12 Days of Christmas: The Lion in the Winter

It's 1183 and King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) and his wife Queen Eleanor (Katharine Hepburn) are holding Christmas Court.

King Henry is suppose to name a successor and wants to name Prince John (Nigel Terry). Queen Eleanor wants Prince Richard (Anthony Hopkins in his big screen debut). Meanwhile King Philip II (Timothy Dalton - future James Bond in his motion picture debut) of France wants his half-sister Alais (Jane Merrow) to marry the future heir. Except that she's been the mistress of King Henry for quite sometime now. A lot of verbal sparing and death threats follow.

The film is based on a play by James Goldman and directed by Anthony Harvey who, despite working several times with Katherine Hepburn, never managed to top this film. It isn't historically accurate but the acting between O'Toole and Hepburn is magnificent.

Six In The Morning

1 HANG UPS Saskatchewan RCMP to crack down on cell phone use while driving, starting...now! (CBC)

2 MORE ON THAT FLAWED U.S. HEALTH CARE DEAL No public option. No abortion in conservative jurisdictions. Yet this is still a landmark deal? Welcome to America. (Globe And Mail)

3 CANADA MET WITH RED CROSS IN 2006 What did the Red Cross tell Canada about Afghan prisoners? We don't know. Did they warn Canada that transferred prisoners were being tortured? We don't know. (Toronto Star)

4 LISTEN TO LISA The Simpsons might shape viewers' nuclear power views, says a professor with an eye for the obvious. (CBC/Canadian Press)

5 GREEN VIBRATIONS Liberal MP and doctor Carolyn Bennett says Canadians deserve non-toxic sex toys. Dog Blog salutes you, Dr. Bennett. (Globe and Mail)

6 "DON'T BRING A GUN TO A SNOWBALL FIGHT" I bet a certain snowball fight-hating Washington, D.C. cop is going to get coal in his stocking this Christmas. (Washington City Paper) And hopefully, long-term administrative leave and counselling.

Fun!



Snowballs vs. gun!



Fun again!



(Note to snowballers: in a situation like this chanting funny slogans is good. Saying "fuck you pig"? Prrrobably not the best idea. Besides unneccessarily escalating the conflict, it makes you sound like an asshole instead of a friendly, playful snow elf.)

Pick of the Day: Close Strangers: Distant Relations

This is the latest in a series of exhibitions the MacKenzie Art Gallery has presented where they invite a local artist to visit their vault and select works from the permanent collection to curate a show of their own. Sometimes prairie dog columnist Seema Goel was the first artist, I believe, to participate. A few years ago, she paired some traditional Western landscape paintings with Inuit prints to explore the link between art in those cultures and their broader relationship with nature and the land.

Close Strangers: Distant Relations is the brainchild of University of Regina Fine Arts professor David Garneau. Painter, art critic and academic, Garneau, for the last ten years or so, has been keenly engaged in critiquing pop culture and historical representations of First Nations and Metis people in Canada and the United States.


For this show, he pulled a broad range of paintings and sculptures from the gallery's collection. He then recorded short story-based commentaries on each work that viewers can listen to via iPods borrowed from the gallery gift shop while they wander through the show. Neat idea, eh?

Pictured above is Janet Werner's 1999 painting Gray Girl which is included in the show. Close Strangers: Distant Relations is on display at the MacKenzie until Jan. 3.

I Saw Avatar

Saw it. Liked it. Recommend it. Avatar has no plot, the characters have the depth of Disney cartoons and the dialogue ("You're not in Kansas!" "We will fight terror, with terror!") ranges from "sketchy" to "George Lucas-esque painful to listen to." But...

Yeah, you should probably see this in the theatre. Ideally in 3-D. Ideally as soon as possible.

I love Avatar's dopey, hippie message. Maybe it's just that I saw the film on the right day but I was all-up for a flashy, brainless "tree-huggers vs. American-style corporate fascists in space" fable where (spoiler alert!) the good [cats] win. After a couple of weeks watching humanity's leaders bungle through Copenhagen for a useless non-treaty on global warming in real life, I needed giant, blue, feline warriors killing the crap out of crummy, capitalist scum and their stormtroopers-for-hire.

