Un(en)titled

When I was a teenager in the 90’s, I was intrigued by a new thriller with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani called Diabolique. I found out it was a remake of a classic French film from 1955 with the same title. I’d never heard of it before! So I tracked it down, watched it, and it instantly became one of my favorite movies!

Hell, you can do this even with GOOD remakes. Like, do you love John Carptenter’s The Thing? Watch the original The Thing From Another World by Howard Hawks! Carpenter loved it so much that he not only faithfully recreated the title sequence, but he also included the original briefly in Halloween! Do you like gangster films like Al Pacino’s Scarface? Watch the original Scarface from 1933 (also by Hawks) and read about it was one of the last films before the Hays Code went into effect! If you like it, try other gangster films of the era like The Public Enemy with James Cagney! You might discover a whole new world of stories you never thought you’d love!

And when it comes to public domain stories like fairy and folk tales that Disney has famously made, you have so many options! Pissed about the live-action Beauty and the Beast? Watch the beloved 1946 French version by Jean Cocteau or the 1978 Czechoslovakian version! Disney doesn’t own these stories, no matter how much of a stranglehold they may have on our childhood nostalgia. Don’t let them fool you into thinking that theirs are the only worthwhile versions of these old stories.

Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny reinterpret this cartoon first published in German magazine Lustige Blätter in 1932:

Parents and teachers in Canada will now have an “educational toolkit” to help them if they notice a child being groomed by a hate group.

The new resource, launched by the Canadian government in partnership with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, intends to combat the growing prevalence of hate groups online. Members of those groups, most of whom were raised in the digital age, are becoming more adept at recruiting. For example, the neo-Nazi terror group The Base, as well as other neo-Nazi groups, have used meme websites to recruit young people, usually male teenagers, into their movement.

Authorities are still figuring out ways to effectively combat the problem.

The toolkit can be found online free of charge here and contains modules that run teachers and parents through a variety of subjects related to hate groups, such as ideologies and recruitment techniques. One of the sections presents scenarios and offers ways to handle to them from a variety of perspectives. Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said that the examples were all taken from real-world events that had occurred in Canada.

"The scenarios in the toolkit deal with increasing severity of what hate might look like within the school community, said Simons.“You start out with anonymous hate promotion—so that could be graffiti, that could be a swastika on a desk.

“It starts from there and then it escalates all the way to overt hate organizing within the school community and outside the school community” she added.

The project is one of the latest anti-racism initiatives rolled out by Canada’s government. In a Wednesday press conference announcing the project, Ahmed Hussen, the minister of housing diversity and inclusion, said that in total the government "has invested $35 million to fund 175 anti-racism projects across the country."

Again, the link to the toolkit is https://www.antihate.school . I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but knowing the CAHN, it should be a good start. Of course, a tool can only serve its purpose if people use it, so I'm hoping this will be part of curriculum in schools across the country.

Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny reinterpret this cartoon first published in German magazine Lustige Blätter in 1932: