The Maple Leaf Lounge

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by Avro Arrow, Mar 14, 2018.

  1. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    That's always going to be a problem, especially with Canadian movies. The same thing more or less happened with the Red Green movie, because it then becomes hard to expand a half-hour series into a full-fledged movie. They've often got to expand beyond the initial sets and premise into making something epic. In the case of the Red Green movie, it meant a road-trip throughout Northern Ontario, and I think the best thing about it was seeing the Goose from Wawa, and seeing Harold drunk.

    The Corner Gas animated series is actually pretty good. It stays true to the live-action series.
     
  2. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I remember there was once talk of an animated Red Green series, about Harold's childhood.

    Something tells me it's a good thing that didn't pan out. :lol:
     
  3. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Well, they've made a Big Bang Theory prequel series about the Nerd in Chief's childhood, so anything's possible ;)

    I'd always been secretly wondering what would happen if Red Green were to find himself at Corner Gas, or Brent appearing on Little Mosque on the Prairie or vice-versa.
     
  4. Avro Arrow

    Avro Arrow Vice Admiral Moderator

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    I was watching Little Mosque recently, and a guest character made a reference to recently being in Dog River. So I guess they are in the same continuity/shared universe! :lol:
     
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  5. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Hah, that's funny, and totally plausible, even given the fact that both of them were on different networks, with Corner Gas on CTV and Little Mosque on CBC. If anything, the one character I could see crossing over on Little Mosque would be Oscar, trying to convert and ending up cussing them out by the end.
     
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  6. DEWLine

    DEWLine Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Both Corner Gas and Little Mosque were created by people with very deep ties to Saskatchewan - not unlike myself - so the mutual cross-referencing was almost an inevitability.

    If you're interested in more Saskatchewan stuff, I'd recommend the mystery novels of Gail Bowen.
     
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  7. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, I would have figured they'd eventually reference each other, in particular Corner Gas, not only because they're both set in the same Province, but because it was highly influential on the entire scene in Canada. Without Corner Gas, we likely wouldn't have had Little Mosque, Kim's Convience and Schitt's Creek.

    Oh and I love mysteries, so thanks for the recommendation.
     
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  8. DEWLine

    DEWLine Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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  9. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I used to have that blog bookedmarked for a long time until he stopped updating it. He's always had an interesting perspective on the industry. And yeah, that article touches on one of the reasons why Corner Gas was so successful. Canada hadn't had many original sitcoms or dramas up to this point and when Corner Gas came along and became immensely successful, it kind of changed everything. I think everyone will have different ideas about why it was such a success, and my opinion is that the single-camera format helped a lot in setting itself apart from a lot of American sitcoms, but the great thing is that it wasn't afraid of being Canadian. We as a Country I think like to sell ourselves a little short when it comes to entertainment. But the good thing is, I think the industry has changed al ot since Corner Gas has gone off the air, and for the better.
     
  10. DEWLine

    DEWLine Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think we may soon get to the point where we can do the same for home-grown SF&F on TV.
     
  11. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I hope so! I think the thing preventing us has been the budgets, and for those we've mostly relies on co-productions. Those are decidedly more steered by American production companies using Canadian production talent, and sometimes actors too.
     
  12. Timewalker

    Timewalker Cat-lovin', Star Trekkin' Time Lady Premium Member

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    And also means our new GG making a sincere effort to learn French.

    I get that she wasn't given the opportunity in her school years, in one of those places. The objective there was to make her forget and despise her own heritage, learn English, become Christian, and after she aged out of the system, let her fend for herself, preferably on a reserve.

    But... she's had one hell of a diplomatic career in her adult life, and decades of interacting with others in international situations. Since she made it her career, why did it not occur to her that a Canadian diplomat should be able to speak French? She's had many years to remedy this. It's not like she's going to find a hell of a lot of Inuktitut speakers at an international or diplomatic function or charity function anywhere else in the world except Canada. So that basically fails the requirement that the Govenor-General be bilingual (as understood to be both English and French).

    I wonder how her language lessons are progressing?

    Yep, in addition, not replace. Fortunately, my own city name is the English translation of an indigenous phrase and that indigenous word is used for one of our subdivision names. But... there was a hullabaloo some years ago about renaming Calgary. Next thing you know, there were four indigenous groups all squabbling over what to name it because their preferred choices were so different and had different meanings.

    Calgary's name is good enough. As for the others... hold a vote. Pick straws. Choose one, and symbolicly add it to the "Welcome to Calgary" signs (or whatever they have on it). Renaming half the country is just not practical, and I don't think it's going to make reconciliation easier.

