Cynical Cinema

There are a few telling scenes in the new documentary Jonas: The Quest. One is where a woman describes the effect Jonas has on an audience. She says it’s very telling when you see a guy perform on stage, and look at the crowd. If the women are excited and turned on, and the men are not pissed off, then you have a really special act. This is probably true. Then she cites some examples of rockers who have been able to pull this off, starting with Jon Bon Jovi. What?

Jonas: The Quest is a documentary from Quebec being released by Alliance Atlantis on January 15th. It’s about a Quebecois rock star named Jonas, who is searching desperately for his big break. A lot of it rings true. I have never heard of Jonas. The movie explains that it is much easier for many French Canadian artists to get their break in the U.S. than it is in Canada. I believe that. How many French Canadian musicians can most of English Canada name? Celine Dion and Roch Voisine? Mitsou? Yeah. Not exactly a proud heritage there. But there are definitely many artists labouring in Quebec that never get the mainstream recognition they deserve. But I’m not sure Jonas is one of them. There are constant comparisons to Nickelback. That’s kind of telling as well. His band is good, his voice is good, but his songs are not exactly world beaters.

Jonas: The Quest is an interesting movie, especially for those who want a real inside look at the Canadian music business. But for anyone else, there isn’t much here. None of the personalities are huge enough to be engaging, and the music itself is mediocre. Would you watch a documentary about the undiscovered Coldplay? Especially if there was no real conclusion, none of the characters were interesting, nothing really happens from beginning to end, and you have to watch a lot of Coldplay songs? I would guess no.

In 1974, Richard Dreyfuss was a relatively unknown actor. He had appeared very briefly in The Graduate, and Valley of the Dolls, and had managed to score a starring role in American Graffitti. But his first truly challenging role came as the title character in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Ted Kotcheff’s Canadian film adapted from Mordecai Richler’s classic novel. The novel itself is one that took me an awfully long time to read. I started it in high school, just like everyone else in Canada. And, just like 99 percent of the people who are forced to read certain things in school, I had no desire to read it at the time. So I read chapters one and two, and then followed along in class just barely well enough so I could fake the book report when it was done. I never read any of the rest of it. Then, about ten years later, when I was moving for about the fifth time in my life, I rediscovered all the books I had carefully avoided reading in high school. And I sat down and read them all - the two that really stuck with me were The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

In the intervening years, I have endeavoured to read as much Mordecai Richler as possible. (I highly recommend The Incomparable Atuk, an absolutely hilarious satirical tale of an “Eskimo poet”.) What I love best about Richler is his satirical style, the way he is able to turn even the sutlest of phrases to change what could be a harsh sentence into a funny one. In the movie version of Duddy Kravitz, that satire is a little tougher to find. Richler was actually nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay, and he really did do a great job adapting his novel to the screen. The movie helped to revitalize Canada’s film industry (for a time) in the 70s, and brought critical acclaim to Richard Dreyfuss. He went on to roles in Jaws, Close Encounters, and dozens of other huge movies. Kotcheff went on to direct Rambo: First Blood.

Dreyfuss really is great in Duddy Kravitz, in that he makes what is really a rather unlikeable character strangely compelling. Duddy Kravitz, both in the book and in the movie, is not a likeable human being. He does some pretty awful things to the people closest to him, but somehow the novel and this movie are both able to find some kind of humanity and sympathy for Kravitz. Randy Quaid is excellent too, in one of his first ever film roles as Duddy’s simple and suffering right-hand man Virgil. And for the first time the film is available on DVD, courtesy of Alliance Atlantis. It gets released on Tuesday, and I certainly recommend picking it up. Not for the sense of Canadiana it inspires, but for the quality of the film. Unless you’re still poisoned against it from being forced to read the novel in high school.

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.

