Introducing the Canadian Screen Awards, and their 2013 nominees
By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 0 Comments
Rachel Mwanza of War Witch / courtesy Mongrel Media
It’s been a spectacular few days for Quebec writer-director Kim Nguyen. On Thursday his film Rebelle (War Witch) received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, just one of five titles plucked from a year of world cinema. And back home today, Rebelle tops the list of films honoured by the newly created Canadian Screen Awards, with a total of 12 nominations. Shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, his modest but affecting drama about a child soldier—portrayed by Rachel Mwanza, a girl he discovered in the street—trumped much larger Canadian productions such as Midnight’s Children, Goon and Cosmopolis.
On its tail with 10 nominations is Laurence Anyways, the story of a teacher’s transsexual odyssey by Quebec auteur Xavier Dolan. Quebec features dominate the awards with four of the six best picture nominations, the two exceptions being Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children and Michael McGowan’s Still Mine. Mehta’s adaptation of the Salman Rushdie novel, led the non-Quebec field with eight nominations. Like Rebelle and Laurence Anyways, it also scored nominations for director and screenplay.
Still Mine and Nicole Robert’s l’Affaire Dumont were tied with seven nominations; both have double lead acting nods. Michael Dowse’s hockey comedy, Goon, has six nominations, including best director.
The Academy’s choices differ sharply from those of the Toronto Film Critics Associaton, which honored Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell with its $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award for 2012. The Academy has nominated Polley’s movie in the documentary feature category. Goon, one of the TFCA’s two Rogers runners-up, didn’t figure among the Academy’s six best picture nominees; and the TFCA’s other runner-up, Denis Côté’s experimental doc Bestiaire, received no nominations from the Academy.
Heading the list of TV nominees are Flashpoint, with 11 nominations, Less Than Kind with 10, and Michael with eight. Among the nation’s news programs, CBC’s The National topped the list with six nominations.
Re-engineered by the Academy’s new CEO, former TIFF director Helga Stephenson, the Canadian Screen Awards have merged cinema’s Genie Awards with TV’s Geminis. The winners of the film and TV nominees will be announced at a two-hour inaugural gala hosted my Martin Short and broadcast live Sunday March 3, 2013 at 8 p.m. (8:30 N.T) on CBC.
Replacing the Genie and Gemini trophies is a new statuette, a spike-shaped figure with a pair of enveloping cape-like arms. The form, says Stephenson, “symbolizes two screens with the public at the core of it all. The new Canadian Screen Awards statue celebrates Canadian talent and Canadian productions, now destined for multiple screens.”
Amalgamating Canada’s film and TV awards makes sense—certainly on the film side. The Genies have been limping along for many years, and just like English Canadian cinema, they’ve had a hard time finding an audience. Film is supposed to carry more prestige than TV, but that’s worthless if a Genie falls in the forest and no one hears. Film and TV are increasingly interlocked. And hitched to the industrial power of the broadcast biz, the film awards may gain more traction. With some synergy, hopefully, Canada’s film and TV glitterati can create an entertaining prime-time awards show we can proud of. And they couldn’t have a better energizer bunny than the virtuosic Martin Short, who was dazzling in his recent turn as host of SNL.
The anomaly, of course, is that the film awards include Quebec while the TV awards do not. But Quebec television is its own industry, with its own star system. Canadian film is a smaller world than Canadian TV—it sounds counter-intuitive, but the big screen is smaller than the small screen. Yet cinema is, at least theoretically, the more universal medium. Besides, if Canadian cinema can’t claim the likes of Villeneuve, Arcand, Falardeau and Nguyen among our auteurs, we would be pretty impoverished.
