Brass said that with the film he plans to “revisit an abandoned project about a Roman emperor that was ruined by Americans, and go from there,” a reference to “Caligula,” which he has criticized because of hard-core sex scenes added during postproduction without his consent.
Pajiba speculates that the project could be a remake of Caligula. I’m going to guess Helen Mirren won’t show up for it either way.
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I wasn’t expecting to see such vitriol from the National Post Editorial Board.
If the reports are to be believed, Women’s Studies programs are disappearing at many Canadian universities. Forgive us for being skeptical. We would wave good-bye without shedding a tear, but we are pretty sure these angry, divisive and dubious programs are simply being renamed to make them appear less controversial.
The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.
Women’s Studies courses have taught that all women–or nearlyall– are victims and nearly all men are victimizers. Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity — hiring quotas based on one’s gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.
Umm…. what? This is a bit much. I could spend some time tearing this one apart, but as the commentary on Jezebel says, “the piece is so completely insane and off the rails that one doesn’t really need to make fun of it, as it stands as a joke on its own”.
Did you know that if you are a woman in Canada having a gynecological surgery, it’s very likely that one or more medical student will give you a pelvic exam you never consented for? From the Globe and Mail:
Imagine that you are undergoing a fairly routine surgery – say, removal of uterine fibroids or hysterectomy. During or right after the procedure, while you are still under anesthesia, a group of medical students parades into the operating room and they perform gynecological exams (unrelated to the surgery) without your knowledge.
Do you consider this okay, or an outrageous violation of your rights?
Regardless of your feelings, you should be aware that this is standard procedure in many Canadian teaching hospitals.
Medical students routinely practice doing internal pelvic examinations while surgery patients are unconscious, and without getting specific consent, at least in Canada.
The most troubling part of the article for me is this:
Guidelines in the United States and Britain say specific consent is required but, by contrast, Canadian guidelines state that pelvic examination by trainees is “implicit.”
Implicit to whom? Surely not to the women who are having these exams. I’ve never heard of this before and I’m sure manyCanadians haven’t either. I understand that it’s important for medical students to learn how to perform pelvic exams, but without consent? We deserve better than that.
The piece even says that out of 102 women polled, 72% expect to be asked for consent, and 62% would give consent if asked. There’s no excuse for withholding a patient’s right to say no.
I have no idea if this is actually true, but according to BuzzFeed, George Lucas sent this to James Cameron after Titanic knocked Star Wars off the top of the list for box-office earnings.
It’s official. Miramax is dead, as reported by The Wrap.
It’s been a slow death, but Miramax dies on Thursday.
The New York and Los Angeles offices of the arthouse movie studio owned by Disney will close.
Eighty people will lose their jobs. The six movies waiting distribution — “Last Night,” “The Debt,” “The Tempest” among them — will be shelved, to gather dust, or win a tepid release.
I find this particularly sad because I remember a time in the 90s when, if I saw the name Miramax on a trailer, I wanted to see that film. The name meant something.
The Wrap also included this update from a Disney spokesperson:
A Disney spokeswoman called to protest that Miramax is not ‘dead.’ “Miramax will consoldiate its operations within Walt Disney Studios, and will be releasing a smaller number of films than in previous years. But it will continue to operate within the Walt Disney Studios,” she said.
Let’s not kid ourselves though. That brand and the quality associated with it is gone, even if Disney chooses to absorb some of the personnel.
If you have a moment, read Kevin Smith’s words on it. I might need to watch a few movies from the good days to mourn this loss.
Neil, his sister and I were lucky enough to get free front row centre tickets to Vertigo Theatre‘s production of The Woman in Black, an adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel. A couple of hours later and it’s still sticking around in my brain.
It was creepy, but I didn’t find it scary (although there were some screams in the audience at a few points). There were only two main actors pulling the whole thing off with one of them playing several roles, and the whole play-within-a-play thing worked for me. I also really like how they dealt with the title character.
I don’t really want to describe what it’s about because I think it’s better to go in cold, but here’s how they describe it on all their marketing materials: Mad with grief and mad with anger and a desire for revenge.
My only complaint is that while there are a few interesting twists, the play telegraphs them too early. That aside, it’s still very much worth going to see. Go see it before it closes on February 14. Better yet, show your partner you care–take them to see a creepy play for Valentine’s Day.
Here’s the thing. I’m not going to say I loved Salinger. I can’t say that. I tried to read Catcher in the Rye when I was around 20 and it didn’t do it for me. I couldn’t identity with Holden Caulfield and maybe that’s because I wasn’t a boy (never have been, ever will be), but I just couldn’t find an appreciation for it. But since I’m reading 95 books this year, I may give him another try. All that said, I understand that he was incredibly important to American literature and better than that, to the millions of people who read his books and felt like he truly understood what it is to be a pissed off, confused teenager.
Howard Zinn on the other hand wrote one of the most compelling history books I’ve ever read. A People’s History of the United States took the typical white man’s history as written by white men and turned it on its head. It’s been too long since I’ve read it for me to talk about it knowledgeably, but this makes me want to go back and read it again and it’s one I would highly recommend to anyone.
Go to kayak.com and do a search for a one-way flight from Sydney to Los Angeles for September 22, 2010 and scroll to the bottom. You’ll find a flight an Oceanic Airlines flight for $4839.
/film says:
For those of you who don’t follow the television show Lost, Oceanic Airlines is the fictional airline which crashed Oceanic Flight 815 on a mysterious island. The flight was traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles, which under mysterious circumstances, on September 22, 2004, the airliner, carrying 324 passengers, deviated from its original course and disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.
