Movie week at my house

Last week I was alone. (Well, the cat was there too. But he is terrible at conversation.) The silver lining of E being off at the cottage with the kids was that it allowed me to catch up on a variety of movies I've been meaning to watch for quite a while; movies that E has either already seen or has no interest in seeing.

Machete
I know it's intentionally campy and there is a time and place for camp, just like there is a time and place for gore and a time and place for gratuitous nudity. But I found myself wondering about every ten minutes or so who in their right mind would have paid good money to see this movie in a theatre. Admittedly I have basically no standards when it comes to selecting movies, so who am I to complain? But there's a huge risk when a movie aims for "so bad it's good" - often it turns out merely bad. Would this movie have been improved by a theatre full of enthusiastic like-minded viewers? Preferably drunk ones? Probably. But on its own merits, there is not much here to recommend.

Moneyball
With a little bit of cynicism on my side, I can see why this movie is so highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes: it's a fairly solid story with all the trappings of America's favourite pastime. Brad Pitt is nothing to write home about here (in fact I don't think any of the acting really stood out). Yet it still works, perhaps mostly in its story than its film making. But it's hardly unique. Kevin Costner's For Love of the Game wasn't nearly the same commercial or critical success, and I'll happily acknowledge Moneyball was the better overall film, but I've never really forgotten the experience of seeing the Costner movie while I'm pretty sure I'll forget about Moneyball before I'm done writing this post.

The Descendants
I confess I knew next to nothing about this before I saw it, and it's probably just as well. I was not prepared for the sadness of the main plot points, though it was softened considerably by some Hollywood-friendly lighter moments. (Like seeing George Clooney trying to run angrily in flip-flips.) There are quite a few young actors in this film and they are the standouts - this role was not a big stretch for Clooney. I don't mean it as an insult: He's proven over the last few years that he can pull off some serious drama when he needs to. Sometimes I see a movie like this and get annoyed with the movie makers for being manipulative. Other times I have to acknowledge that if I felt anything, they've done something right.

The Amazing Spider-Man
OK, this one shouldn't count because I didn't see it at home. This is a retelling of the same Spider-Man origin movie we saw ten years ago with Tobey Maguire. The big difference this time around is the Emma Stone is a thousand times less cloying than Kirsten Dunst (my second least favourite actress behind Julianne Moore). There's not actually much to choose between the 2002 and 2012 versions of this story: Today's is slightly less cheesy with the jokes but all in all one does have to wonder if we're only encouraging the big studios by actually showing up for all these "reboots" of familiar franchises. (Though I am totally down with the rebooted Bond movies. Oh, and Batman. So maybe I shouldn't be so quick to complain.)

Senna
I had been hearing about this movie for quite a while. It had the seal of approval from my mother, who has more than a passing interest in Formula 1 given our family's connection to the sport, and also from Jeremy Clarkson, who raved about it on Top Gear. And while I share the interest, albeit at a slightly lesser level, I had been hoping it would stand up as a solid documentary in its own right. There is a wealth of fascinating footage in this movie and it's not all about his death, though of course that's where it culminates. But I still question whether anyone who isn't interested in the first 45 minutes of gawking at F1 celebrities could find it in themselves to enjoy the movie as a whole.


Did I just slag your favourite movie of all time? Tell me about it in the comments!

Still alive! Barely.

Where I live
(photo by me!)

Every now and then someone will announce on a social media site that I follow that they are taking a break. They'll say they're sick of some annoying aspect of Facebook or Twitter etc. Eventually they come back, declare themselves refreshed by the absence and pretty much pick up where they left off. I've occasionally thought I should do the same thing, but I never have. I realize that I engage in social media for the same reasons as everyone else, and a little bit of self awareness about how much time I spend on social media isn't going to change any of the reasons I signed up in the first place.

For the last 9 months or so I've been working on a significant project at work, one that has grown steadily harder to keep up with as we approach our May deadline. In the month leading up to Christmas, my Instapaper backlog grew from essentially nothing to about 200 links, and the unread article count on Google Reader crested 600. Thanks to the Christmas holidays and some judicious purging, I managed to get the backlog down to almost nothing once more. After the Christmas holidays, things started to get really out of hand. I started bringing work home with me in the evenings. I started doing work from home on the weekends. Time I had been spending unwinding with  Instapaper and then going to bed turned into time to catch up on work.

