_December 20, 2011
Top 10 YouTube videos of 2011
By John Terauds  

The mock agony of a dog teased with non-existent meaty treats was the world's No. 2 YouTube video of 2011.

"Ultimate Dog Tease" grabbed the No. 1 spot in the U.K. and was No. 2 in Canada - its country of origin.

The sad gastronomic fate of an adorable, talking German shepherd - captured on video and voiced by Halifax comedian Andrew Grantham - has been watched 74 million times by people around the world.

Although that's more than double the population of Canada, it's a drop in an ever-deepening YouTube bucket. The Google-owned, free online video service is growing at a rate of 48 hours of video a minute, according to Google Canada spokesperson Aaron Brindle.

In all, the world has so far watched or replayed YouTube videos 1 trillion times in 2011.

Another Canadian who climbed to the top of the world's YouTube pyramid this year was adorable 12-year-old Winnipegger Maria Aragon. She has sung and keyboarded her way through Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" more than 45 million times by now.

In Canada alone, Google's year-end ranking puts Aragon's performance in third place, right behind the talking dog.

The big winner, both around the world and in Canada, was American pop singer Rebecca Black, whose vapid, auto-tuned single "Friday" inspired tens of millions of views, not just for the official music video, but for a raft of parodies and covers, which include one by the cast of TV hit show Glee.

The ultimate in mindless songs, "Nyan Cat," clawed its way to sixth spot in Canada.

Commercial interests also had their moment in the spotlight, as ads by Kijiji.ca and Volkswagen picked up slots on Canada's Top 10 list of most-watched YouTube videos

1. Rebecca Black, " Friday" (Official Video)



This song, created by a hit factory in the U.S., was a viral sensation, proving that a lack of talent is no impediment to fame these days.

2. Talking Animals, " Ultimate Dog Tease"



You simply can't go wrong with animals and this dog-sided conversation racked up the hits earlier this year.

3. Maria Aragon, " Born This Way" (Cover)



This Winnipeg girl took the world by storm with her version of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way." She eventually ended up performing with star at Gaga's Toronto concert.

4. Kijiji.ca, " Eric Wants to Sell His Stuff. Fast"



How did this crack the list? This commercial for Kijiji had more than 10 million views.

5. Michael Bolton, " Jack Sparrow"



The Lonely Island guys did it again, with their hilarious video guest starring Michael Bolton, who had a little too much Pirates of the Caribbean on the brain.

6."Nyan Cat"



Likely the worst earworm you will hear all year.

7. Charlie Sheen, " Songify This"



Winning, warlock, tiger blood. These are just some of the words that Charlie Sheen added to our collective lexicon this year. This interview set to music sums up the actor's very weird year.

8. Volkswagen, " The Force"



Volkswagen won the Super Bowl with its ad featuring a tiny Darth Vader trying to use the force around the house. Bonus points for releasing it early online.

9. "Einstein vs Stephen Hawking"



Einstein and Stephen Hawking split flow all scientician style! Aww yeah, that's an Epic Rap battle there!

10. Emerson, " Mommy's Nose Is Scary"



Emerson can't decide whether his mom blowing her nose is hilarious or terrifying. No argument about how adorable this video is.

_ December 19, 2011
Review: Rooney Mara squeezes fresh pulp in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Peter Howell   Movie Critic

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo


Starring Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård and Robin Wright Penn. Directed by David Fincher. At GTA theatres. 158 minutes.

David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is dirtier, more violent and marginally more complicated than the Swedish original - which was so recent, it still feels like it's in theatres.

But is Fincher's version any better? And does it matter?

Here's where things start to get interesting, but ultimately it all comes down to the "girl" of the title, played here with a ferocious combination of rawness and vulnerability by 26-year-old Rooney Mara.

Her take on cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander is the real reason to etch this Dragon Tattoo onto your grey matter, even if Daniel Craig's Mikael Blomkvist is merely adequate as her crusading journalist sidekick.

Fincher's remake and the original film are both cut from the same pulp cloth as the first novel of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, who needed a good editor as much or more than he needed worldwide acclaim. The late Swedish author obviously had no fear of thriller clichés, or of telegraphing major plot reveals.

The question is, why would this material fascinate Fincher? He's certainly no stranger to pulpy thrillers - such early films as Seven and The Game proved that - but he's long since moved on to deeper probes of the human psyche, as witness more recent works Zodiac and The Social Network.

He also brings a certain look of dread to his films, which this time seems distinctly second-hand. Apart from a knockout opening sequence, a 007-style montage of figures swimming in something like oil, set to Trent Reznor's vibrant rip of Led Zep's "Immigrant Song," the film might simply have recycled the sets of Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Dragon Tattoo.

The story still plods, perhaps even more than before. Mara's Salander and Craig's Blomkvist don't even meet until the 80-minute mark of the film's bladder-testing 158 minutes. They don't start busting crime until about the 90-minute mark, a time when many other movies are wrapping up.

The story, only marginally buffed by Steven Zaillian ( Moneyball), is still the same "locked room" puzzle as before, the stuff of Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie potboilers.

On a remote Swedish island, where even a billionaire can't get decent cell service, lives the bickering family of elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, happily hamming).

Now a dark and inhospitable place, especially in the story's wintry depths, the island used to ring with the sound of happy children. One of them was 16-year-old Harriet (Moa Garpendal), beloved niece of Vanger, who vanished in the summer of 1966 after a road tragedy removed the island from mainland contact - and watchful eyes - for most of a day.

Harriet has now been missing for four decades, presumed dead and long consigned to the police "cold cases" file. But Vanger refuses to die without knowing the answer to the mystery, which for him is unusually insistent: he's been receiving regular clues that suggest the killer is taunting him. Vanger also suspects it was one of his family members who did the deed, because how could an unknown murderer gain access to the isle?

"I've spent half my life examining the events of a single day," he tells Blomkvist, an ace journalist whose life and career has recently been on the skids. Blomkvist was obliged to resign from muckraking Stockholm magazine Millennium, after his probe into corrupt businessman Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg) blew up in his face, resulting in a libel conviction and an impending jail sentence.

Vanger's proposition to Blomkvist: Investigate Harriet's disappearance and apparent death, under the guise of writing a biography. In return, Vanger will not only pay Blomkvist handsomely, but also help him get revenge on Wennerström, whom Vanger also hates.

Blomkvist has nothing better to do, although he does have a loyal and loving girlfriend in Erika Berger (Robin Wright Penn), his editor at Millennium, whom he'll be obliged to leave behind for many months.

But he won't want for company, albeit of the weird kind. Enter Salander, the woman with the fire-breathing tat, introduced as someone whom her co-workers don't much like, and for good reasons - and not just because of her fondness for leathers and piercings of every variety.

"She's different," her security-firm boss understates.

Salander's abundant personality disorders, the cause of which are detailed in later chapters of the trilogy, have obliged her to become a ward of the state, under the too-close attention of her oily guardian, Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen).

A subplot involving Salander's eye-popping resolution of her status is one of the few areas where Fincher has pushed the violence beyond what Oplev did in the original Dragon Tattoo. Reznor's and Atticus Ross' score, another improvement from the original film, helps build the dire mood, and listen for a mordant riff on a certain film by Paul Thomas Anderson, a Fincher rival.

Salander is one messed-up gal - she lives on Happy Meals and caffeine, and wears a T-shirt reading "F - k You, You F - kng F - k" - but she also rocks a computer like Steve Jobs.

Too bad that what she and Blomkvist are doing is mostly plowing through old paper library files and photographs, which plays as porn for diehard print lovers, but which doesn't make for dazzling screen action.

Vanger's family, described by the patriarch as "the most detestable collection of people that you will ever meet," should fill the void. Alas, most of them are drier and flatter than a Swedish cracker, even the usually reliable Stellan Skarsgård, who plays the unctuous industrial heir Martin Vanger.

