June 20 is a poised to be a banner day for Canadian cinema. On that hallowed Friday, films by two FilmCAN favourites are set to hit theatres in Toronto.
Guy Maddin’s documentary / love letter / hallucination My Winnipeg, which makes explicit the director’s noted obsession with his hometown, will see its first post-festival circuit airing, bringing with it accolades from TIFF (where it was voted best Canadian film) and Berlin (where it was selected to open the Forum program). Openings in other Canadian cities will follow.
The 20th will also see the unleashing of Global Metal, the follow-up to Scott McFadyen and Sam Dunn’s great 2006 doc, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. Global Metal sees the devil horn-throwing duo traversing the earth to see how metal has mutated in unlikely places such as Indonesia and Dubai. Expect a healthy mix of anthropological musing and aggressive moshing, as the filmmakers look at how traditional music has influenced metal, how the music reflects and deconstructs power and class dynamics, and whether or not it’s possible for anyone to like Metallica after Some Kind of Monster exposed them as total douchebags.
Heads up: FilmCAN12 is on the way. The new issue, set for launch in mid-February, features Don McKellar reflecting on Twitch City); an interview with Mark Wihak, director of River; a whack of reviews; and a piece on Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze,, recently named one of Canada’s best films of 2007 in TIFFG’s annual listmaking hoohah (check below for a teaser).
Also, new films for sale, including perhaps the best Canadian television series of all time: TWITCH CITY. FilmCAN has the whole first season of this groundbreaking series, ready to be downloaded and watched in the comfort of your Kensington aparment. You have to think Curtis would be jazzed.
Also on deck is Guy Maddin’s mindwarping debut, TALES FROM GIMLI HOSPTIAL. This film kicked off Maddin’s career-spanning obsession with mothers, Manitoba and searing, surrealist cinema.
All this should be up by mid-February. To tide you over, here’s an excerpt from Alice Shih’s piece on Yung Chang’s
Up The Yangtze was conceived in 2002, when Yung Chang, a
first-generation Chinese-Canadian, went on a “Farewell Cruise” on the
Yangtze River with his family, to get to know the China that his
grandfather told him about. Instead, he found a China that is
virtually unknown to his ancestors, a country in which the landscape
of the past has undergone drastic change.
Farewell cruises are trips that offered tourists a chance to visit the
scenic Yangtze banks and area before they were flooded to make room
for the Three Gorges Dam. This enormous dam, one of the largest
enginnering projects in modern history, is supposed to provide power
generation, water control and navigation advantages, although its
tangible benefits are still debated. What preceded these possible
outcomes is the forced re-location of almost two million residents,
mostly farmers, who had to move from low-lying farmland to the dry
highland, where farming is not a reliable way of making a living. Thus
a change of skills and employment are now called for, on top of
resettlement disputes, which, due to corrupt housing officials, have
left tens of thousands homeless.
Yung wanted to document the experiences of residents whose livelihood
was affected by the dam. Unlike Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured
Landscapes focuses on the landscapes of the area around the dam, he
wanted to do it through human stories. He spent about three years
getting the finances in place before principle shooting started in
2006. Understanding that a documentary can only be as interesting as
the subjects on screen, he shot as many as six subjects at the start;
they included people from different social strata, including a farmer,
a factory worker, an antique dealer and government official and the
two cruise ship workers who ended up as the protagonists in the film.
Both Yu Shui and Chen Bo Yu, or Cindy and Jerry as they were renamed
on the ship, were recruited in March, 2006, by the Victoria Cruise
Line. The new recruits then went through training before they embarked
on the ship in August, 2006. Yung took advantage of this time gap to
establish rapport with his subjects.
An interesting, if angering, piece in the NYT today.
You’ll see quite a bit about this in our imminent 10th issue. It’s insane that this industry can still be claiming financial crisis when it’s taking in $4 billion in one season. Yes, the costs of making these films is astronomical — but that’s a poor excuse, considering how many of them fail due to things like bad writing and unoriginality, which are relatively cheap to fix, compared to the marketing and FX side of things.
And they lament that there’s no “independent movie [that] became a sleeper hit along the lines of “Little Miss Sunshine”.” As if independent films were of any concern at all to these people, aside from their status as products of the new Indie brand.
Quoth Douglas Adams: “Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.”
You can almost smell the canapes: the Toronto International Film Festival is under two months away, and the programme announcements are coming fast and furious. Yesterday, TIFF rolled out its slate of Canadian offerings, with several noteworthy inclusions:
- Martin Gero’s Young People Fucking, which will open the Canada First! Program. Mr. Gero was a regular performer on Toronto improv stages before heading to BC to write about spaceships, and given the quality of his live humour, we are anxiously awaiting his debut film — even though the description of it as a “scathingly honest and hilarious portrayal of four couples, one threesome and a crazy night of sex” sounds dubiously like a mix between Friends and Porky’s.
- New films from FilmCAN favourites Guy Maddin and David Cronenberg, as well as reputational heavy hitter Denys Arcand and the famous-for-some-reason Clement Virgo. Maddin will screen his take on the documentary, My Winnpeg (see FC issue 08 here for a sneak preview), which stars his mother. Cool. Cronenberg once again teams up with Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises, which sounds suspiciously like A History of Violence, But In Russia This Time. Arcand offers L’age des Tenebres, which caused a mild controversay at Cannes, and Virgo offers something or other that we hope will be better than his last picture.
Check FC for more information in coming days, as we get inevitably if reluctatantly drawn into the TIFF vortex, and try our damndest to drink more free beverages than we did last year, even before the festival starts, possibly just by taking them from other people’s restaurant tables when they aren’t looking.
summer’s here + it’s time to throw a party…
Wed. July 18, Drake Underground. 9pm. $6
WE’RE MARCHING ON
THE GOOD SOLDIERS
plus a short screening of short films and videos.
a funder for FilmCAN.
more details to follow…
NEW FILMS FOR DOWNLOAD
Bruce McDonald’s HARD CORE LOGO, HIGHWAY 61, ROADKILL + Blaine Thurier’s LOW SELF-ESTEEM GIRL, MALE FANTASY
FREE VIDEO PODCAST
includes Bruce’s award winning short ELIMINATION DANCE, an interview with PETER LYNCH from Flux Factory in Queen’s, NY, on the Project Grizzly-inspired art installation GRIZZLY PROOF + FilmCAN’s first commissioned short, by BLAINE THURIER (including bonus behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the upcoming New Pornographers album
Sarah Polley’s Away From Her is getting glowing reviews from critics both at home and down south. A few of the more effusive tidbits from U.S. critics:
“Away From Her expands from its tragic tearjerker basis to be a movie about the complexity of love and passion and sacrifice… (it) combines the ache of loss with cinephilia.” – Armond White, New York Press
“Far from being the look-at-me calling card so many first-time filmmakers feel obliged to turn out, (Away From Her) is a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro’s precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.” – Elia Taylor, The Village Voice
“How did Polley do it? How did she convey knowledge of an age decades beyond her own with such sensitivity, wisdom and depth? Saying she‘s an old soul seems like an oversimplification, and a cliche. We can say this with certainty: She‘s an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker, someone you‘d like to see more from in the future… (Away From Her) tackles a difficult subject with near perfection.” – Christie Lemire
We may not have loved the film (see review here), but we aren’t above congratulating Polley on what promises to be a big success. Although much of the praise is aimed at Julie Christie, there’s no lack of it for Polley herself, and it’s always good news when a Canadian filmmaker can make a little noise among the clatter of Hollywood – especially when it’s in the form of a whisper like Away From Her.
Sick and tired of annual best of and new year wish lists? Annoyed by the particularly cringe-inducing way in which entertainment journalists use a single introductory sentence to simultaneously admit mainstream media blows, how they wasted way too much time watching/covering it, but that it’s secretly a worthwhile and healthy guilty pleasure?
Well, screw all that (and fuck people’s choice awards too) - Ingmar Bergman, in announcing a new award in conjunction with the Göteborg International Film Festival, reminds us what audiences, critics, and cinema are really supposed to celebrate; and it comes accompanied by a truly wicked rock:
Bergman describes the award as a tribute to “the singular art of the twenty-four frames. A way of encouraging young filmmakers to deal with the really important issues, in a time where the film industry more and more has taken on the shape and form of a butchery and fornication business.” The award consists of one week’s stay at the Bergman Week at Fårö during the Summer of 2007, and a beautiful engraved stone from Ingmar Bergman’s own beach at Fårö.
