Quebec’s striking students received some high-profile musical support last night when Montreal’s Arcade Fire appeared on “Saturday Night Live” wearing the symbol of the student movement, a red square.

The Grammy-winners, along with Nick Fraiture of The Strokes, accompanied host Mick Jagger on a version of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 single, “The Last Time.” They aren’t the first Quebec artists to offer the symbolic endorsement while on an international stage: earlier Saturday, filmmaker Xavier Dolan and the stars of his new movie Laurence Anyways wore the carré rouge on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.

While Arcade Fire performed, protestors once again flooded the streets of Montreal, testing Quebec’s new Bill 78, intended to clamp down on the strike. Among other strictures, the law requires that police be given eight hours notice of any gatherings involving more than 50 people. They have reportedly been flooded with calls, including prank notices of children’s birthday parties.

By Mark Leiren-Young

It takes years to make a movie. It takes less than 48 hours to determine its fate.

If the box office numbers from Friday and Saturday night aren’t impressive, a movie won’t be in theatres the following week.

Samuel L. Jackson’s latest, The Samaritan, opens tonight and if you’re looking for a movie this weekend here’s the scoop on what you should be seeing instead of The Avengers or Battleship. The Samaritan is a modern film noir drawing strong early reviews, including a thumbs up from Roger Ebert. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to go straight, and Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson plays the bad guy determined to make sure he doesn’t.

I emailed co-writer-director, David Weaver, whose previous films include the quirky cool festival favourites Century Hotel and Siblings, to ask what excited him about making a 21st century film noir.

“A prof of mine at film school said once that directors just spend their career remaking the movies they loved when they misspent their youth in darkened theatres. Well, I always loved noir. And where are they now? I’m not necessarily talking about classic noir (although I bow to no one in my appreciation), but to revisionist, Jim Thompson-inspired noir, like The Grifters or The Crying Game. Nobody’s making those movies anymore? Fine. I’ll make them myself.”

Weaver’s other stars include Luke Kirby, Deborah Kara Unger and Gil Bellows — all faces you’ll recognize even if you don’t know their names and all of them Canadian. Yep, The Samaritan is an honest to Telefilm Canadian movie — and it has something few Canadian films do, besides brand name stars like Jackson and Wilkinson . . . it’s actually opening in more than a few tiny art houses and it’s premiering simultaneously in the US which means a bit of actual PR. Not Battleship PR but, hey, a review from Ebert already tops the attention most CanCon films get and a great first weekend would be good news not just for Weaver, but for the Canadian film industry.

“It’s just such a jungle out there, with so many possibilities for your entertainment dollar, as they say. So if audiences don’t show up on the first weekend then the movie is likely to disappear,” he says. “I spend my life frustrated that I didn’t get a chance to see the way they were intended to be seen — on the big screen. And all of this is particularly true for our movie, which is a little bit of a throwback to begin with. After all, don’t you want to see a noir in the theatre? That’s really the only way you can see into the deep, dark shadows.”

Producer Tony Wosk told me, “The opening weekend of any film is incredibly important these days because of a constant fight for a limited number of screens. A film has to perform in that opening weekend to ensure it doesn’t get replaced by another film the following weekend. For an independent film it’s even more important because Hollywood tentpole films often snap up the majority of screens in any market.”

Wosk spent six years on the board of Canada’s First Weekend Club — a group that spreads the word about Canadian film openings in the hopes that a first weekend will lead to a second weekend and a third and . . .

Full disclosure: Wosk produced my first feature film, The Green Chain, and without the help of The First Weekend Club I doubt our film would have played a second week. That’s why I’m aware of the importance of first weekends and such a fan of the First Weekend Club.

And that’s why I’ll give the last word to their executive director Anita Adams, who I contacted for another quote about why seeing The Samaritan this weekend won’t sink Battleship but would be, well, the act of a good Samaritan — not to mention a savvy cinephile. “The first weekend of a film’s release is critical,” says Adams. “The more people that go see a film during those first three days, the more likelihood that film will have an extended run. A film’s future really hinges on the success of that opening weekend, as theatre owners look at the box office results Monday morning and decide which films to keep and which to cut. So if you want to help some great Canadian films stay in theatres longer, go see them opening weekend!”

A few days before The Avengers debuted I was asked why I was so excited about seeing what’s looking like the most successful comic book movie of all time. This was my answer.

I’m a lifelong comic book fan and the idea that it’s even possible to make The Avengers has my inner 16-year old doing cartwheels — which is seriously impressive because my outer 16-year old sure as hell couldn’t do cartwheels. The idea that The Avengers is doable is mind-boggling; the fact that they hired a lifelong comic book fan to bring the series to life . . . and that they handed the project to the guy who should have been doing The X-Men all along, is beyond cool.

Joss Whedon doesn’t just freely admit his comic book influences — he has actually written comics. He did a run of The X-Men that lived up to the title billing as “amazing.” What I love about the Marvel movies is that, whether they work or not — and even when they have inexplicably awful sequences like the Spider-dance — they all seem to have been written by someone who has actually read the comic books.

The Marvel movies also treat the inside nods to fans like Easter eggs in a DVD or video game, instead of slowing the plot with them and trying to hit various iconic moments as if they were compulsory figures in skating. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Mans featured several sequences that were literally lifted from famous Spider-Man covers.

But fan boy bliss aside . . two words: Joss Whedon. And again . . . not just ’cause he did Buffy, but because Buffy was so clearly inspired by the Marvel universe (especially The X-Men).

Personally, I’d love to see Marvel hand Whedon the keys to their universe, but until that happens here’s why I’m hoping Joss Whedon’s first sequel isn’t a new Avenger’s movie, but a solo story featuring the Black Widow.

1. Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.
2. Scarlett Johansson in the Black Widow costume.
3. Did you see Buffy? Did you see Dollhouse? Did you see how Whedon turned a tiny dancer into a lethal killing machine in Firefly and how he transformed the nerdly Fred into a lethal goddess on Angel? Did you see what he did with Black Widow in The Avengers?
4. Because Joss Whedon doesn’t just talk Fanboy, he’s the real deal. Kitty Pryde was his inspiration — and if you don’t know who Kitty Pryde is, you may have written or directed one of the earlier Marvel movies. The whole epic Dark Willow storyline on Buffy was dark Phoenix from The X-Men. Angel borrowed heavily from the Bat-world. Whedon even handicapped a fight between the Black Widow and Buffy.
5. Because somewhere the Mensa reject who pulled the plug on Whedon’s Wonder Woman movie is feeling like he’s just gone 15 rounds with the Hulk, so why not finish him off.
6. ‘Cause I can see it now . . . Black Widow returns to Russia to fight mob corruption. There’s probably a suitcase nuke, a dirty bomb and a love interest, maybe Hawkeye, who will die and need Avenging. (Hawkeye has a tendency to die in Marvel comics.) She’ll go rogue. It’ll be like the ultimate episode of Dollhouse. And, just maybe, the Widow’s sometime beau Daredevil will guest star and Whedon will be able to undue some of the damage done in one of the worst Marvel movies ever made.
7. If it fails, Scarlett Johansson can always come back for the next Avengers movie as the Scarlet Witch. Nuff said.

Mark Leiren-Young won the Leacock Medal for Humour for his memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen and was part of the team that adapted the Marvel hero Moon Knight — one of his all-time favourite members of the Marvel Universe — as a live action TV series.

By Montreal Simon

It never made any sense. A movie where children kill each other gets a PG-13 rating, a documentary about children getting bullied gets rated R. So I’m glad to see that Bully has been reclassified.

I’m happy that kids are going to be able to see it, and that the new rating will make it easier for schools to use it as an educational tool. But I’m really hoping that more adults will see it as well.

Because they’re the only ones who can change the situation, a lot of them are living in denial, so they need really need to see what happens when horror meets blindness

Too many older people think that bullying is just like it was when they were in school. When in fact it’s much much worse. Our culture encourages aggression, from our hockey rinks to our Parliament. Kids are being desensitized to violence. The internet is a bully’s happy hunting ground. There are more and more victims.

