Xixax Film Forum

Who are some good Canadian directors?

Atom Egoyan:
http://xixax.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=780

cronenberg
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=594
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=2891
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=450

Francois Girard (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Girard,%20Fran%E7ois)

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Trogi,%20Ricardo

Ricardo Trogi

Only one movie though

I like what I saw from Cronenberg and Egoyan!

And I have to see Spider yet... :P (BRILLIANT book by Patrick McGrath!!!).
I will definitively LOVE that film.

Anyway, I've seen one film of the less famous Canadian underground director Guy Maddin. Anybody knows him, or got something to say about him?
I saw Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which is a very weird, hypnotic, surrealistic piece of art work really. Here Maddin has made a ballet version of Dracula's tale...

Highly inventive!!!

Anyway, I want to see more of him, although I can't find it anywhere near my neighbourhood (Holland).
The stories of his films really look GREAT.

Article:
Cinema of Guy Maddin (http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue09/reviews/maddin/text.htm)

Some extracts:
No one makes films like fabulist Guy Maddin. From his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Maddin is isolated from the facile preoccupations and coarse trends which plague the majority of Hollywood films nowadays. It could be argued, though, that he is also estranged from what passes for independent cinema. Truly a stranger in a strange land. But what a strange land indeed!

His films are black comedic excursions into the netherworlds of silent film, but he also has an uncanny feel for replicating images and sounds from painting, classical music, and literature. They could easily become a pretentious mess in less-skilled hands, yet Maddin’s melodramatic films are anything but. They’re playful, complex, hilarious, and exquisite; a perfect melange of high art and camp. Cinematic images that can only be described as post-modern phantasms.

Try it, you North Americans out there!

Quote from: prophetWho are some good Canadian directors?

No one, yet.

You don't dig Egoyan?

His script for Exotica read like bad film school shorts, and I got through 30 min of Sweet Hereafter before I had to shut it off due to annoyance from the wooden performances and boring camerawork. I've tried, but just find him to be, I dunno, so Canadian in the worst CBC way. But I have it from a good source that his new one (Arat?? sp?) is quite different and good. So maybe I'll check that one out.

You really should man.  It's a very good film.  It was playing on IFC the other night....

Quote from: SoNowThenHis script for Exotica read like bad film school shorts, and I got through 30 min of Sweet Hereafter before I had to shut it off due to annoyance from the wooden performances and boring camerawork. I've tried, but just find him to be, I dunno, so Canadian in the worst CBC way. But I have it from a good source that his new one (Arat?? sp?) is quite different and good. So maybe I'll check that one out.

I'm mixed about his films. That CBC remark is right on the money though. The Canadians here should know exactly what that means.

I like Don McKellar.

Only one feature to his credit thus far, 1998's pre-Apocalyptic character piece Last Night (terrific flick), which he also wrote and starred in. I like his darkly humorous, low-key, neurotic, deadpan sensibilty a lot. He's an accomplished screenwriter firstly, with his work on Bruce MacDonald's Higway 61, Dance Me Outside and Roadkill, and Girard's The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. And I am just plain mad for the Canadian sitcom "Twitch City", which MacDonald and McKellar collaborated on as well. Brilliant stuff there.

He's probably still best known for his work in front of the camera. He starred on "Twitch City" and has at least supporting roles in many of the films I mentioned as writing credits above, plus Egoyan's The Adjuster and Exotica, and Cronenberg's eXistenZ.


I hope McKellar gets financing for more feature films in the future. He's one to watch.

What's Canada?...

Quote from: Cecilcronenberg
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=594
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=2891
http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=450

Beautiful stuff

Quote from: mutinycoWhat's Canada?...

a barren wasteland of socialism, where good art comes to die

Quote from: SoNowThen

Quote from: mutinycoWhat's Canada?...

a barren wasteland of socialism, where good art comes to die

Oh, well, the grass is always greener, I guess... maybe you and I should switch places. I'd love to give Canadian citizenship a try, and if this Bush Great Depression lasts much longer...

Seriously, picture it: SoNowThen and godardian switch lives and citizenships, exploring the sociocultural differences and coming to realizations about their own countries! Like Freaky Friday by a North American Fassbinder.

