Magnificence/ Christmas TV movies

This was on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Dec. 18 Magnificence: I cut out this Globe and Mail book review “The struggle to stay open to love” by Lisa Moore.  She reviews the novel Magnificence by Lydia Millet.  After I reread the article, I didn’t really like the story.  I probably cut it out because of the title “The struggle to stay open to love.” Here’s the whole article:

Early in Lydia Millet’s novel Magnificence, Susan Lindley discovers that her husband has been stabbed to death in a dark alley in Central America. Susan is a chronic adulterer and self-professed “slut.” When Susan’s husband, Hal, catches her in the act of cheating with a man she couldn’t care less about, he opts to go on a journey to Belize.

He is going to rescue Susan’s young boss, T., a real estate developer who “fetishized his Mercedes and wore no suits retailing at less than 5K,” but who has undergone a Kurtz-like transformation on a remote beach in Central America.

T. has decided to divest himself of his considerable wealth by creating a fund for the world’s most endangered species.

Millet can be very funny. The narrative voice here is bracing and bold, sometimes purposefully grating. Susan pronounces on the failings of men with a table-turning brand of female machismo, snappy and skewering: “In one sense, though, she didn’t blame the men. That would be blaming the victim. They were hobbled by their repressed rage and Asperger syndrome, variations on which were lavishly spread throughout the male population.”

The women don’t fare much better: “In a society of aggressive or even merely confident women, she would be overlooked, but since most of them were passive and most men were lazy, the field was wide open.”

As with the female protagonist in Zadie Smith’s recent novel NW, Millet’s protagonist deals with emotional loss or numbness by partaking in as many meaningless sexual encounters as she can muster.

The promiscuity, Susan believes, has led to her husband’s death. Hal may have said he was going to Belize to find T., but Susan knows he was going to get away from her. She sees herself as Hal’s murderer.
From here the plot torques and corkscrews in all directions.

Susan’s daughter, Casey, a paraplegic and phone-sex worker, falls in love with T.; Susan inherits a Gothic mansion full to the brim with taxidermy, fauna from all over the globe; a handful of geriatrics are invited by T.’s mother, who suffers from dementia, to the mansion for a Christian book-club meeting.

The old women, who come bearing frozen cakes, sandwiches on white bread and massive numbers of paper napkins, decide to stay indefinitely (Millet is having fun here; imagine an author imagining a book club that moves in). There is a three-page critique of NPR radio host Terry Gross conducting an interview with a rapper while Susan is stuck in traffic on her way to court to fight distant relatives who want to take the mansion away from her. (I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that very interview with Terry Gross and loved it. Millet clearly has something against rap, or at least something against white, middle-aged, middle-class women who pretend to like rap); and finally, the buried mystery at the core of the novel is tantalizingly unearthed.

The subplots are slight and delivered with sleight of hand. Themes accrue; there are the questions of infidelity, environmental preservation, the moral quagmires of real estate development.
Millet touches on ideas about wealth, class, aging, sexism and female desire.

Complex characters and deft caricatures rub shoulders with each other to produce a hybrid of bright satire and touchingly brittle, broken-hearted souls who struggle to stay open to love.

Susan’s daughter, Casey, who became a paraplegic after a car accident, is potty-mouthed and brave. Though her appearances are brief, she sparkles. Millet is convincing about the restrictions of life in a wheelchair and affecting about how those restrictions can sometimes be overcome.

Magnificence, the final book of a trilogy, is more fable than realism, and promises a kind of moral or eerie warning at the end.

It is also more of a long short story than a novel, as all of these subplots are funnelled into the service of a single, graceful, short-story-like epiphany.

What Susan discovers under a manhole in her backyard, which leads to a buried basement, is both sinister and revelatory, bringing all the plots and themes together in a poetic rumination on the nature of extinction and the opposite: existence.

Lisa Moore is a novelist living in St. John’s. Her novel February was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/in-lydia-millets-latest-the-struggle-to-stay-open-to-love/article6365708/

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter: Last month I found my old vampire script.  I then thought about this movie.  I went on Youtube to watch the trailer and there are these comments:

Aval154: Love how everyone would break out in laughter in the theater when this trailer played lol

Armando Diaz: This movie was actually really great!!! I HATE how people already judge this movie and others based on their trailer.
 