And they are younger and younger. 

His son then tried to befriend the boys during another recess — “presumably to get them to stop” bullying him, Ratte says. Instead the trio gave him another beating.

“That really affected him.” the father says. “He barely ate for two days, would fall asleep (before six) each night. He was just so withdrawn, and, then, he finally told us.”

And what’s most striking about Bully is how casual that violence is. The bullies in the film knew the cameras were there.

But that didn’t stop them…

Will I see the movie? I honestly don’t know. Seeing anybody young or old bullied makes me really angry.

That’s one of the reasons I hate the Harper Cons so much.

And I don’t need to be educated about the problem, I’ve been blogging about it for years.

But I do know this image haunts me:

Even though the three boys were not allowed out at recess this past week, all his son did the other day “was walk around by himself,” apparently too timid to go near anyone.

And I do know that anyone who thinks they can build a kinder, gentler, more peaceful world, without fighting bullying.

Is blind to the horror, and doomed to failure . . .

A last blog post by Joe Bodolai has gone viral today after the L.A. Police ruled the well-loved comedy writer’s death a suicide. Bodolai, who worked on both “Saturday Night Live” and the “Kids in the Hall” before helping to launch Canada’s Comedy Channel, apparently intended the post as a combination suicide note and impromptu memoir.

Titled “IF THIS WERE Y0UR LAST DAY ALIVE WHAT WOULD YOU DO?”, the long farewell includes Bodolai’s list of “Things I Regret”:

Later he writes: “I wanted a channel. I felt the huge failure of comedy, such as sitcoms, on Canadian television, could only be successful if showrunners were comedy writers, not Telefilm form fillers. This is one of the proudest accomplishments I have seen come true. Mark Farrell, Brent Butt, so many more of you….”

Butt confirmed as much on his twitter feed. (See The Globe‘s complete round-up of social media tributes to Bodolai here.)

Bodolai, who was US-born, had apparently lost a TV job recently and, according to his own Twitter feed, undergone surgery. Over Christmas he volunteered at an L.A. Homeless shelter. “[It] may be my new home,” he writes. “I call it ‘Shawshank Summer Camp.’ 65 men on cots in one big space where sleep is victimhood.”

Bodolai opens his post with a list of “Things I Think Will Happen Next Year,” in which he mixes gags (“Sales of Mayan Calendars up  for 2012, drop for 2013,” “World Supply of Band Names will run out”) with more serious prophecies: “Martial Law in the USA, first probably in Louisiana”; “Americans will go along with this, but resisters will be FEMA camped.”

Unfortunately we think a lot of his readers won’t realize he’s not joking about that last bit.

Joe Bodolai would probably like it if you visted his youtube channel.

- Zeff Davies

As though the tenterhooks weren’t tight enough for Harry Potter 7.2: The One Where It Actually Ends, the Rowling megalith taunted its fans last week with the mysterious offer of . . . Pottermore.

Pottermore, the powers promised, was a Thing That Was Not A Book But Was Still Very Great And Seekrit. Said powers gave the masses about a week to stew and ponder before revealing the actual Pottermore, a sort of interactive online game wherein players are sorted by the Sorting Hat and chased by Dementors or whatever. Also, the books are joining the rest of 2011 and being released as ebooks. So, that’s neat.

Pottermore’s eventual manifestation is less interesting, however, than the anticipatory buzz. In the pre-online days, if you’d heard Something New And Seeekritive was coming out, you and your buddies would come up with a few half-baked theories about Harry Potter Action Figures, and then you would chase a hoop with a stick down to the swimming hole. Your speculative powers were limited to your social circle and the spare time and concern therein.

