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.

Massive spoilers: Harry Potter wins and Voldemort loses!

I probably won’t be able to read the new book for a while as I’m not a big enough fan to buy the expensive hardcover and the paperback probably won’t be out for a while. Truthfully, I don’t even want to buy the book; I just want to read it. Maybe I’ll ask around and see if I can borrow it from somebody, or I’ll wait a few months and get it from the library. Then again, there’s a pdf that’s floating around on the torrent sites. Decisions, decisions.

By the way if anyone’s ashamed of reading the book in public Pointless Waste of Time has a series of fake book covers that can easily be printed and slipped over Deathly Hallows. My favourite is Prisoner of Ass Cabin, but The Phoenix Disarray A Work of Serious Literature is also admirably fake.

Harry Potter Book Disguises

Robots in disguise

Last year I was living in Southern California and I happened upon the following:

The video isn’t mine, but I’m probably somewhere in that crowd on the sidewalk. The scene I watched isn’t exactly like the one in the video; there was some soldier guys shooting at nothing and there was also a yellow rescue truck and a couple cars involved. That was in downtown LA, about a couple blocks from the Central Library. It was a pretty nice day and I just wandered into this movie shoot. There was this annoying intern who kept trying to get the crowd of onlookers to move back and he kept saying “Grande explosion!” in a horrible Anglo accent. When I asked what movie they were shooting he said it was called “E7”. Later on, a kid asked the same question to another guy, and he said it was Transformers. I kinda figured it out since some of their T-shirts said “Transformers July 2007”. I stayed for a couple takes but it was pretty boring after a while.

Well, I saw the movie on the weekend and it turns out that the scene was the climax to the movie. They didn’t include the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure a couple shots of people running were from that shoot I watched. The part where the soldiers were shooting at the tank robot may well have been part of the scene I watched too. Anyway, it was pretty cool to watch that part.

As for the rest of the movie, it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t that good either. The original cartoon had a couple human sidekicks but I don’t think anyone cared about them. Well, in this movie it was pretty much all about the human sidekicks. They could have still made a good movie from that, but I don’t think Michael Bay had it in him. The action scenes alone were too confusing – it’s that MTV video style that emphasizes quick cuts of extreme close-ups. My biggest beef was the design of the Transformers. It’s too busy – they’ve got stuff sticking up all over the place and it was kind of hard to tell them apart. The designers should have taken a cue from the cartoon and gone with a simpler, easily distinguished design scheme. The Hater said they looked like walking piles of garbage and she wasn’t exaggerating.