THE NEXT DECADE

An example of image pastiche…

I’m not exactly sure why I like the number 10. I suppose John Lennon was right when he said the number 9 was perfect because it is the highest number. I’m actually a fan of the number 7, as I was born on the seventh, and finding other people born on the seventh is actually rare. I do think instead of focusing on the number 10 I should be focusing on the word decade. I spend a dramatic amount of my life studying history, and the decade seems to be that which defines us recently. In the Ancient World, nothing changed for thousands of years. It took the Renaissance to really wake the world out of it, excepting Asia, which lie for another five centuries. By the 1700s, it was clear that centuries could be defined by thought, or fashion, or other trends, but not remembered, as no one ever lived long enough for that. By the twentieth century, time and ‘progress,’ whatever that is, started moving fast enough that we could remember whole decades. 

When I was in college, I remember reading a feminist history called “From the Front Parlor to the Back Seat” in which the courtship of women was recorded from 1910 to 1960. Women were respected once, it was said. Courted. Dated. Married. Then life started. Halfway through the century they were in the back seat of some boy’s car, giving away the only thing that made them unique. That long view of the twentieth century shook me. My grandmother was born in 1920. “During the Wilson Administration,” I would joke to my friends. She passed away in 2006. When she was born, barnstorming was an aerial sport. When she died, SpaceX announced it was going to make the moon a regular habit soon. 

That wound up being delayed, but you get the drift. In that span of a lifetime, of a hundred years, what was it that made us remember the decade 1911-1920 as original as the one before it? How did we go from Victorian to Edwardian? We are aware of the Roaring Twenties. The Great Depression defines the 1930s. The Second World War and the Shoah is the cataclysm that divides the century in the 1940s. Every decade the past century is definable. Nameable. There are several markers to go by. Politics. Fashion. Sexual Culture. This year will mark the one hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Why can we do this in the 20th Century and no other? I’m sure many scholars have written tomes devoted to this subject. I haven't cared to research any of them. I’m just going to talk out of my ass, like I normally do, and say it is cinema.

Cinema is what defines our memory of each decade. Cinema is why the world started moving forward in terms of ten years, and not in the terms of centuries. Cinema is the ultimate art form because it is made in a time that is defined by that time. That’s why I choose each film in my second decade on the Super 70 Podcast to represent a single decade in American History. Each film is unique, but every film is. What does each film represent in our history? Racism. Sexism. Misogyny. Fear. Corruption. Hope. Futility. Nostalgia. Othering. Purpose. That is what defines the Super 70 Podcast’s Second Decade. That is what defines American History for it’s first hundred years on the silver screen. 

Like everything else in our history, Buster Keaton was a complex individual. He was a genius choreographer who stuck to comedy and decided to do a film about the Lost Cause of the South. When he helped direct The General with Clyde Bruckman in 1926, there were still a multitude of Civil War veterans still attending the sixty-first anniversary of the war’s end… and some of them still weren’t too happy about it. The first films of our country made racism acceptable. Not just The General, but D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation from the previous decade, and even Gone With the Wind two decades later didn’t just ‘tolerate’ racism, but espoused a false history with the purpose of subjugating a long suffering minority of our population. If you think I am exaggerating, just head on over to www.boxofficemojo.com and look at Gone With The Wind’s all time adjusted for inflation position. Number One, with a bullet, with ONE POINT TWO TRILLION DOLLARS. Racism pays in America. This isn’t something that we didn’t know already. The NAACP protested The Birth of a Nation, as they protested The General. As they gave Hattie McDaniel shit over collecting her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Gone WIth the Wind while she was waiting for the honor in a separate...but equal I’m sure… section at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Racism still pays in America. Our President was elected on it. 

As if racism was not bad enough to contemplate about ourselves, Ginger Rogers prances out on stage in the first two minutes of a film called “Golddiggers of 1933” with a silver dollar hanging over her vagina. What more symbolism do you need to prove women are not people but commodities? Still a non believer? What about when she looks into the camera and sings “we’re in the money, come on in, honey?” Throughout the film, rich men skirt chase women a quarter of their age and we are led to believe it is the woman's fault their sexuality is being valued and constantly discounted. 

Mildred Pierce follows this up with an out and out hate fest of Joan Crawford’s working woman character of the same name. She’s so successful, we hate her. For taking our husband’s jobs. For taking their pride. Their masculinity. And in the end, they’re not even thankful for us fucking thier teenage daughter. And if that hypocrisy isn’t enough, we have insinuate the real reason Mildred is upset isn’t because her husband is sleeping with her daughter (which is okay, because after all Monti and Vida are not blood related) but because Mildred secretly wants her feminine daughter for herself. Incest is the worst accusation you can make of a person, and in this case it would be incest and pedophilia, and that’s what we thought of women in the forties. They are threats. And when we see threats, what do we do? Discredit them. 

It is a woman that betrays Monti, and it’s a woman that betrays Miles in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1954) but the focus of that film isn’t necessarily sexism, which is pervasive even in that film, but rather fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of this Battlestation. Sorry. Wrong movie. Fear of everything, even your next door neighbor. My own son made it forty minutes in this film and turned to me with his fifteen year old mind and said “this movie is about communism, isn’t it?” Yes, it is, son, and about how paranoia, when we’re right, is even worse. 

Paranoia is an undercurrent of The Graduate. Ben doesn’t trust anyone, especially if they are over thirty.. He doesn’t trust anything. He is surrounded by ‘plastics,’ a catch phrase from the late Sixties youth generation that signifies anything fake or phoney. And yet, smug little Ben surrounded by all the things his parent’s money can buy just can’t seem to treat women right, regardless of who they are. Ben’s duplicity in the Graduate underscores the duplicity of the liberal left in America. The film would be much more interesting if it were much more honest. 

And if you want honesty, look no further than Gordon Parks, Jr.’s Super Fly. Not a single shot is on a set. You can pick up the dingy bedrooms, the dilapidated basements, the bombed out neighborhoods. Parks’ tale of drug dealer Youngblood Priest’s struggles trying to get out of the narcotics trade might be just as far-fetched as any spy movie in which Val Kilmer in The Saint, or Pierce Brosnan in The Heist, tries to get just ‘one more score,’ but the struggle against the man, and the inner-racial disharmony is real. Priest might just make it out alive, but how long he can stay clean is another film that was never made. It’s ending is just as uncertain as his life, and that makes this the most real film in the next decade. 

The unreal, or dishonest, or the plastic if you like, angle of The Terminator presents a different challenge to the viewers of the 1980s. Though clothed in the hypermasculinity of the time, Cameron’s Greek God as killing machine is worse underneath the cheap plastic sunglasses. The real hero of this story is Sarah Conner, who not only perseveres in her struggle against man and machine, but against her own reservations as well. She emerges strong, victorious, and in complete charge of her body. In giving birth, she will save all mankind. This type of hope is what we needed in the 1980s after such four straight decades of soft serve dog shit. 

Pastiche is defined on Wikipedia as “a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.” No one is more skilled in the art of pastiche than celebrated director Quentin Tarantino, the former video rental clerk who has become grouped with Scorsese and Fincher as one of the greatest living film directors. Although Steven Soderbergh uses pastiche more masterly and effectively in telling a story, Tarantino’s original screenplays all emphasize character over the visual, other than Soderbergh’s other-way-around. Tarantino has been accused of not just using pastiche well, but too well, to the point of plagiarism, and if ever there is such a thing, there is no better person to point it out than Mike White of The Projection Booth Podcast. I will ask Mike to join us for more commentaries in the future. I hope he will consent. 

