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MEDIA OVERKILL
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Letter to the editor: Endless coverage of tragedies is media overkill – Ottawa Sun
Here are today’s Ottawa Sun letters to the editor.
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As this is written, it has been a few days since a demented gunman opened fire at a Tops grocery in Buffalo and we still have unrelenting news coverage.
We cannot just quickly move on and forget the horrors of this tragedy. It affects not just the direct victims, but survivors, their families, bystanders and communities far beyond Buffalo. Nevertheless, when is enough media too much? I refer not to the need to report, to express and address issues associated with and investigate this crime, or search for ways to prevent repetition (good luck with that unless politicians enact really draconian measures to deal with firearms). I refer to reporting overkill in repeating the same old info.
For more than 30 minutes, CTV News Channel broadcast speaker after speaker in Buffalo. They droned on, repeating the same sentiments — thanking police, first responders, expressing condolences, announcing actions or donations local groups have undertaken, etc., but not adding any information on new developments. It’s a self-congratulatory PR exercise with all the wonderful announcements and reactions that still won’t prevent the next mass shooting.
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Adding insult to injury, Power Play takes over at 5 p.m. and immediately continues 20 minutes of the same regurgitated info and interviews. Most of them simply parrot the same platitudes we hear every time out, what we (authorities/politicians) must do to end these attacks, but never follow through.
Once more, some media go way out of proportion with excessive repetitive coverage of an event to the point of obsession, like a dog with a bone. This continuing repetition of the same news clips only gives the acts of twisted perpetrators unwarranted media coverage.
MIKE ALAIN
OTTAWA
(You could always change the channel.)
GRANDSTANDING PM
I’m another one who thinks Justin Trudeau’s “surprise” visit to Ukraine was a bit of grandstanding. I believe he has deservedly lost a lot of respect and credibility on the international stage. I agree we should do everything we can to help the Ukrainians, but, on the other hand, Trudeau didn’t have the decency to acknowledge or even listen to his own Canadian trucker citizens. They had a legitimate reason to at least be heard. What a hypocrite.
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GISELE LAVICTOIRE
ORLÉANS
(Perhaps if they had found a different way to deliver their message, people would have been more inclined to listen.)
SHOULD HAVE BEEN BLOCKED
The commentators for Monday’s Ontario election debate were terrible. Steven Del Duca and Andrea Horwath continually interrupted Doug Ford when he was talking. They should have been blocked several times. Very unprofessional.
ROGER POWER
OTTAWA
(Isn’t it better to let their true colours shine through?)
LILLEY LOST HIS WAY
Re: LILLEY: Poilievre ran in favour of carbon taxes multiple times in his career, online, May 16
At one time I thought Brian Lilley was an excellent reporter, especially when he was on Sun TV. Of late, it is difficult to understand exactly what he stands for as he comes across as being very pro-Liberal policies. He has even been singing the praises of Justin Trudeau on occasion. What Lilley fails to point out in his hit job on Pierre Poilievre is his stating he will do away with Trudeau’s carbon tax if he becomes prime minister. This is in stark contrast with Jean Charest and Patrick Brown, who Lilley seems to be in awe of and who have no such plan. Most Liberals, who view Poilievre as being the greatest threat to ending Trudeau’s rein of bad governance, view Charest and Brown as weaker opponents, so they are singing their praises.
LARRY COMEAU
OTTAWA
(Opinions can ebb and flow over time and sometimes even change tack.)
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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