Tristian1: Now I wanna see MLK hunt warewolves  ;)

Dec. 23 Christmas TV movies: I cut out this Globe and Mail article "The new Christmas classic is ridiculous romance” by John Doyle on Dec. 20, 2014.  He reviews some TV movies.  He is completely right about how all these TV movies are the same with variations on these love stories.  Here's an excerpt: 

In TV movies where the holidays are major part of the plot, nobody is seen sitting around watching TV. (Unless, of course, it’s a rare scene of some guys watching a sports event, because that’s what guys do from American Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day.) Mainly there’s no TV-viewing featured because all the characters are too busy having breakdowns and then realizing the true value of family. Or realizing they have met their soulmates. And yet a vast amount of our time is spent watching these silly, slight TV movies about the holidays. The viewing numbers for them are staggering.

Christmas Under Wraps (Sunday, W, 9 p.m.) is one of this year’s Hallmark Channel movies. It stars Candace Cameron Bure as a doctor who gets relocated to the small town of Garland, Alaska, where, after hating it at first, she falls in love with a handsome local. This is the fifth time that Bure has done a holiday TV movie. She always plays a successful businesswoman or professional who is too busy to appreciate the season until she falls in love with a nice chap. Yes, the fifth time.

Merry Ex-Mas (Sunday, Lifetime Canada, 10 p.m.) is new and stars Dean Cain as a guy whose wife (Kristy Swanson) divorced him when, wrongly, she thought he’d had an affair. It’s three years later and they are snowed in together along with his new girlfriend. Stuff happens. Everything turns out right and the necessary hook-ups happen. This is Cain’s 15th Christmas-themed TV movie. Yes, 15th.

The point is that this is the new Christmas ritual – dozens of similarly themed TV movies are made and aired featuring romance achieved after setbacks. It’s the new holiday reality.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/holiday-guide/holiday-survival-guide/the-new-christmas-classic-is-all-ridiculous-romance/article22162603/

My opinion: Dean Cain and Candace Cameron Bure doing Christmas TV movies all the time, it’s because they’re actors and they need to get work.  If they can and want to work on these kind of projects to make money, then it’s their choice.  There are lots of people who work at one job, company, or industry for years because they like it.  

I watched Call Me Mrs. Miracle and wrote about it here:

http://badcb.blogspot.ca/2014/12/call-me-mrs-miracle-tv-movie.html

I did watch the Christmas mystery TV movie Deck the Halls.  My favorite Edmonton actor Eric Johnson is in this one, but if he wasn’t in it, I would still watch it.  It’s based on a book by mystery writers Carol Higgins Clark and Mary Higgins Clark:

“Detective Regan Reilly and cleaning-woman-turned-private-eye Alvirah Meehan, investigate the kidnapping of Regan's father and a young female driver just before the holidays. The race is on to rescue the pair and get them home in time for Christmas.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942839/

“You find the eyeballs. He’ll fund your movie”

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Dec. 15 “You find the eyeballs.  He’ll fund your movie”:  I cut out this Globe and Mail article “You find the eyeballs.  He’ll fund your movie” by Robert Everett-Green on Dec. 8, 2012.  It’s about film making, so of course I had to read it and cut it out.  It’s been a couple of years since I read that article, but it was kind of inspiring to read it.  It’s about find the audience first and then making the film.  Usually it’s making the film and then advertising so it gets watched:

This week, the Toronto International Film Festival announced its annual list of Canada’s Top 10 – the best Canadian movies of the year, in TIFF’s opinion. The list included much-discussed films by David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis) and Deepa Mehta (Midnight’s Children), as well as the transgendered love story Laurence Anyways, and the comedy My Awkward Sexual Adventure. If you don’t know those last two, you have plenty of company. Laurence Anyways played a few Canadian theatres for three weeks, and My Awkward Sexual Adventure is still on the festival circuit, with no theatrical release in sight till next spring.

TIFF says that Canada’s Top 10 “is intended to raise public awareness of Canadian achievements in film” – a polite way of saying that most of us are slow to notice when good films are made here. But maybe the trouble is that nobody tells us about them till way too late in the process.

That’s the word from Vancouver digital entrepreneur J. Joly, who says that filmmakers ought to build their audiences before they shoot their pictures, not after. To test his case, he has launched CineCoup, a one-year “film accelerator” that gives social media a starring role in film production.
Any three-person team with a two-minute trailer and $150 can sign up from now till Feb. 21 for a 17-week program that will run participants through a series of competitive “missions,” designed to build a following and refine film ideas. By the end of June, one team will emerge with up to $1-million in funding (from private sources and tax credits), six months to make a film, and a release in Cineplex Odeon theatres in January, 2014.“My whole disruptive model is based on getting filmmakers to focus on audiences first,” says Joly. “It’s not an afterthought to making the movie.”