No one has accused Ridley Scott of using pastiche. In fact, it might be the only thing he is not accused of. In Kingdom of Heaven we see a troubled storyline (a low born knight trying to make his way to heaven) hampered by a troubled time (three years after 9/11) and a troubled release (critics hated it and it's director’s cut). I asked Dave Anderson, who sat in on The Terminator podcast, to sit with me through this long, slow, slog of a film and help me understand why, why, for god sakes why did Ridley Scott make such glaring mistakes? And isn’t that what our country was doing in the ten years following 9/11?

Perhaps the greatest film from 2010-2019, or perhaps the greatest film of this Decade of podcasts, The Social Network in many ways exemplifies the direction western society is taking, iPhones firmly gripped in our hands. The tech giants have us by the balls, and they want the world. Why? Because they just can’t emote with that one girl they love. And isn’t that most people now, or at least most millenials? What kind of society are we in which we have to use code in order to express our emotional feelings with each other? The irony of Mark Zuckerburg, who appears to be a very withdrawn individual, creating a website that exemplifies the very nature of all ‘Social Networks’ we find online, is too rich to pass up. Coupled with Fincher’s bizarre sense of humor and a film crew that can pull off the most technical of shots, The Social Network is literally the nerds telling us the story of other nerds, and we love it. 

I’m pretty sure the first film I saw with Dave Anderson was his laser disc copy of Clerks in Late 1996, early 1997. We watched it in his economy apartment in West Houston with another friend. This was after geology classes and constant bickering over the right Fleetwood Mac line up and whether or not Louis Malle was worth our time. We cooed when the Oyster Scene in Spartacus was put back in and just about passed out when Kubrick announced he needed more scenes for Eyes Wide Shut. We were Edwins, and we loved it. Somewhere in my files is a seventeen page email in which we argued point-by-point on whether Raging Bull was one of the greatest movies in the world, or just pure shit. Dave and I are nothing alike. We come from different neighborhoods, different backgrounds, have different interests, and though we used to work together, have very different careers now. But in the middle of all of that he’ll send me a Ringer Podcast on Roger Deakins and I’ll send him an article on Barry Lyndon that’s so good, he’d rather read that than watch the film again. Somehow, on this one thing, we just click. We don’t always agree. I hate Zoolander and Game of Thrones. He orders his Criterions by spine, which makes it damn near impossible for me to find anything. But we seem to understand why we disagree. And that might be the only thing we have in common. Oh yeah, we’re both white.

I asked Dave to help knock out some movies and then we chatted ‘live’ for a few episodes. The Terminator wasn’t perfect, and The Kingdom of Heaven was almost painful. But the Special Reports have their own charm and we’re getting better all the time. By the Social Network, we seem to have our shit together and he’ll be back for an indeterminate number of episodes in the future. He seems to get the Decade idea, and that’s worth exploiting. 

The history of the United States as told through ten films was not easy, and it took forever, but it was well worth it. I got so wrapped up in this that I still haven’t finished my last two novels. Dave and I have planned out the next decade and he’s going to sit in a few. I’ve got a standing invitation to Mike White to come back for another episode, and I’ve got a couple more tricks of my sleeve. Stay tuned. 

Thanks to you, the listener, for subscribing and occasionally transferring your free interest in my random thoughts on film to actually ordering my books online. How else am I moving copies in Manchester? It has to be the podcast. It’s been an interesting decade. I hope the next one will be just as entertaining. Namaste, Mariska Hartagay. 

WHY DO I CARE ABOUT DOLORES O'RIORDAN?

Don’t let it fade…

QUICK NOTE: I’ve been meaning to write something like this since her untimely passing in two years ago in January 2018. But like most things in life, I’m late. I’d rather not write this at all.

We meet the infinite. This is a fact. We try not to think about it lest we go insane. Instead, we try to live. Some of us live better than others. It is a worthwhile struggle to improve everyone’s quality of life. Some of us care more than others to try to do this through our conscience, our votes, or even our individual actions. Most of us don’t give a shit, even if we say we do. We just keep looking at our phones. There are many, many worthwhile things to care about. I have a wife and kids, a semi-important job, hobbies that keep my knife sharp. In short, I have shit to do. Given this is the case, why do I care about a woman I never met dying halfway across the world? I’m not quite sure I know. I do know I’m getting more sentimental and emotional in my old age. When I lived in Calgary, the Military Museum had a display of a thirteen year old girl whom a photographer had met in Afghanistan. When the photographer returned the following year, he learned the girl was dead. I think I cried for an hour over that. I saved the photo of the girl. It’s in my office, reminding me… of what exactly?

And when Dolores O’Riordan passed away, I remember driving into work totally fucking stunned. I’ve never seen The Cranberries in concert. I did not know she had two solo albums out. But looking at my shelf I see seven Cranberries CDs, also all on my phone. I was just as upset when George Harrison died. But he was a Beatle. His life was cut short. He was more...what is the word? Surely not Iconic. Look at O’Riordan in a random Google image search. She’s just as Iconic as any male rock star, certainly. For the first few weeks it looked like she took her own life, which put a tint on the grief her fans and I’m sure her friends and family took hard. I did more than just put a sign on my door that announced her passing and blasted her music for months. I wondered more than just what the hell happened. I wondered… why did I care?

Linger came out when I was in high school, and you had to be an idiot to to see that she had talent pouring out of her. The minute she opened her mouth, it was like every daughter in Ireland sang at the same time. I was shocked to learn from her bandmates that other bands had turned her down because they didn’t like her ‘keening’ - the traditional Irish vocals used to lament the dead at gravesite - because it was exactly her use of keening that shot The Cranberries from Ireland and nobody to Linger and the world in less than six months. The Cranberries’ first two albums sold forty million copies. Pick up a copy of the next Rolling Stone, if you still care to read print. Find any artist today who has moved forty million whole copies of any album - not streamed. It doesn’t fucking happen.

There was that, and there was her image. It could only be found in fast cuts on MTV “back when MTV played music videos” and on the cover of their spectacular first album “Everyone Else is Doing It, Why Can’t We?” She was petite for sure, but not a Deborah Harry, you could say, or a Pat Benetar. She didn’t look like a runway model, but it didn’t matter. It’s not that it didn’t matter because she could sing. There are millions of girls who don’t look like runway models who can’t sing. She just had a charm about her. The way her eyes would roll around in her head. The way she seemed to be nervous every time she talked to just about anybody. Her personality is what made her beautiful, and she might be the first female rock star to make me want to listen to her by deliberately not doing what the other girls were doing - and I mean that with absolutely no disrespect to Joan Jett or Grace Slick or whoever. There has to be someone like that for every generation. And for the Xers I think it was Dolores. 

Obviously she was trying to be noticed. She had more hairstyles than David Bowie. Like many front women before her, she bobbed hers, got a crew cut, like Billie Eilish, she dyed it different colors, experimented like any seventeen year old punk girl would. She went platinum blonde for the their second cover No Need to Argue. Other than constantly looking at her on the cover - and Fergal, what the fuck was up with him? - everyone who I ever knew who listened to the Cranberries had the same question - what’s up with the couch? It was like being a Dave Matthews Band fan. Who the hell was Fenton? It didn’t matter why she did it. It didn’t matter that she did it at all, really, with a voice like that. But when you watch the zombie video, my lord. Striking does not even cut it. 

I listened to Zombie of course, being in college in the 90’s when the Troubles were still going on and wondering when in the hell were those two sides going to end the longest violent clash in western Europe? But I was never really a huge fan of the song. Ode to My Family and Twenty One were the standouts for me, regardless of my worshipping of the guitar on that fine song. And I absolutely could not stand Ridiculous Thoughts. Perhaps it was the video with Elijah Wood. What the hell was going on? What the hell was the song about? It seemed just as random as Alanis Morrisette’s Isn’t it Ironic, which I fucking destest. But Everything I Said, Dreaming my Dreams, Yeat’s Grave. Great songs. Great album. So what if I didn’t like the singles. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. 

