Breakfast With Scot

Sooo...

The biggest thing in the movie that made me go 'huh'? The credits.

Produced in association with both Corus and Astral. This is... odd to me on a number of levels. Please keep in mind that I don't work for either of these companies and most of my knowledge of these companies has to do with their radio assets... but...

First of all... since when is Astral into film/TV? As far as I know, Astral used to be Standard. Standard owned very little TV stations... they did buy out the Craigs (who owned a block of specialty stations), but I think that Craig maintained ownership of their TV assets and only sold off their radio stations. I could be completely wrong. And who knows, maybe Astral has aquired more TV related assets since buying Standard... or maybe they were bigger into TV than Standard was... but until the buyout happened, I hadn't even heard of Astral... and I'm someone who's shopped for employment with most major media companies. I check Corus' job postings regularly. I check all TV job postings regularly.

And... usually, these companies are too busy duking it out to team up on anything. Now, maybe the film recieved several grants and that's where the partnership ends, but it still strikes me as odd to have these two companies linked to the same film. It's kind of like Disney and MGM deciding to share Shirley Temple. Believe me, the amount of politics involved is absolutely insane when it comes to media. The stuff I deal with on a dialy basis would blow your mind.

While we're on this topic... media is changing in Canada so fast that it's hard to tell what the hell is going on most of the time. When I started out, there were a few big companies... Corus, CHUM, Standard, Rogers, CanWest, CTV, maybe NewCap and GoldenWest if we're feeling generous. In literally the last few years, CTV has become CTV Bell Globemedia which is a huge conglomerate and they then bought out CHUM (MuchMusic, MTV Canada, etc) after CHUM had just bought out another company... I believe it was the remainder of the Craig assetts but to be quite honest, I can't remember. Astral then came out of left field and somehow managed to buy out Standard. NewCap recently bought out a whole bunch of Corus stations (recently as in the last 5-10 years). The landscape is changing and becoming smaller and smaller. Sooner or later, we're all going to be working for the same people and there'll be no wage competition, no benefit competition, no reason to treat us well. We don't have a union. If this is getting disjointed sounding, that's because I'm having a minor panic attack just typing this. Some radio/TV stations are unionized, but it's a market by market thing. I believe Astral may be unionized? I know that some stations are. I also know that the CHUM station in Winnipeg was unionized (possibly). But, there are no specific unions, like ACTRA or WGC for these people (me included). Many people may claim that unions suck, and I would have to agree with some of their points, but as talent, what makes me different than an actor? Why shouldn't I have union scale and all these things? Why shouldn't my employer be forced to pay me fairly for the work that I do? Why can't I demand green M&M's in my dressing room? Wait... got a little off topic there... :P

Okay... I'm ranting now... so I'm going to end this right here. The movie was good by the way. Highly recommended and I'm going to pick the book up tomorrow.

EDIT: One nitpicky thing I remembered about the movie... I really liked the guy who played Eric, but I have one minor eyebrow raise about the whole thing. He doesn't really look like and NHL goon. He looks more like... Brian Orser than Tie Domi or Mark Messier. I just couldn't picture him mauling people on the ice! No matter how tough you are, if you're the size of Theo Fleury, you're not going to win against Mark Messier. No matter how many Lays potato chips he's packing back these days. And I just know that because I used those people to make my point, someone is going to come up with a YouTube video of Fleury beating the crap out of Messier. But whatever. I think you get the point.