Tag: depression

Dead Show Eulogy: More Tears (1998)

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.

[cont’d]

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thank you, Cardinal Richelieu

to whom we owe our fabulous screws

A poem.

the smitten
are only going to give you
as much grace as they can.
nothing waits forever


unless you work across from them

often turning one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees
in their direction
not for them –
it’s just part of your job description;


accidentally break
at the same time as them,
back-and-forth, braiding one another between
the sink and the toaster oven.

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400 Words on: Conclave (2024)

or, “Doing Away with the Chiller in the Thriller”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2 out of 5

I remember the trailer for Conclave last autumn, and I didn’t want to see it then, either.

Between the super-serious ensemble of Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, and Stanley Tucci all speaking in soft whispers; to the frequent high-angle framing of old White men in robes walking briskly through courtyards; to the punctuated explosion, it simply did not look like a good time. It looked like someone, somewhere was trying too hard.

Lo-and-behold, Conclave’s advertising & creative choices are misrepresentational – this isn’t a nail-biter: it’s a procedural about what happens when the Pope dies, and finding the right person to replace them.

The subject matter at-large joins The Program & The International as a movie with a rich topic worth edu-telling the viewer. But here, that knowledge is at the expense of wasting my time! (with an overdramatized aesthetic suggesting a core mystery that doesn’t actually exist)

[cont’d]

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Dub’s Take: The Unbreakable Boy (2025)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Watching “The Unbreakable Boy” (aka. UB) reminded me of Ben Stiller’s 2008 comedy “Tropic Thunder”, and Robert Downey Jr’s immortal words: “Never go full retard.”

Vulgarity aside, RDJ’s line signified that actors playing overly-challenged characters weren’t likely to win audience recognition. In the Real World, compassion is everything.

That being said, and with all due respect to real-life autistic/brittle-bone sufferer Austin LeRette (“Auz-Man”), the lisping imitation from actor Jacob Laval is so off-putting – transcending ‘cute’ into piteousness – that I couldn’t set aside my disbelief.

‘Uplifting’ genre flicks like this inspire pre-viewing expectations: maybe some bullying; some falling down stairs (like in Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”)… I will give it to director Jon Gunn that he knows how to film scenes of bones breaking, as my wife & I both flinched at each mini-disaster and ones in-waiting.

But the third-act bullying is where I was done, and not because it was too cruel. Whether-or-not how the sequence plays out on-screen is actually what transpired between Auz-Man’s older brother Logan & the school bully ‘who became one of his best friends,’ it is the soppiest, most untenable bit of Hallmark reality ever. Logan should have just kicked the shit out of him and been done with it.

Laval’s representation of Auz-Man is dwarfed by Zachary Levi (both “Shazam’s”) as LaRette’s father. I wondered whether Levi could carry a serious movie with a belied filmography…

And he can’t, instead playing the hollow-headed goof we’ve seen from him time-and-time again. Not only that, but watch how much difficulty he has with sincerity in his climactic apology scene! Sorry, Zach: you don’t have the sauce.

There was kerfuffle with the new Captain America that it didn’t delve deeper into the modern zeitgeist (like its triple-the-length prequel miniseries). Indeed, my wife was adamant her main takeaway from UB was to be inspired by Auz-Man and fly her own freak-flag high.

UB doesn’t have goals of being disposable entertainment: it wants to be an important movie about faith & resilience. So why doesn’t it study some of the dad’s autistic traits more? Why does it give a middle-aged man an imaginary friend, and cutaways of his OCD & restless leg, without exploring them beyond passive freakishness?

The Unbreakable Boy is too timid to answer the big questions it asks, but calculated against the viewer constituting their own empathy. Never go full retard.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you choked that Patricia Clarkson & Amy Acker both went underused (again)? Are you surprised the finished film went three years without a release? Do you think Zachary Levi should get another chance at a dramatic leading role? And probably the most important question of all: as a viewer, do you lose empathy for characters that demand it? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Wolf Man (2025)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

You can blame Film School for my objectively watching movies wondering what I’d do different: “Well, if they had moved the opening flashback to the midpoint, flash-forward to the middle for a bit, then go back, cut the next twenty minutes…” and etcetera.

However, I’m sure the only way to fix “Wolf Man” would be to start over with new hires. To quote “Family Guy,” it “insists upon itself”: it’s innately serious with its body-horror aspirations à la Cronenberg’s “The Fly”, but lacks Jeff Goldblum’s humanizing arc or, plainly, anything else of interest.

What happened? I mentioned TV’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in my negative review for Blake Lively’s “It Ends With Us”, but actress Elisabeth Moss’ time there – particularly the long close-ups of her character’s mental atrophy – made her the perfect actress to quietly communicate the fear of an abusive partner in director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of “The Invisible Man”. A palatable discomfort made that project borderline-unwatchable, but its potency made me excited for what Whannell did next.

Well, next is here, and Wolf Man’s casting sucks: indie-darling Christopher Abbott and “Ozark’s” Julia Garner, as a bickering couple, have zero chemistry. Despite his character’s learned sheepishness, Abbott lacks primality as a father trying to break a cycle of toxic parenting. Garner equally trifles as the shocked city-mom out of her element, emptily channelling Moss’ internal acting successes. Putting Abbott & Garner together at their most unpleasant is like banging two coconut halves together and calling it a horse.

Bad acting can be charming if the story is still engaging, but Wolf Man’s specialty is its disengagement. Abbott’s character history isn’t fleshed out, leaving his father’s notes on hunting the lycan for no one to find and a neighbourly relationship undeveloped & whitewashed, a mother MIA, and a second-act twist without emotional resonance. We spend an inordinate amount of the first act with Abbott & Garner’s marital issues, and the transformation itself doesn’t start until the halfway point, prorating the rest with Abbott barricading only one of the two entrances into the farmhouse where the family is hiding, not including the windows.

Like a puzzle, Wolf Man’s pieces are all there, but there’s no ends tying the loose, disparate bits together, and what’s left doesn’t match the picture on the box: it’s poorly acted, poorly plotted, and goes nowhere fast. Next time, just remake “Van Helsing” instead.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Assuming there are always bits on the cutting room floor, should the filmmakers have swapped out scene-after-scene of Garner & her movie daughter running back & forth between the farmhouse and the barn with some actual backstory about Abbott’s father’s hunt for the lycan? Is it worth hypothesizing about movie scenes not included in the final cut, even if they didn’t exist to begin with? Do you re-edit movies while you’re watching them, too? Leave a comment for us down below!

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