China Gets the Olympics…Again!

Moose Jawvians are very disappointed to have once again lost the Olympic bid. Beijing who hosted the Olympics back in 2008 have managed to win the 2022 Winter Games outraging many locals here in Moose Jaw who’ve been bidding to host the Olympics for well over twenty years.

“It’s an outrage!” says public worker Andy Nohandis. “They don’t even have snow! WE have snow!”

“I think it would have been a show of good faith to give Moose Jaw a chance,” says an anonymous representative from City Hall. “In addition to putting in a bid every two years, we’ve hosted band festivals, word festivals, and even Toby Keith. Surely we can handle a minor Olympic ceremony like the Winter Games.”

Moose Jaw is surrounded by nothing for miles in any direction providing ample space for Olympic tracks and stadiums. The city is even home to an arena, Mosaic Place.

“I don’t see why they can’t just hold international figure skating and speed skating competitions at Mosaic” says the same representative Carrie McIntosh. “And we’ve got plenty of other facilities in town that could serve as homes for Olympic games. With a few adjustments Providence Place could easily be turned into a Biathlon range.”

Many cite some of the roads on South Hill as being ideal for Mogul skiing and the Serpentine Creek in Crescent Park if drained can service luge, bobsledding, and skeleton games.

The City of Moose Jaw assures us that they will continue to bid in the future as the city’s elevation to Olympic host could be a good boost for tourism. As for now, most locals are just pouting at Beijing’s second win. They join most of the worlds’ sentiments in that regard.

Comments

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, em...

The Subtle Sensitivity of the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

When I think of Wong Kar-wai, I think of nighttime and neon lights, I think of the image of lonely people sitting in cafes or bars as the world passes behind them, mere flashes of movement; I think of love and quiet, sombre heartbreak, the sensuality that exists between people but is rarely fully or openly expressed. Mostly I think of the mood of melancholy, yet how this can be beautiful, colourful, inspiring even. A feeling of gloominess at the complexity of messy human relationships, though tinged with an unmitigated joy in the sensation of that feeling. And a warmth, generated by light and colour, that cuts through to the solitude of our very soul. This isn’t a broadly definitive quality of Wong’s body of work -certainly it isn’t so much true of his martial arts films Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster. But those most affectionate movies on my memory: Chungking Express , Fallen Angels , Happy Together , 2046 , of course In the Mood for Love , and even My Blueberry Nig...

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening sce...

Reviews of the Bosch

Search This Blog