LOVE ME FIERCE

It's Friday the 13th and Valentines Day Eve...

Trevor Cunningham

Feb 13, 2026

I stepped away last weekend, now I’m back. So let’s get on with it.

WHAT AM I READING LATELY?

Well, a couple of things. Both Non-fiction.

To start with, I’m reading about the OLD DEMON DOG himself…

The man is Ellroy and he’s terminally fucked-up but I do enjoy his books and interviews.

As a child, Ellroy was exposed to his mother's boozy promiscuity and his father's slovenliness and womanising. Armand Ellroy was Rita Hayworth's manager and, he claimed, her lover. His dying words to Ellroy were : "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you".

Here’s the other non-fiction book I’m hip-deep into…

From the introduction:

During the last three decades, the political leaders of Western democracies have, when confronted with the new conquistadors of technology, behaved in exactly the same way as those sixteenth-century Aztecs. Faced with the fire and thunder of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence, they have bowed down—in the hope that some of that magical fairy dust might be sprinkled upon them too. I cannot tell you the number of times I have witnessed such rituals of degradation. In every capital across the world, the same scene is repeated. The oligarch descends from his private jet, annoyed at being forced to waste his time with this obsolete tribal chief when it could be more usefully employed in some lofty post-human pursuit. After welcoming the oligarch amid great pomp and circumstance, the politician spends a large part of their brief private discussion begging him to build a research centre or an AI laboratory on his territory, before settling for a quick selfie. As with Moctezuma, their servility has not been enough to ensure our rulers’ survival. While pretending to respect the politicians’ authority for as long as they found themselves in a position of inferiority, the conquistadors have gradually built their empire. Now the hour of the predator is at hand. And, in this new world, everything that needs to be settled will be settled by fire and sword. This little book is an account of these events, written from the viewpoint of, and in the style of, an Aztec scribe—using images rather than concepts to capture the dying breath of one world as it sinks into the abyss, and the icy grip of another which will take its place.
da Empoli, Giuliano. The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World (pp. 6-7). (Function). Kindle Edition.

WHAT AM I WATCHING?

I hate to admit it, not much. Strange considering I work in ‘The Industry”. Not much is tickling my fancy to seek-out this month. However I see that Canada’s HEATED RIVALRY is all the rage. And when it comes to Canada’s features the numbers are dire. The box office report that Telefilm sent out, and it paints a pretty sad picture. Namely that Canadian films captured just 1.7% of the domestic box office in 2025, which is down further from the previous year. In English Canada, that number sits at 0.4%.

It looks like 139 Canadian films were released last year. Only 2 crossed the $1M mark - well, 3, as it looks like one film’s box office bled over from 2024.

Anyway, this report is distressing, but as filmmakers, we carry responsibility too. We can’t wait for institutions like this to solve audience engagement. If traditional pathways aren’t delivering, then we need to build new ones.

If the data in this report tells us that Canadian films aren’t reaching audiences, then perhaps the next wave of our cinema won’t just be funded differently — it will be marketed differently, distributed differently, and connected to audiences long before opening weekend. We need bold stories but we also need bold audience strategy.

Of course, myself and others having been saying it for decades about Canada’s feature films. So it’s not new, but getting worse. And let us be frank, so is the US indie feature film scene.

But I’ll pick away on that later because it’s…exhausting…and I’m getting old.

I think I’ll go with this old Canuck classic this weekend…