Oh, Canadian directors: I do like Egoyan, Don McKellar, Cronenberg, Denys Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire being in the top 3 Canadian films I've ever seen), and Mary Harron, if you're willing to count her because she originally from Canada.

Also, Thom Fitzgerald, who did The Hanging Garden and this very interesting, very nicely done, incisive, and VERY deceptively packaged/marketed movie called Beefcake in 1999.

Quote from: godardianSeriously, picture it: SoNowThen and godardian switch lives and citizenships, exploring the sociocultural differences and coming to realizations about their own countries! Like Freaky Friday by a North American Fassbinder.

DUDE! Let's do it!
Hahahaha

So, really nobody knows Guy Maddin?
Not even in Canada…?

Girard's film, The Red Violin, was lovely also.

Quote from: SeraphimSo, really nobody knows Guy Maddin?

I've seen that Dracula film that even Ebert gave a good review for, but I'll tell you right now I've never had to fight off sleep so hard in my life. Man was that boring. Luckily it was short, maybe I just don't get dance.

I'd reccomend it to those who like all that ballet shit. There's only so many times I can see a chick twirling before my eyelids close as if controlled by an unseen powerful force.

i saw the dracule movie too. wish i could see tales from the gimli hospital

I wish for the same thing!

Also his newest film, The Saddest Music in the World, and Archangel are supposed to be special.
Anybody seen them?

Toronto International Film Festival Group Names Canada's Top Ten

The Toronto International Film Festival Group announced the list of Canada's top ten for 2003 at an industry event Tuesday. "Canada's Top Ten," established by the organization which hosts the annual Toronto International Film Festival every September, began in 2001 to raise awareness of Canadian cinema. All of the films named screened at the Toronto fest, with many taking home honors as well. An independent 10-member jury of Canadian filmmakers, journalists and industry professionals, selected the ten.

The list includes: "20H 17, Rue Darling" by Bernard Emond about a recovering alcoholic who arrives home to find his apartment building has burned down as well as Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbot's doc "The Corporation," which probes the extent of corporate power today. The film was a runner up for the AGF audience award during the Toronto festival. Allan King's "Dying at Grace," which chronicles the experiences of five terminal patients at a Toronto hospital and Scott Smith's coming of age film "Falling Angels" were also named. Other films making the list include Sudz Sutherland's twisted love story, "Love, Sex and Eating the Bones"; Quebecois director Robert Lepage's sibling rivalry film, "La Face Chachee de la Lune" (The Hidden Face of the Moon); and fellow Quebecois Denys Arcand's "The Barbarian Invasions." The latter has been released in the U.S. by Miramax and opened the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year.

Three remaining titles include Isabel Coixet's "My Life Without Me" about a terminally ill mother coming to terms with her illness. Sony Classics released the film in the States in September. Also on the tribute list is Nathaniel Geary's street drama "On the Corner" and Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" about a beer magnet who hosts a contest to find the 'saddest' music in the world against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

"Canada's Top Ten 2003 reflects both established masters and new voices, showing the range of Canada's filmmaking talent," commented Piers Handling, CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group in a release. "This year, we're also offering dynamic panel discussions that focus on the collaborative process of filmmaking, and includes screenings of all ten selections, giving the public to see the best Canadian films of the year." South of the border, next month's Sundance Film Festival attendees will have a chance to see "The Corporation" and "The Saddest Music in the World" next month in Park City, UT.

Alison McLean did Jesus' Son with Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton.  A great underrated film.  On first viewing it seemed like a Drugstore Cowboy knock-off, but repeated viewings revealed McLean's rather unique visual sense, and her excellent handling of actors.  Crudup gives one of the best performances I've seen in the past five years.  Morton was excellent.  Even Dennis Leary gave a great performance (not to knock him, because I like him, but I never thought he could play anything outside of his standup comedy persona).

