It almost sounds like you guys are calling for the heresy of getting CBC out of the way of Canadian entertainers. (Or at least getting CBC to actually serve the artists and the viewing public.)
That’s so crazy, it might just work. 
Why should you people up north have it any better than those of us in the rest of the US? Entertainment must be pre-digested or you won’t ‘get it.’ Or at least the advertisers won’t think you’ll get it.
*What, you’re still trying to claim you’re not the fifty-first state? I think that boat has sailed. <d&r very, very fast>
But only if we Canadians watch these stories. And we’ll only do that if we find that they engage our attention.
Which is precisely what often doesn’t happen. Why? Well, it seems to me that, quite frankly, much Canadian film (and literature, for that matter) is inaccessible to most ordinary Canadians. There’s a reason why the teen raunchfest Porky’s is the highest-grossing Canadian film of all time (cite), instead of such “important” films like Mon Oncle Antoine, The Grey Fox, and Jesus of Montreal. It’s because most Canadians like stories involving sex, violence, romance, explosions, special effects, and action (all of which can be found in American films and TV shows), instead of artsy-fartsy stuff (which is too often found in Canadian films and CBC shows).
We are good at a couple of things: music and comedy. Rush, the Tragically Hip, Shania Twain, Loverboy, and even Celine Dion, among many others, have taken our music to the world, and the world likes it (although it may have had enough of Celine 
). Saturday Night Live was the brainchild of Canadian Lorne Michaels, and SCTV made both Canadians and Americans laugh. More recently, shows like The Red Green Show, Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys have proven popular with Canadians and foreigners alike. None of these pretend to be high art, which may explain their popularity.
I don’t disagree with your basic premise–that we need Canadian filmmakers and Canadian screenwriters telling Canadian stories in Canadian theatres. But if all these folks are going to do is produce more of the same inaccessible stuff that won’t go over with ordinary Canadians, then we’re back to where we started. Perhaps what is needed is a balance between the high and not-so-high art–instead of encouraging all film students to become Atom Egoyan or Denys Arcand, and all wannabe-authors to become Margaret Atwood or Mordecai Richler; we should encourage some Canadian filmmakers to become Stephen Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino, and some Canadian writers to become Stephen King or Danielle Steele.
I meant to address this as well, but forgot to. Now’s as good a time as any though.
I disagree. We don’t need propaganda in our art. I don’t go to the movies to be preached at; I go to be entertained. I go to forget my ordinary life for a couple of hours; and instead thrill to an exciting action picture, or be frightened by a horror film, or even to fall into a love story. But I don’t go to the movies because I feel I need a lesson in what I should do, think, or say. Some do, I know, but I don’t. And I don’t feel my views are too different from the majority of Canadians. We want entertainment, not propaganda.
I think your view of Canadian cinema is a little myopic. We have all these things – and a serious distribution problem.
Did you see Bon Cop, Bad Cop last year? Sex, violence, romance, explosions, special effects, action, and plenty of witty, entertaining exposition on our Two Solitudes and pathological obsession with that ridiculous winter sport. Kicked ten different types of ass.
Who the hell saw it? The only people I know who’ve seen it are those I dragged to it or those that I actually physically put the DVD in their hands. It’s not because it didn’t have any of the things that appeal to them, it’s because it didn’t get anywhere near the level of promotion that it deserved, and was automatically relegated to the “alternate” theatres – because people tend to assume that Canadian movies are going to be butt-numbingly inaccessible. (Everyone I showed that movied enjoyed the ever-loving fuck out of it.)
Hell, even the “inaccessible” stuff usually works for people if they get a chance to see it. Who doesn’t love Last Night? Philistines and beaver-buggerers, that’s who.
I saw it. Not a fantastic movie, but in its style – cop comedy – it was pretty good. And it was quite heavily promoted and played in commercial theatres. But if the figures on the Wikipedia article are accurate, it grossed close to $15 million, but only $1.3 million outside Quebec. So that’s what the problem is. Quebec’s movie industry is quite healthy (and I object to Spoons’s description of Denys Arcand as an artsy director that the common people doesn’t care about, he’s quite well known among all parts of the society), but the English-language Canadian movie industry is much less healthy. Why? I guess you could say that it’s because of the omnipresence of Hollywood, but Hollywood movies are actually quite popular in Quebec too. So I don’t know.
I saw it, it was a lot of fun. Great movie.
IANACScholar, but I do think that Canadian cinema will always have a harder time competing against Hollywood than most other countries, besides, probably, Mexico. By looking at how many actors, directors, etc. working in Hollywood are, or were, Canucks, we can see that we have the talent, but we don’t have the bucks.
I have to agree with Larry that marketing and distribution are a big problem with Canadian films. Generally, very little attention seems to be paid to this–for example, I’d never heard of Bon Cop Bad Cop until I read Larry’s post. Any marketing campaign would have helped, period; but one showing the elements that he mentioned might have worked to convince most people that even though it was a Canadian film, it wasn’t going to be “butt-numbingly inaccessible.” But this seems to be at odds with severus’s point that “it was heavily promoted.” Perhaps it was in Quebec, but it wasn’t here.
Severus, let me clarify my remarks a little bit. Arcand is well-known (so, for that matter, is Egoyan), but his films–at least in this part of the country-- tend to be seen as arty stuff that doesn’t appeal to the common folk. In a way, that’s understandable: Arcand makes films that are designed to appeal to Quebecers. He understands his audience, because his films obviously do meet this objective. But his films are neither promoted nor widely distributed in any part of English Canada in which I have lived. When they do play, they play in theatres that have the reputation of being “art houses.” Hence, the perception that he is arty. Correct or not, that’s how his work is seen here.
Don’t misunderstand; it has nothing to do with that fact that it’s Arcand or that it’s a Quebec film. This same treatment occurs to many films that are not in English and/or are in the original language but dubbed/subtitled in English: Francois Truffault may be known to English filmgoers for making Fahrenheit 451 and being in Close Encounters, but his Small Change (French: L’argent de poche) only played the little art houses–I still remember when our Toronto high school French class went to see it in a tiny, grubby, cinema. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (it was in Russian) got the same treatment, even after it won the award. And that was in Toronto; I can only imagine the lack of opportunities to see these films that exist in smaller cities.
The only exception to the “non-English” rule I can think of is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but that brings us back to Larry’s point: heavy promotion and wide distribution will overcome this problem. Hey, it worked for Gibson.
Exactly. As I said, it grossed $15 million, of which only $1.3 million came from outside Quebec. In other words, it was very popular in Quebec but much less elsewhere. I’m not entirely surprised. Even though the subject matter could appeal to all Canadians (with the emphasis on hockey and its increasing Americanization), many of the jokes and references only made sense to Quebecers (and maybe Ontarians, in some cases). And while Colm Feore is a moderately well-known Canadian actor, a large part of the cast was known almost exclusively in Quebec, so didn’t really attract other movie-goers. I get the feeling that the intention was to make a movie that every Canadian could identify with and that could sell well across the country, but as we saw this is very hard to do.
We get down to the fact that Quebec has a movie industry that is quite popular inside the province, and seen as “accessible”, while (as you tell me) this isn’t the case in the rest of Canada. I don’t know why this is. It could be, as FordPrefect says, that many Canadian actors and filmmakers move to Hollywood pretty soon because that’s where the money is. That’s actually a very good hypothesis.
I see what you mean now. Since Arcand makes “foreign”-language movies that play to “foreign” sensibilities (“foreign” might not be the exact word, but you know what I mean) his movies are classed among art house movies in the mind of most people, because that’s what most “foreign” (i.e. non-Hollywood) movies that get promoted here are (especially when they are in a foreign language). But while Arcand doesn’t make “big explosion”-type action movies, his movies are actually quite accessible anyway, and they are relatively popular in Quebec, where Arcand doesn’t have a reputation as an overly arty filmmaker. (Well, he is a little arty sometimes, but some of his movies – consider Jesus of Montreal which you mentioned upthread – feature rather universal themes.)
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Have you noticed that when Hollywood producers notice a foreign movie and would like to promote it inside the US (and make money), they usually don’t dub or subtitle it, but they remake it. I’ve seen both La chèvre and Pure Luck (the latter dubbed in French!), and I only remember one scene that differed between both movies. I’ll have to watch them both side by side one day. This is far from the only such case, I also remember Quebec movies going through this treatment. 
Well, yeah, but Gibson’s name also helped I believe.
Ah, but he’s just here for a good time, not a long time.
The intitial reason for this is obvious - the Québec entertainment industry has very healthy promotion and distribution. The underlying cause for this is likely that the Québécois have a very healthy cultural identity, and (by and large) English-Canadians don’t really think about national identity very much. We are supersaturated with American media.
We need federal regulations for film such as we have for broadcast and cable media if our films are going to be seen by anyone that doesn’t have fecking maple syrup for blood.
Québec filmmakers make plenty of good movies that are just pure movie which is of course what moviegoers usually want, and so we have plenty of great films like Les Boys and C.R.A.Z.Y. that are embraced by the masses and become classics.
When we make a movie-movie in Western Canada (like Whale Music, adapted from my favourite CanLit humourist’s novel of the same name,) nobody ever freaking hears about it.
Argh.