I was driving home the day she died, and a song I thought was a throwaway lyrics about a breakup teamed with a great melody suddenly struck me as a shot across the bow of the press and paparazzi. Twister. Oh. Does anyone see through you? It’s not a boyfriend. It’s the media. But you’re so happy. Oh. I didn’t go along. Nothing she did would ever be right in their eyes, and in the same way, everything she did was fodder for them. There was no escape from the endless cycle of friendless fucks who make their money off her image and music. But she had to move on. She felt alive, but she cried so hard about it. Jesus Christ, I thought. Ridiculous Thoughts. Why is she even giving them space in her head? I must have played that song at the top of my factory speakers on repeat on the way home for a good month after she died. I felt like an idiot. I could have been enjoying this song for twenty five years by now. It’s like I found it for the first time. When I played the video for my son, he fucking got it right away. He’s fifteen. 

When they pulled her body out of the bathtub of an upscale London hotel room, she was clothed with a shirt and pajama bottoms. Most people who drown themselves in bathtubs are clothed. They don’t want to be found naked. Suicide seemed to be the most likely answer. When the toxicology report confirmed that she was way over the limit in alcohol, it became apparent that she was on a bender. Not that suicides don’t happen under the influence, but it’s not the majority of the time. This coupled with phone calls she made to her producer at two am, and other evidence that she was planning meets the next day, all indicate that it was most likely a stupid mistake. Some people accidentally...shoot themselves...in the head. We can make whatever jokes we want about it, but the fact is that it happens, and when it happens to anyone, whether they sold forty million albums or not, it’s a tragedy. 

YouTube has an entire concert in Paris the Cranberries played in 1999. I urge everyone to watch it. Watch it, not watch her. You get the feeling of how good a band they are, and they are an excellent band. Fergal is mad on the drums, absolutely underrated. I’ve heard some say he’s a dime in a dozen. Well, he must be the best dime? I don’t know. I was impressed. And the Hogans don’t even look at each other. They just…do. They play. And of course Dolores is the consummate rock star, and she did this tour after she gave birth. Just…wow. For a time my daughter would go to sleep in the cinema room in our house where I have a projector hooked up to a Blu Ray smart player. So I put the concert on so Dolores could sing my daughter…and me… to sleep. So much so that now she asks me to skip the Cranberries whenever they shuffle on in the car. I have endlessly played Roses, which arguably is track for track their best album, all to her dismay. Some people just aren’t into her voice or The Cranberries’ post-Smiths sound.

I didn’t realize how much in love with her I was. It was more than just knowing all the lyrics, even to the songs that I hated. It was an appreciation of a person and everything they had given me for twenty five years, which was in a way everything they had. And I didn’t know a fucking thing about her. I had no idea she lived in Canada, had married Duran Duran’s tour manager, had three kids, was recently divorced. Yadda Yadda Yadda. I’m not a celebrity junky, despite being a committed cinephile. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I’ve been more cognizant of my intrusion into ‘public’ people’s lives since Princess Diana died (by the way, I’m NOT a Diana fan, and that’s not the topic of this rant). I saw what it was leading to, so I said a long time ago, I’m not going to be a part of the problem. So I just didn’t know anything past what she cared to say on an Island record or on Twitter, which she used sparingly. 

So when I started reading NPR and BBC articles about her and her bandmates, I was really surprised at how much I didn’t know, and completely unprepared for an emotional journey as her bandmates continued to speak to the press openly about their grieving process. Unlike bands like No Doubt, which struggled internally with Gwen Stefani’s image and treatment in the press, and the unfair attention which netted the rest of the band the ability to walk down Fifth Avenue and NOT be recognized, Fergal and the Hogan Brothers were completely at ease with Dolores being the front woman, despite the song credits being so mixed and shared. “Doing photo sessions was easy with Dolores,” Noel Hogan told the media, “all we had to do was get behind her.” And they supported her as best they could. There are millions of pictures of The Cranberries, and she’s always up front. The cover for the 20th Century Masters Millennium Collection is almost a farce. Fergal looks like he doesn’t know what to do. Noel looks like he’s tired of all this shit. Mike looked bored. Where’s Dolores? Right up front, with fishnet stockings, sitting on a ladder, and staring into the camera with her lips parted. Yes, I fucking bought it, and no, I didn’t need it. The set itself is funny. They’re on a photo backdrop, but you an see all the equipment and the backdrop is exposed. The ladder Dolores is sitting on is covered in paint splotches. It’s a deliberate choice to say none of the glossy stuff matters, because she’s in the shot. But what got me crying the day of her funeral, after reading all this about a person I shouldn’t care about, is a picture from the BBC of her brothers and bandmates carrying her miniature coffin out of a church and negotiating down a flight of stairs. You can clearly see Noel, Mike, and Fergal. They’re still getting behind her, even in death. I hope I have friends like that.

As I’m writing this I have Lost from In the End playing. It’s their last and her postumous album and excepting the inevitable re-releases and rarities that usually follow the death of a star who’s had such a long career as hers, it’s the last time I’ll hear her. And I don’t know, I still don’t know why I care about Dolores O’Riordan. I don’t know her, or her story. Or her friends. Or her family. All I have is her music. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe that’s enough.

THE LAST DECADE

Insert pithy quote here.

If you’ve paid some what attention to the podcast over the past year then you figured out about halfway through that I had a plan all along. The first ten episodes of the super 70 podcast are exclusively from the 1980s. I chose to do this for several reasons and for those of you who are curious about my personal journey to podcasting and what those ten movies mean to me…please tune in. If you’re not in the slightest bit curious I highly recommend you skip this all together.

My youth in the 80s must have been what most youths in the 80s was like. I was born in a middle class suburban neighborhood and went to an integrated school. I was a fan of pop culture like everyone my age and fell victim to it as well. I watched and watched and watched movies. I became to love, to worship film. I bought a skateboard after seeing Back to the Future and dressed like a Ghostbuster for my tenth Halloween. It never occurred to me that film was an art form until I got into college and met a friend. He was very perceptive and the first film we watched together was Kevin Smith’s Clerks which he had on laserdisc.

I once saw Hitchcock say in an interview that he thought film was an art form for the masses, not for the art house. Robert Ebert wrote thousands of film reviews and framed a career that felt a need to protect the regular movie goer from a Hollywood intent on making money by shelling out stupidity. We now have teenagers making films on their iPhone. On this long road to democratizing film as art, a kid from New Jersey who never went to college charged up 27 thousand dollars on his credit card and sold his film for three hundred grand. There are obvious downsides to Clerks as every internet troll will tell you. The camera is motionless, the grain is rough, the development is uneven and the actors are all college level amateurs or lower. However, how many of you have created something for 27 bucks and sold it for 300? Kevin Smith did more than this. His next film had a budget of 6 million, backed by a major Hollywood Studio where Steven Spielberg called the shots. He soon produced a film that garnered an oscar for best screenwriting and for those what-have-you-done-for-me-lately crowd Smith has tackled three different genres in the last six years that seemed to have been written, directed, and marketed to a critic proof audience. The masses might not see Smith’s films, but it does not mean they are not for them.

In 2006, Smith started his own podcast, which back then was an MP3 file you had to download from his website and burn to a CD to listen to. Because of the mode of distribution, podcasting back then was not very democratic. You had to know code, pay server fees, and be hip on software. Smith couldn’t do all this so he hired Ming Chen, the star of Comic Book Men, to write the code for Smodcast on www.viewaskew.com. At the time I faced a 90 minute commute every day and listened to Smodcast from Episode One.  

Ten years later I was faced with unemployment and uncertainty. I threw myself into finding work to support my family but I also had to fight the true enemy of the unemployed – boredom. I already had a website, www.thatdylandavis.com, and I had been mulling around the idea of starting a podcast on history but found the research and citations too much for someone who just wanted to do it on the side. Unlike Kevin Smith or Mike Duncan, the incredibly successful creator of the History of Rome Podcast, my podcast is not monetized and it is not a full time job. Because of my post graduate work in film studies, and because film is largely in the eye of the beholder, I decided to do a film commentary podcast. Most film podcasts were two or more people arguing about a film’s merits. The Projection Booth Podcast and the 80s All Over are two that I listen to every week. But no one seemed to be breaking it down scene by scene like were trained to do in film school. I knew it would not be for everyone, but that seemed a way to make it something special. I would do a scene by scene analysis and the Super 70 Podcast, named after Super 8 and 70mm film, was born.

Super 8 is an Eastman Kodak format for 8mm film released in 1965. It is the same size as the previous Regular 8mm format but has a greater exposed area on the sides because the perforations along one edge are smaller.  By 1973 it also included an oxide strip along one border that enabled live recording of sound. The film came in a cartridge that could support two and a half minutes at 24 frames per second, the professional motion picture standard, or three minutes and 20 seconds at 18 frames per second for people shooting home movies who wanted to economize. Super 8 became extremely popular through the 1970s. My grandfather had one, and it is still in use today. In the 1980s it was largely replaced by video tape but industry people still used Super 8, especially in the advent of the music video.

70mm is twice the size of a standard 35mm frame and has greater height. When projecting a film in 70mm you see an image four times the size of 35mm film with no loss in quality. The aspect ratio is 2.20 to 1.   70mm was developed in many forms from the 1930s and 1940s but it took Mike Todd, one of the founders of Cinerama, to make 70mm popular. Cinerama required three different film projectors running a single reel of a 35mm print to produce the 2.20 to 1 aspect ratio on a curved screen. As impressive as the experience was, it was cumbersome and expensive to pull off. Todd left Cinerama and collaborated with the American Optical Company to create Todd-AO, a single 70mm print with 6 channel sound on the same aspect ratio. 70mm was revealed in 1954 with Oklahoma!, and framed such epic films as The Sound of Music and Patton. I first saw 70mm watching Cleopatra in the early 90s and I knew I was seeing something special. Super Panavision 70 was a competitor that MGM used to film Ben-Hur, and the format was used to show Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and more recently, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight which used an anamorphic squeeze to see a 65mm film on a 70mm without quality loss. As digital technology overtakes film in both image capture and projection, 70mm is on the decline, but audiences still love it, and I do too.

I am not against watching movies on your iPhone. I do understand how it irks some people, especially in the industry, that large scale projections are being miniaturized in a commercial process. I also understand that film as celluloid is special and takes talent to use. But it also takes talent to know what image you want to create using a RED or other digital camera. Super 8 and 70mm was to me the two ends of the movie making spectrum. One was extremely simple to use, the other only for global corporations to pull off. Super 8 was for everyone to use and 70mm was for everyone to enjoy. That’s why this podcast is called Super70.

I went to a rather liberal university, which should surprise no one, and I graduated with a philosophy degree in the 1990s. I was from a rather conservative background and I was struck how liberal everyone was from the staff to the student body. I was also struck how liberals viewed history, and almost all of my professors were liberal. I don’t view my education as slanted, if anything it helped me gain perspective. But this did mean I saw certain things in society and history interpreted in different ways. Not good, not bad, just different. History and film seemed like such black and white issues to me. It was strange to see them in tones of grey or in other cases flipped to white and black. One of the many issues that confused me was the color of the brush one used to paint all of the 1980s, including film, pop music, and literature.

When looking back to the 80s, no one seemed to have a good thing to say. Reagan was a demented neo-con. The fact that he signed an amnesty for millions of Latinos and attempted to rid the world of all nuclear weapons was never discussed. His wife was a bobble head doll, empty on the inside despite a forceful persona that cared deeply for the nation’s youth. The culture of the 1980s was inherently connected to Reagan and thus was decadent and corrupt. There seemed no way to explain the marvelous art that occurred at the time following this narrative. The one hit wonders that cranked out of Great Britain that included Spandau Ballet, the Cutting Crew were seen as anemic bubble gum pop art that suffered under a simplistic fantasy created by John Hughes and pumped up with hypermasculinity from the likes of Sylvester Stallone. Cinema in the 70’s was known for being independent, feminist, and in the hands of the artist. Everyone cherishes and celebrates the decade though it was beset by a horrible war, degenerating scandal, and the decay of our economic system. I find this confusing. By the 80s the movie studios were being taken over by banks, junk bond companies and right wing media corporations intent on pushing the country to the right and destroying culture in the process. Time magazine even ran cover with an upside down picture of Reagan that declared the official record was being overturned. Yet I see the 80s as a richer version, and definitely more advant garde, than the 70's. 

The problem with the accepted narrative is that it leaves out a remarkable decade of all types of art, from Maplethorpe to Spielberg, and in the so called vacuum of 80s culture you will find David Byrne, David Bowie, and Dire Straits.  The 80s is not only rich with culture but extremely diverse. Blade Runner is a great American film financed by Hong Kong money and directed by a Brit. Many directors in the 80s like Mel Brooks were second generation Americans, some like him were Jewish, spoke French, served in the Second World War, and had a hell of a sense of humor. The decade was not just American by nature. Australia came into its own in the 80’s with fantastic action films like The Road Warrior and Japan cranked out title after title after title of classics that stand the test of time: Ran; Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind; Akira; The Ballad of Narayama won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1983. China had its own successful run on and off the mainland. The Hong Kong action film was not invented in the 80’s, but the island exploded with the talent of John Woo and Jackie Chan. I picked ten films for very different reasons to confront the idea that the 80s are vacuous of culture as untrue.

Blade Runner is a perfect start for the 80s. It is at the beginning of the decade and so it is not saddled with any baggage. It points to where we should be going in 10 years and thus it is afraid of our dystopian future where cyberpunks and corporations push us around. Head Office pokes fun at the gaping holes in capitalism so we can laugh at the moral majority without too much self examination. Looker uses the thriller genre to examine beauty and more importantly, what importance we put on beauty and how the eye of the beholder is all things in the powerful temple of marketing. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind shows who we can be using a heroine good at heart despite the corruption in the world. Nausicaa is not an Eliot Ness who barges down the door with a gun, but someone who recognizes that the only way to change the world is to show the people who they can be by being that person yourself. And what is wrong with wanting to be a better person? Back to the Future shows some disturbing reactionary phenomenon, but it’s good natured romp through time gives us the belief that if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. Ghostbusters tests this notion, passes it but at the same time warns that if we stay on this track, dogs and cats will eventually live together. John Carpenter told us to look deeper into our society with They Live, a shocking science fiction film that body slams yuppies, or rather, the dog eat dog glutinous attitude that yuppies live by. Gallipoli is the apex of the anti-war film. It could have been any battle of any war, and thus it’s meaning in the decade after we left vietnam transcends its time setting. This is important to look at after so many movies about the American war effort in Vietnam and so many books analyzing them. Gallipoli is so anti-war it is almost dangerous. You might get to a point where you don’t believe in war at all. And if that is the case then there would be no one to stop Hitler except Mel Brooks and his 35mm panavision...and his wit. To Be Or Not To Be keeps alive the dangers of fascism by pointing out that the absurd can kill you just as readily as the banal. And finally we come to Heathers, the final word on the 80s. It can be all you define it as: full of consumers or narcissists whose only good quality is they inspire others to murder them. Killing the yuppies, as much fun as John Carpenter shows that would be, though, is not the answer. Ultimately, Heathers concludes that you should find another way. Personally, I’m going to go rent some video tapes and watch them with my friends.

This was just my take on the 1980s. A time that was described to me as a reactionary far right vacuous culture seemed to me to be fairly liberal and although film in this time struggled with misogyny in Back to the Future and racism in Gallipoli, it seemed to also be discussing domestic and global issues such as pollution, consumerism, and the value of human life. The 80s didn't seem like a dead culture to me at all. It seemed very much alive, very rich and willing to take on issues that needed to be discussed. Film can be a microcosm into the times it was made, the hopes and dreams, and also the anxiety and fears of the audience. If you can see this in the 80’s you can see analyze any film from any decade, and that was my hope.  I don’t see a bunch of overboard homosexuality in the Lord of the Rings. I see a bunch of different people who strive to find their similarities in the face of evil.

In the next decade we’re going to take on some very different themes and the films won’t be so cogent this time. They’re going to be more spread out, less organized, but no less important. I’ll try to do a lot less rambling and drinking this time. I hope you’ll join me.

BEING KEVIN SMITH

I was depressed, man. I wanted that movie to do so much better. I'm sitting there thinking 'That's it, that's it, I'm gone, I'm out. The movie didn't do well and I killed Seth Rogen's career! This dude was on a roll until he got in with the likes of me. I'm a career killer! Judd [Apatow]'s going to be pissed, the whole Internet's going to be pissed because they all like Seth, and the only reason they like me anymore is because I was involved with Seth! And now I fuckin' ruined that. It was like high school. I was like, 'I'm a dead man. I'll be the laughing stock

I tread carefully in writing a blog about such an unconventional filmmaker. I am not afraid of the so-called “professional critics” who have lambasted Kevin Smith for being nothing more than an artist in control of his art, but rather that of the “world” we call the Internet. I refer to the Army of Trolls and associated haters, most of whom have never seen his films or if they have, have only seen Clerks, or those like minded basement beings who have elevated to to the mobile world of Twitter and who genuinely can’t stand to see a fat kid such as themselves make them look bad by achieving his dreams.

Unlike most of his peers his age, he never attended a formal film school. Rather, like peers his age he had short formal training at a certification course in Vancouver from which he dropped out (Richard Linklater had attended film classes at Austin Community College, Robert Rodriguez had animation classes at UT). Inspired by Linklater’s Slacker and Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs he decided to sell his comic book and laserdisc collection and then run up newly applied credit cards to the tune of 27,000 dollars of personal debt. Controlling the debt meant he controlled the film, it’s future, and in time, his career. It is strange how the blue collar background that he comes from is so vocal about hating him - not just his work but him personally. Smith worked a number of shirt-name jobs before clerking the Quick Stop near his house where he shot his first film. Everyone worked on it for free. The only money spent on the film was for equipment rental and food snatched from the Quick Stop shelves. He had to leave the counter to fly across the country with his best friend and ‘producer’ Scott Mosier whom he met in Vancouver so they could push the film through circuits. They took red eyes back to New Jersey so he could sell donuts and cigarettes after doing late night Q & As across the country. At Sundance, he sold Clerks to Harvey Weinstein for 300,000 dollars. He paid off his parents mortgage, continued living at home, and bought his father, a postal worker, his first new car.

In spite of this, when I post a positive comment about Smith on Reddit, I am bombarded by downvotes. When I ‘like’ something of his on Twitter, I have had to block replies to me by avid haters. This has led to me cautiously bringing up my View Askew fandom with people, bracing for verbal assault only to find his detractors are usually only on the internet. His fans are on the streets, and they are everywhere.

Universal producer Jim Jacks put six million on the line for Smith when he produced Mallrats, a ‘smart porky’s’ some said starring Shannen Doherty and former pro-skateboarder Jason Lee. The comic book posters seemed to be in line with Smith’s image but the commercials seemed to fall flat. It seemed not very enticing. “Go see this movie of someone you don’t like,” Smith chided the Universal marketing group later, “and someone you don’t know.” Mallrats tanked just as I was getting old enough to see R rated comedies - a rarity then and now. Smith had tons of projects on the go. All of them stopped. His bright and shining career seemed over… at least in Hollywood. It would take years, stretching into the next century for Mallrats to generate such huge video tape revenues that not only would it start making huge amounts of money in the Universal Canon, but would demand a special edition. Not many ‘bombs’ get that treatment. It is flawed, more flawed than his next film, but it is hysterically funny and typical of college 90’s males. Trust me. I was one.

Rather than go back to Jersey and sulk he went back with Mosier and pooled 300K to make Chasing Amy. I admit I am not a fan, but the film is fascinating to watch as most of the scenes are actually based on famous films. The long walk in the rain from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The scar story trading scene from Jaws. Not just filmmakers loved Chasing Amy, critics loved it, too. With the power of the shrinking press pushing it, the film hit big on the indie circuit and put Smith back on the Hollywood track. Dogma. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Jersey Girl.

The experience that was Dogma was followed by Smith earning his stripes for a few years script doctoring, much like his childhood Hollywood heroine Carrie Fisher - who cameo’d in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. This led him to work on the famous Superman Reborn script that only became legend after his hysterical retelling on his View Askew only DVD An Evening With Kevin Smith. That and an anecdote about working for Prince for a week in Paisley Park kept Smith not only in the Hollywood crowd despite still living in Jersey but also fed his fan base with more recent editions of his unique humor and talking style so prevalent among his age group. He is our Dennis Miller. This is one reason why Smith has endured. His films, largely, talk like we do. And in an extended sense, they reason outside of his target audience. My Uncle was in his late 60’s when he took his wife to see Dogma. He shook his head when he asked me what purpose the big shit monster had in the film. “Don’t you understand,” I reasoned, “he’s a believer. Yes, the Golgotha is myth. It’s absurd. Separate that from the message.” It took a while to digest this, but it eventually happened. I grew up Catholic, like Smith, so I got it immediately. Protestants not so much. Perhaps that’s why the Catholic League was so violently against it (Smith received death threats and was the strange target of Anti-Semitism) and the Protestants didn’t really give a shit. No Pun Intended.

Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back is a fun romp but in the end just a ride to settle the score on a joke at the end of Mallrats. Rarely can someone do this with someone else’s money... but he did. His career rode the same lineup as his consistent star, Ben Affleck, whom he met for Mallrats and who subsequently starred in his next three films. Affleck shot so high up so fast it was hard to contemplate. Looking at his career now as he is directing his own films worth more than all of Smith’s put together, working with haute couture artists like David Fincher and Zack Tyler, is hard to square with the young Affleck that would pull his cock out at the drop of a hat to settle childish bets, drop anal jokes on the set, and who battled addictions with Jason Mewes ranging from prescriptions to pussy.

The blow-up was idiotic. In fact, it was a relationship. Caught in a world that is 100% fabrication, Affleck’s relationship with Jennifer Lopez generated a buzz that was at first healthy. Smith had no problems getting the money for Jersey Girl and signing Liv Tyler and legendary camera man Vilmos Zsigmond who won Oscars for The Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Deliverance. Shooting was in the can when the ‘mood’ in the media over ‘Benifer’ turned on it’s heel. They were engaged to start his first marriage and her third when their other co starring film Gigli (‘Rhymes with ‘really’’) bombed amazingly at the box office. The film is a very weird and final outing by Martin Brest, whose successful run through Hollywood started with Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman. His slide after those hits came to a screeching halt with Affleck hysterically pumping his iron in a mirror and Lopez sensually describing her vagina and what it means to her. These scenes in themselves were the what-the-fuck weird moments critics didn’t get, as if they never saw Charles Grodin pontificating fucking barnyard chickens with Robert DeNiro. But in the context of the film which tried to sell a leather jacket clad Italian mafia type in LA without Elmore Leonard and a Latina in low rise tight jeans as a lesbian assassin it fell flat. It was as if Brest were trying to tackle a serious drama using Smith’s dialogue. It doesn’t deserve the bottom-of-the-barrel 6% that it has on Rotten Tomatoes, clearly a result of the national ‘mood’ created and sold by the media cultural machine (“Jerkin’” to you Josie and the Pussycat fans), and thus the burnout of the powerhouse Hollywood couple (or some would say flameout) brought down not just one film, but two.