The intarweb accrues that spare time and multiplies it a squillion-fold. No sooner had Pottermore graced the interwaves than people began hollering out ideas. It’s a theme park! It’s an MMORPG! A Harry Potter Cast World Tour! A remake of all the movies where they LITERALLY LEAVE NOTHING OUT so the movies are, like, two weeks long. AN ACTUAL WIZARDING SCHOOL. Interest was, as they say, piqued.

And Pottermore is actually kind of a rad thing, if you’re into the Potterverse. It may even be as cool as any of the best ideas that were shouted into the inter-ether. But it isn’t cooler than all those things combined, which would be the only way to blow anyone’s mind after a week of rampant speculation unhampered by budgetary or practical concerns (the potential non-existence of magic, e.g.). Imaginations ran wild and they ran everywhere, whereas the real Pottermore could only ever go in one or two directions without becoming an unwieldy mess.

Ultimately fans will be delighted because more HP is still more HP, even if it isn’t a world tour. But this same phenomenon is what killed the finale of “Lost” (okay, well, that and it being a sort of shitty finale). Years of speculation had raised expectations too high while simultaneously killing off the element of surprise. Literally anything they did would have been predicted on someone’s blog somewhere and come off as an obvious choice.

Buzz is an unwieldy beast, and as much as it generates interest it can result in disappointment with the final product. The blurb for Chris Cleave’s 2008 novel, Little Bee, ran along the lines of “we can’t tell you anything about this plot and shit, because that would RUIN IT, and once you read it and haaaaave to tell your friends, don’t tell THEM either unless you are a Ruinous Bastard.” This vague and enticing lure drove expectations for what is just a Very Good Book About Suffering But With No Twists Or Surprises Necessitating Such Seekretive Marketing to unachievable heights, which the book couldn’t possibly hit.

The week of hallucinatory speculations for Pottermore likely won’t dent its popularity in the long run, and it’s near enough to the best, realistic guesses to soothe the savage muggles. But in some lonely basement at least one HP superfan is legitimately disappointed that it isn’t a wizarding school.

Meghan Cox Gurdon’s Wall Street Journal article on the “explicit abuse, violence and depravity” grown rife in YA fiction must come either from a place of willful blindness or an actual dark rock, under which she has been living. 

Granted, YA fiction has gotten more sexually explicit since 1973 when Judy Blume’s Deenie would touch her “special place” to help herself fall asleep, and more violent since 1967, when S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders fought each other with KNIVES. Oh no, wait. It has always been like, this. FOR A REASON. 

Gurdon calls teen fiction “a hall of fun-house mirrors” that reflect “hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.” I don’t know what means this “hideously distorted.” Dark And Brooding YA is necessary and valuable and popular because this sort of shit happens in real life. (Okay, maybe not the werewolfy bits. But the sudden upheaval of becoming a werewolf [combined with unexpected growth of hair]? Triumph of analogy.)

Gurdon complains that YA lit contains “images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.” As if anyone has ever needed art to help them cope with joy and beauty, and as though literature wasn’t the shoulder on which the damaged, brutalized, and lost can weep.

Life is occasionally very shitty and the teen years are like an uncomfortable, uncertain flame to which said shittiness flocks. There are BAD INFLUENCES above and beyond those nasty books. High school frequently says things like “Bigotry is awesome!” and needs to be countered by novels in which bigotry has real and violent consequences, or is absent altogether. From the outside YA can look like it’s all angst and Chuck Taylors and co-dependency and it IS those things, but it is those things plus BETRAYAL and DISASTER and COURAGE.

Yet Gurdon also takes issue with the ability of YA to meet teens where they are at, and to give them a voice. She complains that writing about such “pathologies” as having been abused (at which I paused to die a little bit and then come back to finish the article), or indulging in self-harm, helps to normalize these behaviors, make them part of the culturally acceptable lexicon, and encourage them in other young’uns. Yet the article earlier asserts that “reading about homicide doesn’t turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won’t make a kid break the honor code.” So which is it? This also presumes that self-harm is a hobby teens pick up because they think it’s rad, not (among other things) a coping mechanism to deal with deep psychological pain. DEEP PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN IS NOT CATCHING. Or, at least, you cannot get it from books.

