By Mark Leiren-Young

It takes years to make a movie. It takes less than 48 hours to determine its fate.

If the box office numbers from Friday and Saturday night aren’t impressive, a movie won’t be in theatres the following week.

Samuel L. Jackson’s latest, The Samaritan, opens tonight and if you’re looking for a movie this weekend here’s the scoop on what you should be seeing instead of The Avengers or Battleship. The Samaritan is a modern film noir drawing strong early reviews, including a thumbs up from Roger Ebert. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to go straight, and Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson plays the bad guy determined to make sure he doesn’t.

I emailed co-writer-director, David Weaver, whose previous films include the quirky cool festival favourites Century Hotel and Siblings, to ask what excited him about making a 21st century film noir.

“A prof of mine at film school said once that directors just spend their career remaking the movies they loved when they misspent their youth in darkened theatres. Well, I always loved noir. And where are they now? I’m not necessarily talking about classic noir (although I bow to no one in my appreciation), but to revisionist, Jim Thompson-inspired noir, like The Grifters or The Crying Game. Nobody’s making those movies anymore? Fine. I’ll make them myself.”

Weaver’s other stars include Luke Kirby, Deborah Kara Unger and Gil Bellows — all faces you’ll recognize even if you don’t know their names and all of them Canadian. Yep, The Samaritan is an honest to Telefilm Canadian movie — and it has something few Canadian films do, besides brand name stars like Jackson and Wilkinson . . . it’s actually opening in more than a few tiny art houses and it’s premiering simultaneously in the US which means a bit of actual PR. Not Battleship PR but, hey, a review from Ebert already tops the attention most CanCon films get and a great first weekend would be good news not just for Weaver, but for the Canadian film industry.

“It’s just such a jungle out there, with so many possibilities for your entertainment dollar, as they say. So if audiences don’t show up on the first weekend then the movie is likely to disappear,” he says. “I spend my life frustrated that I didn’t get a chance to see the way they were intended to be seen — on the big screen. And all of this is particularly true for our movie, which is a little bit of a throwback to begin with. After all, don’t you want to see a noir in the theatre? That’s really the only way you can see into the deep, dark shadows.”

Producer Tony Wosk told me, “The opening weekend of any film is incredibly important these days because of a constant fight for a limited number of screens. A film has to perform in that opening weekend to ensure it doesn’t get replaced by another film the following weekend. For an independent film it’s even more important because Hollywood tentpole films often snap up the majority of screens in any market.”

Wosk spent six years on the board of Canada’s First Weekend Club — a group that spreads the word about Canadian film openings in the hopes that a first weekend will lead to a second weekend and a third and . . .

Full disclosure: Wosk produced my first feature film, The Green Chain, and without the help of The First Weekend Club I doubt our film would have played a second week. That’s why I’m aware of the importance of first weekends and such a fan of the First Weekend Club.

And that’s why I’ll give the last word to their executive director Anita Adams, who I contacted for another quote about why seeing The Samaritan this weekend won’t sink Battleship but would be, well, the act of a good Samaritan — not to mention a savvy cinephile. “The first weekend of a film’s release is critical,” says Adams. “The more people that go see a film during those first three days, the more likelihood that film will have an extended run. A film’s future really hinges on the success of that opening weekend, as theatre owners look at the box office results Monday morning and decide which films to keep and which to cut. So if you want to help some great Canadian films stay in theatres longer, go see them opening weekend!”

In the following 2009 post, in the wake of its Tony Award wins, we considered Billy Elliot‘s contribution to “the metropolitan myth.”

***

By Frank Moher

Best Tony Awards telecast in years last night. (You did watch, didn’t you? I’m not the only Canadian who watches the Tony Awards, am I? I am? Thought so.)

That said, allow me to gripe about Billy Elliot, which danced away with 10 awards, including Best Musical. Actually, my gripe is with the original movie, which I loved until the final 10 minutes, when I realized its message was going to be, “If you’re talented, your destiny lies in London (or New York, or Los Angeles, or fill-in-the-glittering-metropolis-of-your-choice). Unlucky enough to have been born elsewhere? Leave that burg in the dust.”

