June 26, 2009 22:20Tales From The Slab

Breaking news: Michael Jackson is still dead. We're all freaked out at losing one of the giant icons of the music industry, and one of the very few superstars in the world who actually justified the use of the term "superstar." Hint: if you won last season's American Idol, you ARE NOT a superstar, not matter what Ryan Seacrest's hyperbole tells you. Jackson was an ubiquitous pop culture icon all my life, and it will be weird living in a world where he isn't around making the world weirder.

The toxicology results are still weeks away, but the autopsy is complete and, as promised, it was a real show-stopper. I called in some favours and got the scoop on the most shocking revelations from the coroner's report. The bullet points are as follows:

* Malformed conjoined fetus discovered in abdomen indicates that they were really The Jackson Six back in the '70s.

* Wasn't a real zombie for the Thriller album, but had been the genuine article since Bad.

* Surgical mask was actually a retractable third eyelid.

* Face was a removable façade worn on a timeshare deal with La Toya.

* 8.75% not of this Earth.

* Navel transplanted to form chin cleft.

* First nose inverted and reattached to form the lining of his mangina.

* Extra nipples plentiful, but original two inexplicably missing.

* Bone structure was actually that of Joseph Merrick.

* Sex: male.

Fascinating revelations all. Some surprising, some fairly obvious, but all destined to become the stuff of medical journal legend.

On the brighter side of things, judging from the reduced amount of news media coverage, Iran's problems have ceased to exist. Hurry! Good job, Iran! I knew you could sort it all out on your own.

June 25, 2009 20:10Critical Mass

I'm supposed to be working on the first draft of Sex Tape right now. The deadline is less than a week away. But it's hot and unpleasant out, I don't really feel like tying plot threads together, and the news cycle has just reached critical mass. I can't take it anymore, and I must invoke my right to an intermission long enough to comment.

In brief:

Michael Jackson

This will be the most interesting autopsy of the century.

Farrah Fawcett

Okay, I admit it. I had that poster too.

Richard Nixon

Who can ever get enough of Nixon's unreleased audio tapes? Man, that guy recorded everything. There are probably another twenty hours of bathroom flatulence carefully numbered and catalogued and yet to enter the public record as The White House Toilet Tapes. If you missed the latest ones, they include snippets of conversation featuring Tricky Dick telling his wife about a breakthrough in diplomatic talks with China, discussing going out to dinner with his daughter, and advocating abortion in the case of interracial pregnancy.

It really humanizes him.

Perez Hilton

Let me personally thank you for the greatest tearful video blog since the "Leave Britney Alone!" guy squeezed off a few to establish himself as the Alpha drama-queen of the new millennium. Perez managed to work himself up into a frenzy following some fisticuffs with the Black Eyed Peas in Toronto this week. Don't worry though. Perez, despite an overacted performance of Shatneresque proportions, seems to be just fine. Which is the part I don't understand.

You get into an altercation with an entire hip-hop band, and this is what you walk away with? A little boo-boo? I've done worse things to myself shaving. If you're going to rant about a beat-down and press charges, you'd better look at least half as bad as Rihanna.

Come on celebrities of the 21st century! Learn how to mix it up. If this had been Sinatra, you'd all be dead.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

If you're going to fake election results, do it plausibly. Don't overplay your hand and go for an ego-enhancing landslide victory. No one will buy it. Here are half-a-dozen handy tips to help you know when you're taking your fake election a little too far.

1. If results show your challenger failed to carry his own home town.
2. If there's more than a 100% voter turn-out in some regions.
3. If there's a giant nation-wide protest despite your supposed 60% support.
4. If you have to shoot and beat huge numbers of people who supposedly back your government just to maintain order.
5. If your media outlets have to stop covering the election in favour of cooking shows and medical documentaries.
6. If your attempt to pin unrest on western influence falls flat even in the middle east.

Despotic pseudo-democracies of the world take note. I'm looking at you too, America. Obama's election still doesn't erase the 2000 presidential clusterfuck.

The Jon and Kate divorce

Um, yeah. Actually, I don't even know who the hell these people are and I don't want to.

