Nice Things About Canada

1. We've never had anything like a Boston Tea Party, because we sublimate our rage over taxation into complaints about the weather.
2. Our civil war was a bar fight that lasted just over an hour. One casualty.
3. Our health care system doesn't completely suck.
4. During certain months of the year, you can use the back porch as a walk-in freezer.
5. You can buy codeine without a prescription.
6. One of our national heroes is an old Japanese geneticist who nags us to recycle and use environmentally friendly light bulbs.
7. Canadians invented the peacekeeping force, the Robertson screwdriver, insulin, time zones, the paint roller, and the zipper.
8. Our longest serving Prime Minister was certifiably insane, and sought political advice from deceased relatives and dead housepets.
9. Our federal government includes an Usher Of The Black Rod, who carries an ebony cane used to summon members into the House Of Commons. Our current one is named Kevin.
10. We have 19 political parties at the federal level, only one of which opposes same sex marriage.

For the final day of Movie Month, I'm listing my choices for top ten examples of film-makers making films about films and the making of films. ( Read more... )

Cube, a sort of sci fi/horror/suspense movie which could be the ultimate conspiracy fantasy. A group of strangers wake up to find themselves in a large, empty, square room, with no memory of how they got there. They're people with diverse skills, but very little in common: a man with experience in covert military operations, an autistic savant, a professional escape artist, a mathematician, and others. They begin to explore, and find each side of the cube they are in has a hatch built into it, leading into yet another cube. They work to find a way out, and to discover who has put them there, and why. Weird and suspenseful.

An animated short from the NFB. I first saw it in my teens, and thought it was the funniest thing ever made. Apparently, I'm not alone. People still burst out laughing when you make a reference to the film.
Fortunately, it's less than 10 minutes long, so I can post the entire thing.

Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl is a 1998 Chinese language film, directed and co-written by Joan Chen. It's a sad but very beautiful film.

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Pontypool is a recent Canadian film, based on the popular novel Pontypool Changes Everything, by Tony Burgess. Or rather, based on one sub-plot in that novel.
If Night Of The Living Dead and The Happening got married and had a baby, and that baby was stolen from its crib and raised backstage in a comedy club in Montreal, that would be Pontypool.
Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is the early morning DJ on a local radio station in Pontypool, Ontario, which broadcasts from a church basement. Strange reports start to come in of confused people speaking gibberish and violently attacking one another. As the radio station staff try to confirm these reports, the situation slowly escalates, and they find themselves trapped inside the station.
Technically, I suppose it falls into the category of zombie films, but isn't typical of the genre, and I'm sure a real zombie film enthusiast would find it disappointing. Almost no gore or scenes of violence, for one thing. It's very intense at times, but also contains a great deal of humour, often rather dark humour. It's weird, funny, and unsettling, and captures small-town Ontario uncomfortably well.

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This is a fairly well-known film with a famous cast, but I don't think it's ever received the recognition it deserves.
Based on the novel by Michael Chabon, it follows English professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) through several rather difficult days. Tripp's marriage has just fallen apart, and his married girlfriend has just informed him she's pregnant. His editor is flying in to see how the new novel's coming along; unfortunately, Tripp is in the grip of whatever's the opposite of writer's block, and has produced over 2,000 pages with no end in sight. To top it off, he finds himself acting as unofficial guardian to a talented but sad and withdrawn writing student (Tobey Maguire), who is socially awkward, sexually confused, and just plain weird, may also be a pathological liar and a suicide risk, and who ends up saddling Tripp with a stolen piece of Marilyn Monroe memoribilia and a dead dog. It sounds like one of those awful movies they call 'zany,' but it's not. It's just interesting, and very funny.
The trailer: 

Ran is one of Akira Kurosawa's, so you know it's good. It's a Japanese adaptation of King Lear, telling the story of Lord Hidetora and his 3 sons, greed, ambition, violence, betrayal, unbearable tragedy. It makes any other version of King Lear look like a musical comedy. Intense, but great.
The trailer:

Reposting this by request from Aulic_Exclusiva.
.
.Tell me 28 things about yourself.

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Just curious. They ran this non-advertisement for Michael Moore's new documentary in 4 major U.S. cities. I understand a few audience members actually donated.
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Today's movie is Quiz Show.
IMDB Page
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