This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter. Our Guest Stars shine here
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Contact us here.
Recent Features
The Biography of Ebony White
"People
don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
--Malcolm
X / Malik El-Shabazz, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told To
Alex Haley)
Running
from 1940-1952, Will Eisner's The Spirit
was a newspaper insert back when publishers could afford to do such
awesome things. It features Denny Colt, a detective who comes back to
life to fight crime from his secret hide-out in Wildwood Cemetery.
The Spirit is indeed
everything good anyone has ever written about it—all the joyful
adventure, groundbreaking art and genre play. But then there's Ebony
White, the Spirit's African-American sidekick and driver, all eyes
and lips and minstrel show dialect. And I can barely look at him, even though I know
I should.
Time to check in with a few small-press books. This is where where a lot of people get their start, and it’s
also where the books can live quite happily apart from the concerns of multinational conglomerates.
Right.
So you’ve joined the RWA, and are enjoying the information and
advocacy your membership entitles you to. But National’s a long
way off, and RWA headquarters is in Texas, and you’re starting to
get a little lonely. So what do you do? You join your local
chapter. Where I live, that means the Toronto Romance Writers.
Interviewed about the legacy of Canadian tax shelter films
in Cinema Canada in 1985, Mordecai
Richler said,
"I think they squandered a
grand opportunity and it's largely the fault of producers who were shameless
and greedy, people of dismal taste, who were more interested in making deals
than films and who made a lot of money for themselves. And so Canadian films do
not enjoy a larger reputation anywhere and it's a pity... a lot of damage has been
done."
Well, Mordecai, I couldn’t disagree more.
In this era of Bill C-10 (which may be gone, but which
leaves behind its ideological sediment), and $44.8-million in cuts to
arts-and-culture programs (this in spite of a Conference Board of Canada report
attesting to the economic benefits of investing in Canadian culture), I think
it’s more important than ever to remember and celebrate the genre exercises
upon which our film industry - and the careers of some of its brightest stars -
were built. My Canada includes sleazy movies.
But first, a little primer on the tax shelter years:
Although the late 70s are regarded as the heyday of tax shelter films, a 60%
tax write-off for investment in Canadian films was available from 1954 on. In
1975, Minister of Finance John Turner announced a new income tax regulation
allowing “investors to deduct in one year, against income from all sources,
100% [!] of their investment in certified feature films.” Moreover, it was
retroactive, and included any film productions begun after Nov. 18, 1974. 100%
tax-shelter financing more or less continued until 1982, when it fell prey to
the vicious beast known as distribution. (The preceding is a gross
oversimplification, but for the complete story on what was and could have been,
read Wyndham Wise’s excellent and exhaustive article, Canadian
cinema from boom to bust: the tax-shelter years, from which I’ve cribbed
liberally.)
But by that point, the damage was done. We already had Black
Christmas. Meatballs. Fast Company. Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia.
The Pyx. Russian
Roulette. Strange Shadows in an
Empty Room. And a host of others. Some have
gone on to prestigious DVD releases or undeservedly painful remakes, but most
moulder in VHS bins.
Recently (the day before Canada Day, as a matter of fact), I
had the opportunity to see a trio of these hidden zirconia, and I have never
felt such as swell of patriotism in my life.
The evening started with a screening of The Silent
Partner, in which bank teller Elliott Gould preempts Christopher Plummer's scheme to rob his bank. Several double
crosses and corpses later, Gould comes out on top, and along the way, we’re
treated to an early semi-dramatic turn by John Candy and the
you-can’t-unsee-it-once-you’ve-seen-it sight of Christopher Plummer not only in
a mesh t-shirt, but also in drag. Written by Curtis Hanson and produced by Garth
Drabinsky, The Silent Partner is
easily one of the more entertaining crime dramas of the 70s, which is saying
something.
Next up was Rituals
(check the trailer),
starring Hal Holbrook as one of five doctors who go on a fishing vacation deep
in the Canadian wilderness only to discover that a crazed ex-patient is
tracking them with murderous intent. The plot borrows heavily from Deliverance, but if anything, Rituals looks like it was far more hellish to make - for
most of its running time, the actors trudge through forests and swamps, wet and
filthy, surrounded by hordes of black flies that ain’t CGI. If you can find a
print where you can actually see the action (the one I saw was murky to say the
least), give it watch. You won’t be disappointed.
We rounded out the evening with Death Weekend (trailer!).
A Canadian Straw Dogs, Death
Weekend is one of Ivan Reitman’s earliest
productions, and centres on the tribulations of couple who are attacked by a
group of ruffians at their cottage. If you’ve seen Straw Dogs, you can figure out how it ends. It’s not as
shattering as Peckinpah’s film, but it’s satisfying, and smarter than expected.
But where are the midnight Canuxploitation screenings of
tomorrow going to come from when funding for anything even remotely artsy is on
the chopping block? Especially when there’s no reasoning with the people
holding the axe? As Tom McSorley, Executive Director of the Canadian Film
Institute, recently observed, what lies behind the current government’s arts
funding cuts is “ideological adamant rock… I don't think they listen with any
degree of interest to the fact that the economic impact of the arts is
demonstrably positive.”
Time has been kind to the tax shelter films. The opportunity
wasn’t as squandered as Mordecai Richler would have us believe. A lot of
genuine entertainment, expression and - yes, I’ll say it - art squeezed
out between the lines of the producers’ ledgers, and we’re all richer for it.
It would be great if today’s filmmakers got the same chance. But in the current
political climate, that’s a big if.
I like to think that if Mordecai Richler were being
interviewed today, he might use that descriptor - “shameless and greedy people
of dismal taste” - to describe a group other than the producers of those dingy
celluloid dreams.
I know I would.
Command+s.
Ian Driscoll knows he ran a bit long this month, and doesn’t think this article is going to change
any minds, but he wrote it anyway.
As someone who is part of an organization that is a 'victim' of the recent funding cuts, I applaud you for taking the time to write this article. Sure, it won't change the minds (and I use that term loosely) of the current government, but it's nice to know there are people out there championing the cause.
Kudos, Mr. Driscoll. Kudos.
—Jennifer
Is a sad fact that now, more than a century after the Lumiere brothers gave birth to cinema, the release of a Canadian film made for more than $10 million is immediately worthy of celebrity status. Very few films produced in this country have carried such a large price tag
Is a sad fact that now, more than a century after the Lumiere brothers gave birth to cinema, the release of a Canadian film made for more than $10 million is immediately worthy of celebrity status. Very few films produced in this country have carried such a large price tag
Mojo Champion Storyteller talks about his pulp classic, The Drive-In, including its influences, low-budget 1980s horror movies, East Texas tall tales, television and American politics.
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John Hodgman and Patton Oswalt face off in an epic geek-off for WFMU. Bester'ed, Bova'ed-- two geeks enter, one geek leaves.
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A young woman releases demons and then has to trap them up again with her grandfather's camera in the webseries, Camera Obscura. The trailer looks promising.
Symbol. It's a metaphysical, lucha-loving film by Hitoshi Matsumoto. It's especially funny if you've seen art films with a someone sitting in a plain white room.
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View all Notes here. Seen something shiny? Gutter-talk worth hearing? Let us know!
"People
don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
Time to check in with a few small-press books. This is where where a lot of people get their start, and it’s
also where the books can live quite happily apart from the concerns of multinational conglomerates.
Right.
So you’ve joined the 
Interviewed about the legacy of Canadian tax shelter films
in Cinema Canada