Not that this is a new idea; I believe it forms the basis of approximately 25% of movies made in the 1940s. (Cut to heroine standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. HEROINE: “I’m gonna make you mine, New York!!!”) But what never occurs to the keepers of the metropolitan myth is that if the talented stuck around the burg in which they find themselves and opened, say, a dancing school or a publishing house or a jazz club or whatever, their burg would suddenly be a lot less burg-y. Yes, I know Li’l Billy, being eight or whatever, didn’t have the option of opening a dancing school. But wouldn’t it have been something if he realized he could dance and remain a part of his community? Something other than the same old big city jive?

I haven’t seen the musical version, so who knows? — maybe they’ve changed the ending so Billy sticks around and marries the gay kid who adores him and eventually starts up a dance crew that goes on “Britain’s Got Talent” and beats Susan Boyle. But somehow I doubt it. What’s particularly risible about the movie and, by the looks of that production number on the Tonys last night, the musical too, is Billy Elliot‘s pretend social conscience. It beats up on Margaret Thatcher for bleeding Billy’s coal-mining town dry, before going on to propose that it be further etiolated through the loss of its brightest young people.

What, asks Billy Elliot, could be more natural? But what, ask I, could be more Thatcherite than the notion that the talented have no obligation to anybody but themselves?

Forget Nancy Pelosi. The news that James Cameron is coming to visit the oilsands, combined with the premiere of Fubar 2 at the Toronto Film Festival last night, creates a perfect PR storm for Alberta.

Cameron (who is, of course, the successfully grandiose director of Titanic and Avatar), advised Premier Ed Stelmach in a letter received yesterday that he’ll be in the province for a three-day fact-finding trip starting September 27th. When Avatar was released last year, its story of rapacious developers vs. indigenous locals raised inevitable comparisons with Premier Ed’s big northern sandbox. Cameron called the oilsands a “black eye” on Canada’s image, and native leaders invited him to visit the area. A step behind as usual, Stelmach followed-up with his own invitation, but now that he’s been taken up on it, his spokesman says “It’s kind of short notice” and that “if it’s possible to do it, the premier would be certainly glad to meet with him for a few minutes.”

That was precisely the wrong response. The correct response would be “Yessir, Mr. Cameron. Any dietary requests for the big state dinner we’d like to throw for you?” It seems to me unlikely that Cameron is visiting out of pure intellectual interest. May I remind the Premier that the director also makes documentaries, and that in between Titanic and Avatar he produced a number of widely seen films about the ocean, precisely because all that time in the water had piqued his interest? If he now decides to turn his attention topside, to the oilsands — if, in fact, his visit is more in the nature of a location scouting trip — it won’t matter how many dollars Alberta throws into public relations campaigns defending its tar baby. It is perfectly screwed. It’s unlikely that cowtowing to Cameron will make much difference — but pissing him off almost certainly will.

As for Fubar II: it is, as aficionados of art house film will already know, the sequel to the 2002 mockumentary about a pair of beer-fisting, mullet-growing Calgary headbangers who make Bob and Doug Mckenzie look like contenders for a genius grant. (The title is an acronym for “fucked up beyond all repair”.) By a neat coincidence, the new movie has them travelling up to Fort McMurray to work on, yes, the oil sands.

 
Hm, let’s see. James Cameron sets his eyepiece on Alberta’s 4700 sq. km. “beauty” mark while a movie about its not-best and not-brightest, featuring shots of the oilsands that, according to its director, look “kind of like Blade Runner“, opens before the international press in Toronto. As they used to say in that old Milton Berle routine: Makeup!

We’ve now seen, for the second time in recent memory, a journalist being harassed by Canadian border guards while trying to enter the country. Three years ago, American talk-radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones was detained for four hours, in the middle of the night, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada agents in Ottawa who confiscated his passport, camera, and belongings. They ordered him back the next morning for further grilling.

