Is Canadian Cinema dull and boring?
Mon Oncle Antoine is very far from being dull and boring. I think most of it has to do with your personal taste than anything else. Cronenberg is Canadian if you prefer those films.
The film had no feeling, and linear storyline. I don’t know if it was Jutra trying to describe the most depressing Christmas in Quebec, but for a film to at least watchable it must guide the viewer throughout. The acting with the exception of the title character felt wooden, and underminded the story. I also felt like the film went in many directions from the store, to the undertakers route all the way to an unnessecary wet dream sequence,
and then the film ends prematurely with Benoit looking at the family who lost their son. I saw no feeling of sorrow and I felt gyped of a complete ending. And this is supposed to be the mecca of Canada’s cinema?
Croenberg uses non-Canadian actors which makes it feel like you’re watching a film from anywhere but Canada. I enjoyed “History of Violence”, and “Eastern Promises” because of that. I’m talking about 100% Canadian participation
Nevermind.
How is this ridiculous.
I completely agree with Tommy. What could be said however is that the term “Canadian Cinema” doesn’t really exist. By that, I mean that there is no Canadian film movement, or a national cinema partly due to the fact that funding is not really high. However, thank god for the National Film Board, trying to do something, mainly documentaries. On the other hand, Quebec Cinema does exist in various forms over the years and is taking a lot of place of what is wrongfully called Canadian Cinema.
Quebec Cinema is what I’d like to call “Faux French Cinema”. While French actors, and filmmakers put together memorable pictures, the Quebecois on the other hand put together cliched melodramas in French or whatever dialect of French they speak, without true emotions to back it up. Example: Lothiare Bluteau in “Jesus of Montreal”, no emotion, no feeling, underminded the whole film.
The National Film Board are probably the only good source of film in Canada because their prime focus is on non-fiction, and animation both of which are done well. That I will agree on, Marc G.
Search for “Grande Noirceur” or “Maurice Duplessis”.
Dull and boring? Take off hoseheads!
I’m sorry, but your accusation that Canadian cinema, as a whole, is both dull and boring is pretty ridiculous.
check out Guy Maddin, Michel Brault, Atom Egoyan, Denis Villineuve, Xavier Dolan, Don Mckeller, Allan King.
Cronenberg is still Canadian.
But you know that they don’t have the celebrity that American, British, European, and Asian directors hold.
Canadian cinema is far from dull and boring, it is eccentric and turns its nose up at Hollywood:
Lists: "
Canada- a Collection of Cointraband Curiosities
many quirky animations.
Moderated
Both dull and boring?
Good directors don’t want to be celebrities, they just want to make good films.
and name calling is exactly what we need.
Wow, “Faux French Cinema”, that’s almost insulting really and what’s with the sweeping generalizations. I think that in order to completely dismiss two national cinema, you need more than just saying you didn’t like one Jutra film, one Arcand film and the fact that Cronenberg’s films are “not very Canadian”.
Also, how can anyone say Mon oncle Antoine has no feeling simply blows my mind. The film is full of feelings ; it’s bittersweet, it’s nostalgic, it’s uplifting, it’s a bit depressing, it’s full of conflicting emotions. I’m no connoisseur of Claude Jutra (yet), but I know there’s a lot more than meets the eye in this film. But if you want to take it simply at face value, it’s still a beautiful coming-of-age story. An “unnessecary wet dream sequence”, uh, what? How did this not tie in with all that stuff about the sexual awakening of Benoit? Plus Monique Mercure stared in a very commercially successful “soft-core” comedy prior to making playing in this film, maybe, just maybe that was a cinematic reference too? And there might have been a bunch of non-actors in the film, but Jean Duceppe and Jutra himself gave great performances.
But for what it’s worth Mon oncle Antoine is definitively not my fav’ Canadian or Québécois film, that would be Les bons débarras.
Noone calls Canadian cinema dull and boring and gets away with it
^ Atanarjuat!
Dude, keep your stick on the ice !
Love Red Green.
To Monsieur Zom:
The wet dream part came completely out of nowhere. I mean sure it portrays Benoit’s puberty, but it could have gone somewhere else in the film, like immediately after the scene where he spies on Mercure’s character trying on the corset. Completely flawed.
Very Nice, Very Nice
dir. Arthur Lipsett
I think the OP would have been better written:
Is there a national character and is that character reflected in films?
Tarkovsky’s films rain Russian mysticism.
Canadian films?
Dunno…
Perhaps the time has come for a “sweeping generalizations” tab on these forums?
Danny: try some Guy Maddin films, like My Winnipeg for starters maybe
Let this be the first thread:
Is there a national character and is that character reflected in films?
Atanarjuat is wonderful! I’d also highly recommend the other two films in the “Nunavut Cycle”, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and Before Tomorrow. They make for a very interesting, even-handed and moving look at an often-overlooked culture (that’s facing very serious problems today).
Here’s an excerpt from an interesting little article about the difficult place of Cronenberg in relation to Canadian national cinema:
I think it is fair to say that Cronenberg has not had a place in our discourse commensurate with his standing. I’ve talked about the reasons for this, but I’d just like to reiterate that “the Cronenberg problem”—if you agree with me that there is one—is in many ways simply a mirror of the contradictions and self-cancellations of the whole project of finding a desirable English-Canadian cinema. The wish to have a cinema utterly distinct from Hollywood, the wish to maintain a basic tone of seriousness and sobriety, the need for instantly visible Canadian content, a certain puritanism of outlook, protective feelings towards an embattled and obscure brand of cinema that struggled nobly for existence every day, and of course the famous English-Canadian crisis of self-definition, have all contributed to the syndrome. And Cronenberg has failed to realize those wishes or minister to those feelings.
But if he could never fit into this schema, he has found another place. Cronenberg is now a kind of honorary godfather or professor emeritus of a new—or at least newish—school of weird and grotesque cinema that forms a kind of countertradition to the old documentarist one. This was clearly identified by Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond in Mondo Canuck actually as a “school of Cronenberg,” which included Egoyan, Rozema, Guy Maddin, Mike Holboom, and Bruce McDonald (a list to which one would now like to also add a few names). All of these filmmakers, and Cronenberg too, can take up a new kind of station, less exalted and more relaxed, in a more variegated, multicultural, postmodern kind of national film scene. In the nationalist dimension of this scene, the old crisis-of-no-essential identity has been replaced by a postmodern jamboree-of-no-essential identity, where difference is celebrated, and that difference can include oddnesses of the most spectacular sort—oddnesses like Cronenberg’s or, say, Guy Maddin’s, which it was hard to receive kindly in earlier days.
The phrase “jamboree-of-no-essential identity” strikes me as spot on, both as regards Cronenberg’s body of work and Canadian cinema in general.
Nominated for Best Trolling of 2011. Bonus points for ‘underminded’ (used twice in separate posts) and ‘The wet dream came out of nowhere’.
“The Wet Dream Came Out of Nowhere”: Best Porn Movie Ever.
Danny Bailey
If “Mon Oncle Antoine”, a film that was so dull and boring is voted the #1 Candian film of all time, does this mean that the lion’s share of films to originate from that country are also bland in nature as well? Let me know if this is the case or if there are Canadian films that are otherwise.