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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-12-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015. PAGE 5. I’d be ashamed to admit it to a Syrian refugee family, but the hardest single thing I’ve ever done was quit smoking. I was hardcore. Brigham pipe, Old Port cigarillos, Rothman’s, Roll yer owns or Wacky Weed. If it was combustible and I could fit in my mouth, I did. For years. When I was young and stupid(er) I smoked on the off chance that someone might mistake me for James Dean or Marlon Brando. When I began using my high school lunch money to feed my habit I realized that glamour had nothing to do with it. I smoked because I was hooked. A nicotine junkie. Money was no object. When I started smoking as a kid, a pack of cigarettes cost 28 cents – 32 cents if you wanted filter-tips. By the time I quit the price was cresting around $8 a pack. I followed the typical path of the hopelessly habituated – I ‘cut down’. I switched to menthols. I tried going cold turkey. Then I got serious. I signed up for aversion therapy treatments. That’s where a lab technician attaches an electrode to your thumb while you watch a film of people smoking. Every time a cigarette appears on the screen you get a mild(ish) electric shock. Aversion Therapy didn’t make me hate cigarettes, it made me hate electrodes attached to my thumb. I tried avoiding bars and pool halls. I tried Nicorettes. I tried hypnotherapy. I always crawled back to my dirty little habit. And each regression carved another nick out of my self esteem. In the end a combination of three things made me quit: • The price of cigarettes went to $8 a pack. • My doctor put me on a medication called Wellbutrin which inexplicably cancelled out the ‘hit’ I got from my nicotine fix. • I watched one morning as Peter Gzowski, CBC radio icon and lifetime heavy smoker, shuffled across the lobby of CBC headquarters in Toronto pulling a canister of oxygen behind him. For me it was an epiphanic trifecta. My innate Scottish cheapness rebelled at the thought of shelling out eight bucks for 20 cancer sticks; the medication I was taking made cigarettes taste unsatisfying and finally, the sight of one of Canada’s greatest broadcasters tethered to an oxygen tank by plastic tubes running up his nostrils made me give my head a serious shake. Fifteen years ago I tossed a just- opened pack of Marlboros. I haven’t smoked since. Sigmund Freud made much of the symbolic nature of smoking, investing it with psychological interpretations about oral fixation and phallic symbolism. He would know. He smoked about 20 cigars a day. Regarding his own habit, Freud was as deluded as any other nicotiniac. “Sometimes,” he noted airily, “a cigar is just a cigar”. Yeah, right. Freud would have over 30 operations for the oral cancers caused by his habit. He would even have a major part of his jaw removed. In the end he committed suicide rather than endure the pain. Sometimes a cigar is more than just a cigar. Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense It can be hard, through all the Star Wars: The Force Awakens news to find information about any other film franchise out there, but one thing definitely caught my eye this week. I realize that this may fly in the face of previous columns I’ve written about leaving intellectual properties to languish in their retirement and be remembered for what they were instead of trying to force new life into them, but I’m genuinely excited about the sequel to a movie that is coming out a full 20 years after its original. What movie, you might ask? Well, we will get to that. First, however, I have to set the scene. The year was 1996 and I was 11 years old. It was late November and a film, which opened in theatres on July 3 (and that timing should be a hint) was finally out on Video Home System (VHS) cassette and I was fortunate enough to see it. While it may not have been the most critically acclaimed of films, for a mere $75 million, it created a story and characters that have stuck with me to this day. Whether it was the President of the United States who took to the skies as a fighter pilot, the drunk crop-duster who swears he had been abducted by aliens or the young hot-shot United States Air Force pilot who became synonymous with the quote, “Welcome to Earth”, the film and its characters have stuck with me until this day. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll list the cast and then finally, finally tell you the film I’m talking (gushing) about. It was the definition of a star-studded film, featuring Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, Adam Baldwin and many, many others. You’ve gathered, readers, by now that I’m talking about Independence Day. (Note: This is a spoiler warning. If you haven’t seen Independence Day, a nearly-20- year-old film at this point, you should probably go watch it before you finish reading this. Seriously. There is no excuse for this one. I’m not talking about some new film franchise here. This is an established blockbuster hit. Go watch it.) A sequel to the film was announced earlier this week called Independence Day: Resurgence in which the aliens, who were nice enough to leave behind those shattered ships in the first one when they were welcomed to Earth with computer viruses and missiles, come back to attack again, this time finding humanity and Earth has used the husks of their former invasion ships to arm themselves to the gills. Unfortunately, Jeff Goldblum’s character, David Levinson, says in the trailer for the new flick, that it won’t be enough. The original film came out on July 3 because July 2 was when the story occurred in the movie. This one is set for June 24, 2016, so who knows, maybe the film will feature more than a week of exciting action before Bill Pullman (who is also returning) stands up