When the helicopters came, Bruce Cockburn wanted a rocket launcher. All the Na'vi (as they're called) need are inch-thick, four-foot arrows (unnecessarily) dipped in neurotoxic poison. Suck on that, you forest-raping Earth-fuckers!

As for the special and 3-D effects, dial your expectations down, slightly. Avatar won't change the way movies are made like Star Wars or Jurassic Park did. Avatar's effects aren't revolutionary, they're evolutionary. But yes, they're the best effects ever. Just don't expect to see a new colour being invented before your eyes, is all I'm saying. (I should add that, to director James Cameron's credit, the effects aren't used in a pushy way that would distract from the movie. Restraint is an admirable quality in a film that's 95 per cent computer-made.)

So that's my take. Hope it's helpful. Four dogs out of five.

Okay, four and a half. Not too bad for a flick with no script.

No Olympic Gold for BC First Nations

You'd think that authentic aboriginal art would be highly prized by tourists in Vancouver to witness the Olympic spectacle. You'd think that the production of same would be a big industry for first nations communities in BC this year. And you'd think that'd mitigate the concern from some anti-Olympic activists that the event will be a money loser for the city. "Sure, the Olympics cost us a bundle of cash we'll never make back," they'll say, "but at least aboriginal Canadians made a mint selling Haida carvings and such."

You'd think all that, but you'd be wrong. From what the Edmonton Journal is reporting today, BC's first-nations communities won't be seeing much in the way of Olympic gold.

Turns out, while an aboriginal art company is going bankrupt in BC, the Olympic organizers have outsourced the making of authentic aboriginal art to China.

12 Days of Christmas: Lethal Weapon

"Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock."

Splat! A young hooker, high on an illegal substance, jumps off a balcony and kick starts this 1987 action packed film.

It's Christmas time and Sergeant Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) is investigating the death of the girl with his new partner Sergeant Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson). Riggs is suicidal since the death of his wife and Murtaugh is just getting to old for this shit. After watering down the franchise with three sequels, some people might have forgotten how much fun, excitement and intensity this film has.

Made near the end of the '80s and following in the footsteps of several buddy cop movies (48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop), this film was directed by Richard Donner (Superman, The Omen, The Goonies) and written by Shane Black (The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).

After the opening credits and the dead hooker, this film contains so many action scenes, it's almost hard to list them. But highlights include jumping off a building (with a suicidal citizen), a helicopter shoot out, an electric shock torture scene, numerous gun fights, several scenes containing the constant verbal sparing between Murtaugh and Riggs and of course the final kung fu fight on Murtaugh's lawn between Riggs and Mr. Joshua(Gary Busey). This movie is an intense ride.

Pick of the Day: A Serious Man

Following their triumph with No Country for Old Men the Coen Brothers return to their roots with this quirky comedy that mines their own mid-Western Jewish upbringing for inspiration. Set in 1967, the film stars Michael Stuhlbarg as a physics prof named Larry Gopnik who struggles to cope when his comfortable middle-class existence begins to crumble like an asteroid being torn apart by cetrifugal force as it spins ever faster in outer space to extend the physics metaphor -- which the Coens doubtlessly use to great effect in exploring questions of faith, morality and family responsibility.

A Serious Man plays tonight at the RPL at 7 p.m. Here's the trailer. (YouTube)

And if you're in the mood for a double-bll Amreeka screens at 9 p.m. Directed by Cherien Dabis, it chronicles the adventures of a single mother named Mona (Nisreen Faour) who journeys with her son from the West Bank to the promised land of America (small town Illinois, to be precise). Here's the trailer (YouTube)

Stolen? Or Escaped?

A Regina woman's gingerbread men are missing. (Leader-Post)

Blarrrrrrgh!

I don't "do" Saturday mornings and I'm even iffy on afternoons but there's too much report to take the day COMPLETELY off, so here's your evening news links. All bad news, all things you need to know. Sorry about this. Better put a helmet on before you read further.

1 COPENHAGEN RUINED! RUINED! Global political leadership and capitalism fail utterly to sign a meaningful, binding deal to save our future civilization. What came out of Copenhagen is practically useless. It's the failingest failure that ever failed and I hate it and it sucks and we're all fucked. Epic. Fail. (Guardian, NPR, BBC, Guardian again, Globe And Mail (cartoon), Grist, CBC, Desmogblog, Green Party Of Canada/Elizabeth May, and one more from the Guardian--poor George Monbiot, who just calls it like it is.)