This year’s nominees?
Andrea Arnold | Storbritania | Red Road
Joachim Trier | Norge | Reprise
Marta Nováková | Tsjekkia | Marta
Boris Klebnikov | Russland | Free Floating
Ágnes Kocsis | Ungarn | Fresh Air
Thanks to the Norwegian Film Institute for the announcement.
And the top 10 Canadian films for 2006, according to a panel of journalists and filmmakers put together by the Toronto International Film Festival, are:
AWAY FROM HER - Sarah Polley ( Capri Releasing Inc.)
CONGORAMA - Philippe Falardeau (Christal Films Distribution)
UN DIMANCHE À KIGALI - Robert Favreau (Equinoxe Films)
THE JOURNALS OF KNUD RASMUSSEN - Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn ( Alliance Atlantis* Motion Picture Distribution)
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES - Jennifer Baichwal (Mongrel Media)
MONKEY WARFARE - Reginald Harkema (Odeon Films)
RADIANT CITY - Gary Burns and Jim Brown (Odeon Films and National Film Board of Canada )
SHARKWATER - Rob Stewart ( Alliance Atlantis* Motion Picture Distribution)
SUR LA TRACE D’IGOR RIZZI - Noël Mitrani (Atopia Distribution)
TRAILER PARK BOYS THE MOVIE - Mike Clattenburg ( Alliance Atlantis* Motion Picture Distribution)
You can catch clips from each of these films in the latest FilmCAN Video Podcast.
Some interesting panels will also coincide with screenings for this group of films:
CANADA‘S TOP TEN SCREENINGS AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS: JAN. 26 - FEB. 4 All 10 films screen with introductions and Q&As by filmmakers when available. Three panel discussions are also featured. Screenings and panel discussions take place at Cinematheque Ontario ( Art Gallery of Ontario ’s Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West ).
Manufactured Realities: Documentary Panel Tuesday, January 30 - 6:30 pm Both MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES and RADIANT CITY address issues of globalization and the “artificial” way human beings choose to live. This panel will focus on the documentary form’s potential activist role in dealing with environmental cultural and social issues, and explore the unique aesthetic strategies employed by the filmmakers. Guests include Gary Burns and Jim Brown ( RADIANT CITY ), Jennifer Baichwal (MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES) and others. Moderated by Jesse Wente.
New Quebec Cinema Thursday, February 1 - 6:30 pm A discussion moderated by Toronto Star film critic and author Geoff Pevere focusing on recent Quebec cinema, with a special emphasis on the global scope and interests of the three Quebec films in Canada ’s Top Ten. Guests include Philippe Falardeau (CONGORAMA), Robert Favreau (UN DIMANCHE À KIGALI), and Noël Mitrani (SUR LA TRACE D’IGOR RIZZI).
MONKEY WARFARE: A Case Study Sunday, February 4 - 1 pm A look at how the low-budget feature MONKEY WARFARE developed, from conception to script to screen. Guests include director Reginald Harkema; performers Don McKellar, Tracy Wright, and Cindy Wolfe; producers Jennifer Jonas, Leonard Farlinger, and Kris King; editor Kathy Weinkauf and cinematographer Jonathon Cliff.
By J.R. McConvey
Mike Clattenburg doesn’t want to hear it, but Trailer Park Boys The Movie just might be the film to dethrone Porky’s as the highest-grossing Canadian movie ever. Then again, it might not. Either way, Clattenburg has successfully managed to translate his hit Showcase series into a big screen romp that will appeal to both longtime fans and TPB rookies. It’s a rarity in contemporary Canadian popular cinema: a movie whose wide appeal is rooted in a consistent, subversive and genuinely funny vision, rather than a board meeting between Telefilm bigwigs who think “popular” is a synonym for “American.” FilmCAN sat down with Clattenburg to pick his brains about expectations, the jump from DV to film and the origin of “The Big Dirty.”