    Sorry, what did Columbus do to the natives that was "good"?

    I will agree that he has achievements in his legacy, but good/bad are part of those.

    Besides... without Columbus, I wouldn't have had those oh-so-charming conversation with the American-born Mormon missionaries at my door. They'd get prattling away about American history, at some point Columbus would be mentioned, and I'd tell them, "He wasn't the first European to reach North America, you know."

    Them: "He wasn't?" Puzzled looks; they'd never heard of anyone earlier. "Who was?"

    Me: "The Vikings. 500 years earlier. There's an archaeology dig at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, that proves this."

    By that time they're very confused, and have to remind themselves that I still haven't accepted my complimentary copy of The Book of Mormon.

    This is a cordial conversation that's come up several times, whenever they've come around. They go away, having learned something (that I expect they will either not believe or not consider worth remembering) and I didn't have to yell at them to get off my porch. As doorknockers go, they're not bad.

    What do you think about all the vandalism and church burning?

    Any sympathy I had was stopped cold when the Queen's statue was pulled down (Elizabeth II), and finding out on the news that the first two church burnings could have started yet another forest fire. I hope whoever's been burning churches at least checks to see that nobody is actually inside them.

    Oh, it's quite a mess. Cops standing by, watching vandalism happen, claiming they have no idea who did it... which is utter bullshit. They were there, they saw, it was recorded. But it would be racist to do anything about it.

    I know Sir John A was not perfect. He had a dream, there were things he wanted to achieve. Many say now that the cost was too high, in terms of both aboriginal and Chinese workers' lives.

    So if you truly believe that Canada was not worth it (given that the brutal conditions of railway work didn't have to be that way and the residential schools should never have happened; other ways should have been found), when you pack your bags to "go back" to whichever European, Asian, or African country you/your ancestors came from, which one will you pick, will they take you "back" (in most cases they never had you to start with), and will you be at all fluent in the local language?

    Have you see Rick Green's show, Prisoners of Gravity? It's really dated now as a lot of the authors he interviewed have died, but I still enjoy finding old shows on YouTube.

    The Beachcombers
    Adventures in Rainbow Country
    Avonlea
    (and I could name more with reminders from Wikipedia)

    Co-productions are how we got The Handmaid's Tale, even though at first they weren't going to bother letting Canadians see it.

    The Showtime version of The Borgias TV series was a co-production with Canada. Francois Arnault is better known to Quebec audiences, but in my view, he made the perfect Cesare (I saw the other series with a different actor... sorry, nope, not my cup of tea).
     
  13. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah! I remember that show. It would play in the early hours of the morning. They had also been replaying on the book channel when that was a thing. It was kind of funny looking back that it was the same actor as the Uncle Bill character from Red Green :D

    Sure, I consider those exceptions to the rule though. It certainly seems like there was a time when there wasn't much produced before it exploded again.

    Yeah, rather ironic isn't it? I think that actually happens more often than not. I remember constantly seeing commercials for TNT network (many of them co-productions) programming that was never available in Canada.

    I actually haven't seen that version. There were two different versions of that series, but one of them was a european version, and often considered the better of the two and it was the one I watched on Netflix.
     
  14. Avro Arrow

    Avro Arrow Vice Admiral Moderator

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    Although I share the anger at the Catholic church over their role in the residential schools (and their continuing refusal to issue an official apology, AND their misdirection of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to survivors), I cannot support arson as any kind of legitimate protest.
     
  15. Timewalker

    Timewalker Cat-lovin', Star Trekkin' Time Lady Premium Member

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    One of the episodes I remember best was actually a 3-part one in which Rick Green was talking about shared-world universes (multiple authors collaborate in a shared setting; my favorite is C.J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights, and of course Darkover, once the official anthologies came along).

    Harlan Ellison ranted on at length in part of the interview at how he was so against shared universes, calling them "anti-talent."

    So of course he and some of his writing colleagues held a brainstorming session and came up with Medea: Harlan's World. (I've read it).

    I guess he didn't mind it too much as long as it brought in $$$$$ (and the stories had creative, scientific ideas behind it).


    I enjoyed it when he interviewed Judith Merrill. She made a snap decision in the late '60s that she and her daughter would move to Canada because she was fed up with the U.S. and the Vietnam War. I have her biography in my collection and she led an interesting life. She was one of the first female SF authors who wrote under her own name, rather than cave to the notion that women couldn't get published under their own names (ie. Andre Norton's real name was Mary Alice Norton, but she chose a masculine pseudonym).