Moving on.

James von Brunn

If you're going to go out in a blaze of anti-Semitic glory and shoot up a Holocaust museum, you might want to scrub your hard drive of all the kiddie porn you have stashed there first. Because, guess what, the police are going to swing by your house after your killing spree and check out what you have on your home computer. Now, I know, you figured everyone was going to despise you anyway for being such a hate-mongering murderous Nazi dick, but as it turns out, it actually IS possible for us to think even less of you. Go figure.

Kim Jong-il

Congratulations on naming your least-embarrassing son your successor as the North Korean head of state. One tip though. When seeking a smooth transition of power, do not start a nuclear war. In fact, starting any war at a moment like this is probably a bad idea. A threat of war doesn't play much better either.

I know you like a parade. Everybody likes a parade. But when you're rattling your sabre, don't do the whole gigantic army-parade thing. I know it looks really impressive to have all your troops marching down main street in lock-step formation. But it makes a really tempting target. Every time we see that in the west, we don't think "Wow, I'm so intimidated." We think more along the lines of, "One napalm fly-by and that war's over before it even starts."

It's a point of strategy. Read The Art of War. It's probably covered in there somewhere.

Mark Sanford

Argentina is a long way to go for a booty call. Look, I get it, I'm a guy. Sometimes you're so damn horny, flying to Argentina to get you knob polished sounds like a good idea. If you gotta do it, you gotta do it. When you don't gotta do it, is when you're the governor of a whole state and will be instantly missed by your staff, your wife, your family, the entire population of South Carolina, and the national news media.

Also not a super idea: going on an out-of-country booty call with public funds.

But best of luck with that presidential run in 2012 just the same!

Okay, I got that off my chest. Now back to work on my dirty movie. 105 pages and counting.

June 05, 2009 05:35Ill Bill

If you've read more than, say, three of my blog entries, then you'll know I'm morbidly obsessed with celebrity deaths. So waking up yesterday morning, there was a special treat waiting for me on the CNN ticker. CNN, of course, considers itself far too classy to name the cause of death in this case. For that, I had to go searching the internet rumor mill. And I could scarcely believe what the early reports were claiming. Ever since the day Elvis was found dead on the toilet, I've been waiting for a major celebrity to find a way to depart this Earth in a more embarrassing way. And at last, pay dirt.

Somewhere out there, there has be somebody who put down David Carradine/Thailand/autoerotic asphyxiation on their celebrity dead pool and just hit the trifecta jackpot.

Now, it's not like autoerotic asphyxiation is all that uncommon. Any coroner will tell you it happens all the time. But most people only know it as the ultimate fate of Fox Mulder. Fictional characters aside, this cause of death is frequently swept under the rug, even in official reports. Authorities often find it easier and less-shameful to label it suicide, figuring they're sparing the deceased and their family the embarrassment of calling it what it is: death by tragic masturbation accident.

But for the first time ever, some respectable media outlets were quick to bluntly state the facts. That pleasantly surprised me, because I'm not a fan of euphemisms. Many called it as they saw it and drew the obvious conclusions from the circumstances surrounding Caradine's death. Others, not so much. My favourites are the ones that referred to the rope found around his "neck and body." For "body" read "penis." Creepy as it may be to picture a 72-year-old man pleasuring himself with a combination of asphyxia and masturbation in a Thailand hotel closet, the dodging of the facts that's been going on in some corners has only served to raise all sorts of unfounded questions concerning suicide or foul play. And I don't know what's accomplished by that, other than creating a completely unnecessary mystery over something that's merely a tad tawdry.

Personally, I've only been left with one real question. Who the hell goes to Thailand to masturbate? You go to Thailand for the underage prostitutes. And if you really really need to get in a bit of autoerotic asphyxiation to relieve the monotony of sex with children, then you pay one of the underaged prostitutes a couple of bucks to keep an eye on you in case you start to choke.