But what could anyone do with eye-rolling material like this? The villain is pointed out very early in the proceedings, something Fincher oddly underlines with a cat-torture scene (the violence happens off screen) that might as well be a flaming arrow of revelation.

"Why don't people trust their instincts?" a character says.

Good question, but in the incendiary performance by Rooney Mara, one of the year's best, you have all the incentive you need to drag out the Dragon Tattoo gun yet again.

Noomi Rapace was great as the original Salander; Mara goes her one better with a performance that is as disturbing and wounded as the character is meant to be.

_ December 18, 2011
War Horse script brought co-star Tom Hiddleston to tears

By Linda Barnard 

Movie Writer Tom Hiddleston praises the film's 'classic storytelling' "It was a good week," British actor Tom Hiddleston conceded with a grin.

That would be the week two legendary directors, Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg, chose him to star in their films. The Allen movie was Midnight in Paris, where 29-year-old Hiddleston plays F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the call from Spielberg was for War Horse, opening Dec. 25.

Based both on Michael Morpurgo's children's novel set during World War I - about a bond between an English boy named Albert Narracott, and his horse, Joey - and the 2007 stage adaptation of the same name, Hiddleston plays Capt. Nichols. He takes the heartbroken Albert's beloved Joey to the front when Britain needed horses both for the cavalry and to move guns and supplies.

"The screenplay was so moving I cried four times the first time I read it," said Hiddleston, who first captured attention from moviegoers this year in a far less sentimental film, playing the supervillain Loki in Thor. He'll reprise his role in Joss Whedon's The Avengers, due out May 4, 2012.

"I think it's just classic storytelling," he said of War Horse. "I read the book and I saw the play and the reason the book and the play work is because it somehow encapsulates something very deep and profound about the human condition."

Hiddleston said Joey displays "nobility and perseverance and strength and dignity in the face of horror" as he serves in the trenches and battlefields of World War I. The setting offers a "romantic, poetic backdrop" that adds drama to the tale as Albert tries to find a way to be reunited with his horse.

"It's a very simple and beautiful story," said Hiddleston. "Spielberg saw that when he saw the play and so shooting it was a dream. It's very hard to encapsulate it without sounding sentimental."

Hiddleston felt a personal connection to the story and shared that with Spielberg about it when he auditioned for the role.

"We talked about First World War history and the horse and certainly in British schools, the First World War is a big part of our history, so I feel very connected to it," he said. "I'd played the trumpet in the Remembrance (Day) service when I was 13 and it was a great honour. After I told him that story, he said, 'I'd like you to do it.'"

That kind of thing "never happens," Hiddleston said with a chuckle. "Usually the casting director calls your agent and your agent tells you but he (Spielberg) told me across the table."

Hiddleston shot War Horse last summer in Devon and Cornwall in southwest England and said the setting adds to the "just gorgeous" look of the film. But the heart comes from its director.

"Spielberg is a master. He's just a miracle maker. He's one of the kindest men I've ever worked with and I think that kindness runs through all his work."

_ Okay, so it probably isn't for everyone, but for me, "Midnight In Paris" is Woody Allen's best work since "Hannah and Her Sisters."  Of course, to fully apprecate this film you must have a love for art, artist, and Paris.  Of which, I do!  "Midnight in Paris" is an intellectual fantasy trip, a film snobs day dream,  a surrealist dream within a dream,  and I'm still floating from the well shot, acted, and scripted film.  I don't know when or if I will ever come down wondering how cool it must have been to be an Ex-Patriot living the artist life in Paris after the first World War.  The opportunity to be a fly-on-the wall and see  Hemingway, Zelda, Scott Fitzgerald, Dali, Porter, etc. as they might have been in casual conversation gives this dreamer hope in American Film.  Owen Wilson is the perfect Woody Allen character: smart, but given to mental distraction, modest, but daring in love , witty and foolish with sophisticated edges.  And when Owen Wilson walks in the rain across the Seine with the down-to-earth French woman at the end of the film, it is a film snobs dream.  Thanks Woody, lets do it again, soon.  American film needs you