Now U.S. public-radio star Amy Goodman, co-host of Democracy Now!, has received a similar hazing while trying to get to a speaking engagement in Vancouver. Goodman got off a bit easier — apparently the guard who interrogated her was mostly concerned that she might say something nasty about the Winter Olympics — but what they have in common is that they were stopped because they might be bringing across the border, not fruits or vegetables, but ideas.

Those ideas could hardly be more opposite — Jones is an extreme libertarian while Goodman comes from the far left — which suggests that it is not a particular ideology but thinking itself, not to mention any opposition to state authority, that causes our border police to become unhinged. We are unlikely to get an explanation or defence out of Citizenship and Immigration over this embarrassment; when Jones was detained, all they had to say was that they could say nothing because “we are forbidden from discussing individual cases.” But it’s time various knuckleheads-in-a-uniform started getting disciplined or fired for their behaviour. Telling them that trade in ideas is not criminal behaviour is not likely to work. Telling them their paycheques are on the line might.

And yes, border guards, if you’re reading this at some point in the future, because I’ve been flagged in your system for speaking ill of your fine work, I did write this. And I’d be glad to discuss it with you — though preferably not while in detention in the middle of the night.

An interview with my Current-Self re: Where the Wild Things Are (the film), conducted by my Previous-Self (who had not yet seen it).

Previous-Self: I am nervous about this movie. I carry my generation’s obligatory love of the book, and the trailer looks terrible. Speak to my nervousness!

Current-Self: Calm yourself. The movie is unexpectedly good. Also, surprisingly faithful to the book.

PS: How can that be? The book has, like, 12 lines of text, and no discernible plot.

CS: I know, right? And without really seeming to add anything, the film is some hour and three-quarters long. It breaks all the laws of physics, but there it is. Also, ALL of the dialogue from the book ends up in the movie, and it is seriously nostalgia-inducing.

PS: Is it cheesy? Will I throw up in my socks?

CS: Not hardly! It is sweet without being saccharine, and heart-warming without being hokey.

PS: What of the wild things?

CS: Again with the ridiculous fidelity. The one that sort of looks like a bird but not really, he’s there, and the bull-like-thing, he’s there too. They’re ALL THERE! And they’re actual muppets, not CGI monstrosities, but their faces are eerily human. One of them will look like your uncle.

PS: If I have a five-year-old niece who also loves the book, should I bring her along?

CS: Hells to the huh-uh. Max cries, like, five minutes into the movie, and it is sad, and then he is yelled at with vehemence some 10 minutes later, and it is upsetting, and then the monsters LEGITIMATELY TRY TO EAT HIM, and it is frightening (also hilarious, but in ways that five-year-olds won’t get). Best keep your munchkins at home. [Aside to readers who are not me: I don’t know your life. If you feel that your niece needs a good ensaddening/upsetting/frightening, carry on.]

PS: What size popcorn should I buy?

CS: As much as you can stomach. You will forget to eat dinner that day.

Best Tony Awards telecast in years last night. (You did watch, didn’t you? I’m not the only Canadian who watches the Tony Awards, am I? I am? Thought so.)

That said, allow me to gripe about Billy Elliot, which danced away with 10 awards, including Best Musical. Actually, my gripe is with the original movie, which I loved until the final 10 minutes, when I realized its message was going to be, “If you’re talented, your destiny lies in London (or New York, or Los Angeles, or fill-in-the-glittering-metropolis-of-your-choice). Unlucky enough to have been born elsewhere? Leave that burg in the dust.”

Not that this is a new idea; I believe it forms the basis of approximately 25% of movies made in the 1940s. (Cut to heroine standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. HEROINE: “I’m gonna make you mine, New York!!!”) But what never occurs to the keepers of the metropolitan myth is that if the talented stuck around the burg in which they find themselves and opened, say, a dancing school or a publishing house or a jazz club or whatever, their burg would suddenly be a lot less burg-y. Yes, I know Li’l Billy, being eight or whatever, didn’t have the option of opening a dancing school. But wouldn’t it have been something if he realized he could dance and remain a part of his community? Something other than the same old big city jive?