FILMCAN: This is obviously the question you get more than any other, but here goes: with the buzz that’s been building around this movie and the amount of effort Odeon’s put into marketing it, everyone has really high expectations. So, when you’re making this movie, and you’re aware of all the expectations, how do you just make the movie without factoring that in?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: You shut off your conscious mind, and just allow your unconscious mind to fuck with you while you’re doing it. No – but you have to put it out of your head, or it’s just too much pressure. Even last week, I was getting calls about how this film will save English Canada’s film industry if it does well. I can’t even listen to that kind of stuff. You just try to put it out of your head. Besides, the anticipation of the fans is, for me, the biggest source of pressure. You don’t want to disappoint them. We had to reinvent [the TV series] as a movie for a first-time audience, and it’s really tricky to do.
FILMCAN: Did you ask fans beforehand about what they might like to see in the movie?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: No, absolutely not. We’d like to try to surprise them with things they’re not expecting. It’s something that we like to try to do with the series, too. You hear stuff – “Bubbles should get a girlfriend!” But we wanted to try to keep it fresh.
FILMCAN: So how did you settle on what would be the definitive Trailer Park Boys story?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: We collaborated for about eight months with Ivan Reitman across the table in Los Angeles, and he had a lot of input in the film. He’s got an incredible track record as one of the most successful comedy producer/directors ever. He loves the show, he’s seen all the episodes, and he had a lot of ideas as to how best to present it. We, at the same time, were thinking, those are good ideas, we’ll try this, try that. There are a lot of ideas Ivan didn’t want us to do because Ivan didn’t think they’d work for a first-time audience, so we did them in season seven [of the show]. We trusted his judgment on a lot of things, and fought tooth and nail to retain a lot of the series’ charms, too. But it’s not the series – it’s a movie, so there is some room for change and development, and a different feel. People expect a different experience.
FILMCAN: I’m curious why you shot this on 16mm film, when a lot of people are going the other way and shooting on digital video.
MIKE CLATTENBURG: I have a love-hate relationship with DV. I love the charms and the amateur feel that we’ve fostered on the show. However, it’s very hard to work with in sunlight. Nine times out of ten it’s going to look terrible unless you’re in an overcast situation. In which case, it can look pretty good – but for the most part it’s a pain in the ass. Except that people think it’s real – it’s that handicam look.
There was talk of shooting on real high-res HD, or 35mm. I thought about it, and decided to go with Super 16mm, because it still has an indie feel. And I can still shoot a lot of takes, be loose and not throw chains around the actors with two takes of 35mm. I think that would’ve destroyed the film because we need some room to relax and breathe and feel these characters, and get some real performances. You can’t just say, here’s the scene, action, boom – you’ve got it, move on. It’s a real organic process with Trailer Park Boys. Each take we tweak and tweak and tune things up, listening, changing some lines, taking contributions from the actors. So we were able to keep that organic working style with Super 16. We had a great DP, a guy named Miroslaw Baszak. He really loved the show and saw that there were some handheld things on the show that should be in the movie, too. At the same time, we both agreed that we would also not be afraid of shooting classical-style sequences – lock the camera down, do some steadycam, a hybrid of cinema and the show. Which has subsequently informed season seven of the show. It really works.
FILMCAN: So there’s more static stuff in season seven?
MIKE CLTTENBURG: A little bit. We did a lot of handheld – I leaned a little bit more on the doc-style. Occasionally you’ll see some cinematic establishing shots. But I shot on a Prosumer HD camera rather than a DV camera, and the lighting range on those cameras is so much better. If you’ve got something bright in the background and something dark in the foreground, on a DV camera you can barely get it. It’s either black or white. On the Prosumer HDs, you’ve got much more latitude. So it looks a lot better, yet it still looks like our show.
FILMCAN: Getting back to the development of the movie, the characters have been around for awhile now, and especially with the guys appearing in character all the time, they’ve really taken on lives of their own. Was there a lot of improv on set, where you just let the character happen?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: We always come to a creative agreement on what we want to do. Occasionally, some spark will hit Rob [Wells, aka Ricky] or [Mike] Smith [aka Bubbles] and they’ll do something unexpected, but moreso it happens in rehearsal, where we sort of listen to the scene, we start to play with it, tweak it, come up with a new joke. I’m in a position where I’m the very first audience to watch the show. So I do a lot of tweaking at that stage. I like to be a very open director – I stay open to input from everybody, be it our lead actors or our grip. For example, there was a scene in the movie when some change is flying through the air, and we just couldn’t propel it right. The screen direction wasn’t working right. And our focus guys said, ‘There’s a very simple solution. Just get a lot of people with buckets right there to throw it this way.’ Bam. If you’re not open to that, it’s going to be like, I don’t want to trouble the director with my idea. Same thing with the actors. They have a sense of ownership of their performance, but we really work as a troupe, where we decide in rehearsal, tweak, tune and then shoot right away, so it feels really fresh.
