Feb. 15, 2012 - Issue #852: The Coffee Issue

The country’s finest?

A look at Canada's top 10 flicks

When one has access to a decent number of the many films produced in Canada over the course of any given year, through festival screenings or what have you, the annual unveiling of Canada's Top Ten is almost inevitably frustrating. Particularly with regards to work from lesser-known, first-time or not-especially-connected filmmakers, what's conspicuously absent from CTT is always cause for grumbling—particularly when work from established filmmakers seems to get a free pass. At the same time, CTT is never as predictable as it might seem, and 2011 is no exception: yes, it's kind of impossible to imagine how something as deeply mediocre as Starbuck could have been considered if it weren't for the presence of Quebecois star Patrick Huard—or for the fact that certain people in the industry seem to think that production value is itself something to applaud—but the failure of, for example, Bruce MacDonald's Hard Core Logo 2 or DIY queen Ingrid Veninger's i am a good person/i am a bad person to make the final cut cuts against the assumption that CTT is only a popularity contest.


Of the seven CTT features screening at Metro Cinema over the next two weeks—my apologies for not commenting on the shorts, but I haven't been able to see them—there is at least one film that one might call an underdog: Hobo with a Shotgun, a film that I didn't much care for but which certainly bucks against the likes of Starbuck with its odd fusion of nihilism, sentimentality, low-budget gore and conventional plot structure. Meanwhile, the placement of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is a given—it's also awfully close to a masterpiece, though many of my fellow Canadian critics seem to disagree—as is C.R.A.Z.Y. writer/director Jean-Marc Vallee's Café de flore, which has its moments of genuine emotional resonance but pivots on a high-concept structural device that's kind of a load of bullshit. The other two Quebec films, Guy Edoin's Wetlands and Sebastien Pilote's The Salesman are far more worth the spotlight, even if they might not seem quite as ambitious or, let's say, fully realized as Vallee's.

That just leaves Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz, which may require more defending despite the almost unimpeachable stature of the filmmaker at its helm—we'll see what the consensus is when it gets properly released this summer. The biggest problem with Polley's story of a marriage in peril is the lack of chemistry between its heroine, played by Michelle Williams, and both of the men she's torn between—Seth Rogan plays the husband, Luke Kirby the Other Man. Yet I felt that Polley's immense and at times unnerving insights into the intricate network of problems that beset long-term love, along with Williams' typically brave and intelligent performance, more than outweigh the film's considerable flaws.


As for the three remaining CTT features that didn't make it into Metro's series, Monsieur Lazhar has already opened and both Nathan Morlando's Scott Speedman-starring bank robber biopic Edwin Boyd and Guy Maddin's sublimely demented gangster movie Keyhole are sure to secure some sort of proper release later this spring. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus