Ford, perhaps anticipating all of the apologies he’s going to have to make as part of his 12-step program, is said to have already written one to Stintz:

Dear Karen:

Geez, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for saying that I wanted to fucking jam you. It was inelegant of me, and you are a classy lady who deserves better. In fact, when I get back (I will have a tan and expect to have lost another 30 pounds) I would like to take you out for an elegant dinner at Splendido (Spendido!).

Just the two of us.

On me, not the city.

I can apologize in person and we can talk policy and then you could listen as I explain how business and government work. You are easily the most attractive of my opponents, and it wouldn’t bother me in the least to give a pretty lady like you a little help.

I think it would have been cool if we went to high school together. I was really good at sports, rich and quite a bit thinner than I am now, and I bet we would have gone out. Do you ever think about alternate universes? I do all the time. In one alternate universe I bet we’re together, in an open kind of relationship, and are political dynamos. In another alternate universe I live in California and spend a lot of time on the beach and in another I’m an MMA fighter.

But right now I’m confronting reality head-on. It’s what a man does.

Anyway, now that I’ve wrestled and vanquished my demons, it’s time to forget the past and move forward. I’ve survived a terrible disease now, showing a lot of courage in doing so, and I’m no longer going to be a victim to drug monkeys, the media or left-wing politics. I am going to be a new and improved Rob Ford, slimmer and more deserving of having an affair with a woman like you. I swear, you’re so pretty that you could be a figure skater or a hot sportscaster.

I really respect you, Karen and look forward to working with you in the future!

Cheers,

Rob Ford

And so for first-time director Aaron Wilson, who debuted his film Canopy at the festival, it must have been a validating and exciting experience. The movie has a very simple premise. An Australian pilot gets shot down while battling the Japanese over Singapore and improbably bonds with a Chinese soldier similarly trying to elude capture.

The central characters of this film—which is almost devoid of dialogue—aren’t really the actors playing the roles, but the jungle in which the story unfolds and the hyper-accented soundscape that surrounds them. Wilson is trying to do something different here, but in so doing Canopy comes across as more of a concept of a film than a film itself, an interesting idea in theory, but in practice maybe not so much.

It’s impossible to see this movie and not think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red line.

I don’t think that there’s a film on the planet that compares well to it, and Canopy is no exception. Although Canopy is beautiful to look at, it never establishes an emotional grip on the audience, relying too heavily on the mechanisms of filmmaking rather than the film itself. For instance, after a spell, the wordlessness of the movie becomes burdensome, a cinematic imposition rather than an organic necessity of circumstance and disparate languages. Clearly, the director wants us keenly focused on the canopy of sound covering the silent action, but he points us so intentionally in this direction it’s as if we’re following a neon-signs-lit detour route.  The acoustics swiftly become a clumsy, almost naive contrivance that is master rather than servant to the film, pulling us away rather than in.

Perhaps if the actors were more expressive or physically compelling, the director’s reach wouldn’t have so exceeded his grasp. As it is, in spite of its lyrical flourishes and allusive passages, the movie has a constructed, almost humid weight. As we move from one poetic war trope to the next, as if in some theme park yet to be invented, Canopy does little more than ask you to like it.

When it ended, the near-full house applauded, as if in encouragement, it seemed, rather than appreciation. The director and his key people took the floor, ready for a Q & A, and the last amongst them to do so was the lead actor, Khan Chittenden. As is often the case, he was smaller and more vulnerable than you would have expected after having just seen him up there on the giant screen, and as he youthfully bounded down from his seat, he threw up an arm to the crowd, he too hoping for more than what was received.

We sat in the third row of this IMAX 3D spectacle, and I have to say it was the most concussive, punishing movie experience I have ever had.  We were so close to the screen that we couldn’t actually see the screen, and appreciating the movie was more of a physical challenge than an aesthetic one. Strictly confined within the conventions of the genre, Pacific Rim was a living, evolving piece of abstract expressionism that came screaming out at us like some terrible flying monkey.  We could only see gestures within the film– sound, colour and velocity—all swirling and spitting before us, but never did we have a clear, overview of things as they unfolded.

Of course, this didn’t really matter, because we knew exactly what was taking place. Pacific Rim is an action flick, a B movie writ monstrously large, and it followed the formula these movies always follow. This genre is now so much a part of me that I feel like it’s coded into my DNA, my understanding instinctive and unmediated rather than the product of conscious, cognitive functions, if that makes any sense.

Nonetheless, it was still a very disorienting experience ( I wanted nothing more than to inhabit a Brian Eno composition while there), and not simply because of the shock and awe campaign detonating around  us. Pacific Rim (note the name) was a movie designed for a global audience rather than a North American one. The film was so flat and one-dimensional that it was little more than a series of symbols and cues. There was no nuance or complexity, and this was intentional, because it’s built to travel, to be easily transferrable to other languages and cultures. The primary human characters in it are a diverse array of ethnicities, and the world represented a global, cultural mash-up. You simply don’t have to speak the language in which the movie is made to understand exactly what’s going on, in fact, you might even be better served if you didn’t.

For a movie that was all about fighting, there was no real violence in it, and it was more like a gigantic puppet show than a graphic representation of what a robot three times the size of a skyscraper fighting a massive alien might be like. It was a kid’s movie, meant to move merchandize and launch a franchise that will have global appeal. Last year, I think the top 10 top grossing films in North America were all sequels or prequels. Losing market share to piracy and revitalized cable television, original one-off movies that aspire to art are not where the bottom line lives, and the Hollywood arrow no longer flies no toward the heart of North America, but is now launched like a volley out toward the rest of the world, where all the money and people actually live.

Table Tennis reminds me of a Wes Anderson film and I like to watch it wearing shorts and drinking coke. It makes me feel like a boy, a boy with an unlimited future where anything is possible including an Olympic gold medal in a child’s sport, instead of the middle-aged man who keeps getting ads for Gout medication popping up in his Facebook feed.

Sailing is a sport I like to watch while drinking gin and tonics. I usually dress for this event, in the sort of outfit that would get you beat-up on buses or in certain towns. Actually, I should tell the truth here, I don’t really watch sailing, but fall into a kind of glamour stupor with sailing as the backdrop. I dream, and yes, these dreams include supermodels in bikinis and helicopter pads and then supermodels not in bikinis. Long live the one percent!

Perhaps my favourite part of the Triathlon is the name. It sounds like a Japanese monster that took on Godzilla. Beyond that though, I find myself drawn to the hopeless masochism of it and the strange psychology that propels people through it. “No, I do not want to do one thing well, I want to dedicate myself only partially to three different things!” I can relate to that. It’s an event for the ADD age, celebrating the doomed scattering of ambition rather than the focused of achievement of excellence in one field. It’s what people who don’t expect to win a marathon, bike race or swim meet do, it’s a hedge. I drink chocolate milk when I watch, as well as play video games, surf the net for good Groupon deals and unload the dishwasher.

Beach Volleyball has finally been saved. I couldn’t watch it before as I found it demeaning to women. I mean, why did they have to wear bikinis? And why weren’t their bodies more like, you know, women’s bodies? They all looked like a tall, thin and often leathery species from outer space. Nobody needs that kind of objectification. Now, in sensitivity to nations where the female body is rightly feared, especially if it’s revealed to look like it came from outer space, participants will be allowed to wear more traditional Burqas or clogs or whatever flies in your country, religion, etcetera. This year Beach Volleyball will be a learning experience, and I will treat it with the solemnity it deserves, watching it while sipping tea in my library.

* PS: This was recently published in and written for Ottawa Magazine.