Frédérik Sisa

I am not a sporty guy. Truly. I like hiking, and bicycling, and camping – you know, physical outdoorsy stuff. But sports? Nuh-uh. Oh, sure, I like watching the Olympics, and basketball has a certain appeal to me. But again: sports? Not on the top of my list. I did swim competitively for about three years, though, when I was a kid. The first year was great. Our coach was a swell lady who really focused on proper swimming form, a focus that made swim meets that much more fun. But she left to become a nun in the middle of nowhere, Québec, and year two brought along a wishy-washy coach. Nice guy, but wishy-washy…And then came year three, with a coach focused on winning, winning, winning. The fun got sucked out of the swimming, the competitiveness became oppressive, and suddenly, there was no good justification for getting up at 5:30 on Saturday mornings for swim practice in freezing water. So much for athleticism.

Ah, yes. The holidays. Christmas carols over the speakers of stuff-selling stores. Tinsel for the trees. Snow on Disney’s Main Street. The Ivy and the Holly. Ho, ho, ho, and glowing red noses – a certain reindeer’s luminous proboscis and too much rum in the egg nog. Colourful wrapping paper, ribbons and gift cards. Chocolate peppermint bark. Family visits. And maybe, just maybe a dash of that old bah, humbug? In the stress of the holidays, the relentless drive to play a part in unbridled consumerism, the forced smiles and strained good cheers – surely it’s not uncommon to feel a bit like a pre-phantasmic Scrooge amidst the onslaught.

Ranking right up there with the semi-imaginary stereotype of the angry liberal is, of course, none other than our friend the angry atheist. Oh, yes. Him. With the sneering visage and clenched fists. With the sarcasm and disdain towards all things religious. Why IS he so angry?

Review: The Life I Lived

Perhaps greater than the fear of that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns is the fear that comes with discovering, then desperately clinging to, regret over bad choices. And many are the stories that take this primal psychological morass as the drive to dig deep into character.

As my wife and I prepared for a family Thanksgiving gathering at our home, we had the TV set to the Macy’s parade. Big balloons, floats, marching bands; the whole shebang. At some point, a modestly sized float came into view, a large urban landscape crowning a giant apple. But it wasn’t the float itself that took my attention away from some last-minute cleaning-up. It was the commentator announcing the float with something more or less along the lines of “and here’s the float for New York City, the greatest city in the world.” My first reaction: Sorry, but New York is not the greatest city in the world. My second reaction: What is this obsession with being “the greatest?”

Only an overzealous dog lover would make a cat give a speech about having a dog complex defined by a secret desire to be a dog. Why can’t cats get any respect? Never mind. It’s all about the hamster, anyway. “Bolt,” Di­sney’s riff on “An Incredible Journey,” delivered in gorgeously rendered 3-D animation, starts out with Bolt (Travolta), a brave dog who is the victim of a monstrous “Truman Show” deception: He doesn’t know the TV show he stars in as a superpowered canine is all fake. So when his beloved and perpetually endangered human Penny (Cyrus) is separated from him in the latest episode’s cliffhanger and a mailing mishap puts him on the other side of the country, Bolt doggedly sets off, as always, to the rescue.

Okay, so who am I to talk strategy? My attempt at activism, the Always Choose Love Initiative, didn’t quite go according to plan. Maybe the tee-shirts were too expensive. Maybe tee-shirts in general didn’t suit people’s fancy. I definitely should have had buttons and stickers. (I do now, but more on that later.) At the very least, I don’t have Obama’s capacity to inspire. But having frankly admitted my limitations, I still don’t quite agree with the current strategy underlying Prop. 8 opposition. At the very least, I’m sitting on the fence.

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A DVD review: Death of a President

With assassination fears and an increased number of threats directed to President-elect Obama, it seems appropriate to review another hypothetical Presidential assassination, one I suspect many people never have heard of let alone seen. When released in 2006, “Death of a President” created quite the hubbub with its realistic depiction of a sitting President’s assassination – the President of the title being none other than George W. Bush. But the filmmakers were aware of the controversy – a controversy fully realized as many have condemned the film as shocking and tasteless. In crafting the film’s style and presentation, director Gabriel Range and his crew successfully avoid face-slapping sensationalism; even the assassination scene itself is too gritty, too quick, too chaotic to be perversely exploitative. Footage filmed using different camera formats, including cell phones, is seamlessly spliced (thanks to Brand Thumim’s phenomenal editing) into actual footage, representing a steadfast dedication to a cinema vérité style, a naturalistic realism that is almost anti-cinematic. Surprisingly, “Death of a President” is so studiously measured and convincing that it comes across, not as controversy for controversy’s sake, but as one of those somber, stuffy history documentaries we had to watch in school. Stuffy, but undeniably disturbing in a skin-crawling, insidious kind of way. And far from celebratory. “Death of a President” takes no joy, indulges no horrific wishful thinking, in presenting an all-too-plausible scenario in a country with a history of political assassinations.

Although I’m not convinced that the protests serve a strategically useful purpose – and I wonder where the heck everybody was before Nov. 4 – I don’t buy accusations (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/) that these are mob justice or disrespectful of “the people’s will.” Insofar as the mob justice canard is concerned, Prop. 8 not only revoked a legal right, it did so on the basis of portraying gay marriage as harmful to children and a threat to social stability. When somebody calls you a threat, immoral and the like, then pulls a stunt like Prop. 8 to interfere in your life, getting upset and exercising free speech rights strikes me as a natural human response. Prop. 8 supporters may not like being the object of anger, they may not like being called intolerant and bigots, they may not like these protests and boycotts, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. People don’t like to be insulted and treated like second-class citizens, and it was, after all, the Prop. 8 people – who don’t seem to understand or care about the pain they are causing – who started it. They could have left well enough alone, living their lives according to their beliefs and leaving others to theirs, but no.