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Author: mattshepherd
I love storytelling, and helping organizations share their truth with the world. From non-profit media outlets to for-profit boutique agencies to one of Canada's great universities, I've been connecting institutions and stakeholders for a while, and enjoying both the journey and seeing great ideas find great audiences.
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Maelstrom (2000)
Long before Dune and Blade Runner 2049, long before LA, Denis Villeneuve made a movie in Quebec that mashed up kitchen-sink drama, dark humour, Tom Waits songs, and a narrator that is also a dying fish.
Maelstrom was a high-water mark for Quebec film in 2000, and by and large still holds up.
The story, in a nutshell, is that nepo baby Bibiane is bad at business and not super great at life: she’s blown a $200,000 deal for the family business, parties recklessly, and ultimately drunk-drives herself into a hit-and-run. She runs.
From there, scored partially by Tom Waits’ “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today,” the movie loops around as Bibiane grapples with guilt, falls in love with the son of the man she murdered, and finds, if not happiness, some sort of French-Canadian approximation of same. The plot is driven in part by stale octopus and a mysterious man who looks like a Harkonnen Oliver Platt that dispenses wisdom at laser-perfect moments.
If you didn’t live in Quebec in the late ’90s, it’s hard to express how perfectly Marie-Josée Croze absolutely nails the ur-Quebec-Woman of that era — the look, the hair, the clothes are insanely bang-on. And the movie lives in Montreal really successfully — the upper-class apartments but also the dive bars, the docks, the bus, the subway.
The movie is narrated, for no particular reason, by a Cronenberg-level gross fish that is being serial-butchered by a giant naked dude. Quebec!
It’s achingly obvious that Villeneuve has grown as a director since; there’s significant chunks of “student film vibe” scattered around here. But it’s got a lot of loopy charm, it’s a compelling time capsule if you want a feeling for Quebec au tournant du siecle, the leads are charming, and it’s interesting to see L’il Villeneuve as a nascent film director finding his feet.
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Endorphine (2015)
Spoilers ho. I strongly recommend you watch this. Like, in general, but especially before you keep reading this.
What a f’in trip.
When I think of my go-tos for Quebec film, Un crabe dans la tête is always one that’s stuck with me for over a quarter-century, so diving back in in an effort to get more Canadian media in my diet, I looked up the director (André Turpin) and found his latest on Amazon Prime (gross, but I’ve already paid for it, and it’s where it’s streaming).
This is probably a work of genius. Or maybe it’s just really unnecessarily complicated. But I’m leaning more to the former than the latter; I can’t say I understood all of it, but it felt like there was a very solid and coherent vision underneath it. It doesn’t dive as wildly into the surreal as David Lynch, but is extravagant in its nonlinear approach to a story in a way that feels, like Lynch movies feel, like there’s something rock-solid in the mind behind the camera. Even if you struggle to keep up.
In essence — a girl, Simone, is traumatized by her mother’s murder, and concurrently becomes deeply emotionally damaged and also unstuck in time.
Even from the start, time loops — seemingly unimportant things said while sleep-talking become important later; time loops back on itself and then back again; characters transition from moment to moment in sometimes impossible ways.
But it never feels out of control, narratively — difficult to follow, sometimes; ultimately linear while also being unpinned.
One of the reasons Crab sticks with me is I think Turpin’s eye is unmatchable. The stop-motion time-lapse of the sun and the black bus off the top. An incidental sequence of reflections in a car window as the youngest version of our main character sleeps. Unbelievable amounts of dread packed into just a car alone in a parking garage with a tarped-up van barely in view. A three-quarter angle on an unremarkable office full of cubicles. I watch a lot of horror movies; Turpin can pull off more menace in an office building stairwell than I’ve seen in most top-tier horror movies in the past several years.
(One important note for English watchers — there’s a pretty pivotal stairwell scene, but if you don’t know that RC means “rez-de-chausée” [mezzanine], you might think it’s corporate branding or something — it’s not; no matter where she goes in the stairs, she keeps coming back to the same mezzanine door).
Equally impressive is the gradual derailing of a linear narrative; starting with the trauma, then hypnosis, ultimately time-jumps back, and forth, and back through Simone’s later life.
There is a lot I don’t fully understand, particularly in the back end of the middle third, when young-adult Simone is a… parking garage attendant? Working for… an industrial sewing concern? Visiting… uh… her choke-buddy cousin in the hospital, and he’s aged dramatically for no particular reason? Or is that her father? Is her sewing-concern boss the same actor as her mother’s killer? Hard to tell.
But while I have a real antipathy for “nothing is real” movies, this doesn’t feel like that. It’s unstuck, sure, but it feels real emotionally. Hard to keep up with, but tangible and coherent underneath all of its apparent unstuckiness.
My only complaint, really, is the insert / wrapper of some sort of presentation that feels like the kind of philosophy you come up with as an undergrad when you get really, really into pot in your third year. It’s a bit hand-holdy without being really helpful, and ultimately made me feel like Turpin wasn’t wholly confident in himself, or his audience.
On the whole, though, wow. Some frames that will be indelibly burned into my brain. A really fascinating exploration of trauma and memory. Crab and Endorphine, seem to be Turpin’s only movies, the latter having come out a full decade ago. Make more movies, dude. You’re good at this.
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Puffery drift
I continue to be fascinated — maybe uniquely so? — by puffery. Probably because of the marketing background, but the notion that being untruthful is okay if the lie is extravagant enough that a layperson wouldn’t believe it 1my own words; I’m working on a set of definitions in case law, which will be interesting (to me, anyway). is not only intriguing, but I’d argue in some ways necessary to modern advertising.
At the far end, it makes perfect sense. If you watch an ad for Skittles and a unicorn touches a couch with its horn and the couch turns to Skittles, it would be preposterous for somebody to sue the Skittles people if a furniture-transforming unicorn fails to appear when they open a pack.
But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a line past which the grey starts shading into black, and judges are making very nuanced decisions based on, I’d argue, very little guidance. Looking at CanLII, the word ‘puffery’ has been used a lot in court decisions in the last few years, with subtypes of puffery including…
- “election puffery,” examined repeatedly by the Nova Scotia Labour Board (there seem to be a lot of union disputes in the Maritimes these days)
- Criminal court, where puffery has been raised as a form of braggadocio under which somebody claiming to have committed acts of violence was clearly using puffery to enhance their rep, but not seriously confessing to crimes
- Privacy statements, even granular ones such as “[COMPANY] complies with all applicable privacy laws, rules, and regulations in the jurisdictions within which it operates”.
Nothing substantial here today, but a bit of a placeholder to remind myself that I’d like to unpack this a bit more.
- 1my own words; I’m working on a set of definitions in case law, which will be interesting (to me, anyway).
Just in case anyone needs one: I made a tabloid size, portrait-oriented calendar template for Affinity Publisher 2 for 2025.
Working on some holiday gifts for friends and family, and thought I’d share the file.
As reported by Law360, CanLII is filing suit against the Caseway AI chatbot over allegations of a mass scrape of CanLII’s content.
I’m a big CanLII fan. I use it all the time, including on multiple blog posts on this site, and recorded a podcast episode about it some time ago. It’s a phenomenal resource.
There are a few things that will be unpacked here, in the courts or otherwise.
CanLII’s main claim to fame isn’t original content, but being a central resource that consolidates legal decisions in Canada.
That said, the very first point in the Statement of Facts, per CanLII, is
- The plaintiff, the Canadian Legal Information Institute (“CanLII”), is a not-for-profit organization that owns and operates a proprietary search engine and database containing its work product, including court decisions, legislation and secondary sources that have been reviewed, curated, catalogued and enhanced by CanLII at significant cost and effort (the “CanLII Works”).
This would be tricky to defend on copyright grounds. The Supreme Court has upheld copyright in “headnotes, case summary, topical index and compilation of reported judicial decisions” in the past.1CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, 2004 SCC 13 Broadly speaking, most of what CanLII does isn’t original work.
But some of it is! From the Statement of Facts, 18(i) CanLII:
summariz[es] court decisions and generating an original analysis containing case facts, procedural history, parties’ submissions, legal issues, disposition, and reasons for judgment, with links to the pertinent paragraph numbers within the body of the corresponding decision;
This clearly aligns with the SCC decision above, and if it’s found that Clearway included and used the original works in their scrapes, that’s not great for them.
