Chinatown vs. Ontario

With Roman Polanski back behind bars, the expression life imitating art or art imitating life seems apropos of a filmmaker that claims the spotlight for better or worse. His personal life makes for some amazing fluff. Beyond the tabloid headlines, it's hard not to rubber-neck Polanski's pictures. The classic film noir/crime story Chinatown is no exception.

Overshadowed in 1974 by The Godfather Part 2 at the Academy Awards, I think Chinatown is a film more relevant in the big picture. I'll draw a comparison if you live in Ontario and happen to follow the provincial government's progress with the Green Energy Act.

Chinatown

• The film's base plot explores corporate greed, murder and incest set as a period piece in LA circa 1930s.

Ontario

• The Ontario government's Green Energy Act explores corporate greed, NIMBY bashing and cuckolding set in a surreal 2009. (I had to look that up - cuckold - thinking it was some bizarre new fetish.)

Chinatown

• The scoop. The folks at LA's Water Works Inc. are up to no good. Deliberately diverting fresh water back into the ocean claiming there's a drought in the city. In real time supplying water rights to the rich & famous living large in estate homes & vineyards. Add the murder of the City's chief engineer and things are not what they seem with the evidence on display.

Ontario

• The scoop. Boy George & Dalton McGuilty team up and enforce wind-farm development by creating the feed-in-tariff incentive before they figure how the grid can support it leaving local municipalities wondering why there's a new giant wind-farm in their village.

Chinatown

• It's a picture that takes it's time telling the story and it needs to given the lack of narrative. Normally a crutch of Hollywood fair like this. It's refreshing not to have the protagonist blabbing away during useless segues to help the ignorant. Instead the viewer works along side Jack Nicholson (JJ Gittes), the PI hired to unravel the clues as characters come clean.

Ontario

• It's a government doing as little as possible by telling it's citizens that greenwashing is the solution to jump-start a slumping economy. Employing expensive lobby groups who gorge on expenses while spewing endless rhetoric from renewable pundits. The bill at the end of the day is footed by the tax-payer.

In the film there's a famous line delivered from the PI when asked what he was doing in Chinatown. His reply: 'As little as possible'. It's a marvel of visual style, both the film and Ontario's Green Energy Act.

For the latest on the Ontario government's progress with the Green Energy Act, check out the Q&A from the National Post.

For more on Polanski as pedophile, read Jeff's view on the famous auteur.

I offer a different opinion on Roman than Jeff does. It took some balls at the studio to hire him to helm Chinatown. Surely he had made a name for himself with Rosemary's Baby but after the brutal murder of his wife (with expecting child) he probably went insane. No doubt Romans early Hollywood experience taught him there are no rules when you have the money and the power. (E.g Then you get the women - as per Scarface). His crime, wrong as it was, pales in comparison to his childhood memory as a Polish Jew during the Nazi regime or a victim of the Mason murders.

Messed up for sure but he's a survivor on the epic scale of life.

You Don't Need A Bigger Boat

Anybody remember when the Crocodile Hunter died? I know it was a few years ago, but it leads into something I've wanted to talk about for a while. For those of you who forgot about this ultimately foreseeable incident, Steve Irwin was a certifiably insane Australian who made his living provoking and antagonizing potentially dangerous animals of every stripe. In his extensive career he was bitten, stung, strangled and otherwise maimed by just about every predatory animal on the planet. He eventually met his admittedly tragic end on the pointy side of a manta ray's stinger – bam, right through the heart. Like I said, raise your hand if you didn't see this one coming. Statistically there are only so many times you can poke deadly animals with a stick or drag them around by the tail or whatever before one of them punches your clock. So Steve Irwin got Dracula'd by a venomous fish, and the entertainment world lost one more strangely compelling nutcase.

The response? A whole school of stingrays were found mutilated with their stingers ripped off all over the beaches of beautiful Queensland, Australia, because a bunch of rabid fans figured it was justifiable retribution against a species that clearly has an agenda to rid the surface world of wingnut naturalists (that's sarcasm, folks). Leaving aside the somewhat dire insinuations about human nature this incident illustrates, it points to the very human proclivity to hate and fear anything we don't understand.

