Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Michael Moore’s work. I liked Sicko, The Awful Truth and Bowling for Columbine, and I was ok with Fahrenheit 9/11.

But Slacker Uprising doesn’t explain any issue. It doesn’t argue any point. It doesn’t actually try to change anything, despite Moore’s pleas that the film be screened before the election. It’s just a bunch of videos of stump speeches pieced together with a bunch of videos of artists performing protest songs. This review from the Ann Arbor News explains it pretty well.

There are some interesting parts, about how Republicans attempted to stop the speeches, offered money to get student unions to cancel them, and even showed up, chanted and prayed out loud while Moore was speaking, but there’s already a documentary about that.

For those used to Moore’s passionate, personal arguments about political issues, you’ll be disappointed. He doesn’t even narrate the movie. Instead, you just hear him speaking to the converted, to the point where the hyperpartisanship of those audiences might turn you off from voting for Democrats.

Michael Moore chanting “one more day” isn’t entertaining, moving, inspiring or educational. And it’s not worth watching.

See also:

• September 9, 2008 — From baby photos to baby scandals
• September 6, 2008 — This speech is a rerun
• September 2, 2008 — Hurricanes suck

For those who want to show their Habs pride, catch a glimpse of players, and have entire afternoons to blow off, they’re filming Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.

See also:

• November 13, 2008 — Right now now now
• November 11, 2008 — I … must … have … the MEDALLIONS
• October 18, 2008 — Habs Inside/Out does guest blogging

Want to see the feature film based on the online hit Le Cas Roberge? Well, tough. It’s been pulled from theatres after a disastrous $40,000 over two weeks in cinemas. The problem, apparently, is that it sucks and the few people watching it fall asleep halfway through. They’re keeping their chins up, saying it’s “not a disaster,” but it’s hard to quantify it as much else.

Maybe you can catch it in a few weeks at Dollar Cinema, where screening in front of three people isn’t considered strange.

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Something you don’t see that often: A Quebec film screening at Dollar Cinema.

Sci-fi parody flick Dans une galaxie près de chez vous 2 (not to be confused with Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2) is playing there twice a day until Thursday. Here’s a review from when it first came out in April from The Gazette’s Brendan Kelly.

See also:

• November 19, 2008 — RBO et al need to understand anglos better
• November 11, 2008 — Do the line
• November 5, 2008 — Canadian Association of Broadcasters ignores Quebec

This is a joke, right? I mean, they’re not actually making a movie about the Maple Leafs, with Justin Timberlake playing a Québécois hockey player?

And one whose jokes are so racist that they end up making us look bad?

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Dear Newline Cinema,

I’m available to proofread your websites in the future.

See also:

• October 21, 2008 — Pourquoi suis-je obsédé par cette photo ironique?*
• August 20, 2008 — More “clarifications”
• August 14, 2008 — CTV Montreal’s $23,600 “clarification”

It will also feature an electronic gadget to read the bar code on a patient’s identification bracelet and automatically dispense appropriate medication.

“The bar code is to distinguish among three people (for example) all named Claude Gagnon on the same floor,” Leclerc said.

“The medicine dose will be prepared by a robot. The patient’s charts will be filed electronically in the computer.”

The electronic gadget will be connected to the hospital’s mainframe, which will be connected to the Net, but both will be protected from unwanted intrusions by Gatekeeper security software by Gregg Microsystems. So your medicine dispensing will be perfectly secure and 100% accurate, unless you’re friends with Angela Bennett.

(In case you don’t get the obscure movie reference, the previous paragraph is fiction.)

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See also:

• November 15, 2008 — Hand explains metro art
• November 11, 2008 — Turnstile terror
• September 16, 2008 — Welcome Daybreak listeners

It makes sense. How many people really need to rent a movie for seven days? It’s better to pay a set price per day (or even per hour) and leave it at that.

Personally, I don’t remember the last time I rented a movie.

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I wonder why he wasn’t searched for the camera before entering the theatre.

See also:

• May 10, 2008 — Lessons on plagiarism
• December 19, 2007 — Arrests in tvboxset.com case?
• November 16, 2007 — Own a photocopier, get sued

The Festival du nouveau cinéma blog (2007) is getting contributions from Gazette researcher Liz Ferguson, film critic John Griffin, freelancer Al Kratina, columnists Brendan Kelly and Bill Brownstein, and editor Basem Boshra.

See also:

• September 21, 2008 — Gazette books section: bigger, less often, plus blog
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 13, 2008 — YASTGB: Lampert at the airplane junket

See also:

• September 21, 2008 — Gazette books section: bigger, less often, plus blog
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 13, 2008 — YASTGB: Lampert at the airplane junket

For those who don’t know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there’s much better.