I haven’t seen the musical version, so who knows? — maybe they’ve changed the ending so Billy sticks around and marries the gay kid who adores him and eventually starts up a dance crew that goes on “Britain’s Got Talent” and beats Susan Boyle. But somehow I doubt it. What’s particularly risible about the movie and, by the looks of that production number on the Tonys last night, the musical too, is Billy Elliot‘s pretend social conscience. It beats up on Margaret Thatcher for bleeding Billy’s coal-mining town dry, before going on to propose that it be further etiolated through the loss of its brightest young people. What, asks Billy Elliot, could be more natural? But what, ask I, could be more Thatcherite than the notion that the talented have no obligation to anybody but themselves?

Still, a great Tony broadcast. Neil Patrick Harris: hilarious. Frank Langella too. Liza Minelli: still standing. Guess hard times really are good for the arts.

If you haven’t heard about Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga by now, you obviously have no daughters/wives/friends. The story of Bella Swan, a rather underwhelming young woman, and the vampire who wants quite badly to suck her or f . . . uh . . . make out with her, has been taking the teenaged-girl world by storm since the initial book’s release in 2005. The quadrilogy finally concluded this year with “Breaking Dawn,” and the first movie premiered on Nov. 21st.

The books were huge, and the movies will be hugerer still. Every smitten-kitten 14-year old who couldn’t induce her best friend to pick up a 400-page brick is certainly going to be able to drag her to the theater for an evening of blood-sucking and squeee-ing. Every middle-aged woman who wouldn’t be caught dead thumbing through a YA novel on the Skytrain is going to be up for a night out with the girls. Hell, I even saw a few guys at the theater. With their friends. And if the books portray a suspiciously co-dependent relationship between Bella and her hunky Dracula, the movie condenses and throttles up the neediness until watching it is like drinking an undiluted syrup. Of need.

The relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan is unhealthy, straight up. No one in their right mind is going to agree that this is how two people should fall in love (that is to say, instantly, and based purely on physical attraction on one side and bloodlust on the other), and how two people in love should treat each other. Unfortunately, the target audience (viz. shrieking teen girls) is rarely in its right mind. While maybe one in a zillion 11-year olds who follows HP and friends is going to think to himself, “Witching is COOL!”, I guarantee you that fully half of the young girls who watch this movie are going to come away wanting their own psychotically possessive, disturbingly older (Edward’s been 17 for some 70 years) boyfriend.

From the way he initially spurns her (due to his unrelenting thirst for her blood and a desire for her safety, mind you) with all the subtlety of a sack of angst-ridden hammers, to his constant “You can’t do that” and “You must do this,” to the way he grabs her arm when she stumbles and snaps, “Can you at least watch where you walk?” (again, safety first), to the way he’s always shoving her into cars or thrusting her behind him (and away from danger! Oh, he’s so safety-conscious, is Edward), the vamp is a walking A&E; special on Why We Leave Them. For her part, Bella clings to him and puts up with him and constantly (in the books, anyways) derides herself in comparison with him, and practically asphyxiates begging him not to leave her. This, her boyfriend of some two months.

Granted, it’s an intense few months, full of Confrontations and Serious Discussions. There’s no flirting and levity bringing these two lovebirds together, but scowls, furrowed brows, and constant, unmet demands for answers. Aside from the bizarreness of it — teenage love should be all Frisbees, milkshakes, and making out in cars — this kind of killed the important bits of the movie. The melodrama of the moment when Bella uncovers Edward’s dirty secret is pretty much overshadowed by the unrelenting melodrama of the previous hour.