It's the same thing with stuff like Jaws. Peter Benchley wrote a book about an almost-comically homicidal shark that preyed on the unwary swimmers of Amity Island. The movie version by Stephen Spielberg builds on the already-unlikely premise. The big biter leaves a trail of dead tourists in its wake until a trio of local thugs (a sheriff, a marine biologist and – get this – a professional shark hunter) decide to form a brute squad and go hunting for the underwater beast. A string of unlikely circumstances follows, including the fact that the shark apparently really hates English drinking songs, culminating in the use of a pressurized barrel and a rifle to quite literally explode the evil fish.

This is bullsh*t upon bullsh*t, folks – it's pure, unadulterated fiction. Seriously – a survey done by the Florida Museum of Natural History notes that in 2006, there were only 62 cases of what they call “unprovoked” shark attacks on humans (“unprovoked”, of course, meaning the non-Steve Irwin variety). Sharks don't like people-meat; even the most grossly obese American tourist isn't fat enough for the great-white palette, and usually humans are attacked by sharks because they're mistaken for seals or other marine life more suitable to the diet of a twenty-foot long apex predator. Why are they mistaken for seals, you might ask? Because humans have this unwavering desire to throw themselves into intrinsically dangerous situations in order to pursue recreation. Case in point: surfing. Leaving aside all the other stuff that can go wrong (like drowning, or generally looking like a douchebag), why would you want to dress in a rubbery, seal-esque wetsuit and leap on a board shaped like your average great-white's afternoon snack, and then hurl yourself into bodies of water where these scary-ass creatures tend to congregate for meal times? Clearly, this is stupid upon stupid: engaging in already-dangerous activities in an environment where you're at a distinct disadvantage (ever tried to move fast in five feet of water?), and then adding into that you're trespassing on the turf of the baddest street gang of the aquatic 'hood (the Sharks, get it?).

It's like my buddy Jeff O. over at Keep Your Coins I Want Change said to me when I was discussing this post with him.

Jaws should have been the shortest movie ever made. They should have seen the shark, gone “oh gee, there's a shark...so who wants to play volley ball instead?” and that should have been it. Approximate running time, five minutes. Fade to black.

If we could just keep it to ourselves, maybe the absurdly high number of shark attacks (more sarcasm) would dwindle to, oh, I don't know, none. There's no real reason why people should ever get attacked by something in the sea. But we keep doing it, and what's more, we make it a pastime.

At least surfing is athletic – what about these rich, bored, upper-middle class tourist clowns who decide that the swim-up bar in the pool of the 5 star resort just isn't interesting enough. No, they want to go into the sea and have a face-to-face encounter with the oldest, most efficient predators on the planet. But in the interest of public safety and of not, you know, having limbs chewed off, they put these over-privileged voyeurs in a big metal cage and lower them into the water – which is, according to the popular conception of sharks as mindless man-eaters, the same thing as keeping the samosas behind glass at the supermarket. Then, the companies that run these thrill-a-minute excursions dump a bunch of fish guts into the water around the cage so the sharks will be attracted and driven into a feeding frenzy, to the great satisfaction of the Tourist Snacks. Sounds kind of neat, right?

Ever heard of a guy called Pavlov? You've heard of his dogs, for sure – the ones trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. It's called behaviour modification and it works by associating certain sensations with certain results. In the case of our friends the Griswolds, the sensation is the fish chow that makes the sharks think it's time to eat – the result is a sharky association between food and fat tourists in the water. Do I need to draw you a picture here?

To bring it back full-circle, the people who dig (dug?) the Crocodile Hunter and who really want to swim with Jaws are the same people who will lose their minds over a few shark attacks and one dead Australian and endorse mass killings of these scary, scary animals. The point is, you can only mess with nature for a certain period of time before nature will turn around and bite you in the ass. You don't need a bigger boat – you need a new hobby.