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April 18, 2006
Canadian film? Sorry.
In Macleans, Brian D. Johnson puts it impolitely: Why does Canada keep making movies that no one wants to see? Here's how he defines seven of spring's "English Canadian movies": "They contain flashes of eccentric brilliance, and some fine performances. But they seem smaller than life. They tend to be populated by desperate women and repressed, self-loathing men. And they plumb new depths of anti-heroism... 
It's hard to imagine these movies were designed with an audience in mind. So how do they get made? Welcome to the Byzantine world of English Canadian film financing—a surreal maze of auteur dreams, bureaucratic nightmares and ritualized failure. It's a world where distributors routinely snap up publicly funded movies, flip the TV rights to broadcasters for an easy profit, then dump the films into a few theatres for a token release. A few bigger pictures get a better shot, and occasionally one breaks through. But our film culture has become conditioned to obscurity." Johnson notes that in 2005, movies from Quebec counted for 26% of the French-language box; English Canada: one-point-one percent. More worries: "No country in the world has a film industry that can survive without government financing—with the robust exceptions of Hollywood, Bollywood, Hong Kong and (oddly) Nigeria." [A survey of the ills at the link.]
Posted by pride at April 18, 2006 03:04 PM
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