At first, Smith cut Lopez completely out of her cameo in Jersey Girl. Then, having plot and length issues, put her back in. He actually filmed a Benifer wedding that has never seen the light of day. Miramax spent 35 million on the film. It opened at 8 million. Before it went to video, it closed at 25 million. Although it would eventually break even and make money, the film put Smith permanently into the Hollywood doghouse. This result boggles the mind. The film is very endearing, on a parenting topic most do not want to face, with a humor which elevates the argument, with a visual style not seen in a Smith film before or since. George Carlin is rare in film, and is a joy here. But the end result was final. Some shake their heads at Gigli and comment on how Ben Affleck destroyed his own career. This is completely unfair. Affleck didn’t destroy his own career. He destroyed Smith’s.

Following this was a hundred percent struggle, but Smith worked harder. Retreating to what he knew, he financed Clerks II independently, made more money than the first film, told a meaningful story in color: but all for not. Zack and Miri Make a Porno might be the funniest film he has ever made, and far surpases the stupid slapstick of the 90s everyone thought was so funny then but can’t remember now. It grossed two million opening weekend...a film about Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks making a sex tape somehow made less than Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz. Try to get that through your head. Smith watched hockey documentaries, smoked weed, and retreated into his fast-growing business of podcasting. He said he was retired. He never wanted to make another movie again. If you actually sat down and watched Jersey Girl, Clerks II, and Zack and Miri back to back, you wouldn’t understand why. What’s not to like? Or rather, what is there to hate?

It took months of Smodcast, his podcast with Mosier, to just get him out of the house. Stoned, and articulate, he pontificated on his rise and fall, the purpose of having a film career, and why he didn’t understand the focused hatred of the underclass for underclass films. Smith doesn’t make movies about film gods and rock stars. He makes films about servants and drug dealers, single parents who watch porn, use fleshlights, go to church and yoga classes. It’s not glorious. Perhaps the haters see too much of themselves in his films. As the years ticked by, his perspective grew more nuanced. Having never attended any college, Smith lacks the formal training most people in Hollywood get as Harvard or Yale trained actors or homeschooled daughters of moguls and casting directors. Instead, his head is filled with the finer points of pop culture. One episode of Smodcast hysterically recorded everything Smith and Mosier didn’t know about Helen Keller, only to be followed by an episode that chronicled the lives of BJ and the Bear, the real meaning of hockey to the spirit of working class Canadians...and, later on… the film career of Grizzly Adams. Smodcast grew so large, Smith started other podcasts just because he could. The ABCs of SNL, Smoviemakers, and his podcast company S.I.R. even earned public service awards for local history for Highlands, A Peephole History. Most of the podcasts he launched are defunct, but some of them boggle the mind in popularity. When Smith launched a podcast exclusively to talk to Jason Mewes about his struggles with addiction as a method of therapy to keep him sober, it debuted as number one in iTunes for a month.

Slowly, Smith started to recover. Of course the writing came first. Then short jobs here and there in TV and on lots. Then came the strange one-off when the director of A Couple of Dicks was fired with just weeks to go to principal photography. Smith stepped in almost last minute to make the best Tracy Morgan movie out of a bad situation starring Bruce Willis. Though he was forgiven by the community for not turning a buck in a bad project, he shook off what was Cop Out to do Red State the following year with his own money, and toured it to theatres around the country in a bus: the film print neatly tucked away next to his fleshlight and rolling papers. Red State did more than shock his fans, it shocked critics as well. Where were the dick and fart jokes? Where were the Burt Reynolds comments and orangutans? Red State instead was a rare bird even in Indie Cinema: a contemplation on fascism it all it’s forms: power, religion, the purpose of family and the interpretation of sin. The cast of John Goodman, Michael Park, and Melissa Leo was so powerful, Affleck picked them all up when he shot The Town the following year. That movie made money. Red State runs endlessly on Amazon Prime.

The power of Red State is glaringly obvious to anyone who watches it. Smith’s dialogue can be wordy and repetitious, a result of watching Carrie Fisher spout out “Governor Tarken. Only you could be so bold. I thought I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.” Red State cuts this down, shocks us with Peckinpaw-like brutality, and warns us of the danger of intolerance in an age of gay marriage. Michael Parks, the veteran actor of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Grindhouse, From Dusk Til Dawn, and who had steadily worked in TV since 1960, played the best crazy preacher since Powers Boothe’s certified insane portrayal of the Reverend Jim Jones.  Red State was still a working class film, but was more akin to the Saw films than to what seemed by the credits the passing fad of Clerks. When he was done, he wasn’t done. Smith was more energized by what he did than the critics who failed to understand what he was doing, or dismissed it if they did. It reminded me of what Orson Welles said after F for Fake. ‘I thought I was on something,’ Orson had told the BBC. Peter Bogdanovich agreed, wondering what Welles could have done had he simply had the support to develop what he had discovered.

Smith didn’t wait for support. Within a year he was on fire. Smodcast was always full-bore, but up came Hollywood Babble-On to add yet another direction to Smith’s focused beam of regurgitation of cultural milestones. Obstensably a show about industry news by Los Angeles radio host Ralph Garman, Hollywood Babble-On now regularly sells out performance theaters on tour, stays in the top ten most downloaded podcasts every week, and generates interest among a generation of fans that now, 25 years later, have grown up after Clerks and therefore don’t have the same hangups as earlier critics and fanboys. Smith’s website, his books (My Boring Ass Life) and his monthly columns about living with anal fissures add to the Smodcast experience where he rants about getting kicked off SouthWest Airlines because he is ‘too fat,’ the trials and tribulations of raising a girl in today’s media minefield, and the mostly misunderstood but wonderful worldly people of the Great White North.

Smith had always been familiar with Canada. Mosier is from Vancouver, and the View Askewniverse constantly pays attention to it. In short order, Smith had written a soul searching script about hockey based on Levon Helm’s eternal song Hit Somebody, which was then optioned as a mini-series before being caught in development hell. Then he penned and directed a horror film based on a fake but hysterical UK advert about a man searching for a roommate who would perform in a walrus suit as part of his rent. From the Smodcast episode “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Tusk mixed humor with horror, confusing critics already put off with Red State. Along the same timeline he performed several successful tours in Canada which included stops onto such revered shows as the CBC’s George Stromboulopolous where in a rare switch for the much loved Maple Leaf Host he could not get a word in edgewise with the excited social butterfly. Tusk had a hard landing at 1.8 million, but it’s budget of 3 million made sure it wasn’t long before after screen sales went into the black. Having then tackled political commentary with Red State and horror with Tusk, Smith switched gears again even more dramatically. Released just last year, Yoga Hosers, another film inspired by marrying elements of Smodcast with Hollywood Babble-On, is a decidedly tween movie, for tween girls, and not for critics or fan boys. Rotten Tomatoes indelible score recreates this split between the critics of Kevin Smith who scored a 20% and the audience who rated it a 39%.

This divide is so far below what we know as the bar from High School that we are quick to judge. It is, to many, the difference between shit and whipped cream on shit. Variety was especially harsh on Smith himself. After trashing the film as nonsense, Variety attacked Kevin Smith for ‘shackling’ his daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Lily Rose Depp to material so dreadful that it “could be reasonably construed as an awfully expensive form of child abuse.” As if on queue, Yoga Hosers hit the internet with a thud sounding more like a turd dropping into water. Trolls and haters kicked into high gear, criticized Smith for slutting out his daughter, abusing his long time relationship with actor Johnny Depp, and for suspending his talent as a director to push forward the career of his Hollywood Babble-On partner Ralph Garman. When i turned on Yoga Hosers on netflix I was shocked to see a four star rating. I was even more shocked, bracing for a cringe binge film, to find the film not just unworthy of both low tomatoes, but actually funny and endearing. My daughter and I watched it twice and laughed at the bratzis, played by Smith himself, enjoying the Batman ‘66 like ending which seemed to try to redeem the ideas of Tusk’s finale. The critics were especially harsh on Ralph Garmin’s constant string of impressions while by my kids asked me to replay them over and over and over. The 19 point divide on Rotten Tomatoes would be more appreciated if we saw it in terms of 61 to an 80. A divide that great would give us pause. But because it is a Smith film, we shrug and watch Glee instead.

