4 - Sunday. December 3, 1989 - Nosth Share News

THE VIDEO cassetie recorder notwithstanding, I like to go
to movies. I HAVE to go to movies.

This has nothing to do with be-
ing psychologically addicted to
film. It’s just to remind myself
that I am, in fact, an adult.

Living in a world of television
and Hollywood, and all the com-
binations thereof, it is close to im-
possible to keep track of one’s
sense of being old enough to vote,
let ulone think.

The great wasteland of the boob
tube has changed over the last few
years, | would admit. But not for
the better.

Some scholars will argue that
television couldn’t get any worse
than it has been traditionally, that
is, since its beginning.

But even a quick wrist-flicking
survey of the current entertainmen:
fare is enough to convince me that
the intellectual pablum we used to
be served up in the days of I Love
Lucy and the Liberace Show looks
positively highbrow compared with
the jiggle-and-giggle junk of today.

Maybe it is the introduction of
smut, sexual innuendo and
vutright dirty jokes that has
lowered the tone of what was al-
ready a horrendously tasteless me-
dium.

In any event, even though I rake
money from television, I can’t bear
to watch it, except for news, of
course, which television cannot
help doing better than any other
medium. After all, no matter how
scrambled the editorial priorities of
the networks, a camera is a camera
is a camera.

You can’t HELP getting some

of it right.

But otherwise, my frontal lobes
grow flabby too quickly from ex-
posure to the beams zapping out-
ward from the tube.

Of course, you say, one can

Strong as it is, the result is that the
ievel of movies that get played on
our VCR is as close to the lowest
common denominator that you can
imagine.

The last one, for instance, was
Crocodile Dundee II. Before that
was Beetlejuice. Before that, Who
ls Harry Crumb? Before that ...

L felt rejuvenated after seeing
those two movies. It was good to
see nasty rotten characters on the
screen and a nasty rotten ending. It
put me back in touch with the real

world.’’

always hippity-hop down to the
video shop and pick up virtually
any movie ever made. This is true.

But there’s a problem if you
have a five-year-old and a 10-
year-old around the house. You
can’t watch ‘‘mature’’ movies until
after they’re in bed.

And since this usually happens
to be too late for me to want to
start watching an entire movie, the
lure of sweet dreams being as

well, I rest my case.

So last Saturday I abandoned
the family and headed out to in-
dulge myself in a double hit of
mature movies. In one afternoon I
saw Sex, Lies and Videotape and
Jesus of Montreal.

Both were great movies. Inter-
estingly enough, they both ven-
tured outside of the Hollywood
formula to the extent that it is
possible while still trying to raise

OPEN Mi

CEOFFREY BLtNE

money to make &@ movie in the first
place.

By far, Jesus of Montreal was
the better film. Both were
technically exceilent, but Ses, Lies
and Videotape, despite its slightly
provocative material — a hero and
a heroine who are sexually useless
and fixated in different ways on
masturbation — retreated in the
end to a rather formula ending, or
at least a variation on the basic
riding-off-into-the-sunset idea.

In this case, the boy stops play-
ing with himself and learns to play
with the girl, who learns to play
with him, while the bad guy, the
husband, who was playing too
much with the heroine's sister, is
left in the end with no one to play
with at all.

What was refreshing about this
flick was the simple fact that every
single one of the characters was
totally unlikable.

In the Hollywood formula, there
absolutely has to be a good guy so
the audience can emotionally iden-
tify with somebody.

Of course, in real life, it is
possible to meet dozens, maybe
hundreds of unlikable, even
detestable people before you run
inte somebody you can appreciate.
But life doesn’t have a production
budget and doesn’t have to turn a
profit. Movies do.

Jesus of Montreal of course will
probably not turn a profit, even
though it did have a recognizable
good guy. In that sense, it was
formula. The difference is that it
had a miserable, unfair, totally
rotten non-upbeat, or as they say
in film school, non-epiphany end-
ing.

That’s what I liked about it. It
was like life, where, in the end,
everybody dies, i.e. loses, usually
for a completely unfair reason.

I felt rejuvenated after seeing
those two movies. It was good to
see nasty rotten characters on the
screen and a nasty rotten ending. It
put me back in touch with the real
world.

Who knows? Maybe I could
stand watching a few minutes of
television now @

wtworoan

Burrard !nlet
pollution
solution sought

PROVINCIAL and federal gov-
ernment environment ministers
announced Thursday that all three
levels of government will cooperate
in an ‘action plan’ to clean up
Burrard Inlet.

Federal Environment Minister
Lucien Bouchard and B.C. En-
vironment Minister John Reynolds
said a task force chaired by senior
officials, and with representation
from the Vancouver Port Cor-
poration, the Greater Vancouver
Regional District and Fisheries and
Oceans Canada, will develop a co-
ordinated process to improve the
condition of the badly polluted in-
let.

But neither minister announced
the allocation of any funds for, or
any specifics of, that process.

The action plan announcement
followed release Wednesday of an
Environment Canada study of fish
and sediment samples taken from
Vancouver harbor and Burrard In-
fet between 1985 and 1987.

The study, which focused on
trace metals, PCBs, chlorophenol
and polycyclic aromatic hydrocar-
bon (PAH) in the harbor en-
vironment found:
® that while overall sea bed en-
vironmental quality in Vancouver
harbor did not appear to be severe-
ly degraded and continues to sup-
port a variety of marine species, a
number of regions in the harbor
had been substantially affected by
chemical contaminants from both
industrial and urban sources.
® significant portions of the
shoreline areas were affected by
elevated levels of trace metals
primarily associated with spillage
from bulk metal concentration
loading, oil refinery discharges and
combined municipal overflows and
storm drain discharges. Elevated

See Burrard
Page 5

Louis Féraud
TARIS
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