Passchendaele

After seeing Passchendaele with Maria, I promised myself that I’d write a review of the movie if, for nothing else, to ensure that no one else makes the same mistake that we did. Seriously.

Passchendaele is a love story that seems to climax around the Battle of Passchendaele during the First World War. The main storyline, set to the backdrop of the war, is a love relationship between a soldier, a nurse he meets while in the hospital, and the nurse’s brother. As far as I can tell, it’s all got something to do with the fact that said nurse’s father left Canada to fight for the Germans and people don’t seem to like that.

To make a long review short there’s one key phrase that I want to zero in on from my last paragraph: as far as I can tell. The thing about Passchendaele is that, if you can tell what the heck is going on half the time, you may already be a winner. Perhaps it’s some kind of game or something and if you can actually follow the disjointed, fragmented, outstandingly confusing plot line then you win some kind of prize. I do not know. But if you expect to revolve a plot around the fact that I should be feeling empathy for a character I haven’t even been introduced to then you’re playing at the wrong game, pal.

As if a disjointed plot and poor no character development weren’t enough to turn me off a movie there are also some slight scripting problems. This would be true if by “scripting problems” I meant, “Apparently that theory about monkeys and typewriters is true only it isn’t Shakespeare that they’d produce.” Perhaps I’m being too hard on the monkeys though. If I were being paid in bananas I’m sure I’d produce similar quality work too.

The final feather in this film’s cap is the casting, which was apparently performed entirely via a series of random dice rolls and names being plucked from hats. The names in the hat were chosen randomly from a phonebook. A phonebook of actors who cannot act and have no business being in movies. And beware, the result of mixing poor scripting plus terrible character development plus awful casting is quite spectacular.

I suppose if it’s any consolation I’m truly disappointed because I did have high hopes for this film. Maria and I rented Passchendaele and truly looked forward to seeing it. As a rule, I buy into anything Canadian and I’m always willing to give something produced domestically a really good shot. Even with lowered expectations—knowing a made-in-Canada film wouldn’t have a made-in-Hollywood budget—Passchendaele falls miserably short. From it’s very first scene, stolen verbatim from the Band of Brothers catalogue, the movie is a masterpiece of awful film-making and if it’s any gauge of how truly bad this movie is, other than The Wedding Date, it’s the only film that Maria and I actually turned off without finishing.

Re: Conservation with K’naan

I wanted to take some time to respond to some of the response I got to my conversation with K’naan. Right away, I want to say that I can’t respond to everything so I do have to pick and choose.

First, a few bits from a reader calling themselves tgo:

I think you are still skirting around the main issue by including a lot of rhetoric in your blog post. I suggest you get to the core issue particularly because there is wording that is very loaded in your initial interaction with knaan such as ‘enslave’ ‘nation’.

In response to the question of skirting around the main issue. It’s ironic. But it also was never my intention to write a blog post about the evil’s of Coca-Cola (this addresses some of the other complaints this reader brings up). Instead, I posted about a conversation that K’naan and I had, and the ins and outs of that particular conversation. I do see how a word like ‘enslave’ is pretty loaded and perhaps could use some explaining, but, like I said in my original post, that wasn’t the direction that K’naan chose to take the conversation, even though I tried (unsuccessfully) to bring it back on track.

I do agree that in order for there to be good dialogue, you need to communicate the facts and not rhetoric. That was my original intention—perhaps a little emotionally charged—but it failed.

Continue reading…

My Conversation with K’naan

When I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary. I certainly didn’t expect to find myself embroiled in a heated discussion with one of Canadians foremost rappers, K’naan.

But that’s how it turned out.

Waking up, and still blinking the sleep from my eyes, I had a look at what had been going on overnight in the Twitterverse. (Yes, I said Twitterverse, but mostly because it sounds fun to say.) Recently, I’d gotten into K’naan, after hearing him on CBC Radio several times. He was an interesting rap artist and an even more interesting person: a Somali-Canadian who remembers well the hard streets of East Africa and speaks about those experiences freely, proudly. He’s been enjoying a lot of play on my iPod and, since I noticed he had a Twitter account, I’d been following him on there as well.

This particular morning, I noticed a tweet indicating that he’d just finished recording a new version of his freedom ballad, Waving Flag, for a Coke commercial that’s scheduled to air during the World Cup in South Africa. I was immediately offended, perhaps partly because of my sleeply state, but also because of some deep-seeded ethical issues that I’m aware of surrounding Coke and Africa.

From research I’ve done personally, and from things passed along to me during my undergraduate career, I know that Coke has done a great deal of damage in poor, rural Africa. I’ve read essays and seen films depicting the practices of the multi-national corporation. I’ve read that Coke comes into the country-side, introducing a drink that is cheaper to buy than clean water (which is already hard to come by in many parts of rural Africa). And then, once poor Africans are addicted to the caffeine-laden drink, Coke raises the price, significantly, and there’s little that Africans can do…

In addition to these poor practices, I’ve heard about the abuse of water sources, the mistreatment of entire factories of workers, and the bullying of domestic beverage brands in tiny communities and populations. On balance, Coke is, how do we say, a little bit evil in my view. And to me, from all that I understand about Coke and Africa, it has nothing to do with freedom.

So, on that note, I decided to tweet back at K’naan with this message:

Is disappointed that @Iamknaan is letting the Africa-enslaving Coke use his freedom ballad in their commercials. #ironic

I thought nothing of it, of course, except that I was disappointed. Disappointed in a person that I thought was a genuine advocate for the African poor, for the suffering, etc. Then I went to work…

Continue reading…

Google Waves Goodbye to Conversation

Google Wave is a fresh initiative from Google, announced this week at their big developers conference. Out of Google Australia, of all places, and created by the same Danish team who brought us Maps, Wave is intended to be a whole new way of looking at instant-messaging, e-mail and collaborative communication. In a nutshell, its intended to fundamentally alter the way we communicate online.

According to Google, the models for most of our online communication modes are simply mimicking older technologies: e-mail mimics post mail, instant-messaging mimics telephone calls, etc. Instead of following in those footsteps, as it were, Wave is an entirely new communication medium, thought up from scratch, they say. Whether or not its possible to create something brand new, having watched the keynote and seen the application in action, it’s probably about as close as you could get.

But despite being a major innovation, a potential game-changer, as they say these days (as everyone and their mother says these days—thank you Obama!), there’s at least one feature of the new platform that I find troubling.

Continue reading…

Age of Persuasion

One of my favourite CBC Radio shows is finally available online.

Due to complex licensing agreements it took two years, but The Age of Persuasion, is finally available in the on-demand format. It isn’t a podcast, just yet, but it’s the second-best thing, I suppose.

The Age of Persuasion is an excellent half-hour show about advertising (i.e., persuasion). The host Terry O’Reilly is a veteran of the industry and his shows are funny, insightful and incredibly well-produced. He has a knack for making connections you’d never have thought of—linking ideas and issues to advertising, etc. I haven’t heard a show that didn’t fascinate me. It’s worth a listen.