Neil Vokey

I was kind of just ironically hate-watching this, but had to stop because it's just not even fun enough to hate watch. It's an indictment of the extreme mediocrity of the Canadian media industry (which uses public money) to develop this garbage. At the point I stopped watching, the Doc Brown ripoff character used a racial slur for Japanese people. How this racial slur made it into a kids movie in 2017 is a good clue of how many socially insulated white people are in control of "Cancon" productions like this.

Barely made it to the second episode and it seems like they'll all be the same - thirty second etymology (which I could look up myself) followed by 19 minutes of b list celebs saying nothing and a few egg heads talking about how swearing is good for you. There I saved you several hours.

You know how we laugh at those old 1950s documentaries that always present the world through a white, Amero-centric view? We laugh at how people used to just passively accept the topics as they were explained: with voice-of-god narration and no room for nuance or critical investigation. Well, maybe we haven't really come so far. Calling it just "History 101" is insulting. It's like a sliver of American 20th century history. That's it. Anyone who likes My theory is that this show came to exist because the producers were able to get access to a bunch of vintage stock footage for cheap or free so they slapped a few sloppy scripts together (based on the content they had, not on any critical analysis of what might be important).

Imagine being locked in the most beautiful library you've ever seen for a whole day, not reading a single book, and instead trashing the place. Entitled white suburban kids. And not even any breakfast.

I don't mind the concept of a slow-paced, low action, low stakes film. But what bothered me about Paterson, was all those little things - the details that we were forced to pay attention to, because there was nothing else. The unrealistic dialogue; the flat characters; the way Laura packed the cupcakes in weird boxes without taking them out of the baking trays; the way the dog chewed up the book actually looked like it went through a shredder. And yeah, the poems were stupid. But maybe they were supposed to be. Stopped watching 3/4 of the way through. I don't think I've ever done that, but just found myself looking at how much longer it was going to be. Seemed like it was written by a film student.

You know, when I think back to the confrontation between Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman in the washroom, I think that Hoffman really won, even though it didn't seem like it at the time. He won his ability to sleep at night. And, with insomnia at epidemic rates in this country, that's something to be proud of.