Bravo!
**Spoons **should stay up late writing Canadian movie scripts more often!
That is a version of Argo I would go see. It bugs me to have not seen the best picture since I try to see all the nominees every year … but c’est la vie. I refuse to watch a movie I know is going to annoy me to no end!
There was a fairly substantial and, for the time, quite originally directed sequence involving the Free French army.
One would expect no less; Hollywood is located in the United States. Canadian movies and TV shows tend to emphasize Canadian things and make fun of Americans.
Regrettably, our film industry is small and its efforts to make big budget pictures have resulted in dogs like “Passchendaele.”
Whatever the historical problems with “Argo,” it is a picture made with an extremely high degree of technical and artistic competence. If Canadians want different stories heard, then the stories can’t just be told, they have to be told WELL.
Party pooper.
Quoted for truth. Opening day and closing day or sorry WERE huge events in my family. sigh and the chicken burgers.
The line is a lie. My father, who drives a bus for Calgary Transit, tells me that winter tires are readily available for buses but that most transit systems don’t use them for two reasons: 1) the cost of purchasing two sets of tires for every bus is prohibitively high and 2) storing half of those tires for six months per year is both prohibitively expensive and would use up a prohibitive amount of space. If you think about it, for the City of Calgary to store enough off-season tires for a fleet of 960+ buses would take up crazy amounts of warehouse space. So they don’t.
We also need an all-Canadian cast. Bring in people like Nathan Fillion, Jewel Staite, David James Elliott, etc. to fill the roles of the American fugitives along with more Canadian actors to play the real heroes (off the top of my head, I think Elisha Cuthbert, Hannah Simone and Erica Durance would do well as memebrs of CHICS). Andalso featuring Paul Gross as PM Joe Clark and William Shatner as President Jimmy Carter. 
We certainly have the acting talent coming out of Canada. There are also plenty of Canadians making TV and movies in Canada as part of American productions. What we need to do is find a way to get those Canadian film crews on board with a Canadian production.
As to “Passchendaele,” while its $20 million budget was huge for a Canadian production, it really is peanuts compared to a major motion picture release where that’ll barely cover the salaries for the cast. If we want to do it up right, we have to find some serious funding.
If we don’t tell our own stories, we can’t expect anyone else to tell them for us and do a good job of it.
You want Canadian stories told well - that’s what the CBC is there for.
Crap, we’re hosed, eh.
Oh Good Lord, no. The CBC is for telling Canadian stories the CBC way. If we as a nation ever hope to get our stories out to the masses, including beyond our own borders, we have to do it in a professional, well-funded manner that steps outside of the CBC/NFB confines or what we’ll wind up with will be some cruddy Anne of Green Beachcombers production.
Yeah, the CBC really fucked up ‘A People’s History of Canada’ and ‘The National Dream’.
Oh, wait…
Thank you, Jimbo; my monitor is now wearing coffee.
We’re in trouble if we can only muster up two critically acclaimed documentaries over the last 40 years. But I knew that already. 
I’d love to argue with you over what I suspect were tepid viewership numbers for A People’s History, but I can’t find any information one way or the other in a quick Google search (I did note that The National Dream was broadcast on the BBC, although there was no information as to how many people watched it). I’d be fairly stunned if the series reached a significant audience outside Canada, and that was part of my point – we’re constantly inundated with “historical” entertainment brought to us through the lens of US American bias or British bias, but delivering the Canadian point of view to anyone other than CBC viewers will require far more mojo than that corporation can generate.
I’m here all week! 
Finally - a reason to spend all those millions!
And, also, seconding the “we’re hosed” sentiment - we want Canadians stories told properly, not Toronto stories told by Torontonians for Torontonians.
Because nothing says “Toronto” quite like "The Beachcombers " and “Anne of Green Gables”?
Torontonians visions of what those regions are like (you can toss “Little Mosque on the Prairie” onto that pile, too).
A lot of good films come out of Quebec.
A series about some guys scavaging logs in British Columbia, a little girl growing up in PEI, or some Muslims living in a small town in Alberta?
Toronto is an awfully big place, to manage to live rent-free in so very many locations.
Producers will step up if the talent is there. In the case of Passchendaele, it wasn’t. Paul Gross was fun as the Mountie on Due South, but he is an actor of limited range and a director of limited skill. He tried to do everything himself, a process that almost never works no matter how much money you had. For big budget proof of the same phenomenon, see the Star Wars prequels, or most of M. Night Shyalaman’s latest work.
And anyway, you don’t NEED huge amounts of money to make an excellent or provocative film. Hollywood’s famously wasteful, and many films’ budgets are bulged up by the cost of the stars, but even then many successful films are made for reasonable budgets. “Silver Linings Playbook” won the people’s choice award at TIFF, won one Oscar and maybe two, I don’t remember, and was the first film in 31 years to have a performer nominated in all four acting categories, and it cost the same as “Passchendaele.” Almost all Coen Brothers films are cheap and almost all make money. It doesn’t take a hundred million dollars to make a first rate movie.
As for the notion that you need Canadian actors to tell the stories, allow me to retort; Daniel Day-Lewis is English.
Rick makes a good point here. I’ll add that it seems to me that a lot of the big-budget blockbusters spend a lot on special effects in addition to stars’ salaries. But not all stories require the kind of effects that cost so much. A good story, well told, will always find an audience; regardless of who stars in it, or how much was spent.
But it needs to be a good story; one that captures and engages the viewer, and doesn’t force him or her to think too much during the picture (after is fine, but not during). For the broadest possible appeal, I’d suggest that any messages or agendas should be as general as possible (e.g. “War is hell,” or “Crime doesn’t pay”), and films should not go out of their way–as many Canadian movies and TV productions do–to include tangential references to Canadian things that don’t matter to the story. Meatballs was an extremely successful Canadian production (cost $1.6M, revenue $43M, cite). But while Canadian, it did not go out of its way to remind the viewer that it was Canadian–Meatballs was set at a generic summer camp where the kids did not talk about the Leafs’ chances next season or how they hoped to go to North Toronto Collegiate for high school. But it was a good underdog story, that could engage and entertain viewers of all nationalities; and did not go overboard on stars’ salaries or special effects.
There must be others, but Meatballs was the first to come to mind.
It was filmed at Camp White Pine. I was there as a kid while it was filmed. In fact, I was payed $1 as an extra.