    Judith Merrill was among the First Fandom, back in the '30s. I never got to meet her, but I did meet her best-known husband - Frederik Pohl, at the same Calgary convention where David Gerrold was the co-Guest of Honor (what a combination!).

    Let's see how many others I can name... Danger Bay, The Forest Rangers, DaVinci's Inquest, Excuse My French, and of course there were numerous music, comedy, and variety shows like Wayne & Shuster, the various versions of The Irish Rovers shows, John Allan Cameron, Don Messer's Jubilee, Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Rick Mercer... quiz shows like Headline Hunters, Definition!, Front Page Challenge...

    Fun fact: Our new GG was a guest subject of Front Page Challenge, I forget how many decades ago.

    So we've actually done a lot. It's just that you have to be older than at least 40 to have seen most of it in its original production. I actually found a couple of compilations of scenes and an anniversary special about Don Messer's Jubilee a few weeks ago, on YouTube, and for some of it, it took me right back to Sunday nights in the '60s, when my grandmother and I watched it (I think she had a little crush on Charlie Chamberlain). For a couple of others I wondered, "WTF was I thinking, liking this? Those two tapdancers look like robots!"

    There were a lot of people livid at the initial plan to just show THT on Hulu and to hell with the Canadian fans. So they decided to show it on Bravo! (now CTV Drama)... 10 DAYS AFTER the episodes dropped on Hulu. So it was basically impossible to have a coherent conversation with anyone here on TrekBBS who was able to see it on Hulu; by the time I saw each new episode, they were done talking about that, and basically done talking about the 'next week' one that I wouldn't see for another 10 days.

    Then Season 2 cut the wait down to a week. Season 3 cut it to about 3-4 days.

    It wasn't until Season 4 that we finally got to see the new episodes on the same day as the Hulu-watchers... though enough hours after, that the first post here on the forum happily blabbed the first 3 episodes' worth of what happened, not giving a damn about spoilers or consideration that not everyone could all see it at the same time. So now I take my Handmaid's Tale discussion to the YT review channels. There are two or three I follow, and while the conversation can get very tense at times, it's mostly interesting. One of the male reviewers has expressed his appreciation that I explain some of the Canada story stuff that doesn't make sense, either from an American perspective since they don't know how things are normally done here and think something is weird when it isn't, or from a Canadian perspective since I pick up on all kinds of ridiculous things that wouldn't seem strange at all to an American viewer.

    The unfortunate thing about the Showtime production is that it ran out of financing and they were not able to do what would have been the final season - and the most riveting one, in my view, because that's the one where Cesare really did become this fearless, fearsome warlord whose army swept across the Romagna, conquering and uniting the various city-states under the Borgia banner.

    In real history, Rodrigo died at a really inconvenient time, and Cesare chose to trust Cardinal Sforza at exactly the wrong time. His fledgling empire he was accumulating fell apart, Lucrezia had remarried, this time into the d'Este family, and most of Cesare's old allies were either already dead or wanted nothing to do with him.

    The 4th season would have shown this, and the producer did everything he could think of to raise money and get permission to finish the story he'd started. The actors offered to work for basically peanuts, and even permission for a 2-2-1/2-hour TV movie to wrap up the story was denied.

    So the script was published and offered on Amazon. Some of it was bizarre and I don't see how it would have fit into a short movie, but it would probably have made sense in the course of a 10-episode season.

    Cesare's death in battle was depicted as part of a montage of "this is the fate of the major characters" so we saw Cesare and Micheletto's deaths, Lucretzia happy in her new marriage, the next generation of Vatican plotting, etc.

    It would have been glorious, if they'd been allowed to film and show it.

    The casting was superb, in my view. Yes, Jeremy Irons wasn't a huge man, like Rodrigo Borgia was, and Irons brought this up as one of his questions when he was offered the part. But the showrunner felt it was more important to portray the Borgia determination, ruthlessness, amid the deep attachment to family that Rodrigo Borgia had.

    I've seen clips of Francois Arnaud's audition, and it's amazing, the rapport Arnaud and Irons had.

    This was entirely missing in the European production. I had no sense that the Borgias even liked each other let alone loved each other to the extent that history (and history's gossips) say they did. The scene where Lucrezia had to publicly consummate her marriage to Alfredo was honestly disgusting, with her father watching and enjoying it. That same scene in the Showcase version had Cesare there as the Borgia's witness, and he looked ready to kill Lucrezia's father-in-law for insisting on this.

    The only advantage I can see of the European version over the Showtime version is that the European show was able to fit the whole story in.

    Except... they cheated. HOLY CRAP, DID THEY CHEAT!