CineCoup is an unusually audience-aware part of a small but vigorous movement toward what could be called dramatized or impatient filmmaking. Filmmaker Ingrid Veninger’s recent 1K Wave: $1,000 Feature Film Challenge was also about vaulting over the steep cash barriers that often deter or delay filmmakers. (The next 1K Wave will be announced later this month.) The 48 Hour Film Project, which challenges people to make a movie in that time, has iterations and imitators around the world, including Bloodshots, the festival of 48-hour horror shorts that screened at Vancouver’s Rio Theatre on Halloween. Joly’s twist on these speedy, rule-based ventures is to put up more money and get the marketing into the process from the beginning.

“If we can get Canadians to fall in love with Canadian filmmakers early,” he says, “we believe we can be the Oakland A’s to the New York Yankees of the big studios.”

Joly’s moneyball strategy came out of his experience with such Web-business incubators as Vancouver’s GrowLab and Bootup. Rather than pour in all their money at the start and then look for customers, those tech types tend to “speed to market with a minimal viable product,” Joly says. “You’re not too precious about the idea; you just want to get it in front of people, test it and iterate on it based on feedback.”

His eureka moment came, he says, when he realized you could do the same with a film trailer and a few social-media accounts. Put the concept before your immediate community and beyond, take note of who responds and why, and you can build your project and “audience equity” at the same time.

The goal, he says, is not to make a commercial film in the usual sense, but a desired film. “If the audience decides that it wants this cool doc made by these people in their fifties who somehow connected with all these Canadians, that’s the movie I’m going with,” he says.

The first nine weeks of the CineCoup process are devoted to getting the competing projects noticed and talked about on social media, and building from whatever lessons are learned there. Every three weeks, “social voting” on the CineCoup website will determine who stays in the running for the $1-million – but nobody, says Joly, is booted off the island. If a team’s audience reach takes off, it’s still possible to get back in the process as a wild card.

“We’re not a contest, just a competitive, tough-love studio model that’s very transparent,” Joly says. “But instead of having these filmmakers run around looking for capital, we’re saying, ‘The money’s here. Just concentrate on building up your audience equity.’ ”

Joly, who worked in Toronto as a film reader and script doctor, doesn’t even want to see a script till he’s down to the final 15. The final 10 are expected to launch their own crowd-source campaigns: to top up their funding, bankroll a particular actor or special effect, and prove that their audience is willing to do more than like them on Facebook.

“Is it a real army that will be the bums in seats, or is it a ghost army?” Joly says. “That’s when you go back to your army, and see if they’ll invest some money in you.”

He’ll offer all 10 finalists a two-year option on their projects, for $2,500 – the first cash they’ll see in the CineCoup process. But he’d be delighted to hand off nine of those projects to any other producer who could help make the films.

“I can only do one this time,” he says. “My blue-sky scenario is that I just turn these other scripts around to another producer. I don’t want to hold onto nine other scripts and watch them burn out.”
The Web infrastructure for CineCoup will come from dimeRocker, a cloud-based platform Joly developed for social TV and “transmedia experiences.” Its most visible projects so far have been the 2011 version of CBC’s Kraft Hockeyville site, and the online component of the network’s Cover Me Canada. Joly will be combing through every CineCoup contestant’s social-Web metrics, looking for patterns of viewer interest, hot spots on the national map, and audiences for the future.

“The phase two of this is that I’m building one of the most granular databases of film fans across Canada,” he says. “I’ll know what kinds of movies they like, where they are, who their friends are. I can then go back to really great Canadian movies that never got released or didn’t find an audience, and I’ll know where their audience is. If you’re the first person to get that social database, and you deliver on that social contract, you win.”

He insists that there will no losers from CineCoup. Every project will get a little further along, he says, and their CineCoup microsite will stay active for two years – an asset that will put “a little more gas in their tank” while they look for other avenues of production.

The real plum, of course, will be if CineCoup’s first produced film takes off. That would validate Joly’s approach, and be a rallying point for every other impatient filmmaking project.

“Who knows, CineCoup could be the birthplace of the next Beasts of the Southern Wild,” says Veninger, referring to the small, neighbourhood feature film that is landing on some critics’ best-of-year lists.

