Fuck tha police

I think I’ve only used my “Fuck tha police” tag once, so, in an attempt to make quota, I will put up this video of the RCMP killing an unarmed man at the Vancouver airport. You may have seen this already, but there’s no harm in seeing it again.

If you’re the impatient type, fast-forward to the RCMP’s arrival five minutes in. Don’t fast-forward too far, though – if you overshoot by a minute the guy is already dead. To top it all off, the man who shot this video had to sue the police to get the tape back. They said they needed it for their investigation and wouldn’t release it until after the coroner’s inquest (which can take anywhere from a week to a year). Luckily, they caved under threat of a lawsuit. As for those officers, I hope they get charged (or at least fired), and I hope the man’s mother sues the shit out of the RCMP.

Lest anyone think I’m picking too much on the Canadian police, I will link to this story from The Smoking Gun: Arrested For Salting A Police Officer. A McDonald’s employee put too much salt and pepper on a burger, but since management was always bitching about waste she went ahead and served it anyway. It was just her luck that it was a cop who ended up with the overly-peppered-and-salted burger. The guy took a couple bites and then went ahead and arrested her for “Reckless Conduct”. She spent a night in jail and had to post a thousand dollars in bail money.

Finally, I’ll leave off with another video, this time involving the use of pepper spray. A cop went through a Wendy’s drive-through and thought he got short-changed. He went into the restaurant and started making a scene, then approached the teenage girl who served him and accused her of stealing his money. When she refused to be intimidated, he pulled out his pepper spray and let her have a blast, then subsequently arrested her. The kicker is that, as the video clearly shows, the girl had no opportunity to steal his money and the cop never gave her the twenty dollars he thought he did. He was just being another dickhead drunk on his own power.

I don’t know about you, but I sure feel protected and served.

Intelligence fucking blows

I guess I should explain what I’m talking about, for those unacquainted with the depths of Canadian TV. Intelligence is a TV show on CBC about a big-time pot smuggler in BC. He ends up as an informant for the RCMP, but he uses them just as much as they use him. The show goes into his operation: his grow-op people, business partners, rivals, and others. The show also goes as much into the other side of the fence, showing intelligence and law enforcement people from both sides of the US-Canada border clashing and colluding to varying degrees.

Sounds interesting, right? Ed Brubaker sure made it sound that way when he gave the show a mention in the latest issue of Criminal (Criminal’s a decent crime comic, by the way, have a look if you’re into that kind of stuff). He said, “If you’re a fan of The Wire or The Shield, you need to track it down.” Like most Canadians, I make it a habit to stay away from Canadian-made dramas, so I hadn’t heard of the show -but I am a fan of both The Wire and The Shield, thus leading me to download the first season (and let me just say it was a total pain to find torrents with enough people still seeding). It was a major disappointment. Yes, the premise and the plots are fairly interesting, but the execution falls far short of the standards Brubaker compares it to. Where The Shield has crackling intensity, Intelligence has boring characters. Where The Wire has gritty realism, Intelligence has a bland atmosphere. In fact, if I had to describe the show in one word, that’s what I would use: bland. I’ve met enough government types to know that in real life they’re actually pretty bloodless and uninteresting, and the media probably makes drug smuggling more exciting than it actually is, but that’s the advantage of fiction. Take some fucking creative license, for God’s sake. The biggest crime when producing entertainment is not to make it entertaining. Even when a potential gang war pops up, the way it’s presented on the show is pretty bland and low-key. Actually, “bland” pretty much describes every this and every other drama made for Canadian TV. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair. I know the two American shows have much bigger budgets, which lead to better production values; the budget on Intelligence probably only amounts to The Wire‘s coffee expenditure. If the producers of Intelligence had access to the same kind of money, maybe they’d be able to create something as good. At the very least they wouldn’t have to keep setting so many scenes at night (which I suspect they’re only doing to take advantage of cheaper equipment rentals) and they could show more complicated set pieces and maybe an action scene or two. However, I keep thinking about Robert Rodriguez and how he supposedly shot El Mariachi with a budget of only sixty thousand dollars. Or think about the first Saw movie – shot for a hundred thousand, made tens of millions. I know there are differences between TV and movie production, but the point still stands that if the people in charge are good enough, they can find a way to make interesting fare while working within restrictive budget limitations.

(This raises the question, “Why aren’t the people in charge good enough?” This one is fairly easy to answer. The most talented and ambitious creative types overwhelmingly choose to go south, and not just for the money. The creative opportunities are just so much better, and you get to meet and work with some of the best minds in the industry. With those kinds of incentives, you’d have to be an idiot to stay behind in Canada. You do occasionally get a Cronenberg or an Egoyan, but they tend to be few and far between. Everybody else deserves to get stuck directing episodes of The New Adventures of Sinbad.)

What Intelligence reminds me of the most is MI-5, and what I was hoping the show would be like. MI-5 has the same premise, except it’s actually good (at least the first couple of seasons were, before they started trying to ape 24). The kicker is that British TV channels don’t actually have that much more money than its Canadian counterparts. I think it’s made by a private broadcaster, though, while the CBC is government-owned through-and-through. Maybe it’s true how they say that government work kills creativity? In any event, that’s another show Intelligence can be be unfavourably compared to.

I think I’ll have to revise my original title. Intelligence doesn’t fucking blow. Given what I imagine are a small budget and a limited talent pool, Intelligence works well enough with what it’s got. In other words, Intelligence is good for Canadian TV. And that statement tells anyone what they need to know about this show.