Now, you might think “wow, that’s a really weird hobby”, and you would be wrong. You see, there’s someone else in town who’s doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call “zapping” and showing awful clips to eager audiences.

Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn’t decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.

So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia’s DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here’s the teaser.

Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5’s Kaleidoscopic Zappin’ Party (Teaser).

Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)

See also:

• September 17, 2007 — Total Crap is back
• October 28, 2008 — Oh. Canada. Our. Home. And. Native. Land.
• October 11, 2008 — Proulx unplugged

See also:

• September 24, 2008 — CHOM ferme ses portes
• September 19, 2008 — Boom de ah dah, eh?
• August 19, 2008 — Another gigantic waste of money from Bell

As you might expect, some people are not happy about this.

Guzzo can’t really be blamed for this. The law makes the cinema owner just as responsible if the law is broken, so they’re just looking after their own asses. But the idea that so much is contraband — food, drink, bags, cameras — inside a room where all they’re doing is projecting an image onto a screen kind of boggles the mind. Even aircraft luggage doesn’t get this kind of treatment.

Of course, it goes without saying that, other than proving the U.S. movie industry has our government by the ballsack, this bill doesn’t do anything. Michael Geist (whose blog should be on everyone’s reading list) has a roundup of its problems (and a cool video about it too), to which I will only add this: Movies recorded in a crowded movie theatre are of such bad quality that I’m surprised anyone actually does it.

Take this badly-camcorded Family Guy / Star Wars bit. It includes a laugh track, viewer commentary, a partially obscured, darkened, oblong screen (that the camera pans away from every now and then) and a barely-discernable original audio track. Is this kind of stuff the world’s greatest threat to the movie industry?

See also:

• November 16, 2007 — Own a photocopier, get sued
• September 8, 2008 — YASTGB: Bloc’s campaign bus sends mixed messages
• February 11, 2008 — PicApp: Ads for copyright compliance?

Guilty until proven innocent, just because it’s so difficult to prove guilt.

See also:

• September 8, 2008 — YASTGB: Bloc’s campaign bus sends mixed messages
• January 6, 2008 — CRTC looking at eliminating top-40 radio restrictions
• December 25, 2007 — Bell Canada, our Do Not Call overlords

I suppose I should mention that the claims — that people camcording films in Montreal’s movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies — have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn’t be able to write big feature stories about Canada’s rampant piracy problem.

In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in “trouble” because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.

The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a “diner des cons” with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.

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The surprising thing about both the movie and its presentation was how funny it was (granted, the room was filled with geeks so it might not be so universally funny). The designers (type and otherwise) all had differing opinions on Helvetica, calling it ubiquitous, genius and boring. You couldn’t help but laugh at how absolute they were about their opinions.

To add to the fun, the screening staff had t-shirts that read “Helveticrew” and there was a small group of Arial enthusiasts in the crowd (they were playfully booed as they were announced and again as one of them won the first door prize - a Helvetica movie poster).

What got much fervent applause was the line right after the Arial introduction:

“We’ve stopped the Comic Sans people at the door.”

P.S. There really were a librarian, an archivist and a graphic designer among the people I knew at the screening. The librarian and designer are sisters, for what it’s worth.

See also:

• October 28, 2008 — Oh. Canada. Our. Home. And. Native. Land.
• October 11, 2008 — Proulx unplugged
• September 24, 2008 — CHOM ferme ses portes

For some reason (greed), its makers decided to turn this story into an industry.  They produced 11 sequels, about one every year and a half. Instead of a well-written, gritty adventure story that can be enjoyed by young and old alike, they turned it into a musical farce that a four-year-old would quickly find boring.

Their latest outing comes out on DVD this week. I just saw a commercial for it on TV. I know all movies pick and choose what critics they’ll quote, but in this case the only two quotes were from a parenting magazine. In fact, it was Parenting Magazine. This magazine. Somehow I don’t think their movie critics are as harsh as the L.A. Times or Roger Ebert.

This spring, they’re adding a Cartoon Network TV series to the empire.
God help us all.

See also:

• November 11, 2008 — I … must … have … the MEDALLIONS
• October 7, 2008 — Iz tha green shitz
• September 24, 2008 — Everyone’s exclusive

As I entered I noticed the Dollar Cinema is now a $2 cinema. It’s still worth going (popcorn and soda are still $1), but on principle it seems strange. Kind of like seeing stuff at the Dollar Store that’s more than a dollar.

The movie itself was OK. Craig makes a believable (though incredibly naive) Bond. But … is there a second part to this movie or something? I feel unsatisfied. He doesn’t even get a girl at the end! (Sorry if that spoiled it for you)

See also:

• July 13, 2008 — This is how to bring the two solitudes together