Okay, fine. Carradine was in Thailand shooting a movie. It's not like he was an Australian on a sex holiday or something. But you see how easy it is to start speculating a lot of weirdness when there are inconsistent reports in the media. I'll swear here and now to knock that shit off. Let David's memory only be tainted by the compromising position his body was found in, not by the innuendo and misleading statements of asshole bloggers. Or cable news channels.

May 12, 2009 16:51Where Have All The Good Evil-Doers Gone?

I just got back from the new Star Trek movie. Because I'm a geek. Not such a big geek that I saw it opening weekend, but close. You can call me a Trekkie, I don’t mind. If I did mind, I'd insist on being called a "Trekker" -- and those people are some seriously messed-up Trekkies.

You know what? The new Trek movie was good. In keeping with the tradition established by Nicholas Meyer in Wrath of Khan, if the series is on the rocks and needs to be saved, hire someone who doesn't give two shits about Trek to make the next one. You might get a real story out of it, instead of a bunch of pseudo-science techno babble and bullcrap about the prime directive. Yeah, despite all the fan fretting, it really gelled. Except…

Star Trek producer folk, you have seriously got to do something about your villains. As in: get one. Someone. Anyone.

No no no. Casting the Hulk, covering him in tattoos and giving him pointy ears is not getting yourself a proper villain. He needs something to do, he needs a plan that makes sense, he needs some sort of real motivation. What did you give us? A pissed-off miner. You could have come up with anything in the universe, and that's what you went with? So the villain who goes back in time and (spoiler alert!) destroys Vulcan and fucks up forty years worth of Trek continuity is coming from the same headspace as, say, the slasher from My Bloody Valentine? For serious?

Lame, forgettable villains is something that's dogged this movie series right from the start. V'ger wasn't a villain so much as a problem that had to be solved before it destroyed Earth. Same with the probe in Trek IV. Part VI was more of a conspiracy thingie with a Shakespeare-quoting Christopher Plummer playing an obnoxiously pretentious Klingon English-lit major. There's KHAAAAAAAN! Obviously. But really, without the grudge baggage he brings from the Space Seed episode, all he really has to offer is Ricardo Montalban in a plastic chest yelling at Kirk over a sub-space frequency. The only half decent one was Christopher Lloyd in The Search for Spock because he hardly needed any makeup to play Klingon. He gets to be genuinely nasty at points, but mostly distinguishes himself by getting Shatner's boot to the head in one of the most satisfyingly dismissive dispatchings of a villain I've ever seen.

Then there are those utterly forgettable Next Generation movies starting with Generations. How do you screw up Malcolm McDowell as your villain? Here's how you direct McDowell as a villain: "Malcolm…go full-out Caligula. Action!" Then you just let him do his thing and edit out the bits where he dances around naked and fist-fucks men. Or not if you don't care about your PG-13 rating.

I'd rant on about the subsequent villains in the series, but I can't even remember any of them. I think there was a bald guy. And the guy with the nose prosthetic. And…um…the other guy with the nose prosthetic. And then, er…oh yeah. Nose-prosthetic guy.

But bad villains aren't only plaguing the Star Trek franchise these days. James Bond is having his fair share of problems finding someone to match wits with. Look at the last two guys. An asthmatic accountant who weeps tears of blood? I spent the whole movie rooting for Bond to steal his lunch money and shove him into a mud puddle. And Mathieu Amalric as…well…just some guy. What a waste! Mathieu Amalric is perfectly capable of playing a memorable Bond villain. Just look at him in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In that movie he played a paralytic with locked-in syndrome, drooling all over himself, with one eye stitched closed and the other one wide, staring and blinking coded commands to his minions. What a fantastically creepy Bond villain! At the end of the movie, Bond could have made an unfunny quip about "going down" and pushed his wheelchair into an open elevator shaft. It writes itself. But come the actual Bond movie, what's he playing? A young Roman Polanski by the look of things. Not very menacing unless you're a 13-year-old girl.