No doubt Joly sees something like that in his blue-sky scenario. But indie filmmaking has such low visibility in Canada, he figures he can score without necessarily hitting a home run. “There are so many movies made in this country that never make it to a theatre,” he says. “I hate to say it, but the bar is so low now that the worst I can do this year is as good as everybody else.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/is-social-media-the-answer-for-canadas-indie-filmmakers/article6088721/

Jan. 13 Diane Bennet: I was going through my The Vertex Fighter script papers and I had sent her my script way back in 2009.  She had rewritten the first 5 pages of the script and made it sexier.  I then looked her up in my email accounts for her, but she’s not there.  I looked her up on the internet, and I don’t remember what production company she’s from.

I do remember working at the Soup place and showing Bennet’s version to my friend/ co-worker Ray.

“Film helps father, son reconnect”/ The Imposter

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Dec. 15 “Film helps father, son reconnect”: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article by Chris Zdeb on Jun. 16, 2012.  It’s about making a film, but it was deeper because Corey Lee than reconciled with his father when Corey got married and had a family of his own.  It’s quite touching to read this: 

Corey Lee has always known his father as a superhero.

Martial arts legend Frank Lee could crush a coconut with the palm of his hand, break rebar with the hollow of his neck. As a young immigrant to Canada in the 1960s, he was the bouncer at an all-night Chinese restaurant, vanquishing troublemakers with his kung fu skills.

At the urging of Dixie, his girlfriend and later his wife, Frank began teaching others how to fight, working his way up from a martial arts pioneer to becoming a renowned grandmaster.

He opened the first kung fu studio in Canada in Edmonton and it eventually grew to a chain of 16. In May, he was inducted into the Canadian Black Belt Hall of Fame.

Building his career required long days at the gym, and sometimes five and six months at a time away from his wife and young family, travelling to places like Hong Kong to fight and train other fighters.

Superheroes are invincible in comic books and in movies, but in real life, they're as vulnerable as the rest of us to relationship problems. Frank didn't know that until Dixie shocked him by asking for a divorce. Corey, who was 18, moved with his mom and sister to Calgary, where he attended film school. The split left everyone in the family broken and led to an estrangement between Frank and his kids that lasted more than 20 years - and continues with daughter Kerry.

But Corey, now 42 and a Calgary filmmaker , decided to try to bridge the gap, after getting married and starting a family of his own, by training with his father for the first time in 25 years and making a documentary about the experience.

Legend of a Warrior, Lee's first documentary, premièred in May at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. Edmonton and Calgary screenings are expected this fall.

On the surface it looks like a martial arts film, Corey says, but it's really the story of a father and son.

"I don't know if I said, 'Dad, I want to make a film to help heal our relationship,' but I know I said I wanted to understand more," says Corey. He also wanted sons Grayden, 5, and Dexter, 3, to know their grandfather, and their Chinese heritage.

Filming started at Frank Lee's martial arts gym on 111th Avenue at 93rd Street in Edmonton in January 2011 and lasted six months.

"I have this love-hate thing with the gym," Corey says. "I love it, but it also took my dad away from us.
"As a boy, I was certainly aware of how much time he was dedicating to (fighters he was training), as well as promoting full-contact martial arts ... rather than being with my mom or with our family."

Father and son were like strangers in the beginning, but daily training sessions, and an emotional trip to Hong Kong, where Frank grew up in a ghetto and ran with a street gang, warmed up the relationship.

"My dad will always be a superhero to me," Corey says, "but the film allowed me to peel off the superhero mask and find out who Clark Kent really is."

On Father's Day, Corey will call his dad - they've talked every week since filming on the documentary wrapped up - and they'll chat about their common interests: fighting, boxing and the NFL.

"Right now, my life with Corey is bittersweet," says Frank, 71. "Corey is my buddy again."
But being around to help raise his eight-year-old daughter Katheryn, with second wife Fen, he knows what he missed with his older children, and it still haunts him.

Watching Frank with Katheryn "shows how much he's evolved and grown as a father," Corey says.
Frank points out that he never shut the door between himself and his only son. But he likely never would have made the first move toward reconciliation because it was Corey who had issues with him that he had to forgive.

"If you don't forgive, you're never going to break through the wall," Frank observes. "Everybody makes mistakes. Try to open up and forgive and you will be able to get together and have a good life together again."

Corey says he was surprised by how many people relate to his and his father's story.
They share their own stories after watching the documentary.

He hopes the film is successful and helps him to get his next project off the ground. "But already what it's done for our relationship, that's worth more than anything to me."

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=a13305a6-d790-478f-b589-44b6d4aa35c8&p=1

The Imposter: I cut out the Globe and Mail movie review “A true-life tale much weirder than fiction” by Rick Groen.  It’s based on a true story of how a man pretends to be a kid who went missing.  Read the second paragraph and it’s obviously Frederic Bourdin who pretends he’s the missing kid.  It’s a crazy story: 

You may already have received this astonishing memo from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department.
That’s because the utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.