I knew there was a problem with my habit of reading every tweet in my timeline, something I could stop for totally unpretentious reasons. But it was addictive, and even as the project grew in intensity, I was gamely opening the Twitter app on my phone and noticing I was over a day behind. It was fun at times to tweet replies to people on topics they had long since forgotten about, but generally I could feel myself disengaging - responding to something from 12 hours ago makes your comment stick out like a sore thumb, so instead I just stopped responding to tweets and Facebook conversations that I would once have been quick to join.

The straw that broke the camel's back came when I got a new phone and didn't have time to install any apps on it. The Twitter app I eventually found the time to install had some weird issue where it was destroying my battery life, so I shut it off until I could find time to sort it out, which was weeks later. Occasionally something would happen, or I'd snag a cute photo of the kids, and I'd post a status update but I had no idea what anyone else was talking about over that near week of being unplugged. I finally got a chance to sort out the phone, and to check up on Facebook (I hadn't read anyone's status updates there in about 3 weeks, it turns out). Then I fell right back into the black hole.

This is the part where most people say "I'm such a better person!" and "I don't miss it!" but I totally do. I know some day this project will be over and I'll be able to get right back into things. I will not have fresh perspective, I will not consider it cleansing. I really feel like I'm out of the loop. In fact, I've made a list of all the things I miss about being out of the social media loop:

News from friends
This is kind of a no-brainer. Being parents of small kids means you don't actually see your friends very often. But you can keep up with them through social media. I have no idea what's going on in my friends' lives right now.

Breaking news
You would think that someone in my line of work would be totally plugged into to current events, but because of the project I'm almost totally out of the loop. In the early phases of the project at work, I was alerted to important news through Twitter (the big proportion of people I follow on Twitter are journalists). Now that I'm not monitoring Twitter, I know that Dick Clark died and that's about it.

Municipal events
I really paid no attention to local Toronto politics for the first decade or so that I lived in the city. That changed slightly when Rob Ford was elected mayor. He's done a huge amount for civic engagement among Torontonians! But when I started following City Hall reporters and observers, I really dialed in to local goings on.

Project ideas
There are so many interesting people doing interesting things on social media, that it constantly inspired me to try new things, especially with computers. Being unplugged from that stream of inspiration hurts that creative side a lot, as does the fact that when I'm not working, I don't want to look at a computer if I can avoid it!

So. I've decided to take some time to write this blog post and update my Flickr stream (coming soonish!) If you've wondered what's happened to me, I'll be back. Probably sometime over the summer, when the project winds down.

I miss you all. Really.

This is why we can't have nice things

Diana, if you're reading this, we need to talk.

The Globe has an interactive feature on its website about traffic in Toronto. One of the neat aspects of it is offering readers the chance to submit their own anecdotes about heavy traffic areas in the city. But as anyone with a passing familiarity with anecdotes knows, they are rarely based in reality.

"Diana" writes about the stretch of Eglinton Avenue from Leslie to Yonge, and noting that she "can't wait for an LRT to make this worse." What's puzzling aggravating about this comment is that one block west of Leslie is the point at which the LRT is planned (and was always planned, with or without Mayor Ford's dumb bury-the-whole-thing plan) to go underground and stay underground all the way to Yonge. In other words, over almost the entire distance she's talking about, the LRT will be underground and in no way interfering with road traffic.

Now, it's possible (with a little bit of mental gymnastics) to believe that she might have meant the construction of the LRT - including its station entrances at surface level - will worsen congestion along this stretch. But this is more of the same old "St Clair Disaster" talk. You know, the one where construction of a new dedicated right-of-way for streetcars ran way behind schedule and cost the city more than it expected. People usually forget that one of the biggest reasons (but not the only one) the project was behind schedule was opponents kept dragging the project before the courts to get injunctions halting work and that the TTC portion of the project was not, in fact, over budget. Some of the city's cost overruns (but not all) were caused by having to pay lawyers to defend the project in court. Mistakes were made, but was the end result a disaster? Hardly. But that didn't stop people from using the Globe traffic interactive map to do nothing more than post vague, unsubstantiated complaints about it.

Both Diana's comment and the people who insist on using the opposite-of-reality results of the St Clair project as grounds to object to LRT -- despite them being two completely different modes of public transit --  are pretty good indications of the kind of public planning discourse we witness in Toronto on a daily basis. For those who wonder how Rob Ford ever got elected mayor, this is the reason.

Breakup amnesia

What you'll be doing
to me in a minute.

I've said this before, but I didn't have a blog then, so technically this counts as fresh new material!

What Twitter really needs, in my humble opinion, is a mechanism where if you unfollow someone, you are prompted to jot down a quick note on why you're unfollowing them. So that they can be notified and learn from constructive criticism? Don't be silly.

