aren’t speaking to one another, which explains the radio silence here over the past week and a half.

It’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that I haven’t been able to successfully publish a new blog post.

Frickin’ Blogger.

Anyway, I’m back now, and once I get the hang of WordPress I should even be able to restore the previous blog posts. It’ll be like nothing ever happened.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Bear with me, okay?

Can You Hear Me Now?

I’ve been trying to update this blog since Thursday morning, with no luck — Blogger’s been giving me a “Broken Pipe” error every time I try to post.

The error isn’t new to me — there was a period during TIFF when it was all I saw between the hours of 9 AM and 2:30 PM EDT — but I’ve never received it so consistently.

I mean, I’ve been home all weekend, compulsively flipping my laptop open and hitting the “Publish” button; and after a few minutes’ useless cycling at 0%, Blogger returns the broken-pipe error.

(How long has this been going on? I wrote the above Monday, October 2nd. It’s now Saturday the 7th.)

At least I got the PVR working.

The Ticking Clock

Apocalypse Savings Time
Amazing. Even without my Starweek gig, Wednesday is still the busiest writing day of the week — I’ve got five reviews to file for Friday’s Metro and four DVDs to write up for Zap2it, which would make for several solid hours of work even without screenings at 10 am and 7 pm.

Back tomorrow …

You Wanted DVD News?


How about this?

I won’t try to deny that “Blade Runner” has had an inestimable impact on tech culture, but I find it crushingly dull as a movie. It’s beautiful, sure, but the narrative is patchy and repetitive … and there’s not nearly enough of Rutger Hauer’s energy to balance the droning performances of Harrison Ford and Sean Young. (I know the actors’ monotones are intentional, but it still means the characters end up being very dull.)

I’m still looking forward to the new editions, because Ridley Scott is turning out to be a fairly successful post-facto filmmaker; the expanded “Alien” didn’t do any real harm to that film, unless you’re one of those nerds who argues that the restoration of the cocoon sequence renders invalid James Cameron’s explanation of the xenomorph life cycle in “Aliens”, and I found the recent restoration/expansion of “Kingdom of Heaven” a substantial improvement over the choppy, uninvolving theatrical cut.

So letting him go back to “Blade Runner”, which he’s been trying to do for a decade or so anyway, and a movie about which I’m ambivalent at best, seems like a good idea. It’s his movie, anyway.

It isn’t something I dread on the scale of the next wave of “Star Wars” revisions. And speaking of “Star Wars” and revisionism, don’t even get me started on Lucasfilm using 1993 laserdisc masters for September’s original-trilogy DVDs instead of locating a viable print source — that’s just pudu of the highest order. Imagine the geek cred in being the guy who gives up his prized collection of interpositives, and gives the movies back to the fans in all their pristine, unaltered glory …

… I mean, surely that’d be worth a message on the Jedi listserver, right?

Good? Bad? Can’t Really Say …

Hurrah! 'Hudson Hawk' is still funny!
Mary-Margaret, a friend in meatspace as well as on the internets, writes to ask how the Swaziland movie was, and opens a modest can of worms.

The Swaziland movie — which, if you didn’t click the link, is “Wah-Wah”, the directorial debut of the actor Richard E. Grant — doesn’t open until Friday. And I’m reluctant to discuss any movie in detail before it opens … not because I’ve signed some devil’s pact with the studios, but because the detail comes when my review runs, and the review runs on opening day.

This can be awkward. I don’t want to get into those blind-item games where I start a post with something like “I’ve just seen the YEAR’S WORST MOVIE” and let all y’all wonder what the hell I’m talking about. (Besides, with any luck the year’s worst movie is already behind us .)

On the other hand, “Wah-Wah” has been fair game for months now, having played the Toronto film festival last fall and opened in regular release around the world. Does that mean there’s an exemption for festival films? Should there be a conditional pass if a movie’s already been released on DVD elsewhere in the world?

I have a feeling that part of the problem, at least as it applies to “Wah-Wah”, is that I don’t feel particularly passionate about the movie. Don’t take that for anything more than it is; with apologies to Theodore Sturgeon, the horrible truth of art criticism is that five percent of anything produced for any medium will be great, five percent will be crap, and the remaining ninety percent will be, well, neither great nor crap.

I guess I’ll elaborate further in Friday’s review.