    History says that Cesare Borgia was killed in Viana, Spain in 1507. His body was stripped completely, everything he had was stolen, and the church did not believe he deserved a Christian burial. For centuries his remains were moved here and there, and at one point were under some paving stones on a street in Viana.

    Eventually someone found them, eventually someone realized whose remains they were, and the church decided that after 500 years, it was time to forgive and give Cesare Borgia a dignified burial.

    But what did the European TV series do? It was such a cop-out, designed to please the "I need a happy ending to be happy" fans. The scene shifts to the shore of South America, where some Spanish conquistadores are making their way to shore after having arrived on a ship - their goal to do whatever it took to acquire the Incas' gold and get rich.

    One of those conquistadores was clearly shown to be Cesare Borgia... never mentioning how he could be both dead and alive, though of course the obvious explanation was that someone lied about whose remains were found on the battlefield - that one of Cesare's men had taken his horse and his body had been mistaken for Cesare... who had then lain low until he could get away by becoming a conquistadore.

    Nope. If the star character of your historical drama dies in real history, he has to die in the damn show, as well. No cheating allowed.

    We're agreed on that. What about the vandalism of the statues and pulling them down?
     
  16. Avro Arrow

    Avro Arrow Vice Admiral Moderator

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    I’m a little curious as to why you are directing these questions at me specifically? My post that you originally quoted was talking about our national conversation around Macdonald’s troubled legacy, and possibly renaming things that were named after him. It didn’t reference churches or removing statues at all.
     
  17. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The Red Green movie kinda gave me a disconnect because it's just so weird without the audience.

    Normally I hate laugh tracks with a passion, even ones generated by a live audience, but I love how Red Green literally makes the audience part of the action. Take that away, and it kind of removes the whole point of the show!

    As for the animated Corner Gas: I'm almost afraid to watch it. Part of the reason I love CG so much is that it's so grounded in reality; you really feel like you're watching a "slice of life" in a small town. I've seen some bits from the animated version, and...well, let's just say a Road Warrior homage is about the last thing I ever expected to see. :lol:
     
    Last edited: Sep 10, 2021
  18. Timewalker

    Timewalker Cat-lovin', Star Trekkin' Time Lady Premium Member

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    Forgive me for assuming you might have read the numerous articles or news clips of people vandalizing and pulling down Macdonald's statues. I would say that's connected with his "troubled legacy." :vulcan:

    I was curious as to your opinion of that, as I was surprised that you failed to mention such a prominent part of this whole mess.

    The vandals have also pulled down and vandalized (basically destroyed in one case) statues of Churchill, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II. In the latter two cases, the cops just stood by and watched, claiming they "didn't know who did it."
     
  19. Avro Arrow

    Avro Arrow Vice Admiral Moderator

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    Of course I had.

    It didn’t really seem relevant to my point regarding any supposed sanctity of Columbus’s legacy. I was just pointing out that the conversation was happening; it was not meant to be any kind of in-depth treatise on the positions or behaviours of any pro- or anti-Macdonald groups.
     
  20. Owain Taggart

    Owain Taggart Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Lots that I like in that list, but yes, there's quite a lot, but it's also spread out quite about more. As you point out, they go quite a far way back,. which is part of the problem. There's a big gap between what Corner Gas accomplished and some of the others. I think the last big one before that might have been Beachcombers, which is a national treasure, imho.


    I often feel that we sometimes get treated as second class citizens when it comes to access to viewing things. I remember hearing some big buzz about several movies filmed locally, but when it came time to finding out where to see them, that information was inconspicuously absent, like they didn't even exist. And sometimes that even applies to big budget releases, that for some reason or other, even if they get big buzz, are nowhere to be found domestically. I think there's still a lot of work to be done on that end regarding access and viewing differences.

    Regarding the Borgias, Ok, you've convinced me to watch the co-production. I just have to figure out if I can watch it on Netflix. Btw, in a related matter, have you seen the Medici series on there? If so, what did you think?

    You know, that's a great point. I don't know if I ever really noticed there being an audience, but there are certain shows where the audience is so intrinsic to the production, that the minute you don't have it, it starts to lose something. So, you may be onto something as to why the movie felt "off". Of course they couldn't bring their audience with them on a roadtrip... or could they? :D

    As for Corner Gas Animated, well, I'm very picky, and I was pretty reticent. But then I watched a few episodes and I was impressed. They were using the animation as more of an extension to the show rather than a replacement, so you'd still get a lot of scenarios that would have been perfectly at home on the regular version. I think even Brent Butt himself explained that it wasn't meant as a replacement, but more of a tool to tell their stories that wouldn't have been able to do via the decay of the set.