It speaks volumes about the Brosnan years that the only good villains were hot chicks like Sophie Marceau and Famke Janssen. Then there were the Dalton years that gave us some guy who thought he was Pacino in Scarface and Joe Don Baker. No, really, Joe Don Baker. You have to go all the way back to Roger Moore's run to find memorable Bond villains. Yaphet Kotto, Christopher Lee, Richard Kiel. Hell, Herve Villechaize! Even A View to a Kill had Christopher Walken and Grace Jones. Terrible bond flick, but bonus points for stunt casting.

To find any decent bad guys these days, you have to turn to comic book movies. But even with well-established villain characters who have been around for decades, you take your chances. Every superhero flick has villainitis now. Gone are the days when it was just Jack Nicholson or just Gene Hackman hatching some sinister plot. Hollywood's thing today is to overcast their antagonists, loading each movie with multiple members of the rogues gallery until none of them have sufficient screen time to ply their trade. Even the Joker doesn't get to solo the Dark Knight anymore. The Batman movies have been stacking baddies three-high for nearly twenty years, and I think the official villain count for Spider-Man 3 was thirty-seven.

How sad is it that to find a great over-the-top, gimmicky, freak-show of a super villain nowadays, you have to look to reality? You want a giant Arab terrorist mastermind living in a cave and hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine? Check. How about a pill-popping, morbidly obese blowhard with a bionic ear who uses the public airwaves to call for the failure and demise of the democratically elected American government? Got it. Did I hear you wanted a shadowy puppet master with his own personal death squad who has his exact whereabouts erased from the public record so he can torture his victims in private as a pacemaker keeps his black heart ticking? Turn on your TV. That guy's been doing a lot of interviews lately.

April 27, 2009 16:09This Hour Has 22 Blow Jobs

"This is great," I said. "I can't wait to get home to Montreal and tell my wife. Although she's probably already read all about it on Twitter."

A chuckle from the audience. So far so good. My name had just been announced moments earlier as the winner of the 2009 Writers Guild of Canada award for animation writing and now I was standing on a podium in front of a packed room of film and television industry people. For those in the back, my image was being projected on a screen off to one side. Half a dozen lights were shining directly in my face, so bright I couldn't see a single person in front of me. I felt like I was being grilled in a 1953 police interrogation room.

"Just don't tell her about the blow job," I added.

I hate public speaking, but I like awards and accolades enough to subject myself to the risk of having to make a speech from time to time. There was an open bar at the awards, but I didn't want to get sloshed in case I won. No use slurring my acceptance. To steady my nerves, I had allowed myself one glass of wine. And a blow job from Geri Hall of This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

In all honesty, the blow job just added to the stress of the whole situation. I had to get it up on the podium in front of everybody. And I had performance anxiety. It was my first one.

"When I was a little kid sitting in front of the television watching Bugs Bunny blow up Elmer Fudd for the ten millionth time," I continued, "I never imaged I'd grow up and write cartoons for a living. If someone had told me that back then, I would have thought it was a pretty cool way to waste my adulthood."

I knew what I had wanted to say beforehand. Now that I was up there, I was saying the words, but I was having an out-of-body experience and couldn't tell for sure if I was saying them in the correct order. People seemed to be laughing in the right spots, so I kept going.

"Unfortunately you're not really allowed to blow up cartoon characters anymore because it might encourage children to behave irresponsibly with their own stashes of dynamite."

Another laugh. At least from those listening. The back half of the room had been nattering away amongst themselves since the awards began, talking shop and forgetting all about why they were supposed to be there. A few suggested etiquette calls of, "Shut the fuck up!" from one member of the audience failed to take hold for more than a few minutes at a time. We pressed on regardless.

Oh right. The blow job. You want to hear more about the blow job, don't you? It's a drink. A shot of Bailey's and Kahlua topped with whipped cream. The whipped cream tends to leave you with a white glob on your upper lip, thus the name. Ah, whimsical alcoholic beverages and your wacky monikers! What would drunks laugh about without you? Geri Hall had opened the show by announcing she was going to give all the winners a blow job. As in the drink. Har har. Get it? You need a room packed to the rafters with unionized writers to come up with material this golden.

