Values

I got to thinking about the concept of values reading a book called The Mastery of Movement by theatre director Rudolph Laban.  The book is a technical manual on understanding movement for the purposes of acting, miming movements as a method of communicating to an audience ideas action and intent.  In addition to being renowned in theatre, his concepts are also used in Psychology by researchers studying body language, as he has a detailed, codified system of explaining movement that I still don’t comfortably understand.

In context, Laban talks about values as being important to understanding and portraying a character, because people strive after things that have value to them, and so those values create motivations to expend effort and orient their behavior in that direction.  Understanding what that character values affects the movements that person will take, direction, facing, and how they will treat people.  Desire for value also precipitates conflict, either internal conflict within themselves between contradictory values or the values of society, and external conflicts between two or more people.  If you observe the conflicts between two people or groups, that can give you information about what values those people hold, and what their goals are regarding the values they are attempting to achieve or uphold. 

In the context of theatre, values that audience members observe by actor movement and actions can evoke emotion or a partisan perspective in the person viewing.  Sympathy, antipathy or apathy are all possible when the actor communicates his character, but is dependant on whether the observer can relate to the experience based on their own life.  Of course, I think the goal of any art is to evoke any combination of strong emotions in the spectator, and so the audience needs to be taken in to consideration before any kind of presentation, in that they should be able to relate to it in some way.

A personality can change temporarily on the path to advancement towards a value.  For example, a gentleman can be harsh in dealing with a particular difficulty, or a talkative person may become silent around of certain people.  However their personality will eventually revert to their ‘true’ personality as they progress towards their value or the situation changes and they can no longer advance towards the value, or perhaps temporary resolution of the conflict supersedes direct advancement toward the value.

Inner attitudes, based on the values an individual or character holds, are most visible in small areas of the body, sometimes only barely visible, but is especially obvious in the eyes.  People often feel the need to be deceptive so any obvious movements could be disguised or omitted, except in pro deceivers it will still be visible by micro expressions most often in the eyes and face.  A good example of this is a drug addict, one of the most stigmatized stereotypes in our culture.  A junkie may be a good liar, tell you they need money for something else or explain away their looks or behavior as not being caused by addiction but instead some other plausible reason.  However, when presented with their drug of choice, the addict’s eyes will fix on the drug and follow it if it moves around without being aware they are doing it.  This is what the person values, and society is critical of it for being a petty, shallow, self-destructive value compared to more highly held values like power, wealth, fame.  This is also where the seven deadly sins of Christian ethics comes from (gluttony, sex, sloth, etc), because repeated sin is believed to destroy the grace and charity within a person.  The person’s worth in society is relative to how able they are to be useful or beneficial within that society, and the incorporeal ‘body’ of society are the values that are taken for granted by the average person as common knowledge and natural.  People immersed in sin are in a poor position to help others, because that value erodes the value of charity.

This got me thinking about present day examples.  What are the values held by someone who is using their cell phone all the time?  Do they value social contact, or is it a narcissistic appeal that they have more control over the social experience in that it will be more oriented about them or their needs?  Maybe not as overt as the seven sins, narcissism was alluded to in recent interpretation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.  As you proceed higher and higher up the list, that is most of your basic needs fulfilled such as food, shelter, security, being loved, there could be a dark side toward self-actualization, as many physical needs are met people turn inward in a sense, and perhaps they become less motivated.  Maybe not everyone has the tools or the capacity to become self-actualized, and instead they stall out part way up the hierarchy and, having no apparent motivation, fixate on themselves, in a particular way, as the only value that remains in their life.

Apophenia

I find there are very rare chances in my day to day life to meet a really crazy person.  Sure, Victoria is full of the homeless and lots of drug addiction of course, but it’s not the same.  Of course where I work downtown lots of disheveled shuffle past, making random noises or half walking half dancing from the crack rock, but if movies and TV have taught me anything about mental illness it is just not quite the same.  And what makes mental illness even more interesting is the cultural context totally affects how people in that culture interact with them.  In some cultures people who mutter, hear voices, or have other collections of behaviors that set them apart from the average person are revered or treated as touched by divine or supernatural forces, or just generally treated special in some way.  In North American Eurocentric culture however they are treated as having a maladaptive problem that must be dealt with, like back pain or high cholesterol.

Of course this involves drug related treatment, and it seems like our society is at the point where any abnormalities or behaviors that don’t fit the norm need to be medicated, either at doctor direction or desired by the patient themselves.  And let’s be clear, this is the same culture that has normalized people imitating The Jersey Shore.  I guess having excessive over tanned skin and ugly haircuts isn’t enough to have someone committed to a mental hospital.  Ultimately, as with most other illnesses, it is more important that you are socially functional than any other sort of problems, mental or physical.  Being productive, having a job and some sort of friends and family life need to be hindered in some way before anything can be considered problematic.  This is probably why prohibition was revoked, and why many people choose to self-medicate, because as long as you can hold down a job and aren’t beating your wife, nobody cares enough beyond that how well you are doing or how you feel about this life you’ve been thrust in to.  How many functional alcoholics do you know?  There are few fates worse than not being able to fit in or get along with people around you, which is probably why people will do whatever it takes to change themselves, including self-medicating.  Even homeless people value their relationships with their fellow peers, and I’m sure some people who are addicted to hard drugs do them because it makes them feel like they can fit in, or at least participate in their subculture on some level.

The internet probably maintains the best chance for having an interaction with a sincere, down to earth Lovecraft style crazy person, since neither you nor they have to leave the house for this to happen.  And while if you spend a lot of time online you might be lead to think our civilization is at the apex of crazy people, I would guess this isn’t actually so, since people are just more apt to be open about their craziness online.  I’m sure many people have enough intelligence and discipline to confine their personality quirks online, and come across as perfectly normal when face to face. 

Recently though while reading recent Psychology literature on Emotional Intelligence I came across a term I’ve never heard before called Apophenia.  This is a condition in the scientific grey area of crazy-but-not-quite-diagnosis-crazy, studied in the context of the more extreme version as schizophrenia, described as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.  A good example of this would be conspiracy theorists like 9-11 truthers, or Jim Carry in the movie The Number 23.  Like many constructs of psychology, this can have a wide spectrum of implication, and taken to extremes, can make a person’s lives problematic.  In my mind this seems to relate back to the problem of thinking you are unique, special or especially lucky, such as gamblers who think they can see the pattern in games of chance or finding images of the Virgin Mary in water stains and chicken nuggets.  Taken to a less harmful extreme are people like film students, who (in my personal favorite example) interpret a movie like The Exorcist as being some sort of metaphor for homosexuality, where two male ‘lovers’ exorcise the female from their lives, with the possessed girl being a corrupt, physically ugly being of power trying to confuse and control them.  While this is a fascinating interpretation, neither the writer nor movie director had any intention of making this the underlying theme of the movie. 

There has been some interesting research in apophenia, such as a study by Mintz and Alpert (1972) where they found that 40% of non-clinical participants hear the song “White Christmas” when played white noise and given a simple suggestion, and that those who are prone to hallucinations are more likely to hear it.  Another study using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (basically rubbing powerful electronic magnets across your skull) found that stimulating the left lateral temporal cortex reduced the perception of meaningful information in noise, and since TMS has an inhibitory effect it is thought that this type of thinking originates in this area (Bell et al, 2007). 