Twitter is still awash over the crimes of Kevin Smith, but I seem to be seeing a more distant view of his films for two reasons. First, he seems to have made his films critic-proof because of his branding, and secondly he seems to have found a niche more important than his blue collar stoner movies: keeping his audience guessing. Just in the past year, Smith has directed episodes of the Flash and Supergirl. He wrote a screenplay for Mallrats II which turned into a ten part miniseries starring Shannen Doherty which was later put on hold because of her struggle with cancer. While penning Moose Jaws to be shot this summer and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Smith also came to terms with the fact that Clerks III will never see the light of day due to rumors Jeff Anderson does not want to return as Randall. During this same time period his show Hollyweed has been shot and is in post-production as a cable series about clerks in a marijuana dispensary. He is nearing the end of the first season of Geeking Out with co-host and JJ Abrams sidekick Greg Grunberg and the start of the 7th season of AMC’s ratings cleaner Comic Book Men. Just last month he flew to Florida for a week to shoot the first installment of a monster series based on his shelved Krampus story, Kilroy was Here.

With everything going on just in the past two years, the question isn’t why do people watch Kevin Smith. The question is why do people still hate him...because he is everywhere. Whether he is in Vancouver shooting for the WB or in New York hosting a comic con seminar or in London doing a live show of Hollywood Babble-On or on his toilet in Ben Affleck’s old house writing the next screenplay that he wants to write… Smith is on fire. Whether you like his films are not, they cover their budget. Whether you find him funny or not, people download his podcasts. Whether you find him distasteful or not, millions tuned in online to watch his one on one interviews for IMDB aboard their San Diego Comic Con yacht. If Smith is so hated, why is he everywhere? It reminds me of all the trash talking of Hootie and Blowfish back in the 90s only to find out that everyone you knew had Cracked Rear View in their collection. How many Smith haters have something from View Askew? I’m not a fan of Brian De Palma, but even I have one of his films stuffed somewhere in a CD wallet.

In 2016, Smith announced on Hollywood Babble-On, perhaps when he shouldn’t have, that MGM has pulled him into exploratory discussions about a Buckaroo Banzai sequel. Right off the cuff, Smith convinced them to give the gift that keeps on giving in syndication rights: A ten part miniseries. “In each episode the villain would be a cast member from the original,” Smith repeated for the crowd who started fantasizing about Peter Weller from Robocop, Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future; an endless list of bankable villains. The first season would be a re-telling of the film but would explore Buckaroo’s neurosurgeon experience, pop band world tours, and discovering the 8th dimension. Clancy Brown repeated the story on Variety’s podcast. “I don’t know a single one of us who wouldn’t be interested,” Brown told Kristopher Tapley, who switched the subject as fast as he could.

The image that Smith is some kind of conversation killer among journalists is now so renowned it has become a joke. Smith held an entire podcast with Ralph Garman just to read the Yoga Hosers reviews. Garman took umbrage with so many personal jibes unrelated to the film, while Smith shrugged them off after years of umbrage taking himself. “That’s their experience,” he defend, “how can you argue with that?”

This brings to mind a post Smith put on his View Askew Blog over a decade ago about getting such reviews. He posted a video of two people on a catapult type thrill ride at some nameless amusement park. One participant was having the time of their life. The other one was begging the good lord Jesus to please let it stop. Both riders were undergoing the same experience and yet received two drastically different reactions. That’s what it is to be a Smith fan. It’s the ability to enjoy his films despite the strange sensation that others around you relate them as worse than the Holocaust. I’ve learned to shrug off this annoying notion because there is no way to fight it. When researching an article about Killroy is Here for this blog, the writer ended by asking his audience “What do you think about Smith taking on the Killroy is Here Anthology? Would you rather he stick to his View Askewniverse style?” I find this strange since the View Askewniverse is only six of his films, the last one released in 2006. Since then he has released another six film unrelated to Jay and Silent Bob. Though Killroy is Here is not a VA film, he has written a script for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Underlying this statement, though, is the implicit meaning that the writer and the audience care, that they wish to exert influence over what Smith does and does not create. This is even stranger. He has never let such influence affect what he does and does not do, he has only let the opinion of his work get under his skin...and that in itself seems over.

It is a strange question, though. To go among his peers one might ask ‘would you rather Robert Rodriguez stick to his kid friendly films? Or should he stick to his immigrant bitching mode?’ Should we ask Tarantino fans if they want him to finally kick his pretentiousness and just make another four or five Pulp Fictions? Does Darren Aronofsky give a shit what his fans want him to do? I’m willing to bet none of them do, including Smith. Because really, if you care to tell a director what you want them to direct… then you’re not really a fan.

ROYALE WITH CHEESE (Reflections Upon a Canadian Life)

D. G. Regina Elizabeth II on the flip side.

I just completed an almost seven year stint in Canada working as an Oil Patch guru. Most people I know in my native Texas have never been anywhere, much less lived anywhere else, and always ask me what it is like to live in a foreign country. I’ve always quoted John Travolta from Pulp Fiction in return:

Vincent: You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: No.        

Vincent: It's just a little different. I mean, they got the same shit over there as they do over here, just...over there...it's just a little different.

Jules: Example?

This leads to a hysterical exchange over fast food and theatre fair which ends with this rather low, innocuous point which may have proved the film worthy to European audiences enough to garner it support for the Palm d’Or at Cannes.

Vincent:               And do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese at McDonald’s?

Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

Vincent: No, they got the metric system over there they don't know what the fuck a quarter pound is.

Jules:                    Then what do they call it?

Vincent:               They call it…uh…Royale with Cheese.

This is how I describe Canada… Cunuckistan I sometimes joke… to my American friends and family. They got the same shit over there as they do over here. It’s just a little different. Example?

I take my kids to school and there is a picture of the Queen on the wall. Despite the similar English accent, I run across Francophones pretty normally. There is, astoundingly, a lack of black people in Canada. So much so that when I shake hands with a descendant of Africa I’m more certain that he or she is from Ghana or Kenya as opposed to New York or Florida. Though my car is in miles, everything around me is in metric, and the double-it-add-thirty doesn’t exactly work. Canadians are known for being astoundingly nice, but I have to outline the great difference here. I’m from the South. We are incessantly nice. We call it Southern Hospitality. But in Canada, it’s not lip service. When my RV broke down, a kids half my age retrieved my driveshaft and lugged it a hundred meters to me. Another one towed me off the road. Everyone I knew by first name in my neighborhood offered me tools for projects, shoveled my walkway, and when I was laid off this kindness went a long way to keeping me sane. This led me to think there was something in their culture or perhaps in their government structure we should take a look at. Maybe that would help us govern ourselves more kindly.