To my horror, I realized she wasn't kidding. As each winner arrived on stage, they were served a freshly poured blow job that they were required (under threat of public disgrace and mockery) to gulp down in one shot. When one winner attempted to sip his, he was boisterously booed.

Fun fact: I had never done a shot before in my life. The assumption at the show was, quite naturally, that all writers are alcoholics and will therefore happily accept a free shot of anything. However I had always been a teetotaler until my two trips to Dublin on business. A few years on and I'm still just a junior alcoholic. Although the Irish had insisted on teaching me to drink in trial-by-fire manner, I had managed to avoid the slippery nipple shots (whimsical! wacky!) one producer so enjoyed ordering for guests.

Much as I dreaded making a speech, I dreaded taking my first shot under the sharp scrutiny of so many hundreds of seasoned twelve-step wash-outs. I looked down at the brown beverage with the white creamy head and had no idea what I was about to drink. Making a mental note to Google the ingredients later, I cupped my mouth around the lip of the glass and threw it back with a single swallow. The presenters before me watched in awe and commented, "Oh, so that's how it's done." Beginner's luck. I didn't try to tell them they'd just been schooled by a novice.

With my speech in the home stretch, I went into my mercifully brief thank-yous. Everybody hates listening to a tedious list of thank-yous, so I tried to sex mine up a bit.

"I especially want to thank David Fine and Alison Snowden who brought me on board this particular cartoon show. Their example showed me that all you really need to have your creative vision as a writer respected in this business," pause for dramatic effect, "is an Oscar."

Oh good, another laugh. I must have timed the delivery right. I was still on auto pilot, floating around outside my body, lost in the glaring lights. I'd never said any of this out loud before, but going over it in my head repeatedly just before show time was carrying me through.

"Just one!" I added.

I smiled, happy. I'd won and, even better, had made it through my speech successfully. I was pretty sure I hadn't made an ass of myself, which is a good day for me.

"I don't expect this has quite the same pull as an Oscar," I held up the award for emphasis, "but I've wanted one for a very long time now, so thank you for this."

Lifting the thing took some effort. It was fucking heavy. A solid metal globe on a solid granite base. Blinded by the lights, I found my way off stage by memory and instinct without stumbling. One presenter chased after me to hand me the winning envelope with my name printed on it. Another souvenir -- proof that I had indeed won, and Jack Palance hadn't misread my name or anything. Not that there was all that much doubt. The award itself was already engraved with the specifics. The WGC Award winners aren't exactly a state secret kept under lock and key by Price Waterhouse.

As a few individuals offered me their congratulations, I took my place in the crowd and sat out the rest of the awards, my arm straining under the weight of my block of metal and stone. By the end of the ceremony, I was starting to wonder if it would be inappropriate to coat-check my award while I grabbed some food. And drinks. Lots of drinks. It was time to take full advantage of the open bar, but it was announced that it was only going to be charge-free for another hour. I had to hurry. The bartender helpfully doubled up my last call.

The details of what exactly transpired in that post-awards high are fuzzy. I know it involved a lot of pasta and pilsner. Torontonians like their pilsner. And then there was a trip to the venue's fancy-shmancy restroom where I found myself tipping a bathroom attendant for the first time in my life. What can I say? It was a special occasion, and I leapt at the chance to pay a grown man good money to hand me a towel.

The evening of opulent decadence ended with my stretch limo (read: city transit streetcar) ride back to my penthouse suite (read: father-in-law's guest room) for a night of partying with thousand-dollar hookers and mounds of blow (read: watching The History Channel and passing out on the hide-a-bed).

Aside from weighing down my baggage on the train trip home, the WGC Award accomplished one important thing. As I made the rounds in Toronto over the course of the rest of the week, having meeting after meeting with producers and development executives, the reason I had come to town would come up. Inevitably the question would be asked, "Did you win anything?"

And I was able to respond, "Yes. Yes I did."

Winner in Animation for Ricky Sprocket, Showbiz Boy "The Perfect Family"

April 21, 2009 01:03The 2009 Writers Guild Of Canada Screenwriting Awards

Victory is mine!

Open bar. Too drunk to blog.

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