Sure, by the strict definition of apophenia, overanalysis of what is going on around you may be a symptom, but I don’t think anyone would argue this is a mental illness…it’s creative thinking.  Creativity itself is just connecting two unrelated ideas, and forms the very basis for progress and new ways of thinking in human existence.  Really, everything we do as humans can be thought of as over interpretation…any other animals just seek food, shelter, mating and relaxation.  We are different in that we are constantly striving over mentally conjured ideals to give us purpose, but is that not just extreme over interpretation of the world around us compared to the lives of the lions and the tigers and the bears?  Apophenia drives us to philosophize a higher meaning and gives rise to more complex forms of humor – such as upping the ante in repetitious humor by making the joke progressively more convoluted and complex, tying in less and less related ideas until the joke does not even resemble itself.  Overthinking things just seems to be a component of creativity, and might just be its very essence.  Seeing things that aren’t there are, depending on the situation, both genius and madness, the very root of paranoid – the only thing that sets them apart is application – applying apophenia to engineering problems such as architecture, energy or food production can make you a wealthy, benevolent savior, but apply it to social relationships, government regulations, secret testing and political intrigue and you become a paranoid schizophrenic.  The difference, I suppose, is between the practical, physical, directly useful, vs. abstract social order and what are they up to and what really happened at this historical moment.  Taking history at face value is almost certainly not what actually happened, as we know that the victors write the history books, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me this is frowned on at large.  Is re-examination of social policy frowned on for some deep rooted genetic level reason, or has the idea just been pounded in to our heads for generations as to be seen as a natural belief of order?

While the treatment of mental illness has many beneficial applications and has been helpful to people…epilepsy comes to mind as a good example, I can’t help but think of how much creativity as a whole we are losing to overmedication and stigmatizing minor mental illness…things like strange art, bizarre new inventions and radical social theory.  While many people feel like the problems they struggle with daily like depression and anxiety strangle and stop them from leading full lives, these problematic states often lead to amazing novel ideas.

More Food Type Things Out To Kill You: Tofu and Distilled Water

I wouldn't call the people I work with health nuts, but food comes up often, possibly because we talk over lunch, or maybe the average person just cares more and more about what exactly it is we are all putting in our body.  Where in the past you just assumed that if something is marketed as edible it is actually food, many people understand that processed food is saturated with strange chemicals, flavors and preservatives that take a long term toll on your body, because, well, your body needs actual food and gets confused by the foreign objects it finds boiling down in your stomach juices and passing along down the magical water slide we call the intestinal tract.  Substituting sugar and vegetable oil for other more expensive or high calorie ingredients can take its toll on your body, and the organic/raw/unprocessed food revolution we are still in the midst of has wizened many people to at least a basic understanding of nutrition and eating better = feeling better.

Recently in conversation with 2 people I work with have separately brought two things that even the very healthy regard as staples: distilled water and processed soybean or tofu.  Let me tell you what I've just found out:

Tofu has all sorts of shit going on with it.  I've known for a long time that legumes (family of plants including beans, soy, peas, peanuts) have had it in for people, namely from the lectins they contain, proteins that bind to your intestines and block them from absorbing other nutrients, leading to malnutrition, diarrhea, nausea, bloating and so on if beans are not properly soaked and cooked.  Tofu, or soy in general, also contain phytohormones that mimic human hormones, particularly estrogen.  These fake estrogens have been linked to increases in breast cancer for women, and decreased testosterone production (feminization) in men.  Apparently soy products can also cause imbalance in Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, and perhaps even other hormone function as well, considering how little we actually understand hormone function.  According to this interview, the problem is that they don't ferment tofu in North America and so this is what is causing the problem.  In Asia, where they have eaten tofu for ages, the tofu is properly fermented so does not affect them.  Nevertheless, it is not really a problem as long as you eat tofu in modertation.

Distilled water holds a different problem...while the water has been purified of all the bad things that can be found in water, the distilling process also gets rid of all the minerals that are natural in spring water, for example.  Our body can absorb minerals from food, and other sources like multivitamins, but not to the same extent as vitamins that are already dissolved in water.  Drinking distilled water gets even worse than that...imagine water as being little containers that can hold bits of solids.  In distilled water those containers are empty, and water is ALWAYS trying to fill those containers.  That means when you drink distilled water, it is actually leaching minerals from your body and into the water, which gets flushed through your body faster than regular water.  This study from the World Health Organization reports that studies of distilled water on rats have negative effects on their digestive systems, and leads to increased water intake and more frequent urination.  According to the report, the most important loss of minerals is in calcium and magnesium, and distilled water should be remineralized to be considered safe drinking water.

