Copyright, more like copywrong… amirite?

Thank you, well intentioned people who keep hitting my contact form, I’m well aware that a revised bill C-61 to amend Canada’s copyright legislation was tabled more than a week ago, and I’ve still yet to say “boo” about it.

I don’t want to say too much on it, until I have a chance to actually review the legislation, especially after I knocked other folks this month for jumping on various “hate on” bandwagons without doing their research. I’ll try to get to it in the next couple of days – I promise.

Not Happening

I guess it’s become de rigeur to bash M. Night Shyamalan lately – but I don’t consider myself part of that bandwagon. For starters I count “Unbreakable” among my favourite films, and it was far from a critical darling. So please use that as some kind of calibration to take heed when I feel compelled to vent that “The Happening” is the worst movie I have seen in many years – bordering on unwatchable.

The film is such a monumental failure on every conceivable level that I spent portions of it wondering if Mr. Shyamalan was actually significantly ill, or through some ill-advised contract somehow had to put his name on a film with which he had no actual involvement. Short of either of those possiblities (or perhaps his previously using ghost-talent which wasn’t available for this go-round) – I really don’t have any other explanation for the fact that he seems to have forgotten (or is willfulling ignoring) everything he once knew about writing, composition, or dealing with actors.

The very first line of the movie (a throw away by a bit character which only has to set up one event) somehow manages to be both a non-sequiter, over-explanitory, and manage to be a sentence no one has ever said in natural conversation – in the history of the world. A herculean trifecta of bad writing… in the first line:

A woman is silently reading a book.
Woman: (to her friend)I lost my place, where was I?

How should your friend know? You were silently reading a book.

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