Sherman Alexie once wrote of his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian that there’s “nothing in this book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet.” Gurdon responds that “one depravity does not justify another.” However, in stark contrast to the internet, which is maintained by trolls and scarab beetles, YA lit is written by adults who love teens, and who get into YA PRIMARILY to be like, Let me help you through these awkward, wretched years. Given the choice of who to let talk to my kids about what sex is and what bullies are and how to escape the Zombie Apocalypse, I’ll always take well-intentioned adults over scarab beetles.

Let’s leave aside for the sake of brevity and of my poor, furious heart that the article discusses YA fiction as though it were a homogenous mass – as though Alyson Noel’s angsty Immortals are equivalent to John Green’s smart-talking, prank-pulling, good-hearted teens. Let’s also leave aside the inherent problems in the sidebar “Books We can Recommend for Young Adult Readers.” (Ship-Breaker is a book about a BOY and is therefore for BOYS and girls will be like, I don’t understand this dystopic business, where are the prom dresses? True Grit is about a girl but she is BADASS so it is ALSO for BOYS because girls should stick to books about “love-struck medieval girl[s] gone mad” [Lisa Klein’s Ophelia]. Who can breathe when they see this in print?)

I feel like I am stating the obvious, like I am arguing that water is excellent for thirst or that apples and baby wolverines are, in fact, two different things. But here we are, having this conversation, and I am both boggled and saddened by the fact that some people still think YA will keeeel you (metaphorically, emotionally, ethically). Instead, it is those teenage years that will kill you. YA might be the only thing to save your ass.

When it comes to pop cultural infections, the only thing worse than hearing “Born This Way” AGAIN (again from when I heard it this morning, but also again from when I heard it in 1989) is getting a facebook notification that Jodie just bought me a cow and would I like to feed that cow or buy Jodie a cow in return. And ze “hide all Farmville updates” button, eet does nozzing!

Now unignorable force will meet ubiquitous object on May 17^th when Lady Gaga’s GagaVille Farm launches. A Farmville spinoff, GagaVille will allow couch-farmers to facebookplant such WACKY materials as crystals and unicorns. Plus there will be sheep riding motorcycles. Sheep! On motorcycles! How droll, because sheep are not people. Look at you, thinking outside the box of who can ride motorcycles.

The GagaFarmers will also be able to harvest songs from Lady G’s as-yet-unreleased album but seriously, guys. You’ll be able to hear it about 20 minutes later (and every 20 minutes following), and without descending to the depths of the Ville, from which I hear there is no return.

It’s difficult not to see this as another attention-grabbing stunt, for which her Ladyship is (in)famous. Her fame-mongering has been compared unfavorably to fur-and-feather-and-face-paint-wearing pop-tart, Ke$sha, but at least Ke$ha mongers her fame shamelessly and doesn’t try to pass her antics off as art. I’m not sure how much longer I can take boob-tape X’s as a symbol of sexual censorship.

And the whole enterprise also reeks verrrrry slightly of corporate-shillism, only it isn’t even like letting Home Depot buy one of your songs to hawk its Burnt Sienna. This is like hiring Home Depot to play your zippy new tune, “Burnt Sienna.” There’s a reason, Gag-ling, that this sort of thing has, as you say, “never been done before.”

But then, this also might stick it to the man in a way I do not foresee. I have been wrong before. So what say ye, readers? Is this innovative or desperate? Ironic or obvious? Subversive — or soulless?

George R R Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, while long a big deal in fantasy basements, is now officially a Big Deal™. The HBO series based on the first installation, A Game of Thrones, has both brought the series into the fantasy-abjuring eye and put a much-appreciated amount of pressure on his GRRRRRRMness to move his ass, the aforementioned first novel having been published FIFTEEN! YEARS! AGO! The fifth book comes out (allegedly and after a slew of false release dates) in July of this year.