There is no need to panic, in moderation neither of these things will kill you, only after a protracted period of time is it considered a health risk.  A varied diet can help you avoid particular problems with foods that are a known health problem, or even with foods that could be found problematic in the future.

On Friday the 13th

Since I’m trying to write a slasher short story, and doing whatever the writer equivalent of flailing is in the process, I thought it would be a good time to watch all the Friday the 13^th movies.  I enjoy many horror movies, but slashers are definitely low end by anyone’s standards.  This is because they often lack characters, good dialogue or interesting mythology.  Originally devised to cash in on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, Friday the 13th (named after Jason Voorhees’ birthday, the day his mother took revenge) has horrors of Crystal Lake, something much more appealing to me, compared to the cracking one liners of Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, etc. and gore porn angle of more modern horrors like Saw.  In fact, in watching the entire series, it seems only in more recent movies that focus on the gruesome visualization of people dying in bizzare ways or with quirky murder weapons.  This is more evident if you compare the 2009 Friday the 13^th remake, although the deaths are more drawn out and gruesome it is still a far cry from the movies that make suffering and special effects the movie’s entire purpose.

Don’t get me wrong, the Friday the 13ths aren’t “interesting” by any means.  With a few exceptions the movies follow the formula they helped to pioneer: a sandwich of careless/clueless people murdered one by one between two measly slices of a bare bones story, ending with one or two survivors at the end of the movie where they think they kill the killer for good, often in some epic fashion.  The movie is interspersed with scares, some real and some false (like a cat flying through the camera shot like a paratrooper, or a practical joker up to whacky antics) all the while most of the people who end up dying have sex, do drugs, or commit crimes (something that becomes more pronounced during the late 80’s early 90’s when the crack epidemic/crime wave was peaking in big US cities – an interesting piece of cultural history really noticeable in many movies of that era).  An interesting aspect in reflecting on all the people Jason Voorhees had killed are the many exceptions of the ‘rule’ that they establish that sinners are being punished.  Couch potato rednecks are killed in their homes, friendly teens rejected by their peers are killed alongside the popular kids who teased them, and of course the inept law enforcement – enough to reject any kind of idea that Jason could represent any sort of just angel of death.  The innocent die alongside the guilty, and except for Part 8 (in New York where apparently people wearing hockey masks with exposed spinal cords are mundane enough to be ignored by passers by), every single person coming across Jason is killed, unceremoniously, without hesitation, and sometimes with surprisingly little camera time devoted to their slaying.  Even though it is a slasher series, I was often surprised with how little blood and guts I had to sit through, since I prefer the classic off camera horror approach leaving more to the imagination.

I could devote as much time as Star Wars nerds do dwelling on problems with the movies like continuity, inconsistencies, and things that don’t “make sense”, but what would be the point?  After all, Jason pretty much just acts like an invincible juju zombie killing everyone in a forgotten quest to avenge his mother’s death – or perhaps just a never ending attempt to seek motherly approval by killing those who would never meet her high standards of moral code.  But the glaring problem rearing its head throughout the series I HAVE to bring up is this: Jason was supposed to be drown as a child, something we are reminded of in most of the movies, yet the killer is an adult Jason who lived in a shack of stitched together house pieces (at least in part 2, and also looked really, really cool).  In Part 2 (and also the 2009 remake, which is a remake of Part 2 not Part 1) they state at the beginning that he survived the drowning and instead witnessed his mother die, and eventually took revenge on his mother’s killer by somehow tracking the girl down to her city apartment and stabbing her in the head with an icepick.  I have no problem with him being able to find people, teleport around like a wizard, being super strong and invincible, but if he drowned in the lake, shouldn’t he be a little undead kid?  And if he never drowned, why didn’t he find his mom, yet saw her beheaded?  And why would they keep referring to him having drowned, being the most pronounced in part 8 where the main character of that movie has nightmares about learning to swim in Crystal Lake and the drowned boy version of Jason grabbing her leg, haunting her dreams and giving her visions?  They try to address some of these issues in Jason Goes to Hell (technically Part 9), but that movie doesn’t fit properly  (it was made by New Line Cinema not Paramount like all the others) and completely loses the feel of the other movies so I can’t help but instinctively reject it’s explanations.