I don’t know aboot that. It seems to me that English Canadians are quite interested in national identity, or specifically in highlighting how they differ from Americans. That’s how it is with national identity, more often than not it’s defined in terms of what you are not rather than what you are, and given that Canada is, as you say, supersaturated with American media, Canadians feel the need to say that they are not Americans, emphasize the differences and reclaim their cultural icons (such and such Hollywood stars are actually Canadian!)
That might be more like it. C.R.A.Z.Y., while it is set in Quebec and parallels our evolution since 1960, isn’t “drenched in Quebecness” or anything like that. It’s just a good movie. Maybe English Canadian movies are just too self-aware of their Canadian-ness? Maybe it parallels what you’ve said: Quebec is starting to develop a healthy national identity based not as much on the “other” as before but also on what we are, while the rest of Canada still isn’t sure what it is, but it knows what it is not. (What makes a Canadian anyway?)
Or maybe I’m full of it. Really, I can’t say if Canadian movies are too self-aware of their Canadian-ness or not, I haven’t seen that many of them. I’m just throwing thoughts around.
You’re right, I’ve never heard of it. I’ll keep that title in mind.
I don’t think so. Whale Music, by way of an example, is set in Los Angeles and the main character is a caricature of Brian Wilson, the tragic Beach Boy. The only real mention of Canada that creeps in is the supporting character Claire, who appears naked in his swimming pool one day and turns his befuddled life upside-down. Des is so out-of-it that he imagines she is a (space) alien, and when she says that she’s from Toronto, he imagines she’s talking about the planet Toronto. “Don’t they wear clothes on Toronto?”
Similarly, McKellar’s road movie is called “Highway 61,” not “Trans-Canada Highway.”
I think you’d have to look pretty hard to find English-Canadian movies that are preoccopied with nationality. I wouldn’t look for the fault in the films, we make great movies, too – it’s just that they don’t get shown in the cineplexes, because it’s more profitable to screen big box office American fare – and it appears more profitable to screen big box office American fare, because not enough screens are showing Canadian films.
Holy crap, what a hijack. :o
What would you suggest? I’m picturing some federal Film Cops checking IDs at the door to the cinema: “Nope, according to our database, you’ve seen too many Hollywood pictures. You can only go into Cinema 3, for the next showing of The Beachcombers meet the King of Kensington in Rainbow Country if you want to go to the movies today.”
Seriously, though, what would you propose? How would you implement federal regulations on cinemas and video stores and what form would such regulations take? I could see demanding previews of Canadian films before the Hollywood feature starts, but I’m unsure what else you could do.
I am a jack-booted fascist bastard.
I would table a bill proposing more federal regulation of moviehouses, much as broadcast media has. Canadian content regulation, even relatively weak. (Necessarily relatively weak.) What I’m talking about is quota-based stuff, proportionate to existing supply. You want to show Pirates of the Caribbean 6: Old Man’s Ass? Well, fine. Cinema 6 is going to be showing something made in Toronto, Vancouver, or somewhere in between. (And not “made in Canada” in the sense that Pirates of the Caribbean 6 is.)
Interested parties would scream bloody blue murder, I am sure.
It might mean more crap playing to thin crowds for a while. (Like how CanCon TV gave us years of Beachcombers and King of Kensington before we started seeing Canadian TV that wasn’t frankly embarassing.)
It would be tilting at windmills to propose such a bill, I know.
So a coup, maybe. 
Maybe, Larry, the Canadian film industry should do what the porn flm industry does (no, not that) and give its films slightly-changed titles from popular movies. You know, where a porn film is called Assablanca or Hannah Does Her Sisters, or something like that. Anyway, in that spirit, here are some ideas for Canadian film titles:
The Magnificent Sept-Iles
V for Victoria
Silence of the Lambton
Oh Goderich!
Rich Manitoba Poor Manitoba
And Justice for Montreal
A Lethbridge Too Far
The Kingston and I
And the animated shorts we could show before the feature? Saska-toons!
(Aside to Larry: Hijack? I’m trying to get away from the serious posts and make this both mundane and pointless, honest! )
Hey, I just realized that could be contrasted with that other great Canadian road movie, Québec-Montréal.
Greaaaaaat movie! I think of it often for the most tenuous of reasons. (eg; I picture the road-rage victims that are the subject of that pit thread as that perfect Ken & Barbie couple.) I have no idea why.
Spoons – Rich Manitoba Poor Manitoba… Arf. 
It was a road trip movie, starting in Canada and moving down through the USA, along highway 61 (which has the same number in both countries – it’s at the end of my road here in Canada). It was a distorted peek at American culture through the eyes of a Canadian – a Canadian’s pilgrimage in the USA, along the lines of Twain’s Innocent’s Abroad in which an American travels in Europe and the Holy Land, only a heck of a lot more warped.
Which is more-or-less my point.
A road trip movie that is too self-consciously Canadian wouldn’t take that route. It would look more like this. (Youtube.)