Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

I've no doubt. I'm just airing out the Canadian perspective of how we usually refuse our own.



But this also might even be a generational thing. Rock is probably about 15 years or more younger than me and it's possible he didn't grow up with the national insecurity complex most people my age felt when it came to Canadian contributions to the arts. Maybe the youngers embrace Canada as a cultural force (as my generation snorts at them through so many shameful tears)

No. We’re embarrassed too.

Also, Crumb, if you ever want to stop liking Donald Shebib, you should check out his new one. Yeesh.

Just watch Goin' Down the Road. Twice. And don't worry about anything else.

I think I kind of have to watch this though, though.

It’s essential viewing if you want to see what it looks like when an 80 year old man who doesn’t understand smartphones wants to make a movie about hookup apps, with worse production values than a CBC show.

Very fair.

But I encourage you to give Blood and Donuts a spin at some point. It has a lovely spirit.

That sounds hilarious.

It was an extra awkward experience because several rows of the theatre for reserved for friends and family of the filmmakers. So I definitely had to stifle my laughter a fair bit.



Art Hindle was genuinely good in it, though. The one saving grace.

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Seriously, y'all have:

Joni Mitchell
Oscar Peterson
Neil Young
Leonard Cohen
Feist
Gordon Lightfoot
Rush
The Guess Who
Diana Krall
David Cronenberg
Donald Sutherland
Christopher Plummer
Leslie Nielsen
Ivan Reitman
Denis Villeneuve
Norman Jewison
Ivan Reitman
George Romero
...

I mean, I think that list alone is enough to forgive Nickelback. Hell, Joni alone overwhelms the Nickelback situation.

This shame is mostly directed towards films. We've had patches where our music is a bit of an embarrassment too (mostly during 90's rock, where Canadian radio was forced to play something like 60% music from our homeland, and we simply didn't have that much material, so we would be inundated with absolute crap). But we know we've got a lot of musical talent here, ultimately.



As for that film shame, as long as the director goes to America to make his movies, we're all good. But we are astonishingly resistant to watching our own films that were produced here. And, usually for good reason. Our movie system is seemingly broken. We make a lot of really bad movies. Only for a brief period, where Canadian tax dollars were actually awarded to Cronenberg to make his early films (causing a huge controversty), did things seem to be going to right way. And I imagine the Cronenberg fiasco is what quickly derailed that from continuing. I'm sure a lot of people deeply resented their money going to fund Shivers.

Shit, I wish my tax dollars were so well spent.

I don't understand. But that's okay. Sometimes it is totally fine to stand on the other side of the glass, watching a film unfold, and just peer at it. Even when you don't know what is happening, you can still feel things if the movie is good enough. And this one is

Work severely limited my ability to really watch that much this October, but at least I finished the month with two favorites I hadn't seen in a little bit.


Rosemary's Baby remains the gold standard for the paranoid. Few films convey the terror of suspecting everyone you know has turned on you, but not trusting your instincts enough to be sure. And essays should be written about John Cassavetes in this. The true villain. And what a pitiful specter he is wallowing in the shadows.


And then The Haunting. As much a haunted house film as it is an exploration of a haunted woman. The horror of the film exists almost solely in Julie Harris's performance where her loneliness is so nauseatingly palpable, even the most sympathetic of viewers can't help but turn on her. She exists standing just outside of all the living players in the film, leaving her to be preyed upon whatever is no longer living. A staggeringly unsettling character study, and the purest representation of Shirley Jackson's very partivular voice in film.

I owe The Haunting a rewatch because my big takeaway was how annoying Julie Harris was. But between West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles and The Body Snatcher, Robert Wise is firmly in my good books, so I owe the movie another chance.

Also, glad to see you celebrated the holiday with a movie starring our lord and saviour, Charles Grodin.

Out of curiosity, how would you compare it to The Tenant?

I love The Tenant, and it's even weirder and more visceral vibes are closer to my general aesthetic, the perfection of RB, not only in its arty flourishes, but also in its conventional greatness (acting, script, storytelling, dialogue, black humor, music), make it much harder to deny. Plus, I have all sorts of nostalgia for it. I've been loving it since I was about 7 years old


I generally place Rosemary's Baby in my top 10 films of all time, and nothing about my rewatch dampened that.

It's a movie that I don't think can work unless you are on board tolerating Harris' performance. A tragic character who wants empathy, and maybe deserves it, even though the likely response from anyone watching her behaviour is a total understanding of why she is so alone. Why everyone rejects her. The horror of the film resides in watching such a vulnerable person falling under sway of the only place on earth that seems to want her...a house that has fallen under the spell of some kind of undefinable evil.



I know there are good examples of this kind of character in other movies (maybe Travis Bickle...not a great example though) but I'm mostly drawing a blank. In real life though, a modern version of her character would basically be the kind of undesirable you have on your Facebook who keeps posting batshit conspiracy theories. You feel bad for them, for how vulnerable they are to this kind of nonsense, but you also understand why society has ostracized them to the point that the only people who seem to be listening to them are other crackpots on the internet. And how this can be a vicious cycle that causes a person to become more and more alienated from the real world.



For me these are the perfect kinds of character for horror films, even if in real life you wouldn't want to spend ten seconds with them.