No one has approached me to write Friday the 13^th fiction yet, but I would say what happened after Jason drowned in the Lake, Mrs. Voorhees got a replacement child – maybe by kidnapping, adoption, or some sort of pact with Evil – and raised him as Jason.  Heck, he may have even helped her do some of the killing in the first movie, hiding offstage during her confrontation with Alice in the last half hour of the movie.  It could explain his supernatural powers and helps everything fit together since he may never have been a normal boy at all.

Incidentally the entire sequence after Mrs. Voorhees reveals in the first movie is one of my favorite and unintentionally funny series of scenes in horror movie history.   Mrs. Voorhees sets the standard for a ruthless killer turning into a hesitating bumbler and Alice constantly bopping the murderer and running away blubbering still makes me chuckle and could actually be believable as someone who would be panicking and fleeing for their life.  Making mistakes like unbarricading the door at the sight of the jeep, running away from the vehicle because there is a body in the passenger seat, and running back in to her cabin and turning off all the lights and closing the curtains – when every other light on camp has been turned on – I got to say is pretty damn funny but also manages to make good, agonizing suspense for someone who doesn’t know what is going to happen in a theatre in 1980.  The sequences lasts for a half hour, 1/3 of the entire movie.  Also I have no idea why 20 rifles were in an unlocked storage shed in a camp for kids – maybe rifle training is standard at kid’s camps in the US?

Overall, some of the movies in the franchise hold up under the test of time more than others.  Obviously the first one is great for a few different reasons.  The mysterious ‘unseen’ killer is really effective and was groundbreaking for its time.  The orchestral music is also top notch and something I really noticed compared with bland modern day soundtracks, including the 2009 remake (which is full of the typical ‘modern’ ambient noise and industrial music similar to every other modern horror), part 3, part 9 and 10.  The high pitched violin accompanying glimpses of the killer or the unexpected stab add tremendously to the scare factor and tension, and inevitable doom to chase scenes and other badness.  I cannot emphasize enough how much good music adds to a spooky movie and I hope directors who are serious about making good movies pick this up.

Something else I want to draw your attention to in scary movies is the ‘seriousness’ in scenes.  I think that if you want a movie to retain its scariness and rewatchability/long term quality the serious factor is important.  The characters have to interact with the situation in a realistic way, and the director also has to portray the scene for what it is, that is if it is a serious situation like a murder, people involved need to treat it that way.  A murder should be a frightening experience and that should be conveyed to the audience as well.  I already mentioned the scary music is an excellent way to facilitate this, but the characters, unless they are hardened by a life of war or crime would probably react quite severely to being stalked by a murderer in the middle of nowhere.  Some of the movies handled this bang on, while others suffer from a lack of that serious factor, giving the movie a campy feeling (where characters do not react in a believable manner to the situation they are in) or removing the fright from a scene for the audience.  Any scary movie where people aren’t getting scared is a missed opportunity, n’est pas?  It is possible, however, that screening audiences respond better to these, but I don’t know the criteria for selecting test audiences…are they completely at random or are they people that actually want to be at a scary movie?  If that is the case, then all screened movies would not be scary because they would want to appeal to the broadest audience possible, and the majority of people probably don’t want to be scared I think.  And it’s those little touches that change a movie from being a romp to beholden of terror.

Overall, while the first movie captured the essence of a scary movie where everyone is stalked and murdered and hits all cylinders very well, Part 7 is still my favorite.  The New Blood does all the old things right, with good music, visuals and the serious factor, but adds something new, a girl with psychic powers.  More than just a gimmick, this adds a new level of the supernatural to movies that lack any mysticism at all save the killer.  It is someone who can actually stand toe-to-toe with Jason and makes for some cool special effect sequences and makes the showdown sequence at the end a lot more fun to watch.  Some of the other episodes of Friday the 13^th are lacking an climactic ending or feel short, while 7 feels satisfying.  Parts 3, 6, 8 and 10 suffer from an overabundance of campiness and are mostly horrible soundtracks, although the ending for 6 was well done, the kids in the camp cracking wise deflated any suspense and made them feel like they were a part of the audience and were never in any danger.  Part 2 was pretty good and felt like it stuck to the roots, and 4 and 5 were all right and told the story of Tommy Jarvis which made part 6 less sufferable as well.  Part 4 has a great, more subtly terrifying ending, having Jason get hacked to pieces by a prepubescent Cory Feldman and sets up the future movies.  Part 5 was kind of confusing but also refreshingly different storyline, I really need to rewatch it.  Part 8 feels like they just go off the deep end like they are trying to be ridiculous with purpose.  Consistently Jason shows a homing instinct to go back to Crystal Lake, but this time boards a boat headed for New York.  The movie turns him in to some sort of strange anti-hero, killing drug dealers, rapists, etc. and takes on a strange form of postmodernism, as it feels like Jason knows the camera is on him, following him around as he goes about his business stalking victims and even stopping to do purposeful poses after kills.  Part 9 – Jason Goes to Hell - isn’t really a Friday the 13^th movie and is more this parasite horror movie tied to Jason Voorhees name.  Part 10 completely isn’t even worth talking about but is just more of the same from 8…let’s put Jason in space ok whatever.

In retrospect it seems extremely strange how horror movies had evolved to the point where the killer becomes the main character, but that seems to just be a byproduct from any protagonists having to die, combined with wanting to make sequels to reuse the ‘formula’ and brand name to make money.  As a result people often end up cheering for the killer, and being desensitized to people being killed, because they have little or no back story, so why would you care about them?  Also you can’t cheer for any of the other characters because you know they are going to die and do little of merit while they are alive.  Do horror movies create a desensitized populous, or is their popularity a product of it?  I’ve already made up my mind, I just wanted you to think about it for a minute.  Ready for what I think?  Senseless violence, justice, brutal murder, people being jerks go at least as far back as the bible and probably further.  The very existence of this series of movies has never been about storytelling or brain washing, just about making money.  Corrupting youth is a distant, unintentional side effect, like smoking cigarettes.  It’s only through the sheer volume of movies that they have managed to tell bits of a story, created a few characters, and created a bit of lore.  And that’s just the nature of reality.  Good things come about as a side effect that was never intended.  Like, penicillin and shit.

Regarding Air Canada

If you are Air Canada management wondering about ways to cut costs, improve efficiency or, heaven forbid, increase customer service, I have good news for you: I know what the problem is.

The problem is with your operations. Airport operations are currently being run by either the willfully ignorant or completely incompetent. One of the two. With my new job I was sent to Winnipeg for two one week excursions, and both times I flew from Victoria to Calgary, Calgary to Winnipeg, and back Winnipeg to Vancouver, Vancouver to Victoria. The first time there was smooth...no complications, weather was good, etc. On the way back the airplane was late arriving to Winnipeg due to "unforeseen delays" by an hour, which didn't affect my schedule since I had to wait a few hours for my connecting flight in Victoria anyway. My second trip, however, was a different story.