The TV nominees are too voluminous to list, but is the full slate films nominated for the Canadian Screen Awards:
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Canada’s top 10 movies in 2012, according to TIFF
By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 7:29 PM - 0 Comments
TIFF announced Canada’s Top Ten list of features and shorts tonight at a Toronto event hosted by actress Sarah Gadon and filmmaker Don McKellar. The list of feature directors offers mostly familiar names—David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, Deepa Mehta, Peter Mettler, Michael Dowse, Xavier Dolan and Michael McGowan—along with lesser known filmmakers such as Nisha Pahuja and Kim Nguyen. The cultural balance is unusually tipped toward English Canada, with only two Quebec directors in the mix. (Denis Arcand, Denis Villeneuve and Philippe Farardeau didn’t release movies in 2012.) Four of the 10 features are set in foreign countries. Noticeable by its absence is Picture Day, which just won the Whistler Film Festival’s $15,000 Borsos Prize for best Canadian feature.
Canada’s top 10 features, ordered alphabetically:
Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg (Entertainment One Films)
The End of Time, Peter Mettler (Mongrel Media, National Film Board)
Goon, Michael Dowse (Alliance Films)
Laurence Anyways, Xavier Dolan (Alliance Films)
Midnight’s Children, Deepa Mehta (Mongrel Media)
My Awkward Sexual Adventure, Sean Garrity (Phase 4 Films)
Rebelle, Kim Nguyen (Mongrel Media)
Still, Michael McGowan (Mongrel Media)
Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley (Mongrel Media, NFB)
The World Before Her, Nisha Pahuja (KinoSmith)The top 10 shorts:
Bydlo, Patrick Bouchard (NFB)
Chef de meute (Herd Leader), Chloé Robichaud
Crackin’ Down Hard, Mike Clattenburg
Kaspar, Diane Obomsawin (NFB)
Ne crâne pas sois modeste (Keep a Modest Head), Deco Dawson
Lingo, Bahar Noorizadeh
Malody, Phillip Barker
Old Growth, Tess Girard
Reflexions, Martin Thibaudeau
Paparmane (Wintergreen), Joëlle Desjardins Paquette -
Fates collide in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘Flight’
By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 2, 2012 at 2:13 AM - 0 Comments
Shriya Saran (Parvati the Witch) and Satya Bhabha (Saleem) in 'Midnight's Children' / courtesy Mongrel Media
Midnight’s Children is a lavish spectacle that unfolds against half a century of South Asian history with the complexity of a Russian novel and a blush of Bollywood melodrama. Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie, it’s the most sumptuous, and ambitious, Canadian movie you’re likely to see this year. It may also be the least Canadian Canadian movie you’ll see this year. Aside from director Deepa Mehta, her producer/husband, David Hamilton, and the colour of the money from Telefilm Canada, and some crew, there’s nothing
visiblytangibly Canadian about this movie—at least not the lead actors, the characters, the locations, the setting, or the story.[Since posting this blog, the above preamble provoked a small Twitter tempest. In my first draft, I neglected to specify lead actors. Rushdie pointed out that two of the film's large cast of supporting players, Zaib Shaikh and Anita Majumdar, are most definitely Canadian. Those actors were justifiably outraged. Even after I corrected the oversight, there's been a flurry of tweets accusing me of seeing Canadians as white-only. Offense was taken at the trigger-word "visibly." But it never occurred to me that people would think I was talking about skin colour. What I meant was, if you walked into Midnight's Children cold, without knowing anything about it, from what you SAW you'd never guess it's a Canadian movie. It's about the history of India and Pakistan. My point was never to question the Canadian-ness or the talent of those Canadians involved in making Midnight's Children—just to observe that the film is an eminent example of a Canadian cinema that, in a world of co-pros, now tends to favour non-Canadian stories. ('Cosmopolis,' 'Rebelle, etc.') That may not necessarily be a bad thing. But there's a complex discussion to be had (not here) about the extinction of a traditionally "national" cinema and whether or not Telefilm should fund Canadian filmmakers regardless of where their stories are rooted. I don't have an easy answer. And none of this any bearing on my opinion of Midnight's Children, which—if you're still with me—I've tried to hammer out below.]
Writing about Cloud Atlas, another vastly ambitious literary adaptation, New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it’s “by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket.” Midnight’s Children feels like the most movie you could get out of Rushdie’s novel. With Zhivago sweep, its sprawling narrative spans three generations, six marriages, two surgical abductions, several wars, and political fires that forged three nations: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Painterly tableaux range takes us from the flooded killing fields of Pakistan’s civil war to the rubble of a New Delhi ghetto being bulldozed by the military.
