Is Canadian Cinema dull and boring?

Guys, he came back!

fuck bruce mcdonald. my favourite canadian film is GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD by donald shebib

@ Elvis is King.
That makes two fo us although I do like “The Cat Came Back” I remember seeing it on Cartoon Network years ago, and loving it. Canadian animated shorts are well done, unlike their feature films.

There is for sure a lot of interesting stuff coming from the french in the last few years.
Also Winnipeg.

Also, Starbuck was not boring or dull.

I just tried to watch a Canadian film “The Outside Chance of Maximillian Glick” on youtube. I shut the damn thing off after 10 minutes. I expected a coming of age of story similar to Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants and Murmur of the Heart or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series. The title character pissed me off, because he whined constantly. Canadian films have no density in characterization, that’s why the lion’s share of their films suffer.

I think it’s high-time we stopped putting Canadian and Québécois/French-Canadian films in the same bag (well, many already do). They may be from the same country, but they also belong to two very different national cinemas (this should be as clear as crystal to anybody who has seen a decent amount of films from each nation). It would also make way for more clarity in this discussion.

@Elvis is King : There are many far better Québécois directors than Arcand or Lepage, if you ask me. Also, your post illustrates the point I made the last time I posted ; Kamouraska is very easy to get a hold of if you live in Québec, just like many “obscure” Québécois films are.

@Danny Bailley : Not sure what you expected from a film directed by the guy who brought us Death Wish V: The Face of Death and for somebody who hates Canadian cinema you sure had lofty expectations going in, I mean, few coming of age movies compare favorably to the one you cited. Plus, a whiny character is not automatically a bad character and doesn’t automatically make something bad either, The Catcher in the Rye is a classic of American lit. after all. Not to mention that judging an entire film from it’s first 10 minutes is quite premature.

If you want some films with excellent characterization, Les bons débarras (a film I already mentioned) and Le chat dans le sac are good places to start.

I grew up 10 minutes from the Canadian border. Canada is like another state to me. Quebec, on the other hand, is its own separate world.

“Not sure what you expected from a film directed by the guy who brought us Death Wish V”

Yeah, the dude should at least watch the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz if he wants to watch a Jewish-Canadian coming of age story. But he’s seriously trolling if he expected the film to be like Antoine Doinel. But Duddy Kravitz is a great film. Anyway, the true marker of Canadian coming of age stories would be Léolo, a beautiful film. Besides, Denis Côté is one of the better filmmakers to emerge in recent years anywhere. But, yeah, this thread is dull and boring.

@Monsieur Zom:
So where exactly can I find a copy of Kamouraska?

@Elvis is King : I think there is a VHS of it, but I’m not sure, this kind of info is hard to find on the web (until recently, I could swear that Quand je serai parti… vous vivrez encore never had a home-video release, but somebody uploaded the film to YouTube from what looks like a VHS copy).

What is certain though, is that Kamouraska is available to anybody in Québec who has Vidéotron as a cable distributor – which must be one person out of two, or something like that – thanks to their video on-demand service dedicated to Québécois cinema ; Éléphant (http://elephant.canoe.ca/films/kamouraska_2832). It’s French-only though, I don’t think there are subs at all. It would be possible to make it available on the web and fansubs can be made, but it would take some time.

“canadian cinema” has a seemingly vague identity because “canadian identity” is vague; our national identity is that we are a “multicultural” country, that we are maiti and inuit and quebecoic and anglophone and immigrants et cetera; on top of that, we are geographically much more spread out than the states, with a majority of the population density existing right along the american border.

however, i think canadian cinema has some distinct qualities to it, especially if you look to the NFBC.

also, no one has mentioned john greyson in this thread yet so i’m throwing him in.

Let me resurrect this forum. Since the last post I have watched more Canadian films. Some I liked, but plenty I was not impressed with. Here’s my list of those films:

http://mubi.com/lists/films-that-to-me-make-canada-the-center-of-subpar-cinema

You do realize that, for any major film-producing country in the world, most of us could make a list well longer than 27 films from that country which suck?

I’ll always love John Paizs for (The Big) Crime Wave…amazing film.

@Flip Trotsky

Besides USA, I can’t name 30 bad films from other countries, as I’ve been greatly impressed by British, French, Italian etc… films. In the US, for every 30 great films there’s 1 crappy one.

@Flip Trotsky

Besides USA, I can’t name 30 bad films from other countries, as I’ve been greatly impressed by British, French, Italian etc… films. In the US, for every 30 great films there’s 1 crappy one.

“In the US, for every 30 great films there’s 1 crappy one.”

Even as trolls go, you gotta troll harder than that. Nobody’s gonna buy this bullshit.

One Week is Canadian cinema at its earnest worst. Yuck.

@ Ari

I’m saying that out of all the countries Canada makes the worst films. It’s based on 2 years of observation.