I did not need to read the back of the DVD for Surviving My Mother to figure out it was shot in Montreal and that it was a Canadian film. You see, it stars Colin Mochrie. While Mochrie is no Colm Feore or Roy Dupuis, his involvement in a movie instantly identifies it as Canadian. Also, during the movie, he mentions attending St. Piux X high school. That seems pretty Canadian to me. However, this is the amazing thing: Had I not been aware of Mochrie and St. Pius X, I would not have known! So many movies and TV shows that are made in Canada just smack of “Canadian”. Even the big-budget experiments, the shows that make an attempt to be just like American shows - think Street Legal, or Nikita. (Which of course stars Roy Dupuis.) They had high ambitions, and Cynthia Dale and Peta Wilson were certainly international-hot, rather than just Canadian-hot, but there was something about those shows, something I could never put my finger on, that screamed “Canadian” at me when I watched. It was unavoidable, as though Canuck was something stamped into the film that couldn’t be shaken no matter how hard the producers tried. Call it the Curse Of Danger Bay.

By the way - when I was a kid, I thought the most beautiful woman on earth had to be Nancy Sakovich, star of such Canadian fare as Destiny Ridge and Psi-Factor. To this day, I maintain that she was the only reason to watch either of those shows. She later played Silken Laumann in a made-for-TV biopic, and the same year starred in another made-for-TV biopic, The Jesse Ventura Story. As you can see from this picture, she is still very attractive. But usually, in Canadian TV shows and movies, the “hot girl” was what screamed “second class Canadian!” at the top of her lungs. Because usually the “hot girl” was the chick who played Amanda on Ready Or Not, or the older daughter from Danger Bay, or someone like that. All attractive girls, to be sure, but it’s a different kind of attractive. Were the film or show American, the girls would be played by Jessica Simpson or Mischa Barton or some such thing. There was just an added bit of glamour. Now, it was likely in the way they were shot, more so than in the actual selection of the actresses, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was always a distinct difference.

OK. Now that I had an excuse to put a picture of Nancy Sakovich into a review of a totally non-Nancy-Sakovich related movie, here are some words about Surviving My Mother. It does not smack of Canadian. That, I truly believe, is one of the highest compliments one can pay a Canadian movie. You film it here, you use our stars, you use our cinematographers, and yet an outsider would not know it was Canadian. That’s huge. Now, before all you rah-rah patriotic Canadians get righteously indignant with me, I would like to say this: A movie or TV show that smacks of Canadian is bad. Nikita, Danger Bay, Bumper Stumpers, Bon Cop Bad Cop. But something that feels Canadian is good - Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Away From Her, or Surviving My Mother. This movie is good. And it feels Canadian. Ellen David plays Clara, a woman whose mother has been sick for a long time, living with the family, and has been an enormous burden on everyone. She is a horribly bitter old woman, played comically by Veronique Le Flaguais. Colin Mochrie is Clara’s husband, and Caroline Dhavernas is their daughter Bianca.

When Clara’s mother finally dies, Clara feels like she needs to recapture some of her life that she wasted doting on the frail old lady. She does that by attempting to re-connect with her daughter, and really getting to know her. This leads to some very good scenes, most notably a scene in a movie theatre that is almost self-referential, where the two of them are watching some stupid Hollywood comedy and the daughter starts sobbing. The big drama in the movie centres around the daughter. Does the mom really want to know her daughter that well? Those of us watching would think not. The daughter, you see, is a very dirty tramp. She sleeps with dozens of married men, with anonymous partners she meets online, and has been whoring herself out for a very long time. Her latest partner turns out to be someone fairly close to the family, a local priest who, like Bianca, is living very much of a double life. I would have liked to see a lot more of the relationship between the priest and his own mother, it seems almost more interesting than the relationship between Clara and Bianca.