What’s really interesting is that CanLII is approaching this as a breach of contract, via the Terms of Use for the website. It feels, to my eyes, like they know the copyright case is inherently a bit shaky, and the clearer path is to reinforce the copyright infringement claim with the breach of contract.
This distinguishes CanLII from other high-profile lawsuits against AI by creators claiming copyright violation. Sarah Silverman, for instance, doesn’t have terms of use. (I’m sure Sarah Silverman could make a great and filthy joke about her “terms of use,” but I digress.)
The TOS tack is novel, to my knowledge.
Caseway’s counter-arguments to CanLII’s claims are, well, kinda stupid. Per the Law360 article:
“Our AI is built to pull and analyze unaltered court documents directly from public sources, ensuring compliance with copyright and intellectual property laws. CanLII’s attempt to restrict us from using their data is essentially moot, as we’re already avoiding it,” [Alistair Vigier, co-founder of Caseway AI] said in a statement.
But… Caseway did. Whether or not the documents are publicly accessible doesn’t alter the fact that they pulled them from CanLII.
And
He added that he had never seen or accepted CanLII’s terms of service and noted that Caseway does not incorporate CanLII’s works in any way that masks, frames, or misrepresents their origin.
Yeah, nobody ever reads those things, huh? That doesn’t mean they don’t exist (digging in the crates again, I did a fun podcast episode several years ago with Peter Kissick about the contracts nobody reads). But they’re there. Ignore them at your peril.
Vigier noted that an injunction restricting Caseway from using CanLII’s data would not impact its operations as it is not using any CanLII data in its system.
Whether or not they’re presently using the data is again immaterial to whether or not they violated the TOS and copyright of CanLII.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. Hopefully not an out of court settlement; there are some nuances around the value of categorization and analysis that seem to fall under the SCC threshold established in CCH that could be interesting to see threshed out in court.
And the recursive loop of looking all this up in CanLII will be fun.
- 1CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, 2004 SCC 13
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Horror Movie Challenge 2024
After a few years of playing along with a horror podcast’s horror-movie-every-day October horror challenge, we’ve homebrewed one for 2024, along with my sister-in -law and horror-fiend niece.
The idea is that there’s a theme per day, but we don’t tell people what to watch — they fill in the blanks based on their interpretation of the sometimes-quite-loose, sometimes-very-directive themes.
2024’s list:
Horror Challenge October 2024
01 Final Girl(s) – Happy Death Day
02 Into the Wilderness – The Watchers
03 Food Fight – The Stuff
04 Costumed Creeps – The Banana Splits Movie
05 Animals – Night of the Lepus
06 Clown Town – Killer Klowns from Outer Space
07 Dolls, Living or Otherwise – Oddity
08 This Actor Is Too Good For This Movie – Tentacles
09 Fancy Draculas – Salem’s Lot
10 Scary Books – A Dark Song
11 Silent Movie – Haxan
12 The Sequel – Nightmare on Elm St. 2: Freddy’s Revenge
13 Giant Monster – Tremors
14 Religious Horror – Tumbbad
15 A Scarrel of Laughs – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
16 “It’s a trap!” – Trap
17 Art-House Horror – Eyes Without a Face / Company of Wolves
18 Meh Movie, Great Soundtrack – The Keep
19 Space: the Scary Frontier – V/H/S Beyond
20 Queer Horror – Jennifer’s Body
21 J-Horror (or K-Horror) – One Cut of the Dead
22 The Monster Is The Protagonist – Black Out
23 ’80s Kids – The Watcher in the Woods
24 Evil Children – Z (2019)
25 Under de Sea – Lake of Death
26 The Threequel – Nightmare on Elm St. 3 – The Dream Warriors
27 Beep beep! Cars/trucks/campers – Maximum Overdrive (or Titane)
28 The Only Way to Win (Video Games) – Brainscan (or Stay Alive)
29 Sports Horror – 5150, rue des ormes
30 Before They Were Famous
31 The Scariest Film I Know
This took a long time to do! And I suspect will take a bit of effort to maintain over time.
The biggest issue being to create the table with icons, it wound up being necessary to pull the table out as HTML, manually insert the Font-Awesome icon codes, and then update the table manually every time I wanted to add a line with the icons.
Compounded by the fact that I’m an idiot, and thought that doing a find-and-replace at the code level for “Street,” St.,” etc. to “St,” and “Road,” “Rd.”, etc. as “Rd” was a good idea. But I had RegEx turned on, so when I replaced “St.” and Rd.” every string with St* and with Rd* was replaced, including the word “Kingston,” strings like “Bistro,” and so on — including their URLs. But by the time I noticed it was too late to undo. So half my time on the table was spent fixing those mistakes.
Ultimately, I’d prefer to live in a world where chain restaurants are rare, Facebook is extinct, and people curate local information without being reliant on algorithm driven search. I use Google Sheets and Google MyMaps for this, so I’m not angling to make this some sort of weird purity test — but I’m hoping to use those tools to make people less reliant on Google’s primary product, and do a small bit to eradicate Facebook/Meta.
So Back in the Day I lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec, which has a better-than-you’d-expect art gallery, the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke. A converted really huge three-story mansion.
There was a touring exhibit of impressionist painters that was hitting all the big Canadian galleries that year. You got your Monets, you got your Van Goghs, like one or two lesser paintings from a bunch of the big names. And for some reason, it gets a week at MBAS as well as all the bigger-city galleries. This didn’t get a ton of fanfare: an article in the local French papers and in the sole local English paper.
This is partly because MBAS building would be really big for a house, but it was pretty small for a gallery. I don’t think they had a budget for marketing or promotion at all. The total staff count in there at any point would usually be two people: somebody at the front desk / coat check who would also dash over if somebody was in the tiny gift shop, and a wandering security person.
So this travelling exhibition is up on the third floor of MBAS, and as a frequent visitor, I know a few things:
- You just walk into the gallery. It costs I think $5 as a suggested donation. Nobody checks your ID or anything.
- The fire escape, which you can access through a normal screen door leading to a small balcony from the always-open third-floor break room, is a set of stairs running right down to beside the gallery. It is always unlocked and unalarmed. I’ve seen enough people ducking out there for a smoke over time that I’m aware of that.
- There’s one security person; on the day I drop by to see the Impressionists, it’s a women in I’d guess her 70s. They walk every floor, very slowly, so once they leave the third floor to walk downstairs and start over at the first, you’ve got probably a 20-minute window before they get back to the third floor.
Faced with the Impressionists, I also realize:
- They’ve just, like, hung the paintings. Like you or I would. They don’t seem to be super affixed to the walls with some sort of weird backing systems, they aren’t locked or behind glass. They’re just there, wire on a nail style.
- There are, at least to my ability to see them, no security cameras or anything. I’d never really cared to look before, but I’m suddenly motivated by the realization that
- I can totally steal a fucking Van Gogh.
Spoiler: I didn’t. But man, I thought real hard about it. Not to keep, but just, you know, take it down, wander down the fire escape, loop the block and drop it back off. Or take it home for the night and drop it off in the morning.
Do I regret not stealing a Van Gogh? Hell yeah. I wish to this day I’d nutted up and temporarily stolen a Van Gogh. Maybe I was missing something and an alarm would have gone off and I would have been charged with attempted theft of a Van Gogh, but if you’re gonna crime, what a crime to crime.
And maybe I wasn’t missing something! Maybe I could have 100% stolen a Van Gogh. And for the rest of my life been dining out on The Time I Stole the Van Gogh.
But I didn’t. So instead all I have is The Time I Could Have Stolen A Van Gogh And Didn’t. Which is what you’re getting here.
Sorry.
For those of you not deeply steeped in arch geekery, an Illithid is a species in Dungeons and Dragons, colloquially known as a “Mind Flayer.”
They are basically squid-headed jerks that eat brains.
As the long-running campaign I’m part of (12th level Warlock/Paladin, thanks for asking) winds toward a summer break and we get into the final approach for a seasonal Big Bad, our GM asked what Illithid-themed flair would work for us, so I set about creating this monstrosity.
