Finally!

August Leave a Comment

I am finally not the only one who can’t stand Douglas Coupland (except Microserfs, of course). This paragraph from the article says all that I could ever hope to say, in fewer words: Fellow stream-of-consciousness postmodernists including Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis are talented enough to sustain a book chockablock with tripe asides, but Coupland isn’t. He’s just not a very good writer. In fact, he’s a rather lazy, terrible writer, a one-trick gimmick artist badly in need of a software upgrade. If the book can be downloaded, don’t risk ruining your iPod with it.

Review: Ultraviolet

August Leave a Comment

Well. I’m almost speechless. Let’s just start with the verdict and work from there. Ultraviolet is the second-worst film I have ever seen. The worst was Batman & Robin. The only reason I didn’t walk out was because, let’s face it, Milla Jovovich’s rear-end displayed ten feet high in glorious digital is not something you get to see every day. After this tragedy I am now confident that Kurt Wimmer is not a filmmaker, he is a fashion designer. The only compelling thing about this film was the costuming, which was astonishingly good. Equilibrium was alright, but certainly not the brilliant film that many college-aged viewers hail it as. But it was fairly well put together. Ultraviolet was not. The opening action sequence was so poorly animated that I kept expecting to actually be able to see wires or the green screen or something. Wimmer employed the soft-focus technique, although… Continue Reading →

Critic’s Other Corner

August Leave a Comment

In connection with my last post, I’d like to draw your attention to Joe Morgenstern’s essay in the Wall Street Journal on how the critic’s perspective differs from that of an ordinary viewer, not because of specialized training or a certain background (although those are factors as well), but rather because of the timing; critics see these movies before the hype machines have really started to roll. We see them after.

Critic’s Corner

August Leave a Comment

The Morning News has a great little entry on bad reviews of films that were otherwise much lauded. Read it, and read it now. With Crash taking the Best Picture award this year I very nearly lost all faith in American cinema. This review says almost everything about the film that I could possibly want to say. (“Contrived, obvious and overstated, Crash is basically just one white man’s righteous attempt to make other white people feel as if they’ve confronted the problem of racism head-on.”). Crash was horribly obvious. In fact, I think the only way it could have been more obvious is if Paul Haggis had actually stood behind me in the cinema and screamed “I’m dealing with racism!” while striking me on the head with a book about racism. Not to mention that the cinematography and editing of this film made it very clear that Paul Haggis wants… Continue Reading →

DIY Publishing

August Leave a Comment

Current web-app superstars (or arrogant prima donnas, which ever you prefer) 37 Signals have written a book and are distributing it solely as a PDF, for $19USD a pop. They are now claiming that because of their success with the book (1750 copies sold so far) that there is “a new sherrif in town” (ie. DIY publishing). But is there really? Kottke chimes in as usual with a look at raw numbers rather than context and calls it good (well, “an interesting expirment” is his final declaration, but the rest of the short post seems more optimistic than that), but then I expected no less. What I think we really have to look at is this: Who is their target audience? In this case it’s tech-savvy entrepeneurs who are trying to get the most out of their budgets and still learn from people who are successful. Go to the business… Continue Reading →

Why the Change?

August Leave a Comment

For reasons I do not even remotely understand, Maisonneuve, one of the finest magazines to come out of Canada in a very, very long time, is changing its format to become a sort of Toronto Life for Montréal. In just two years, Maisonneuve has been nominated for fourteen National Magazine Awards and taken home four of these—including the prestigious Magazine of the Year in 2005. Looking to solidify its place in the market, Maisonneuve is transforming itself from a national arts magazine into a magazine of Montreal life and city culture. The “new” Maisonneuve will be launched at the end of September 2006. Can someone explain this nonsense to me?

Novel School

August Leave a Comment

Last month Louise Doughty (apparently a widely acclaimed author, although if I had a nickel for every widely acclaimed author I haven’t heard of I would be far better off than I am today) began a column on, essentially, how to write a novel in a year. Throughout 2006, I will be writing a column in this newspaper called Write a Novel in a Year. Can you write a novel in a year? Well, yes, if you don’t do much else and you work hard and are talented. But in actual fact, if you follow the column, and do the exercises I set (yes, exercises) what you will end up with will not be a novel, it won’t even be the first draft of a novel, it will be a body of work, the raw material, which you may one day be able to shape and work on until it… Continue Reading →