The current Prime Minister has detractors, but no one is calling him a fascist or a communist. He is one among hundreds in the legislature that has the top executive office of the land. As such, he could be dismissed, without notice, by the voters or by a vote of no confidence either by the Parliament in general or by his party in caucus. How’d you like to dismiss your President with no notice? I’d love it. And how about Question Period? Let’s say for six hours every Tuesday afternoon, the President of the United States has to go down to the Senate and answer questions live on TV? I’d eat popcorn and live off of CSPAN that day. We’d have different Presidents, I’m sure. Federal elections in Canada have a 28 day election cycle, not two years like ours. Though elections are scheduled, they can be performed by law on short notice if the PM is dismissed, resigns, or loses an election. This is what I called the Brewster’s Millions Challenge. Our election system just ran through two billion dollars. Try to spend that in 28 days. I’ll bet you can’t. Best yet…all the provinces run this way, too. So there is a Parliament in Edmonton, Regina, St. John’s, etc. that has to abide by the same rules. The result is the voters keep their representatives on their toes. There are many political parties, so compromise is key to keep things moving. In the States, compromise has become a dirty word. In some districts, if you use the word ‘compromise’ in the same sentence as the word ‘liberal’ you would be strung up and drawn. In Canada, it means you have a better chance to live longer, even if you’re paying more taxes.

And if you want something different, let’s look at the tax system. Remember this Royale with Cheese is very small. There are more people in Texas than in all of Canada, about 90% of them live within 200 miles of the US border, and it is the second largest country in the world. So for all intents and purposes it looks like Egypt, where people live along the Nile, and Chile, where they are packed up against the coast because of the Andes Mountain range. Oh, and it’s about five thousand miles across. It is challenging to live in this environment, and almost half of all Canadians live within commuting distance of Toronto. The taxes then are disproportionately settled at the Provincial level. The federal government has a laughable 9% rate for your first 40K of income and then 13% or so for your second 40K…but only on that second 40. You still have the 9% on your first 40K. So you could be paying closer to 11.5% total to the feds. This bracket continues by 40K until you get to the Dragon’s Den and then of course there is a huge jump. As admiring as this is, the Provincial bracket balances out the aspirations with a crushing average of 15% depending on which province you’re in. Alberta’s was 10% while I was there and it was just raised to 12% - a 20% increase. This coupled with a carbon tax and a federal sales tax of 7.5% is not easy to live with. Some Provinces like Newfoundland have an additional 7.5% sales tax so you pay 15% on everything you buy. This, coupled with my American taxes I was obligated to pay, meant I was shelling out close to half my salary every year. It was the price for keeping my citizenship. The cheese on that Royale was hard to taste sometimes.

I remember being in some class thirty years ago saying the US Department of Transportation figured out that any mass concentration of a given distance of 250,000 people or more required at least one Interstate level freeway. Doubling this population to 500,000 meant a second freeway was needed. We all know this can’t be true. New York City is pushing thirteen million and has essentially only FDR Drive semi-circling it. Los Angeles on the other hand seemingly has very close to the same amount and yet only has sixteen freeways. As a radial city, Houston very much sucks to live in. However, over the years, the spokes have fanned out with the business districts. The Medical Center has shifted the working population and ExxonMobil’s surprising move to The Woodlands (yes, I am aware it’s really north Spring) has people wondering if the gentrification of the ghettoes can be balanced out by moving more centers of labor to the outskirts. The XOM move was shocking not just because it was a move out of downtown…but because it was a move outside the beltway. A four hour commute to Dallas was cut by 25%. For Anadarko Corp, this was old news. But XOM is about 58 times larger than Anadarko and you don’t see any Anadarko gas stations around, do you? And when GE decided to double down on their paltry O&G Division where did they go? The Beltway and Richmond.

Canada has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to freeways. I found it astounding and refreshing that I could travel around all of St. John’s (a city of maybe 100,000) on two freeways. Yet if I tried to cross the Island there were innumerable lights to sit through, marking towns sometimes as large at five thousand. I loved that Halifax had an open thoroughfare into New Brunswick and pained to leave this amazing construction project to stop every five minutes on my way to Frederic, their capitol. Calgary likewise has just one freeway plowing through it, the Deerfoot, and everyone is either trying to get onto the Deerfoot or trying to stay away from it. It only serves the East half of the city and does not even touch downtown, forcing everyone trying to get downtown to either fight through the boulevards, the lights on the expressways (the ones on Crowfoot are laughable) or exit and wait fifteen minutes to turn left or right off the Deerfoot onto Memorial so they can fight around the zoo. The city’s only solution to this is to ignore the painful reality of turning all of Crowfoot into a freeway from Banff through Chinook to Regina and instead ask the federal government for more money they don’t have and pour it into horrible ideas involving rail. Calgary Transit is now a shining example of what Houston should have done thirty years ago, but they are about to fuck all that up for pipe dreams that are ten times worse than the bullshit in Houston.

Compared to the travesty that is Houston’s main street line, Calgary’s Red Line is well thought out, cheap to use, and heavily trafficked. The main street line in H-Town started at UHD and went to the Medical Center. Unless you lived and worked in the Medical Center, it was useless. No one goes from work downtown to work in the Medical Center. Patients tend to call an ambulance. Houston’s second line goes from UH to the Galleria, because someone apparently thinks college students like to shop at Sacks. The Brown Line runs through the financial districts, where there are no residences and where the patrons drive Land Rovers and BMWs. Only the Green Line makes any sense, and only because it links a blue collar poor Latino neighborhood, Mag Park, to downtown jobs. The Purple Line hopefully can extend as the Green one. The Calgary LRT is a model of sober planning. Both lines run through poorer parts of town, downtown, and then onto white collar neighborhoods. Unlike Houston, Calgary’s LRT runs out to the ‘suburbs’ where people drive in to park for free and pay for the monthly pass. While Houston’s LRTs are still to this day rather naked and bare after ten years, Calgary’s are packed all the time. They are looking to add a third right down the spine of the city which is going to be brutal, costly, and not perfect. But when it is done and the dust clears, it will provide a purpose to those who use it. By contrast, the South bus lane idea is idiotic, remote, and does not even go downtown. Southern thinking has apparently made it up north. Other extensions are quite possible: to the airport, more access to the blue collar neighborhoods, through the reservations. While this is being decided Houston will be content to wallow on the freeways in a city quickly transforming into the Los Angeles of the late 80’s.

These are governed by local politics and when it comes to even this I must raise my hat to the City of Calgary. My wife and I thought it was strange when we moved there. People were talking about taxes, and bridges, and tunnels and libraries. People wanted more parks and more community swimming pools. It seems Houston was constantly trying to fight inner zoning wars: Condos in West U, warehouse lofts in Chinatown, gentrification in the old Slave Sector that no one wants to document or talk about. Access to Calgary’s east side is critical to the city’s fight against crime. They have built a major police compound there, pour money into refugee relief and social services. This keeps crime low and localized. In over six years in Canada I was never burglarized, never had anything stolen out of my yard, never locked my front door over night or my back door during the day. I rarely locked my car at work or even at the mall if it had anything in it. It was also rare to hear about a crime. Cops weren’t rare but to hear a siren was. To hear an ambulance was a cause of concern. To see one prompted a little more. Within the span of a month in Houston, I witnessed police shoot a suspect dead, had my car stolen at an upscale mall, and ran through a neighborhood searching for a sinister looking man observing my children playing in a cul-de-sac. In Canada, you would call the ‘Police Service.’ Here the man was found by neighbors in their quad cab monster trucks, his license photographed on a smart phone, and told in no uncertain terms what would happen if he were to be found lingering around that neighborhood again.

I was at Home Depot last night looking at a fire arm safe. I have many and need something secure for quick retrieval in case of home invasion. Telling my Canadian friends this elicits a shaking head over Skype. I see security camera kits for 1,500 bucks that give you access on your phone. Later that night I’m at a Mexican food place that I dearly love and sorely miss. The asshat with the weird hairdo is on TV. His name is on bumper stickers out in the parking lot. I’m enjoying an Iced Tea – another missing item up north. I ponder my last six years and my next six years.  I’m glad to be among family. I know I made the right decision to come here: for my kids, for our future. But I am going to miss that Royale with Cheese.