The movie is smart, well-written and well acted. Caroline Dhavernas is smoking hot in a very non-Canadian way. Again this isn’t her physical appearance so much as the way she is shot in the movie. She is creepily believable as the seductress, a Linda Fiorentino type almost, who leads men to their doom, and she has a very disturbing scene later on with the young priest. Normally, I watch movies like this one and think “I don’t care HOW hot she is. I would have been out of there weeks ago. No one needs that much drama.” But in this case, I sort of get it. Sort of. Toward the end, the movie gets very melodramatic, with a scene that comes off as unnecessarily harsh, which unleashes a scene that seems like a massive over-reaction, but it still works. In the end, Clara must come to terms with her relationship with her daughter at about the same time she is coming to terms with her own mother. A fine film that feels Canadian, but not obnoxiously so.

My girlfriend watched the trailers for “Silk” and was very excited to watch it. I thought it might be good too - I like Francois Girard, the director. He’s done some quality films, like The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. (The representative Canadian film, in that it stars Colm Feore as a Canadian icon.) And as Girard is a Canadian director, and he used Canadian people in the production, this film qualifies (yay!) as “Canadian” in the arbitrary terms that make a film eligible for a Genie. And when a film qualifies as “Canadian”, yet has international stars and opens to a wide North American release, it has a leg up in terms of the Genies. There are always five nominations for “best picture”, and if we’re lucky, two of those films will have been recognized outside their own province. This year, Eastern Promises and Away From Her are the two movies that were bigger than “Canada” that got Genie nominations. And Silk was bigger than “Canada”. It stars Keira Knightley, it has a much bigger budget than your standard Canuck flick, and it received international distribution.

This should have been a red flag for me. A movie that was actually seen? AND it’s Canadian? It should be a lock for the Genies! And yet…nothing. I’ve checked - it is eligible. But for a film like this NOT to get nominated for the easiest awards in film to win - it must REALLY suck. And it does. It REALLY sucks. At first I thought it might just be my aversion to Keira Knightley. I really dislike Keira Knightley, thanks mostly to her incredible chemistry-free performances with Orlando Bloom in them Pirates flicks. But I have always blamed this on Orlando Bloom, who is an actor I dislike even more than Knightey. In watching Silk, and Knightley’s profound lack of chemistry with Michael Pitt, I realized it may be more her fault than Bloom’s. But in this case, I blame Francois Girard even more so. The movie opens with Michael Pitt saying “boy, I sure love this woman” or something like this. I paraphrase. And that is what we have to go on. We don’t really see them falling in love, or even really being in love, we are just supposed to take this at face value. They are in love. OK? Now, proceed with the movie.

And the movie does indeed proceed. Slowly, languidly, as though it is building to something. And then it never gets there. 57 minutes in, and we still haven’t seen the things that made the trailers so interesting for my girlfriend. You see, Michael Pitt needs to travel to Japan, because his small village is dependant on silk. And there is some kind of disease wiping out the silk worms. So he must go to Japan to collect silk worm eggs, bring them back, have them hatch, and then they can begin the work of spinning silk again. Now, I’m no biologist, but it seems to me that if you have thousands of untainted silk worm eggs, and those hatch silk worms, could those silk worms not breed, and create more eggs, and thus be self-sustaining? Why would Pitt need to leave his wife for six months at a time and go BACK to Japan for more eggs every year? This is not explained. But it doesn’t matter. Because the silk worms are not the story. The journey is the story. The journey to Japan, and then the journey back again.

And that journey is explored. Again and again. With long camera shots of the countryside and the scenery all over the world, which are great. And then with long shots of hands touching other hands, hands scooping water, and the back of guys’ heads. Those are not OK. They are boring. Especially since there are so many of them. And they last so long. I guess that Pitt takes a lover in Japan - we are to assume this, although any actual contact with any woman does not happen until the movie is more than an hour in. In the meantime, we are supposed to believe that Pitt has fallen madly and obsessively in love with a Japanese concubine because she…smiled at him over tea? So, he continues to return to Japan, searching desperately for this woman because…it was really good tea? If you’re going to spend hours filming hands and heads and scenery, why wouldn’t you spend at least three minutes showing WHY this man decided to have an affair? Or showing that he actually loves his wife? Three minutes, that’s all I ask. One less picture of a horse, and you’re there. Movie stays the same length, and we might actually care about someone.

There is no sense of connection between ANY of the characters in this movie. Every time we got to one of those long camera shot scenes, and we knew the actual plot wouldn’t begin again for seven minutes, we were on the fast forward button. Toward the end of the film, a little bit of stuff starts to happen. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it action, but at least it’s…stuff. There is a really painful reading of a “sexy” letter from Japan, Keira Knightley falls ill. And we yell at the movie - “just die already”! But everything is so drawn out and slow that it takes another half hour of our life. This movie is painful, irritating and completely inert. There is no reason to watch, and no reason to enjoy it.

Alliance Films is releasing Francois Girard En Trois Actes this coming Tuesday. I think the main reason for this is likely because they are releasing “Silk” the same day, and that movie may well taint the legacy of Girard. It is, without a doubt, the worst movie he has ever done. He has done some good ones (The Red Violin) and some great ones (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould). And now, a really terrible film. But Francois Girard en Trois Actes is worth watching. Far more so than Silk, anyway. It deals with three massive stage productions put on by Girard, who has been a brilliant director of both stage and screen. These productions are “Le Proces”, “Lost Objects” and “Sigfried”. There are interviews with dozens of people who are either involved with the projects themselves and also outsiders who just admire Girard’s talent. Atom Egoyan, maybe the most celebrated Canadian film director of them all, makes several appearances, and his entire interview is available on the DVD as a special feature. So too is the interview with Martin Scorcese, an interview that is both informative and fun.

Martin Scorcese is without a doubt the most interesting interview subject for any documentary about film. He is so passionate and excitable that he can create interest in anything, even if it’s something we would never have considered cool to begin with. (His personal documentary, A Journey Through American Films With Martin Scorcese, is a must-watch for any film buff.) But Francois Girard En Trois Actes is about stage productions, not film. And it would definitely help to be bilingual to watch this documentary, since so many of the interview subjects are francophone. It’s a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes of a stage production, and how massive an undertaking it really is to put on an opera or a play. And that really is a huge job. Francois Girard En Trois Actes. Disponible Mardi aux magazins qui vent les DVDs. Just don’t rent Silk.

The longer the winter drags on here in Ottawa, the more people will think about packing up and moving. And where do Canadians go when they want to escape from the cold? Why, Florida of course. Of course, most Canadians who do so wait until they are quite old. Hence, the snowbirds. La Florida is about a man from Quebec (Remy Girard) who decides to make that move while he is still young enough to make some money while he’s there. This 1993 Canadian movie is just now receiving it’s release on DVD from Alliance Films. It is the story of a Montreal man who uproots his family, buys a motel in Florida near the beach, and fixes it up. In order to make his business a success, he must contend with cartoon rival motel owners. Especially one guy, who is a former enforcer for the Canadiens. This guy walks around talking evil, laughing evil, staring evil, and he has a lackey who jumps around him like that little dog used to jump around the big dog on the Looney Tunes.

Not only does this entrepreneur have to deal with rival businessmen, but he has to keep a lid on his rebellious son and slutty daughter. This girl wears next to nothing all the time, and has several boyfriends and parades herself about all over the Florida beach. She is certainly hot, but in the time I have spent in Montreal, I can attest to the fact that there are NO girls in Quebec who wear slutty clothes like this and there are NO girls in Quebec who are as flirtatious as this and there are NO girls in Quebec who would give themselves over so freely to a handsome stranger. I know this because when I was in Quebec, I WAS that handsome stranger. And I tried and I tried…well, maybe I just wasn’t so handsome.

When watching La Florida, I thought “Oh my God! THAT’s what happened to Margot Kidder!” But then I realized that it was filmed in 1993, and 15 years have passed, and Margot Kidder could still be anywhere. Another unsolved mystery. OK, for those of you who are going to tell me where Margot Kidder actually is right now, she is currently alive and well and in post-production on two films, A Single Woman and Universal Signs. Margot Kidder lives on! In La Florida, Kidder plays Vivi Lamori, the evil, conniving mother of a man who is attempting to buy out the motel from under our protagonists, the Lesperance family. There are several groups attempting to drive the family out of Florida, where motels are popping up everywhere. Lots of stuff happens, some of it funny, some of it dramatic, some of it boring.

