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"Earnest" Canadian comedy

The CBC in Canada is debuting a new sitcom in January called "Little Mosque on the Prairie," which details the travails of a muslim woman in Saskatchewan. In a NYT preview today, the producers are quoted as wondering if such a thing can be funny in tense times. The best line in the piece is this:

"In an earnest manner not atypical of Canadians, one goal of the show is to explain Muslim behavior, or at least make Muslims seem less peculiar, much as humor about Jews, Italians or gays helped those groups assimilate."

I'm not so sure that Canadian humour is generally earnest. In fact I think our reputation for being earnest and harmless lets us get away with a lot.

The best example of this is Rick Mercer's series "Talking to Americans," which is archived here. No one from Canada could be anything other than harmess, right?

The horror, the horror (Pocono edition)

One of the things that makes life in a small Pocono town bearable is the presence of interesting book and record stores. Stroudsburg had an exemplary example of the latter, the Main Street Jukebox, until just last week. Early Sunday morning on November 26, several stores on the block that the store was in burned to the ground. The building that held the store was also a historic building from 1900.

The Jukebox had a fantastic vinyl collection, where in addition to the rareties, one could find all sorts of great music for $1 (or 15 for $10). If you want to make yourself sad, click on their website above and check out their still-posted collection to get a sense of what was destroyed.

I was just in the there the week before and snatched some great records from the jaws of impending meltdown (nice mixed metaphor I think). Included were two albums by the Tygers of Pan Tang, an early-80s British metal band that everyone cites as seminal but no one ever listens to.

The two albums I picked up, Crazy Nights and Spellbound, are somewhere between early Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. This makes sense since the Tygers are always included in descriptions of the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" (NWOBHM for short). The reason they're always cited is that you need three bands to make a "movement," although as we all know two will do in a pinch if they're from the same home town, or if the editor really needs a story that day.

There is a million-selling, worldwide fame niche out there for a great metal band without the "growl" vocals.

The best rock album I've heard this year

The woman at my local record store described Wolfmother as sounding like "every great rock band you've ever heard." They somehow manage to be a cross between Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Sex Pistols, Def Leppard, and Iron Maiden, and thus at times sound a bit like The White Stripes and The Darkness, but without the sense of tongue-in-cheek-ness of that last band. My wife said it was "giving her a headache."

The downside of being a movie snob

It's not that I'm really a movie snob -- I like mindless action as much
as the next person, but there are lots of categories of movies that I
don't really watch, like contemporary romances or Adam Sandler comedies.
In the past few days I had a chance to see something from each of these
categories because I was spending time with my three charmingnieces and
we chose some movies for family viewing on Thanksgiving. One of the
benefits of being a film professor is that time spent watching Click and
Rumor Has It... can actually be productive.

Click was surprising in that it was darker than I would have expected from the previews, in which a man (Adam Sandler) gets access to a universal remote that allows him to pause, fast forward, and rewind real time. Sandler's
character ends up inadvertently fast-forwarding through his entire life
because he expresses a desire to skip through illnesses or the wait for
a promotion. While it doesn't get as somber as the New Twilight Zone
episode,"A Little Piece and Quiet," in which a woman stops time with a
nuclear warhead floating over her town, the film goes well past the
point where he has learned his lesson, pushing him further and further
into the depths of misery.

Rumor Has It... purports to be a kind of sequel to The Graduate. Jennifer Aniston plays a woman whose mother was the inspiration for "Elaine" in the original. In "real life" her mother married the "boring" guy, and now Aniston goes looking for the man who was the inspiration for "Ben," believing that he might be her father. The film is largely a lesson in missed opportunities that I can use as a "how not to" example in future filmmaking classes. In scene after scene, a promising premise fails to go anywhere, often because of the wooden performances of Kevin Costner, who has all the impeccable timing of a middle school band.

It helps to see these type of movies to get a sense of where the middle
is, something I lose sight of sometimes. For example, Click was the
second kid movie I've seen lately in which the central conflict is that
a driven career-oriented parent is ignoring his family and has to learn
to put them first. While this is a cliche lesson in Hollywoodfilmmaking, the contemporary twist is that the parents don't get to find a magical solution to the dilemma. Instead, they have to actively choose to sacrifice career success in order to spend time with their kids.