The story begins in India, during the final decades of British colonial rule. A liberal doctor from Kashmir marries a patient after courting her through a hole in a bed sheet held up as a titillating concession to modesty. Settling in Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, they raise three daughters, of whom Mumtaz (Shahana Goswami) marries twice before giving birth to our protagonist, Saleem. Then the narrative finally catches up to the back story—ignited by the fireworks of India’s independence at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, when Saleem is born and switched with another baby. A nurse in the maternity ward, entranced by her revolutionary lover, has the newborns trade place to “make the poor rich and the rich poor.” Saleem, a child of privilege, is given to a poor accordian-playing minstrel named Wee Winkie, whose wife has died in childbirth. Her baby boy, Shiva, is handed over to Saleem’s parents. And with Dickensian symmetry, these two class-crossed males grow up “handcuffed to history,” in the words of Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay and voices the narration for its protagonist.
With diverging destinies of Saleem and Shiva fused to India’s own, the movie propels itself through three-ring circus (binder?) of history, romance and magic. Deepa Mehta does a fabulous job of shooting this Cirque du Salman. She balances a terrific ensemble of actors who are seductive and strong. She weaves Rushdie’s busy tapestry with virtuosity and passion. And her film is beautifully crafted. There are, in fact, many good reasons to see Midnight’s Children. And for lovers of the book, it may bring the story’s elements magically to life. But the movie lacks the elegance, and coherence, of Mehta’s Oscar-nominated Water, which benefited from a simpler story and strong heroine. In Midnight’s Children, a tale of male rivalry, the female characters lack depth. And the narrative becomes is so farflung it’s hard to know where to invest our emotions. Continue…
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Little Mosque star Zaib Shaikh on why he’s backing Justin Trudeau
By John Geddes - Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 9:33 AM - 0 Comments
When Justin Trudeau holds a rally in Mississauga, Ont. this evening—his Liberal leadership campaign’s first stop in the Toronto suburbs so coveted by strategists of all parties—he’ll be introduced by Zaib Shaikh, the actor best known as a star of CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie. Shaikh also has a role in the new movie Midnight’s Children, Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s celebrated novel.
But he will bring more than a touch showbiz to Trudeau’s event. In keeping with Little Mosque’s themes, and his own background as the son of immigrants, Shaikh is active in groups that encourage diversity. As well, after his marriage last year to CBC English services executive vice-president Kirstine Stewart, he is half of a notable Toronto power couple.
Shaikh spoke to Maclean’s about Trudeau, the new Canadian vote, and political charisma.
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Brian D. Johnson picks TIFF’s Top 10
By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 7:32 PM - 0 Comments
As the TIFF circus folds up its tent, here are my 10 personal favorites from the festival. It’s a subjective list. I watched more than 50 features programmed at the festival, some in Cannes last May. But with so much to see and so little time, there are still bound to be some great movies that I missed. Note that four films on the list are documentaries:1. The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer’s shattering documentary about Indonesia’s 1965 genocide is without precedent—a portrait of mass murder by the perpetrators, proud gangsters who re-enact their crimes for the camera.2. Stories We Tell
Boldly putting her entire family on camera, Sarah Polley unwraps the riddle of her parentage with exquisite craft. Deconstructing as she goes, she turns the home movie, real and faux, into new genre of investigative memoir.3. The Master
Acting doesn’t get any better as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, cast as a L. Ron Hubbard-like cult leader and his unstable acolyte, play truth or dare. Paul Thomas Anderson’s gorgeous 70-mm period epic decants extra-virgin snake oil of the highest order.4. Amour
In a far more subtle fashion, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva give an octogenarian master class in acting. Michael Haneke, best known for visions of human cruelty, gears down with a dire, delicate chamber piece about an aged couple facing their mortality in a Paris apartment. It won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and will likely lead the Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film.5. The Hunt and Beyond the Hills
I’m calling a two-way tie between these European dramas about intolerance, which (like Amour) I haven’t seen since Cannes. Directed by Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), Mads Mikkelsen gives an intense, finely calibrated performance in The Hunt, as a divorced man whose life is ruined after a young girl falsely accuses him of sexual abuse. And in Beyond the Hills, Romania’s Cristian Mungiu tells a horrific but true story of an exorcism performed on a young woman who tries to liberate a nun from a monastery.6. Silver Linings Playbook
Football, mental illness, dance and romance mix with Altman-esque chaos in an off-kilter crowd pleaser from David O. Russell. Bradley Cooper is pitch-perfect as an ex-mental patient who goes off his meds and moves back home to an OCD dad played by De Niro. Jennifer Lawrence steals the movie so deftly we don’t even realize we’re watching a romantic comedy until we’re hooked by the plot’s Hail Mary pass.7. Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tom Ungerer Story
A documentary portrait of the artist as an old man tracks him from his origins as a Nazi-scarred child in Alsace through his various American lives as magazine illustrator, best-selling children’s author, anti-war propagandist and S&M freak. Computer graphics bring his subversive art magically to life.
8. Leviathan
The documentary camera goes where it’s never gone before in this action painting that takes us into a churning, real-time whorl of fish, men, birds and water from the deck-level POV of a fishing boat at sea. This documentary views industrial slaughter with ferocious intimacy. It also batters the optic nerve with dizzying syncopations of light and dark. So it’s hard to watch, but equally hard to forget.9. Anna Karenina
Reunited with director Joe Wright (Atonement), and his adoring gaze, a radiant Keira Knightley brings more depth to Tolstoy’s heroine than you would ever expect. An ingenious adaptation, scripted by Tom Stoppard, frames lush visuals with a trompe l’oeil theatrical setting that, has trains thundering across a proscenium stage.10. Rebelle
Quebec writer-director Kim Nguyen spent a decade bringing this harrowing drama of African child soldiers to the screen. Shot in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s the tale of a pregnant 14-year-old girl (Rachel Mwanza) who is forced to kill her parents and become a child soldier. Nguyen’s camera shies away from depicting atrocities, finding moments of tenderness and humour in a story of authentic horror. Continue… -
TIFF 2012: Literary adaptations: 5 films that were better than the book
By Sonya Bell - Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments
Anna Karenina, On the Road and Great Expectations are all premiering at this year’s festival
'On the Road'
This year’s TIFF line-up has several movies going bravely where many have gone – and failed – before: bringing celebrated literature to the big screen. Adaptations of Great Expectations, Anna Karenina, On the Road and Midnight’s Children are all screening at the festival.
So how do you escape a quick dismissal of “not as good as the book”? Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes are adding star power to Great Expectations. Anna Karenina is the third collaboration between director Joe Wright and Keira Knightley, following up on Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. On the Road’s screenplay is by Jose Rivera, who adapted The Motorcycle Diaries. Midnight’s Children is based on Salman Rushdie’s controversial story of India’s independence, which has never before been made into a movie.
Contrary to high-brow wisdom, some movies are superior to the book. Here are five examples.
5) The Devil Wears Prada: Start with a very average piece of chick lit (sorry, Lauren Weisberger) and cast Meryl Streep as the ice queen magazine editor who terrorizes assistant Anne Hathaway. Who even remembers this movie was a book first?
4) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Yes, the original book was a best-seller – but parts were long, meandering and overly dramatic. By contrast, the movie won an Oscar for best achievement in film editing, and cast a captivating newcomer, Rooney Mara, in the lead role.
3) Requiem for a Dream: This movie took an already dark and shattering book, gave it top-notch performers and a terrifying stringed instrument arrangement. The result? A film about addiction that is far, far more effective than any school’s DARE program.
2) Stand by Me: That oncoming train scene! Those leeches! Rarely can four young actors carry a movie the way this cast carries the adaptation of Stephen King’s coming-of-age novel The Body. Even the author himself gave it two thumbs up.
1) Fight Club: Brad Pitt. Edward Norton. The book is critically acclaimed, but the movie is a cult classic, with the first-person narrative working even better on the big screen, and the twist ending packing twice as much – excuse the pun – punch.