FILMCAN: I wonder if these characters could exist in isolation? Could there be a Bubbles spinoff?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: Well, anything’s possible. But I think this is the best dynamic. Bubbles needs Ricky and Julian – they’re his surrogate family. Julian has a plan, Ricky completely fucks it up and Bubbles gets caught in the middle; that’s usually how it happens, so I think the relationships between these characters really steels these characters. That trailer park world is important.
FILMCAN: The film was originally supposed to be subtitled “The Big Dirty.” It seems a shame to lose that.
MIKE CLATTENBURG: You’re fuckin’ telling me, man. I wanted The Big Dirty hard – Trailer Park Boys: The Big Dirty! For the American release, they thought Trailer Park Boys was a great name on its own. I wish I’d won that won, that it was called The Big Dirty for Canadian fans. But it’s an international project, so…
FILMCAN: Where did you come across that phrase?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: I’ll tell you exactly where it comes from. When we’re shooting the show, sometimes on a Friday night when we’re finished, we’re all musicians, so sometimes we’re like, ‘Let’s get the fuckin’ drums, guitars and amps on this Hollywood back lot we now have, and let’s fuckin’ jam until five in the morning. We call it the Big Dirty. We drink beer and laugh our faces off. The legendary Big Dirty involved Gord Downie and Alex Lifeson. Lifeson shows up, all of us are getting our amps set up, Downie shows up with a guitar… and we had to shoot the next day. Then the thunder and lightning starts. Alex started playing this really ethereal improvised guitar thing, Gord started doing some spoken word, there was thunder and lightning – it was awesome. We played until 5 a.m. There was only about 11 people there, so it’s the Legendary Big Dirty.
FILMCAN: How excellently Canadian. Speaking of which, what’s the story in the U.S.? Is there a similar push planned there?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: We still have to get an American distributor. We’re in negotiations now, haven’t signed anything yet. But we will. Sundance, perhaps, might be the time to do it… but we don’t know what we’re doing yet.
FILMCAN: Are you anxious to bring it down there, and really break it open in the States?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: Nah. That’d be wonderful, icing on the cake. But we’re very satisfied with the success we’ve had. It’s not keeping me awake at night. There are Americans watching the shit out of Trailer Park Boys [the show] already – they’re downloading it, the DVDs are selling well at Amazon. So they’re certainly seeing it.
FILMCAN: So you spoke a little bit about how making the movie influenced the series, but do you feel like it’s refreshed you at all as far as the series goes?
MIKE CLATTENBURG: I was exhausted at the end of shooting the movie, and we went right into shooting season six. It was a hard one. The scripts weren’t working, we were having a lot of trouble making the narrative work. Then we started doing post-production on the movie, entered that vacuum for awhile, going back and forth to L.A. Then we sort of said, ‘We gotta write season seven here.’ And we thought, ‘We’re gonna be so fucked if we don’t get it written now,’ and we saw that we really had to take a block of time to settle in and write. And then it just came in waves. We were so revitalized. We learned so much from doing the movie, learned to trust our guts on stuff. So we went in with very solid scripts to season seven and then brought our normal improvisational style to these tight scripts. I’m cutting them now, and they cut really well narratively. And they’re funny. So yes – we’re very revitalized. Thrilled, even.
Congratulations to Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which took in a whopping $20,000 during its opening weekend at Toronto’s Varsity Cinemas, leaving the competition in its toxic yet beautiful dust. The film was shot by Pater Mettler, who you can read about here.
While it may seem a small sum to those prone to following Hollywood box office takes, it’s
a major achievement for a homegrown doc, especially one with environmental overtones. Of course, it probably won’t dethrone Porky’s as the highest grossing Canadian film ever; for that, we’ll look to Trailer Park Boys The Movie (or, as it should’ve been called, The Big Dirty), which opens Friday. Check back here on opening day for an interview with director Mike Clattenburg.