First, the Ripley-esque facts. Back in 1994, Nicholas Barclay – blonde, blue-eyed, only 13 – disappeared from his home in San Antonio, Texas. A long 28 months later, the family receives a phone call from a small town in distant Spain: The boy has turned up. In truth, he hasn’t. It’s a 23-year-old man, Frédéric Bourdin, posing as the boy and claiming to have been kidnapped into a sex ring. However, thinking Nicholas found, his sibling Carey flies to Spain, whereupon she actually identifies Bourdin as her brother – despite his brown eyes, dark stubble, French accent and failure to recognize family photos. In her view, his changed appearance and faded memory are just a function of his trauma.

On the strength of Carey’s identification, the U.S. embassy issues him a passport and the two fly back for the homecoming. There, Nicholas’s mother, Beverly, also embraces him as her own. Investigating the crime of the boy’s abduction, a local FBI agent interviews Bourdin, who pours out a lurid account of a military cabal engaged in torture, rape and prostitution. The agent swallows the yarn. Others do not. A psychologist rejects Bourdin’s claim, as does a private investigator hired by Hard Copy to get a scoop. A dogged fellow, he questions why the family members are so eager to accept this obvious imposter, and begins to wave a homicidal flag, wondering about their involvement in Nicholas’s disappearance. Then – wait for it – Bourdin starts to wonder too.

Okay, take a breath and ponder the obvious: In the annals of forged identity flicks, this is a towering Everest, dwarfing the deceivers in the likes of Catch Me If You Can and F for Fake. But, since others have beaten him to the tale, Layton faces the problem of how to spin it fresh. Well, he rises to the challenge and more, proving to be an adept forger himself – expertly deploying noirish re-enactments to set the mood, simulating the crackle of a bad telephone line, cross-cutting judiciously to generate suspense.

His most successful trope, though, is his most conventional: the talking head at the centre of the piece, the one that belongs to Bourdin. Looking darkly straight at the camera, he details how he pulled off the original scam in Spain, how he “washed the brain” of sister Carey, and how, ensconced as Nicholas in the Texas family, he “didn’t need to be Columbo to put the pieces together – they killed him.” To say the least, the guy is an unreliable narrator, but this much is clear: He’s reliably creepy.

But so are the family members, especially Beverly, who ain’t exactly June Cleaver. Domestic disturbances regularly put her home on the San Antonio police beat. Also, well after the boy’s disappearance, her older son Jason died of a drug overdose, and she admits to more than a passing acquaintance with illicit substances. Her face is drawn, her eyes glazed, her voice uninflected, her whole manner further ratchets up the creep-quotient. In the end, you leave this film in urgent need of a cleansing shower – Layton has done his job well.

Yet maybe too well, since the doc, so keen to envelop us in the narrative’s sheer unlikelihood, seems to forget what’s really at stake here. Almost lost in the tabloid’s tawdry twists is the lost boy himself. A 13-year-old child is gone, and his absence isn’t weird or lurid or stranger-than-fiction – it’s simply tragic.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/film-reviews/the-imposter-way-stranger-than-fiction/article4605242/

My opinion: I thought the sister Carey and the mom Beverly just so want to believe that their brother and son has been found that they will take this stranger into their home.

The Round House/ crime fiction

This is on my blog www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Dec. 18 The Round House: I cut out this Globe and Mail book review by Candace Fertile on Oct. 27, 2012:

It’s no surprise that The Round House, the 14th novel by acclaimed writer Louise Erdrich, is one of five finalists for the National Book Award (winner to be announced on Nov. 14). This novel continues the complex and sensitive saga of native Americans that Erdrich began with Love Medicine in 1984.

The Round House takes place in 1988 on a reserve in North Dakota. Geraldine Coutts, wife to Antone and mother to 13-year-old Joe, is late coming home one day. Antone and Joe set out to look for her, and they meet up back home only to discover Geraldine in a state of shock, her hands gripping the steering wheel of the family car. She has been brutally assaulted and nearly killed.


Antone is a tribal court judge and believes he must put his faith in the judicial system. But which one? Who has jurisdiction? The tangle of laws governing the lives of the Ojibwa on the reserve (or even determining who is Ojibwa) do not serve Geraldine. Joe wishes he could do something to help his mother who has completely withdrawn, spending time in bed, barely eating and rarely talking.