When six months pass by and you stumble on a retweet or someone asks you if you're following that old twitter crush from many moons ago, the moment you click on Follow it'll pop up a big message:

"Are you SURE you want to follow this person? Because you already broke up with them once. Remember? You said 'this guy RTs compliments to himself all the time - ugh!' Don't let them break your heart again."

And the two buttons under the prompt would be. "Oh, yeah. Nevermind" and "It's different this time. I'm different this time. Why can't you just be happy for us?"

ps This would be a perfectly good feature idea for a specific Twitter app, but I really think it needs to be built into the Twitter infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what client you used to unfollow. I'm three times as likely (gee, that sounds like science!) to inadvertently refollow someone as an impulse on the web, but usually I read Twitter on a mobile app. So we need to cover all the bases.

The fairness fallacy (a transit story)

Scarborough Councillor
Michelle Berardinetti, we must fight.
(Photo from her website)

It's taken me more than a decade of living in Toronto to feel a real vested interest in local politics. Watching the city elect a guy like Rob Ford as mayor will do that to you. I've not really kept my feelings for the mayor's policies a secret, and since I'm in the middle of trying out a dozen different directions for this blog, I might as well lob an angry rant about politics. I didn't want to write a "hey, I dislike Rob Ford" blog post. Not only has it been done, it's been done by people who have way more practice than I do.


Recently one of the city's suburban councillors by the name of Michelle Berardinetti took to Twitter to pontificate on recent attempts to reopen debate on a major rapid transit initiative known as Transit City. It consisted of a network of light rapid transit (LRT) rail-based lines, starting with Phase 1's Finch, Eglinton, Sheppard and Scarborough lines (the latter a one-for-one replacement for an existing RT rail line).

The four pieces of pre-Fordian Transit City.
Source: TTC.ca

Rob Ford declared on his first day in office that Transit City was dead. People did not want glorified streetcars, he said, so he asked the province to rip up its plans for the first phase of Transit City and use the money to complete the Scarborough LRT line and, significantly, bury the Eglinton line from end to end. Transit City had already called for the line to be buried through the centre of the city, emerging as a surface route on the east end at Laird Drive (which you'll find marked on the orange line above) and continuing through to Kennedy. What was so puzzling about this decision was that there was no reason to do it. What was so infuriating about this decision was that it would come at the expense of the Finch and Sheppard lines.

That didn't sit well with many folks, but it didn't seem like there was much anyone could do about it in a Ford-controlled city council until that same council shot down some fairly significant service cuts to the relative surprise of many. All of a sudden, the door was open to taking another look at the dismissal of Transit City.

This is where Michelle Berardinetti - and my indignation - comes in. She made some eye-opening comments on Twitter this week on why we should just accept the mayor's unilateral cancellation of the plan in favour of paying to bury the Eglinton line through the suburbs.

Heard LRT will stop every 300m between streets forcing Scarborough residents to walk to bus stops. Also exposed to elements.
@CouncillorMB on Twitter

Let me just start by saying that I think it behooves a city councillor to make major (read: multibillion-dollar) policy decisions based on reliable sources, not just what you "heard" somewhere. What really caught my eye, though, was the point about being exposed to the elements. Is she really suggesting that we should spend an extra $2-billion to bury the full length of the line just so people don't have to stand outside to catch the LRT? Apparently yes.

Movie: Submarine

Eddie Marsan isn't in this movie,
but don't worry, I'll explain.
(Photo from gdcgraphics on Flickr)

This is the kind of movie where you know what you're going to get right from the very beginning, but sometimes that kind of movie just works. Sure, it's simple, but it's also sweet. I was already fairly predisposed to liking it, knowing it was directed by Richard Ayoade, whom I knew only from the IT Crowd.


And honestly, it was just so nice to see Sally Hawkins in another film after spending all of Happy-Go-Lucky hating her "Poppy" character so much I was contemplating stabbing out my own eyes with the straw from my drink. She doesn't do anything special in Submarine but her scenes with Noah Taylor form an entertaining subplot.

And while we're on the subject of Happy-Go-Lucky, I would really be interested in seeing a short film made up of just the drivers' ed scenes from that movie. Eddie Marsan was just so perfect in that it almost redeemed the whole movie, kind of like how Christoph Waltz's scenes in Inglourious Basterds were the only ones worth watching.

So there you have it, my thoughts on a movie that are pretty much entirely about movies and a TV show other than the one I was supposed to be talking about. I wish I had a dog; then I could write about that too!