or, “Waiting-Out Your Shift on the Toilet”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
1 out of 5
“Life is like an onion. Peel it back one layer at a time. Sometimes you weep.”
– Carl Sandberg
Recently, I went to a boring live drama where the players hardly moved – not even to monologue. In media, you shouldn’t have this problem because editors exist, where theatre fills that gap with the ‘live’ experience.
Jack-of-all-trades Tyler Perry’s new Prime collaboration “Duplicity”, however, is so top-loaded with actors in closed rooms retching phlegmatic dialogue, that Perry seems overwhelmed by his own cinematic mediocrity, and reverts back to his theatrical training. This results in stagers either sitting or standing across from one-another completely stationary, endlessly overstating their positions. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of waiting-out the end of your shift on the toilet.
A Canadian Legacy TV Review and Personal Discussion
“(…) Why do they call news, ‘stories?’ After man takes care of his basic animal needs, he indulges in a behaviour not imposed by nature, but invented by him. Emerging, as it does, from his imagination, can we not, then, call all invented human life (…) a fiction?”
– Peter Keleghan in Ken Finkleman’s The Newsroom (Episode 1×12: Meltdown Pt.3)
Preface
What are ‘White guy problems’?
Patriarchally speaking, man-kind is always thinking about ‘man-things’. Whether you have the privilege to only have to worry about yourself determines its White guy status.
Ken Finkleman – Canada’s answer to a Winnipeg-born, politically-charged Woody Allen (without the marrying-your-adopted-daughter nonsense) – has lots of White guy problems.
That isn’t to say the one-time Hollywood screenwriter & director (Grease 2; Airplane 2; Head Office), comedian, and provocateur’s satirical agenda on fascism & privatization wasn’t valid in its time – isn’t still valid – to the right viewer. Art is, above all, subjective. But when Finkleman calls his audience “an abstract” in a 2013 interview with Canada’s Dick Cavett, George Stroumboulopoulos, Ken’s peak on national television between 1996 & 2005 could retrospectively appear to some as the practice of a middle aged White guy with White guy problems, and the federal financing to produce aesthetically-pleasing art about it.
His acme for most (myself included, as of today) would be The Newsroom – not to be confused with the Aaron Sorkin HBO series – which ran for three split seasons and a TV movie at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As a Larry Sanders Show-style spoof (think an early-90s The Office) at a television network, Finkleman’s alter ego – news director George Findlay, as played by Ken himself – is his preferred vessel for his commentary on male myopia; cowardliness; and Fellini-esque disdain & admiration for the opposite sex, going so far at one point to physically liken himself to Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido from Fellini’s 8 1/2 (although without making that connection, Ken’s dark sunglasses will likely make a newer generation of viewers think he smoked a big fat doob off-camera, which I wouldn’t rule out, either).
While there are plenty of pro-tem left-minded observations about North American society, it’s Ken’s George and his ensemble’s flagrant pettiness & sharp-edged selfishness that defines season one of the show, with Jeremy Hotz & Karen Hines being personal supporting highlights. But the majority of viewers will flock to Peter Keleghan’s meme-worthy portrayal of an idiot anchor, not unlike Michael Scott.
This era of Newsroom is often very funny and occasionally poignant – particularly the three-parter – but no one else I’ve shown it to, over the last twenty years of being a fan, shares my sentiment.
Time and experience has taught me why: empathy. Ken Finkleman is a Daskeman.
or, “Running Around the Woods with Shrimp Cocktails”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
2.5 out of 5
There are few things more comforting to a cinephile than Robert De Niro calling someone an expletive & unloading an entire pistol clip into them.
It’s unwholesome, but this has been his playground for decades. The Alto Knights is an impassioned throwback to the Scorsese/De Niro collaborations of old, but lacks the oomph of those masterpieces.
GQ’s 2006 interview with Bob is required reading for anyone wanting an encapsulation of the stubborn actor. I’m not here to rag on De Niro: he’s had many legendary performances over his long career. But like any artist (*cough* senior), he’s set in his ways, rejects change, and becomes crotchety when he feels disrespected.
Now an octogenarian, Bob can’t just go back & retroactively change his De Niro-isms, no matter how much digital technology de-ages him (like in Scorsese’s The Irishman). Now forced into ‘grandpa’ roles that he may or may-not feel are beneath him (being a new dad at 81 certainly increases that obligation), audiences know exactly what to expect.
or, “A Big Studio Budget Retained for Payroll”: A spoiler-free mini movie review.
1 out of 5
Snow White 2025 is as much a product for consumer consumption as it is a snapshot of Disney’s current socioeconomic agenda – from Lion King’s Pride Rock in the background of their vanity card; to bookending sequences so similar to Beauty and the Beast’s you’d swear copycat if they didn’t both originate from the same company; to Dopey’s now-curable neurodivergence.
It attempts to redux the material as a feminocentric Robin Hood with a protagonist who’s ‘her own woman,’ but she’ll still drop everything to jubilate musically about her new White beau.
As the titular character, Rachel Zegler opts for the Queen of the High School Drama Department approach: she’s kinda hot and can carry a tune, but emotionally empty from crying about her now off-again boyfriend right before showtime. Watch her strain during the movie’s one big moment for her to act: like Zachary Levi’s recent dramatic try in The Unbreakable Boy, Zegler lacks the skill required to convincingly portray painful remorse. Go do some indies and get back to us.
theory of a daskeman 