and rouses the entire world with a speech about Independence Day. Anyway, what makes this film different from the other ones that Hollywood, like some kind of buzzard, has picked from the carcasses of old franchises? Well I guess it’s because I always wondered what happened at the end of Independence Day. (Seriously, go watch the film before you read this.) After Goldblum discovered a way to cripple the alien vessels threatening to blow up Earth so it could be harvested for resources, after Earth is defended from this alien invasion, after fighter jets take down alien ships as large as cities, the movie cuts to black with Goldblum and Smith’s Captain Steven Hiller talking about Independence Day with their families. What did they do about the aliens that survived? What about all that glorious technology that unceremoniously crashed to the Earth? What happened to Pullman’s President Whitmore? Was he re-elected? Did they make it so the man who fought for the entire planet was now the President of Earth? Was there peace after humanity realized there were far greater threats out there than different ideologies? I guess the last one came to the surface years after I saw the film. Humanity needs to realize that there are things out there we need to fight together. We need to forget who worships which god and look to defeating common enemies like cancer and global warming and (if they ever show up) alien invaders. So I always wondered if that lesson was lost on the Earth of that film. Now the time has finally come to see what happened. To see whether the United States became a leader of the world of if the world realized there are bigger threats out there and they need to face them as a united planet, not a group of nations. I’ll get to see what was done with the amazing technology that the aliens used. The space craft, the energy weapons, the body armour and everything else that just looked so cool. So yes, this does go against the rules I want to implement when it comes to banning sequels and reboots and re-imagings of old franchises, but hey, what rule doesn’t have an exception? Anyway, if you’ve come this far and still haven’t seen the movie, ignore what I said above. It’s funny, it’s fun and it’s a great film. Watch it if you haven’t. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Same as it ever was For as long as I’ve been alive – and I’m sure for as long as many readers have been alive – we’ve been told about the cycle of things; how things go out of style and come back into style. Kind of like “what goes around, comes around” but not in the revenge kind of way. Last week, the second season of Serial debuted. Serial is a podcast and, for those of you who don’t know, a podcast is a form of episodic audio that you can download over the internet. The first season of Serial told the rich and detailed story of a murder and what some believe to be false imprisonment, all emanating from an incident in Baltimore in the late 1990s. The second season will tell the never-before-heard side of the story of Bowe Bergdahl – an American soldier who left his post in Afghanistan and was eventually kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009. The team behind the first season of Serial is teaming up with Mark Boal, who has been speaking with Bergdahl for over a year. Boal, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, has written the acclaimed military movies The Hurt Locker, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2010, and Zero Dark Thirty. After the first episode was released, Boal was quoted as thanking someone for introducing him to podcasts. The future belongs to podcasts, he said. And when I heard that quote, I couldn’t help but think how much “the future” looks like the past. We’ve all heard the stories, or perhaps lived them ourselves, about serial radio programs that would be broadcast over the radio, telling a story with a new episode every week. Television, especially in all of its current high definition iterations, was supposed to change that. With stunning visuals and beautiful people, television was to revolutionize storytelling – and in many ways it did. But meanwhile, here are millions and millions of people every week, downloading Serial and listening to an hour of audio with no visual component to be seen (literally). It reminds me of a point made by the Blyth Festival’s Young Company in its annual production one year. I can’t recall the name of the show, but the youngsters turned technology on its head while discussing phone conversations versus texting. Imagine it, they said, if after decades of merely typing out messages to one another with our fingers (texting) like Morse code, new technology introduced the ability to speak, with our voices, to one another – to actually talk, in real time, with our friends and loved ones. But instead, we’ve gone backwards. After decades of being able to talk voice-to-voice to people all over the world, we sit and pound out short, often anemic messages to one another. So, back to podcasting, which marks the return of the grand old serial radio program that made people like Orson Welles famous. It just goes to show that the biggest and best, the newest and shiniest, isn’t always what’s going to grab the attention of the masses. It’s refreshing to me to hear that one of the most consumed forms of entertainment is one that values the use of the consumer’s imagination, good storytelling and quality of material – not just cutting edge technology presenting a deconstructed story a monkey could understand, but with plenty of eye- catching explosions and super-loud music. Maybe if more entertainment appealed to these senses the world would be a better place. Other Views Unholy smoke through the years Sometimes a resurgence isn’t bad Final Thought “When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.” – Edward Teller