Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won’t be able to see Harry Potter and Emma’s enhanced breasts before it’s actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won’t be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they’ll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.
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.