Thanks to sitting on our asses and sticking our heads in the ground (we're flexible!), and listening to lunatics like Sarah Palin, Lord Viscount Christopher Monckton Of Bugeye-Pompington, and Ian Plimer, the denial dude Rex Murphy has the contrarian crush on, our children's world is almost certainly going to be much, much worse than yours was. (How Stuff Works).

We can bail out banks. We can invade countries that never attacked us. We can't agree to save the climate. IF anyone's left to write a history of our species in a hundred years this disaster will be one of the biggest jokes going.

(steam blowing out ears)

The public has been misinformed and nakedly lied to, which works because we're all mostly decent people who aren't experts who tend to expect the best in others and when there's two groups arguing about something complicated, we assume they both have reasonable points. That's how the liars trick us into being polite when we should be freaking the fuck out en mass (and on their lying asses). Like prairie dog printed last edition: the climate liars fucked our future. Liars? We probably should've called them terrorists. Because they are. Madmen and terrorists and climate war criminals, defending indefensible economic interests.

(Top of head blows off like a raccoon in a geyser)

BUT: I refuse--refuse!--to believe that our species is incapable of acting in its collective interest of self-preservation. Unlikely to do so, yes. Sadly. Incapable? Absolutely not. I'll probably be alive for another 30-40 years and I'm really interested to see how this turns out. Maybe people will wake up, hold their leaders to account, organize, demonstrate, etc? Stranger things have happened.

Oh and Rex Myurphy? You're an awful man. (Globe And Mail)

IN OTHER NEWS...

2 AUSCHWITZ SIGN THEFT Holy motherfuckers, Batman. Maddest I've been about vandalism in, well, maybe ever. (CBC/Canadian Press)

3 AN AMERICAN COUP In a new book, the FBI is accused of abusing their power in a bid to jail Bill Clinton after Monicagate--by the former president's secret service guards. (New York Times) How come no one "abuses their power" to go after war criminals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Oh, right. Fascism. I forgot. American fascism says blowjobs are an unforgiveable sin but it's okay to bomb countries under false pretences, spy on your own population, blow the cover of your own country's secret agents for political payback against whistleblowers, torture your enemies, shepard huge contracts to your business buds, cut taxes to the super wealthy while ordinary people laguish in poverty, deregulate everything until your country goes bankrupt, blah blah etc. blah. Fascism is fun!

4 IRAN ADMITS ELECTION PROTESTORS BEATEN TO DEATH IN PRISON The election-stealing country's judiciary says that's the facts Jack. Oopsie doodles! (MSNBC)

5 LAME, WATERED DOWN HEALTH CARE BILL HAS THE VOTES TO PASS, WELL, AT THE MOMENT ANYWAY So yippee for America, or something, I guess. Too bad about women who want to have abortions, but, whatever. Lots of American women don't really seem to care about their rights much anyway. (Washington Post)

6 POLL DANCING IGGY WANTS ANOTHER YEAR OF STEPHEN HARPER? A federal election in 2010? Nope, nope, nope, says Ignatieff. (Ottawa Citizen)

12 Days of Christmas: Trading Places

There's a scene in this movie where Dan Aykroyd, brought low in a social experiment of nature versus nurture, sits on a bus in a Santa Claus suit. He's drunk and foul looking and he had just failed to frame Eddie Murphy at a company Christmas party of his former employers in an attempt try to reclaim his previous life. At the party he had "procured" some food and booze. Now sitting on a bus he pulls a smoked salmon out of his coat and tries to eat it through his Santa Claus beard getting hair stuck in his mouth. It is one of the funniest and nastiest bits I have ever seen. Sure there's sicker gags out there on film but that beard is just a nasty, filthy looking beard and I'm not sure I'd wear it much less let it get stuck on food that I was trying to eat.

The film is one John Landis' last of his really funny comedies that he made. After this he made several mediocre comedies like Spies Like Us and Coming to America and more than a few done right disasters - Innocent Blood, Beverly Hills Cop III and The Stupids.

This is one of those rare comedies that has some insightful social commentary. It also has an ending that apparently makes perfect sense if you're a commodities broker. I've tried to follow it several times and I think I understand what's going on. Fortunately there are folks out that look into this sort of thing and have actually explained what happens.