Quote from: soixanteAlison McLean did Jesus' Son with Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton.  A great underrated film.  On first viewing it seemed like a Drugstore Cowboy knock-off, but repeated viewings revealed McLean's rather unique visual sense, and her excellent handling of actors.  Crudup gives one of the best performances I've seen in the past five years.  Morton was excellent.  Even Dennis Leary gave a great performance (not to knock him, because I like him, but I never thought he could play anything outside of his standup comedy persona).

I liked this one lots, too.

McLean directed lots of Sex and the City episodes...

She had one called Crush earlier on (which I never saw).

I thought she was from New Zealand, for some reason...

EDIT: Checked IMDB. Crush was considered a "New Zealand" film, but Maclean was actually born in Ottawa.

I'm glad you mentioned The Hanging Garden, godardian. I've never met anyone else who's seen that. It's such a great piece of magical realism -- something that really hasn't been conveyed well on screen until the Polish Brother's Northfork earlier this year. Fitzgerald had another movie out back in October called The Event, but I missed it.

I'm also an Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin fan, I like Jesus' Son and Last Night a lot, and David Cronenberg rules, of course. I guess, though, that I've never differentiated much between Canadian films and US films.

Everyone that people mentioned up till now are excellent (though I know of only..four?  Canadian cinema is very intriguing.  For those of you who haven't seen The Barbarian Invasions yet, stop reading and go see it.  Now.  Yes, now.

Anyway, check this movie out:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dvdplanet.com%2Fproductimages%2Ffront%2F31263.jpg&hash=129a38124567708b6cc1d9060e9a164325aa4187)

There's this guy named Marcel Dzama whose artwork I like very much. He has made a couple of shorts. I have seen one of them and found it to be interesting. I hope he decides to make a feature someday.

bruce macdonald is some good shit.  you can get his film "hard core logo" through the Tarantino Rolling Thunders production company in the states.  you should check it out if you get the chance.  it's kind of like spinal tap but much better.

-sl-

Barbarian Invasions, absolutely. Also The Decline of the American Empire (Arcand's English-language films, at least the ones I've seen, are very skip-able).

Lea Pool's Set Me Free is wonderful, too.

I just saw 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

:yabbse-thumbdown:

There were some interesting moments, some really great visual moments, actually, but there was one big problem:

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Probably the most pretentious performance I've ever seen. And completely unlikable. Because of Colm Feore, I have even less interest in Glenn Gould than I did before I saw the movie. He conveyed none of the "humility" his friends kept talking about. I seriously can't think of any worse tortured genius performance.

Picolas.

Canadian directors see violent, star-struck U.S.
Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg look south with two new films. Source: Los Angeles Times

CANNES, France — Canada. The United States looks different from there. Ask Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, Toronto residents and good friends who have films in competition here — films that turn out to share a potent point of view vis-à-vis the United States.

It's not just that Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" and Egoyan's "Where the Truth Lies," both based on novels and both changes of pace for their directors, are set in the U.S. It's that their north-of-the-border attitude has given them a different take on two pervasive American problems, our culture of violence and our fealty to celebrity.

Both directors refer to media guru and fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan when discussing their own work in relation to the U.S. "Does a fish know about water?" Cronenberg asks metaphorically. "Living in a tributary, not the ocean, McLuhan had a different perspective. The insights he had into America would not be possible to anyone living in America. Stepping away has a lot to do with it."

"A History of Violence," written by Josh Olsen from John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel, is, at $32 million, easily Cronenberg's most expensive film. More to the point, for a director whose previous work, from "Scanners" to "Naked Lunch" to 1996's "Crash," has usually played out on reality's farthest shores, this one deals with a convincingly happy family (parents Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello and their two children) in Millbrook, Ind., "a Middle American vision of Eden."

"I enjoyed that aspect of the film, it was kind of a free gift," the director says, looking calm and collected despite very little sleep. "When you're inventing weird stuff, you have to start from scratch so the audience gets it. The dynamics of family are so understood you can start from a higher level and go further. You get the gift of emotional intensity, people relate and are drawn in in a way a bizarre fantasy never could accomplish."

Not that what happens to Tom Stall (Mortensen) isn't more than passing strange. The film begins with his killing two homicidal psychopaths who attempt to rob his diner, and the resulting publicity brings some equally tough hombres into his life, two of whom are splendidly played by Ed Harris and William Hurt.

"Give me great actors every time, they solve so many problems," Cronenberg says, smiling and referring to his entire cast. "When you get on a racetrack, you want a Ferrari. The whole Svengali thing is not for me, I don't want to help them figure out how to act. I'm looking for collaborators. It takes a big burden off of you." Hurt, for one, was so excited by his role he promised the director, "I've got some afterburners I haven't used," and Cronenberg replied, "I'm going to ask you to fire those."

"Violence" has ended up a particularly fruitful collaboration, a forceful, riveting film about the pernicious effects of violence that easily combines an absorbing and disconcerting plot with underlying societal concerns. "It has a simplicity, such a transparency, that you can see through it into something else that is underneath," the director says. "And that something else is quite disturbing."

"You can't pick up a newspaper or go online without seeing violence close to home," Cronenberg explains. "In a way, every act of violence in the movie is justifiable, it's set up deliberately so that anyone would have done it or wanted to. But killing is killing. As a kid I remember watching something on TV that brought home the horror of state-sponsored execution. If you're an American, you have a current administration that says killing under certain circumstances is very desirable, and the more wonderful at it you are — 'shock and awe' — the more you can congratulate yourself."

The violence in "Violence" comes in brief, intense bursts — "nasty, brutish and short," Cronenberg calls it, quoting Thomas Hobbes — and was intended by the director to reflect street fighting techniques. In researching those he found more evidence of the kind of malaise the film is addressing.

"You can find places that send you tapes and DVDs about how to kill on the street. And they show a guy our age from Florida, in golf pants, saying, 'I feel much safer knowing I could kill three guys with my bare hands.' You should see this guy, he's like your father or grandfather, and he's blossoming, talking about a situation he's certain is going to come. The reality the media creates is a terrifying one. It's selling fear, and it wouldn't be able to sell it if people didn't want to buy it."

Like Cronenberg's film, Egoyan's project also began with a book, but this was a mainstream bestseller by Rupert Holmes that dealt with a young reporter circa 1972 (Alison Lohman) who investigates the mysterious murder of a woman 15 years earlier that led to the breakup of the great comedy team of the age, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon).

It was a book so unlike the projects Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter") usually takes on that the filmmaker admits even his own agent was surprised. But the energetic and articulate director says that "sometimes I get taken into a world so completely outside my own I get excited by the possibilities, by something latent in the material that provokes and engages me." One of those things was what the film depicts as the potentially corrosive and destructive effects of Hollywood-style show business celebrity.

"As a filmmaker who works in Canada, I'm both inside and outside that world, and I love the distance I have from it," Egoyan says. "The entertainment industry is clearly America's major export, it's something that we as Canadians have a profound respect for as well as an awareness of its mechanics. It was exhilarating dealing with the rhythms of American culture; one of the film's most exciting aspects was being in the belly of the beast."

As the child of interior designers who has himself "always been intrigued by how interiors are constructed," Egoyan was especially fascinated by the notion that "so much of celebrity is about being able to project an image of who you might appear to be, which has very little to do with who you are. That creates tremendous pressure, a dilemma that my two actors understand way better than I do."

When he's taken meetings with major stars about roles, Egoyan says, he's come to "understand the pressure they're under to make the right decision, how vulnerable they are in that position. If they commit, they have to be able to defend that decision, because ultimately a whole battery of people have to follow them through the process of making that film.

"In most artistic pursuits, one is aware of having a set of creative standards, but here people find themselves in a lifestyle that presupposes everything they are going to do will be successful. That is completely different from what their artistic plans might be."

As to Egoyan's artistic plans, he might be speaking for both directors when he says that he's trying to create in the viewer what he calls "the transgressive feeling of not being sure you're supposed to be watching, of being in a place where you shouldn't be but you can't get out of it. Something dangerous might happen, things might go too far. You don't fear for the characters, you have a very distinct sense you yourself might be affected."

Then there's the matter of this film festival, and the place of films like his and Cronenberg's within it. "From the English-speaking Canadian perspective," Egoyan says, "this is an incredible year at Cannes."