To truly appreciate La Florida, it would be best to speak both French and English. Either way, you are going to have to deal with some subtitles. The film is in both languages, and when they speak English, the French subtitles appear on the screen whether you want them or not. And if you don’t speak French at all, the subtitles can be very distracting, since the English and French then appear at the same time, and take up half the screen whenever the characters are speaking English. There are some pretty good performances, mostly from Remy Girard, who plays the patriarch of the family, and also from Marie-Josee Croze, (seen most recently in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) who plays his daughter. She really has nothing to do in the movie except wear almost nothing and look hot…but she does it well. La Florida is tremendously Canadian, fairly generic, but has moments that are truly fun and interesting. If you’re bilingual.

Donal Logue is a pretty funny actor. He starred in one of my favourite films, the very-underrated Tao of Steve, in 2000. In that movie, he played an overweight, lazy slacker who still somehow managed to score every hot chick he came across. It was a great movie and a great role, because he was so slovenly and yet charming at the same time. And on some level, in some weird way, it absolutely made sense that he would be able to have sex with all these women. In the new film from Alliance Films, Almost Heaven, Logue plays a similar character. He is a television director who can no longer get work because he’s a drunk. One of those lovable, one-day-at-a-time, funny drunks, but I guess drunk enough to not work in Canada. So he gets sent to Scotland, to produce a fishing show, in a village where half the people are alcoholics, and the others still drink with breakfast. And although he’s a drunken slob, fat, who clearly pays no attention to his personal hygiene, he is still fighting off women at every turn. If there is a hot woman in this movie, there is a scene where she tries to sleep with him. It made sense in the Tao of Steve, it doesn’t so much make sense here.

So Logue goes to Scotland to film this show, and he has to do it with…his ex-wife! Hilarity will ensue! Anything that can go wrong will go wrong! There are no fish for the fishing show, people fall in the water, drunks fall over…it’s basically a sit-com for an hour in the middle. A very low-budget sit-com, where some of the scenes look like they were printed on the first take to save some money. Which doesn’t really hurt the film, in fact it adds to the small-town feel of the piece. Although therein lies a problem - the movie doesn’t feel to me like small-town Scotland. It feels like small-town Canada. Which is kind of a problem. The whole town feels like it was picked up in Scotland and dropped right into the middle of the prairies, such that half the actors seem like extras from Braveheart, and the other half think they are in an episode of Corner Gas.

Somehow, although Logue being a drunk is the central theme of the movie, and the question of “will he be able to overcome his problem and become successful” is the recurring theme, his drinking never really seems to actually be a problem. We see him take a drink, we see him get kind of tipsy, we know he is drinking because he gets other people to take his urine test for him, but it never appears to affect his work. The worst thing that happens to him is he sleeps in and misses breakfast a few days in a row. He falls for a local girl played by the gorgeous and charming Kristy Mitchell, and they have the inevitable fight that leads to the inevitable reconciliation, but it all feels strange, because a girl that hot and that smart and witty and together would be able to find a guy who wasn’t a fat ugly drunken slob. One would think. Logue’s small amount of charm in the film is not enough to justify his landing the best looking girl in the movie. This would be kind of like watching The Princess Bride, only Cary Elwes doesn’t get the girl because she’s fallen for Andre The Giant.

All this being said, Almost Heaven is almost good. As far as Canadian indie movies go, it’s sweet, charming and at times a little funny, thanks mostly to Donal Logue and Kristy Mitchell. Outside those two, there is very little to recommend this movie on any grounds. It’s a story we’ve seen before a hundred times, and it goes through the motions until it is over. Only Mitchell and Logue rise above.