Joe wants more direct action than his father. And so over the summer, he tries to find out who hurt his mother and to devise a punishment. Like all Erdrich’s novels, this one is concerned with the challenges facing native Americans, and it touches on many aspects of life, including racism, family, friends, language, sex, violence and love. As befits its 13-year-old narrator, the novel is interlaced with references to popular culture and food, the focus of Joe and his three friends. They are captivated by Star Trek, especially The Next Generation. They want to be Worf. As Joe notes, “Worf’s solution to any problem was to attack.” The boys can make sandwiches disappear as if they were in a magic show, and they are tentatively exploring their growing sexuality. Every aspect of the novel is utterly realistic. Erdrich does not do romanticism or sentimentality. What she does is unflinching realism.

The novel works wonderfully both as social commentary and as a mystery, but over all it is literary fiction at its best. The Round House has echoes of characters from other Erdrich novels, such as the Kashpaw and Nanapush families. Vehicles are important, as is the imagery of fire. And worked into the fabric of the novel is historical perspective and information. Because of Antone’s work, Joe has access to legal books, which he devours, and he gives snippets of the landmark decisions that affect native-American life.

One of the central twists in the novel is that an Ojibwa family adopts a white baby girl named Linda because her parents reject her. She appears deformed when born, and the parents, Grace and George Lark, decide to let her die. Joe describes the Larks:

“The Larks were bumbling entrepreneurs and petty thieves, but they were also self-deceived. While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.”

Fortunately, an Ojibwa woman working as a night janitor saves the baby, and Linda is raised as an Indian and is loved and protected by her adoptive parents and siblings against the machinations of her biological parents. In Erdrich’s world, family is often composed of the people who take care of a person, and the issue of identity is key to all her novels. Bloodlines are also important to many characters and can cause problems. And, of course, the designation of who is an American Indian has much to do with complicated laws about blood. This novel shows unequivocally how messed up things are.

Erdrich controls the narration exquisitely. Joe has grown up and alludes to his adult life, but the novel is firmly focused on the summer when he tries to save his mother. Love, as Erdrich shows over and over in her work, is a powerful force, but it does not always lead to the right action. As Joe and his friends search for answers, the tumbledown structure called the Round House, once the heart of the Ojibwa community whose cultural practices were outlawed, signals the seismic shifts in the way of life of the people and how assaults on culture are as damaging as, if not more than, assaults on individuals. In many ways The Round House argues that these attacks stem from similar grounds. And that we must all work together to try to prevent more of them.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria.

Crime fiction: I cut out this Globe and Mail article by Margaret Cannon on Oct. 27, 2012. 

The Vanishing Point

By Val McDermid, HarperCollins, 434 pages, $22.95

This novel, one of McDermid’s best stand-alones, begins with a trek though airport security. Stephanie Harker and her five-year-old ward, Jimmy, are on their way to Disneyland. To get there from London, they have to change planes in Chicago. They dutifully line up, wait, line up again. Stephanie knows that the plate in her leg will set off the alarm, so she tells Jimmy to wait as she goes through the doorway and is whisked aside for a personal inspection. As she is being prodded and questioned, a man in a security uniform takes Jimmy’s hand and the two walk away. Stephanie screams, tries to run, is restrained and eventually tasered. By the time she convinces airport security that she’s not a criminal, Jimmy is long gone.

The hunt for Jimmy is the tale here, but the clues to his disappearance lie in his and Stephanie’s shared past, and that takes us into the netherworld of international celebrity. Jimmy’s mother was Scarlet Higgins, child of poverty and neglect, who came to fame on a British reality television show. Stephanie was Scarlet’s ghost writer. Together, they sculpted the public persona of Scarlet the Harlot, hard partyer, tough gal. But there is far, far more to Scarlet’s life than anyone, even Stephanie, supposes. This book builds to a climax and there are at least three twists. Just when you think you know what’s coming, it doesn’t.

Salvation of a Saint

By Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith, Minotaur, 336 pages, $28.99

Here is the perfect novel for readers who love puzzle plots from one of Japan’s foremost mystery authors. The detective is physics professor Manabu Yukawa, and the murder, it appears, is impossible. The dead man, Yoshitaka, was murdered with a cup of poisoned coffee. He was about to leave his wife and she is the logical suspect, but she was more than 100 miles away when he died. One Tokyo homicide investigator believes she’s innocent, another is convinced of her guilt. Prof. Yukawa must use all his talents to sort the clues and find the truth.

