I'm a little sports fixated this week. There's all the hype for the Superbowl and NHL All Star Week, not to mention TMZ  issuing alerts every time some hockey player gets into a bar fight. I guess that's news in LA -- or it at least fills space while Charlie Sheen is in rehab.But I think the whole thing started with seeing "The Fighter" (Run, don't walk) just a great biopic with astonishing performances from all...

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"If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative." -- David Ogilvy The ultimate purpose of any marketing campaign is to get consumers to buy your product. Some are more successful than others at re-exciting current customers or attracting new buyers. But every now and then one comes along that really makes you wonder what exactly they're trying to achieve. Usually, that's a sign of either desperation or confusing what your target audience...

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I might've half-watched half of last Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards. Award shows don't matter to me and what gets said at them matters even less. I thought host Ricky Gervais had a funny opening monologue and gradually lost interest from there, not realizing I was missing the destruction of everything that's holy about Hollywood. As the firestorm over Gervais' jokes spread in the days that followed, I kept wondering what...

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Maybe I'm way off base here. But I always thought a lot of the point of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was to provide a Canadian perspective on world events to Canadians and a distinctly Canadian face to the world. Since both of those characteristics long ago became rare on CTV and Global, isn't that the main reason so many of us feel the Federal government needs to keep providing a Billion dollars a year to keep the...

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It was a dreary Sunday afternoon in Vancouver sometime in 1974. I was shooting my 3rd or 4th feature, "The Supreme Kid", playing a character who was in virtually every scene. It was a low budget movie, probably under six figures, and we worked six day weeks in what felt like continuous freezing rain. Sunday was our one day off and I should have been sleeping. But another Canadian movie had opened that week, a really big and very...

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Maybe this will help clarify the whole Dire Straits "Money For Nothing" debate over what the polite media have already begun to refer as "The Other 'F' Word". We all know that words can hurt -- even in a context designed to reflect reality, ridicule their usage or disempower them. So those who work with words have a particular sense of responsibility, an awareness that correct usage is what sets...

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Remember that guy in a trench coat in that really cool B&W movie everybody loves? Remember him saying -- "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." ? Turns out he was right. Enjoy Your Sunday. ...

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A lot has been written about the cesspools of bile and hatred that are tacked on to virtually every blog post, published opinion and news article linked to the internet. It's universally accepted and acknowledged that most of what actual readers append is mindless drivel mixed with envy, bigotry, ignorance and political agendas of all imaginable colors. But Comment Threads have always reminded me...

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The purpose of tragedy in drama is to encourage introspection. The same is true of for those not directly impacted by tragedy in real life. Those who lost a parent, a friend or a child in Tucson on Saturday morning will forever carry a wound that few of us can imagine and none, even in our harshest moments, would wish upon another. The rest of us need to use that tragic event for the opportunity for soul searching that it...

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I brought the curtain down on 2010 by listing all the TV shows I'd actually, faithfully watched through last year. Some of those aren't coming back, so I need new ones and I have a strong feeling that "Episodes" will be one of them. "Episodes" debuts on Showtime tonight and a day later on some Canadian network that doesn't have enough of a commitment to Canadian artists (or maybe just the brains or talent) to do something original...

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"You can fool everybody but the Bull." That's a line from the very first blog post I ever published over on Will Dixon's site. It's an adage I learned as a kid hanging around the rodeo ring. It means that for all your cowboy swagger, no matter how big the silver buckle on your belt, there's somebody who knows who and what you really are. The Rodeo Bull has always symbolized the audience for me. Wily and unpredictable, capable...

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I took my dad to a New Year's Eve matinee of "True Grit". Ordinarily, it wouldn't have been my first choice. But he loves "Dusters", so that's where we went. I was in my teens when the John Wayne version came out in 1968, so I knew the basic story and I didn't have a positive memory of it. I didn't see it in a theatre when it came out, John Wayne being an ultra-conservative supporter of the Vietnam war and representing (to...

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