In fact, there are a number of other bones I could pick with this movie. Like how they took Rob Pattison (who is quite nerdily sexy as Harry Potter’s Cedric Diggory) and totally de-hotted him. And being hot is, aside from being undead, Edward’s defining characteristic. I mean, this movie was a guaranteed success. They could have at least flung a little bit more money towards making Edward’s undead neck the same floury color as his undead face. Or how Bella is so constantly surly, and is always sexy-biting her lower lip, and refuses to shut her rabbity mouth for more than a second. Or how . . . actually, Edward and Bella are my only real beefs. All the other vampires are spot-on, the high-school girls are refreshingly average-looking, the corn-fed young man who unsuccessfully pursues Bella for a minute is bright-eyed and keen. Everyone is charming and surprisingly pleasant, given that half of them are the stuff of horror stories, except for the Dour Duo.

Unfortunately, it is these two and their aggressive co-dependency that occupy the most time onscreen. Talk about sucking.

It’s some measure of the maturity of Atom Egoyan’s career, if not of Canadian film generally, that news that his new movie Adoration will be premiering at Cannes this year prompts mostly a shrug. Don’t they all? By my count, he’s been there six times with six films (Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, Where the Truth Lies), not to mention the time (times?) he’s served on the jury.

In fact, Egoyan seems to be one of a handful of filmmakers who show up with amazing frequency in the Cannes line-up (Gus Van Sant and the Coen Brothers would be others). Has Cannes become a sort of Bilderberg Group for cineastes?

In any event, Adoration apparently marks a growing-up for Egoyan in another way: he’s grown up. Interviewed yesterday on the CBC Radio art-chat show “Q,” Toronto Film Festival co-director Cameron Bailey noted that “For many years, through the ’90s especially, Canadian films began to be seen as almost willfully weird. You know, that Weird Sex & Snowshoesschematic that ran through a lot of films that came out in that era. So I think often jurors and critics as well, internationally, are looking to Canadian films to kind of shock them a little, to give them a little frisson of something strange and perverse.

“There’s less of that, I think, these days, and most of the filmmakers who pioneered that kind of Canadian cinema have matured. Atom Egoyan is not so interested in exploring the far reaches of human behaviour as much as he is in getting deeper into his characters. So I think if people are still looking for the weird sex, they may be a little disappointed.”

Thank the sweet christ. The “weird sex and snowshoes era” of Canadian film was one of our great national embarrassments. And it seems to me international audiences weren’t so much looking on with lascivious grins as they were wondering, “When is that country going to stop playing with itself?”

The era began, in fact, with a play, Brad Fraser’s 1989 Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. A skillful script, Human Remains became a sensation, first in Calgary, then in Toronto, because it embraced gay, lesbian and bi life at a time when the cognoscenti of Calgary and the mainstream of Toronto were finally ready to do so as well. Good for all of them. But the reaction did have a quality of Britney Spears finally figuring out there’s more to life than Justin Timberlake.

Fraser’s play had two long runs in Toronto, and I’m guessing the city’s film community was out in full force, because soon after, not only did Denys Arcand snap up the film rights (for his ultimately disappointing Love and Human Remains), but Egoyan gave us his 1995 Exotica, about a tax inspector entranced by a young stripper who dresses as a schoolgirl, and David Cronenberg released Crash, the film now known as “No, not that ‘Crash.’” Cronenberg’s Crash (as opposed to the 2004 Oscar-winner) was based on J.G. Ballard’s novel about a cult of fetishists who get turned-on by car crashes, and even have sex in the car carcasses. Now that, my friends, is weird sex.

Egoyan’s film was acclaimed and Cronenberg’s respected, but really, it was like watching them go through a sexually chaotic mid-life crisis on film. Egoyan came out the other side quickly enough, with The Sweet Hereafter (a truly exploitive film, for the way it took a real-life Mexican tragedy and blithely transplanted it to B.C.). It’s not clear yet whether Cronenberg has.

One can only hope. The Canadian obsession with sexual filigrees was nothing more than our rube side showing. Yes, there are many varieties of sex and sexuality. Yes, there are many ways to have a good time. But at some point — say, around 25 — that should cease to be a point of obsession. If our filmmakers are finally emerging from adolescence, and with them our film industry, we may eventually make some movies that get the world’s attention for the right reasons.