It’s like that joke Lewis CK tells about traveling cross country in ye olden days, where a bunch of you would die along the way and babies would be born and by the time you got to where you were going you were all new people. When I started SoIaF I was a young, newly married student, working on a BA, and now I am . . . okay, I am a terrible example. But other people, people who started the series when it started and who have managed to do things in the intervening 15 years (have children, change careers, give up on the project altogether, die and reincarnate) are, metaphorically, all new people.

Which is always dangerous in publishing, because the new people these people are might not have the same urge as the old people these people used to be to snap up your product. You must CAPITALIZE! Strike while you are still a hot iron, etc. And I’ve been hearing rumblings around the Tubes that authors need to bump up their production, and that it’s not fair to make readers wait MORE THAN SIX MONTHS (or, ye gads, a YEAR) for the next installment, an attitude for which I blame Netflix Streaming. You want me to wait a FULL BUSINESS DAY and then put on PANTS and go to my MAILBOX before I watch this movie? You presume too much.

Ultimately, it is a question of value. I don’t really want to spend my afternoon watching “Outsourced,” but if I can stream that instead of waiting a day for the infinitely better “Community,” I will.  But where I am lazy about my television diet, I am passionate about my literary one. Yes, some authors churn out subsequent books every six months, but I strongly suspect those books of not being terribly good (or those authors of having James-Frey-style fiction factories in their basements). There is a certain ballsyness in asking your fans to wait six years for Book Five (particularly when Book Four ends with something like, I wrote the thing and it was too long so here’s half and the other half is soon forthcoming), but those balls are predicated on a confidence in your work’s value.

So I will (willingly, if not cheerfully) go about my business and grow old while I wait for Martin (or Diana Gabaldon, or Robert Jordan before he pulled a Robert Jordan *coats both Martin and Gabaldon in bubble wrap*) to do what they do.  I am not a toddler.  I will choose a cheesecake later over a Ding Dong now.

I love youtube videos and am opposed to sex trafficking.  I think it’s safe to say these two sentiments extend to a large percentage of the population.  So why am I baffled by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s hilarious “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls’ videos?”  They feature foxy mens! Who isn’t down with foxy mens?

 
Leaving aside issues of perpetuated gender stereotypes, how droll!  Only, are they supposed to…what?  Raise awareness?  Did anyone NOT KNOW that child-trafficking exists before they watched Sean Penn iron a grilled cheese sandwich?  Call me old-fashioned, but I remember a day when Public Service Announcements announced something.

I mean, I get the aim.  But I’m slightly skeptical that Johnny ChildBuyer is watching these thinking, Well if the man your man could smell like isn’t buying girls, then I guess I won’t either.

(Also, is there a logical fallacy here or am I taking crazy pills?  Real men can make a meal and real men don’t buy girls and Bradley Cooper clearly cannot make a meal and is therefore not a real man and more therefore…guys, is this whole scheme just a covert attempt to let us know Bradley Cooper buys girls?)

And maybe it’s better than doing nothing only it’s not better than doing nothing, because when you’re doing nothing at least you KNOW that you’re doing nothing, and then maybe you do something.  Throw up a Rainbow Brite picture as your facebook profile and you’re all *dusts hands*  I’ve done my part to help end child slavery.

It’s that misplaced sense of back-pattery that bothers me most.  Because while it’s understandable for celebrities to take a stand on controversial topics like wearing fur or using eco-friendly plastics, topics on which people might reasonably take sides and therefore be swayed by Hot People Opinions, this is sex trafficking, something we don’t need to be told how to feel about.

The website itself provides survivor stories and places to donate.   Too bad it’s unhelpfully addressed demiandashton.org (because who doesn’t hesitate a second before clicking that, expecting either Punk’ing or phone-photos of Demi’s ass?) and slipped into the end credits that no one reads anyways.  And I mean “too bad” in the literal sense, not in the “too bad you suck” sense, because this is clearly a cause Los Kutchers care deeply about.

Ultimately, I’m torn.  I’m all for good intentions, and  maybe making people laugh about a thing is the first step towards making them do other, more useful things about that thing.  Or maybe it just trivializes the movement.