Victoria to Calgary, again, was smooth. Victoria almost always has great weather, and it was only lightly raining when we left. When we arrived in Calgary, however, it was the middle of a snowstorm. This was mid February, mind you, not at all unexpected for a winter stricken hell hole like Alberta. Leaving the Calgary airport was delayed because we had to wait to get de-iced...sensible and a necessary precaution. What happened next confused the hell out of me. After de-icing and driving around the 'strip at a snails pace, we wait in line for our turn to take off....for about an hour. At the end of this hour, snow falling just as hard as when we arrived, the captain makes an announcement - we will need to de-ice the plane again, but because we have been idling so long, we also needed to refuel. With groans and contemptuous remarks, the passengers resign themselves to their fate of being trapped in Calgary on a hallway with wings and chairs with nothing they can do but groan. Another hour later, we are finally airborne - effectively doubling our 2.5 hour flight. One thing lead to another and it was midnight by the time I got to my hotel, starved from not being able to access real food all day because I have been at airports, yet being trapped in a city where restaurants don't stay open past 12.

Looking back at the situation, it makes no sense to me. The ground crew at the Calgary airport were supposedly caught "off guard" by snow...falling in February...in Alberta. Really? Air Canada, in business since 1936, has never implemented any preparedness protocols for snowstorms in one of the snowiest populated places on Earth? On top of that, they decide to de-ice the plane, then leave it in the queue while crossing their fingers that, despite seeing how many planes are in line to take off, and how long each take off is taking, hopefully maybe they will perhaps get the chance to lift off before snow builds up on the plane again. Can't this be easily solved by creating a system where planes are de-iced just before they take off. Sure it may slow things down a tiny bit, but it would easily prevent these rediculous delays. I also find it strange that one hour of idling burns enough gas that a plane is no longer safe to make a 2.5 hour flight. I always was under the impression that planes had massive amounts of extra fuel to ensure they could stay in the air much longer than they needed to in case of emergencies, even enough to fly all the way back to their point of origin.

Now I'm going to put passenger convenience aside in my argument. Sure, people were pissed, but considering Air Canada has a near monopoly on flights in Canada, it's not like people can show their contempt by using someone else's services. What boggles my mind is, with all the complaints from Air Canada about how flying isn't profitable with rising fuel costs, and threatening unions because they want decent wages, they are still not able to cut costs that are easily avoidable. Hey, here's an idea guys - instead of demonizing unions and trying to pay your workers sweatshop wages, why not try and eliminate easily avoidable massive costs by actually running things smoothly? When our flight was delayed, fuel was burned, the plane was de iced one extra time, and you had to pay all of your staff involved overtime for all the extra time involved. Not to mention the effort rerouting the plane and trying to fit it in at new departure and arrival times, no doubt interfering with other flights to some extent. To an outside observer like myself, it looks like no one is overseeing the smoothness of overall flow from departure to arrival, as well as planes getting to where they need to be in a timely manner. It looks like pure, unbridled incompetence, and it is costing everyone a lot of money.

That was the worst of it. But then guess what, on the way back, the airplane was delayed AGAIN arriving in Winnipeg due once again, on the very same day of the week, just two weeks layer, to "unforeseen delays". Hey guess what, by the time this happened, even I had foreseen it was going to be delayed. The entire experience just left me feeling that pretty much no one at Air Canada with authority cared whether or not massive amount of resources were wasted with bumbling, or that people would be inconvenienced by flight delays. People arriving in Vancouver missed their flights, and Air Canada happily paid for their hotel rooms and taxis to wait for the next flight in the morning. Hopefully their were enough extra seats on their flights the next day, or else what would they do, send a whole extra flight to make sure people were able to complete their trip?

On Becoming a Musketeer

Every once in a while, I need to be reminded that Hollywood hasn't become an utterly festering pit of despair when it comes to great storytelling of classic and new tales - it has always been that way. And for all the beefs I have for the average movie full of terrible dialogue, mediocre acting and almost no character development, they do usually hit on the sights and sounds, costumes, music, explosions and special effects. If you need proof of this, watch any older movie, pretty much at all. There are always exceptions obviously, and you should remove probably 10% of all movies because they either have exceptional special effects for the time it was made, or some other attribute listed above that makes it exceptional for it's time. That being said, it still doesn't set me at ease sitting down to watch a new movie of any sort knowing I'm going to subject myself to more of the same for reasons I am still not sure of.

That being said, subjecting myself to the 2011 reprise of The Three Musketeers made me particularly irritated, not at the giant computer generated airships or dialogue which seemed to progressively demean every actor who uttered them, but because 20 minutes in I was completely convinced that what I was watching in no way resembled the original story, a bastardized string of action sequences and wonton killing that would make Conan the Barbarian start to question the sanctity of life and Indiana Jones wondering who would spend that much time setting up highly artistic elaborate traps. It seemed like a patchwork of all the most popular movies of the last 30 years - DaVinci Code style pseudo mystery treasure hunting, Matrix style rotational slow motion fight scenes, all the while taking the seriousness of the situation with the stride of the appropriate Loony Tunes character.

With all this in mind, I was determined to find out what the deal was with the original story, mostly so I could make fun of the movie and point out in all the ways it is WRONG. However, as it turns out, I jumped the musket and the reality of the situation is that the movie followed the original story in many ways:

-d'Artagnan is the "stranger coming to town" to become a musketeer
-he runs in to the head of the Cardinal's guard and is almost killed by him
-he then schedules duels with all 3 musketeers the first day in town, then they all get in a fight with the Cardinal's guards
-Milady de Winter is involved in a plot to start war between France and England - Milla Jonavich, shame on you, probably the silliest of all the characters, all of her scenes could have been in Resident Evil: Musketeer Zombies
-probably some other stuff but can't write about since the movie was mind numbing and I never read the original story

I know what you're thinking: QUITE AN IMPRESSIVE LIST!
Still, more than I had expected, and it is quite amazing they were able to put all this together while maintaining little or no integrity and a schlockfest of stupidity, cardboard cutout characters and absurd violence.

Now, my main gripe with the film was that it is or was supposed to be portraying a particular period in history, while simultaneously having no resemblance in terms of technology, manner of speaking, ideology, believability or even in any attempt to portray actual people from history as close to reality as possible, such as the Cardinal Richelieu for example. The Cardinal happens to be the embodiment of pure evil, as demonstrated by putting a skeleton pope with a crucifix and a reaper's sickle on the prow of his guard's airship.

As it turns out, it is probably just me getting older. The next nearest adaptation, the 1993 3 Musketeers made by Disney stars Tim Curry as a Wile E. Coyote style Cardinal, attempting throughout the movie to grope women and torture children if not bound by the producers and their PG 13 rating, and actually still comes across somehow as more evil than his 2011 counterpart.

The 2001 movie The Musketeer probably shows the least amount of effort, dispensing with all of the other characters but d'artagnan in a Japanese style shoot em up. In 1978 the Soviet's made a musical version, and in 1957 there was a Mexican comedy based on the original story. Anways, point being there has always been absurd revisions and changes to classic stories.

So why does it get my goat so much, why do they seem like such abominations to me? I can only guess that the contemporary "version" of a retelling of a classic story does (and will) speak volumes about the current state of the society it was conceived in, and made for. It represents all of us, preserved for all future generations, and like other stories and characters of popular culture like Dracula 2000 or the new Conan the Barbarian, speaks nothing but ill about the society we are in, where mindless fighting and gore planned around a loose character concept and a setting that is similar to present day in ways it seemingly should not be. Do I find it hard to care about the characters in more modern movies simply because they seem to lack personality, or because they remind me too much of the present. I don't really believe the latter, but it's just an idea.