If Morgan Freeman wasn’t the coolest guy in Hollywood already, he certainly is now. This weekend, Freeman’s production company, Revelations Entertainment, joins with computer chip manufacturer Intel to make his latest movie, 10 Items or Less, available online for download. That’s the same 10 Items or Less that premiered in movie theatres just under two weeks ago. As of now, the net is no longer strictly the domain of ancient and/or obscure movies offered at unseemly prices, or grungy, illicitly made video copies that take forever to download from thepiratebay.org (while you wait for the copyright police to kick in your front door). Freeman’s is a real movie, and, on average, critics are saying it’s pretty good.

So this isn’t just a new version of rushing some embarrassment into the video stores before its awfulness stinks up the zeitgeist. At least not yet. One can foresee the day when bad, bad films skip the cinemas and Blockbuster and head directly to the web (in part because one can forsee the day, and not too far off either, when the cinemas have all been razed and the Blockbusters converted to hydrogen stops). But Freeman and his director, Brad (Lemony Snicket) Siberling, had the web in mind all along; they kept their movie small — focussed almost entirely on Freeman and co-star Paz Vega of Spanglish — shot it in 15 days, and spent bupkis. Which is maybe just as well: in its two weeks of release at 15 big-city theatres, 10 Items or Less has grossed just over $70,000 US.

In fact, after suffering the spectacle for decades of Canadians trying to make American films, we may have finally seen the obverse: these Americans have made a Canadian film — quirky, tiny, and seen by nearly no one. The only thing it appears to be missing is the weird sex. But if this downloading thing works out, even modestly, it could point the way to a solution for the Canadian film industry’s distribution woes — skip the theatres that they can’t get into anyway and show up on people’s iMacs instead. (Interestingly, the only distributor Freeman could find to go along with his unconventional scheme was Toronto-based ThinkFilm; do they have some other tiny movies they maybe want to push onto the net?) So, not only is Freeman the first Hollywoodite to stop whining about piracy and how everybody’s little kiddies are going to starve if it doesn’t stop, and instead respond creatively to the challenges presented by technology, but he may also have saved the Canadian film industry, and without even meaning to.

Man, that guy really is cool.

Daryl Duke, the Vancouver-born TV director and producer who died last Saturday, was the real deal. In an industry full off hypesters, especially in B.C., where there are 20 would-be producers for every dollar of financing available, Duke had sufficient credits that he didn’t need to tell you all about them: you already knew. He’d produced the classic CBC current-affairs show This Hour Has Seven Days. He’d produced The Steve Allan Show. He’d directed the 1983 mini-series The Thorn Birds, which, along with Roots, bookended the days of the massive TV saga. He’d also directed the 1978 Canadian film The Silent Partner, which was perhaps the only movie made with Canadian tax-boondoggle bucks — as they all were back then — that didn’t blow harder than Hurricane Katrina.

The interesting, nay inspiring thing about Duke was that, even as his career was at its peak, he continued to run CKVU-TV, the Vancouver indie station he’d founded in 1976. The man knew where he was from, and always came home. And continued to make a contribution to it. Long after he could have escaped the political infighting that sometimes makes the Canadian TV industry feel like a very small sauna full of obstreperous fat guys, Duke was in there, swinging: defending the CBC against the depredations of Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, then, later, attacking it for centralizing its operations in Toronto. (“The local outlet of the CBC,” he told the Vancouver business magazine Equity, “might as well be nothing more than a fax machine and an 800 number.”)

I suspect what really bothered Duke about the CBC by the late 1990s was that it had been taken over by B-listers — people who were in charge not because of their talents but because of their political connections and/or where they lived. The amateurs had taken over the asylum. Most people of Duke’s standing would have shrugged and walked away, but he didn’t have it in him not to give a shit. Good man. Great career. The country just got a bit smaller.