Invisible Murder

By Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, translated by Tara Chace, Soho, 340 pages, $29.95
This is a superb second novel from the authors of The Boy in the Suitcase. The setting is again Denmark, and the protagonist is the gutsy Red Cross nurse Nina Borg. The background is the ongoing tragedy of the Roma people, the traditional Gypsies, who are an oppressed minority in Eastern Europe and unwanted migrants in the West. This story begins in the ruins of the Soviet period and then moves to an abandoned garage in Copenhagen, where Nina comes upon a group of Roma boys hiding a terrible secret. As with the earlier novel, Kaaberbol and Friis tell a moral tale as well as a mystery.

The Fallen One

By Rick Blechta, Dundurn, 384 pages, $17.95

What if you lost a beloved husband under terrible circumstances, say a fire in your home. You were not there; you were performing in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. If you had been at home, you might have saved him. But you were not there. That’s the beginning of this terrific novel from Toronto’s Rick Blechta. Marta Hendriks cannot stop grieving, but after months of therapy, she is able to resume her singing career. Then, in a Paris bus shelter, she sees her supposedly dead husband. Is he real or the fantasy of a sick mind?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/new-in-crime-fiction-the-latest-thrillers-and-mysteries/article4680153/

"Cartoon College a Big Draw"

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Dec. 9 "Cartoon College a Big Draw": I cut out this article "Cartoon College a Big Draw" by Elizabeth Mehren in the Edmonton Journal on Mar. 11, 2007.  It’s a really old article, but it still stands on it own very well.  I remember when I was a kid, I saw an episode of The Reading Rainbow.  They talked to a cartoonist and I thought it was a cool and fun job.  However, I was stuck on what kind of comic strip to create.

When I was 13 yrs old I was interested in it again when I was reading these Cathy comics by Cathy Guisewite.  Once again, I still couldn’t think of a comic strip.  I was more about writing than drawing a comic.  Here’s the whole article: 

The professor gazed at 18 students seated at long, glass-topped drawing tables, then projected a frame from the comic "Fritz the Cat" onto a pull-down screen.

"I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin when I fell in love with R. Crumb," James Sturm said of the cartoonist with the signature big-footed characters, an icon of the counterculture. "I can honestly say that this comic that you are looking at caused me to drop out of school."

Nods of recognition rippled across the high-ceilinged space that once held women's dresses, men's suits and first-Communion outfits for this 19th century mill town. Just over a year ago, the defunct Colodny Surprise Department Store was reborn as the Center for Cartoon Studies, with the mission of offering college-level training in a discipline often dismissed in the more tradition-bound halls of academe.

An increasingly visual culture has turned cartooning into a field with a future, serving a seemingly limitless audience for stories told through hand-drawn pictures. The field has exploded with the growth of graphic novels, imported comics from Asia and a global passion for cartoon-based animation.

CCS co-founder Sturm taught drawing for years, and in 2001 his graphic novel about Jewish baseball players, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," was Time magazine's comic of the year.
About four years ago, he moved to Vermont with his family and stumbled onto a tired industrial hamlet intent on repackaging itself as a 21st century arts haven.

Sturm, 41, describes CCS as both a cartoonist's boot camp and a think tank for graphic novelists. He argues that cartoons offer a unique synthesis of fine art and popular culture, and afford an arena for biography, fiction and improbable dreams.

"Wish fulfillment: That's the birth of a comic book," he told the students one recent day. "A man can fly. You can shoot flames out of your hands. In a comic, that is possible. That is what this class is about: laying legitimacy to your own wish fulfillment."

In White River Junction, Sturm found a community of 2,500 that once was one of this country's most active railroad centers. Late in the 19th century, 100 locomotives a day steamed out of the depot here. When the train traffic dwindled, White River shriveled.

But the town Sturm encountered was stretching in new directions. Dormant for decades, the old Briggs Opera House had become home to a repertory theater company. Artists' studios occupied defunct factory space. A printmaking cooperative, used bookstore and natural foods co-op had sprung up in the four-block downtown center. In the old Tip Top bread factory, an upscale bistro dished up avocado Napoleon.

The school received a grant from the state and financial support from other cartoonists. Jeannie Schulz, widow of "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz, said she provided start-up funds for CCS because her husband maintained that cartooning was about depicting human emotions and maintaining high artistic standards.

Jeannie Schulz said conventional colleges — even those based at museum schools — "never gave cartooning its full credibility." She said training students to write believable dialogue was as important as teaching them to draw properly.

"If you don't have some sensitivity to the reality of an emotion, you can't parody it," she said. "I don't think you would learn this in most places. At CCS, I think they are stretching the field."
Annual tuition for the two-year course is $14,000. The first group of students will graduate in May, and it is not clear yet what form of certification they will receive. The state is in the process of appraising the school for "degree-granting authority."

Sturm and co-founder Michelle Ollie — a former director at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design — say they are not certain how large the school will grow, but applications continue to increase.
Nearly all of the 38 CCS students, mostly in their mid- to late 20s, already have college degrees. Lacking dormitories, CCS helps students find local housing. Ollie said that counting shopping, paying for rent and putting up visitors in the local hotel, CCS contributed as much as a quarter of a million dollars to White River Junction in its first year.

The school has brought guest lecturers including such cartooning stars as Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for "Maus: A Survivor's Tale," a graphic novel about the Holocaust. Homework assignments include group outings to the Polka Dot Restaurant, where students transcribe overheard conversations in hopes of mastering dialogue.

"These visiting artists come and tell us the tricks of the trade," said Jaci June, who came to CCS directly from Dana Hills High School in Orange County. "There is a big focus on making connections within the industry. These are things I could not get without going to this school."
Modern-day cartoonists spend endless hours in the artistic counterpart of solitary confinement. They draft complex stories that might as easily be based on Jane Austen as on bright-green visitors from another galaxy. Some create panels evoking their own youthful traumas, or allegories that illustrate broad social issues.

They invent scenarios such as second-year student Elizabeth Chasalow's "Dead Pets," proffering eight "sad-but-true stories" of pets who perished. Another second-year student, Andrew Arnold, tackled the cosmic mystery of where superheroes go to relax. (The answer, of course: the Superhero Hotel.)
Some CCS students choose the lucrative world of greeting cards, or leap directly into a cyber-commercial universe based on the convergence of fantasy and superior artistic skills.

"You can do just about anything with cartooning, not necessarily comics," said Robyn Chapman, 28. "Here, we can talk very clearly about the way cartooning works, the basic building blocks: improving stories, pacing, page composition — even anatomy."

New York literary agent Judy Hansen said "a steadily greater interest in the comic book format along with, culturally, more and more movement toward visual literacy" had fueled demand.
When major booksellers began to allocate increasing space to cartoons, the need for specialized training became apparent, Hansen said.

"I think what they are trying to do at CCS is instill a certain level of professionalism and high quality in the medium. I think that is the way any artistic endeavor advances," she said.
Brenda Bowen, vice president and editor in chief of Hyperion Books for Children in New York, said the graphic-novel medium was booming in "a very visual culture, fostered by websites. Words and pictures are now so inextricably bound. And that is how these young people are thinking," she said of those at CCS. "They are at the cutting edge. They have futures. I really think they do."

Sketching feverishly between seminars, June said she knew in third grade that she wanted to be a cartoonist. At 18, June is the youngest student at CCS. She said her friends in Southern California were perplexed when she headed to CCS.

"They were like, 'You're going to Virginia?' I was like, 'No: Vermont.' And they said, 'Where's that?' " June said. One friend teased that she was going to clown school, not cartoon school. Now, June said: "I wish they could see what I have done since I got here."

Second-year student Alexis Frederick-Frost, 28, said he was already doing "legitimate art" when he came to CCS with a fine arts degree from Bates College in Maine. Frederick-Frost selfpublished a graphic novel about an Italian bicycle race and is at work on a new graphic novel about a post-Impressionist painter.

But unlike his previous experience studying art, "the focus of this school is to make an object. It's like film school," he said. But whether he can make a living is another question: "It's pretty uncharted territory, but the field has a lot of momentum right now."

In Dover, N.J., the founder of the country's other full-time cartooning school recalled that when he got his first job at Catman Comics at age 12, the medium was considered "pure, unadulterated junk."
Joe Kubert, 80, said he was not remotely upset about the appearance of a potential competitor to the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. "If they are successful, that means there are enough people who are interested in this to feed the field," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-cartoons21jan21-story.html#page=1

My opinion: I looked up the Center of Cartoon Studies and here’s the website:

http://www.cartoonstudies.org/

Feb. 7 Email schedule: I remember talking to my friend Sherry a long time ago on the phone and she says I send her 2 or 3 emails a week.  Then months later I talked to her again and she said I send her 4 or 5 emails a week.

Tracy: I send 3 emails a week.  Don’t you notice it’s always Sun., Tues, and Thurs.?

Well, here’s my new email schedule: Sat., Sun. and Mon.