|
REVIEW
By David Cornelius
The Amazing Colossal Website
HOLLYWOOD NORTH ***
2004 - R - 89 min. - First Look - dir. Peter O'Brian
THERE'S SOMETHING dependably
funny in seeing the production of a movie go all wrong in a zillion
different ways. Be it real or fiction, getting to watch
as egos burst, millions get wasted, and art turns into trash
always makes for a good comedy. (Oh, it can make for good
drama, too, but the comedy's too easy to pass up.) The
latest in the long line of films about a movie project gone awry
is Hollywood North, a pleasant little comedy set in 1979, when
the Canadian film industry was struggling to find its footing
its own unique voice.
 And how do you make something so inherently
Canadian? You hire an American star, of course. That's
the paradox first-time producer Bobby Meyers (Matthew Modine)
faces when attempting to adapt his favorite novel to the screen.
The novel is regarded as something of a national treasure,
and how appropriate it would be for the film to be an all-Canadian
production. But then the financer (Alan Thicke) insists
that a Hollywood celeb be cast in order to help sell tickets.
Bobby's cornered into hiring Michael Baytes
(Alan Bates), a one-time great actor who's devolved into a gun
nut and conspiracy freak, a hammy lunatic who's pretty much what
you'd get if you took Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson and
squished them into one person, then loaded him up on coke and
locked him in a bunker. Baytes, paranoid about the troubles
in Iran, insists that a complete script overhaul must be done
to make the story a pro-democracy anthem, and soon the quaint
Cuban-set romance known as "Lantern Moon" is now a
gung ho action thriller set in Colombia and called "Flight
To Bogota." Just don't tell the author.
Hollywood North isn't
as clever as, say, the wicked satire of State and Main. But
what the film lacks in bite and originality, it makes up for
in humor and charm. This is a geniunely funny picture,
with big laughs coming from seeing just how bad the movie within
the movie's becoming. And while many moments get a bit
too broad (Baytes eventually becomes convinced that the rebels
of the movie are actually out to get him) or familiar (Jennifer
Tilly plays the slutty costar, a character that offers nothing
new), they're balanced by warmer, quiter laughs from Modine and
Deborah Unger, who plays the gifted filmmaker hired to do a "making
of" documentary. And besides, Bates and Tilly are sharp
enough to be funnier than their material, and for the most part,
they make their punchlines work.
There are jokes I'm sure went over my head,
as I'm no expert on the history of the Canadian film industry.
But the punchline about how America manages to get into
(and ruin) everything is pretty universal stuff, as are notions
of compromise in art, chaos spinning out of control, and, well,
people acting like jackasses. Hollywood North is nothing we haven't
seen before, but it is likable enough and humorous enough to
make it worth the time.
Moviemaking satire turns
into real-life farce
by Martin Knelman
Feb. 8, 2004,
Toronto Star, www.thestar.com
Week after week, movies
arrive with such heavy-artillery promotional bang that their
slogans and teasers infect your brain and make it impossible
for you to forget that they are playing on a screen near you.
Hollywood North - a gently amusing
satire of the Canadian movie business - was not one of those.
It opened nine days ago, and is already on the verge of disappearing.
And chances are you didn't notice it was there. Hardly anybody
did. Which is a pity, because I found much to enjoy in this movie
- especially a memorable comic turn by the great Alan Bates (who
died just a few weeks ago) in the role of a psychotic, paranoid
Hollywood has-been who is parachuted in to prop up a Canadian
movie and who insists on rewriting the script to reflect his
own lunatic political views.
And I'm sure there are other people out there
who would want to see this movie - if they were aware of its
existence.
Indeed, the picture played to an appreciative
audience in the marketplace at Cannes last May, and was thoroughly
enjoyed by Toronto audiences who laughed raucously at two packed
screenings last September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
More recently it has played well at one-night Film Circuit showings
in places like High River, Alta., and St. Thomas, Ont.
- no trailer, no ads, no press screenings
-
So why has its Toronto theatrical release turned
out to be a disaster?
Its distributor, Thinkfilm, booked it onto
two screens - one at Cineplex Odeon's Carlton Cinemas, in downtown
Toronto, and the other at AMC's suburban complex Interchange
30. Why waste money making more prints than necessary?
The theatrical trailer is the No. 1 basic
tool for promoting a movie, but there was no trailer made for
Hollywood North. There were also no radio or TV ads. There
were no press screenings. And there were no interviews in the
newspapers with the stars or the director.
Consider the evidence of Joe Fox, the Star's
movie editor. Fox keeps careful records of all the movies that
are scheduled to open in Toronto, and sometimes has opening dates
recorded months in advance. "We bend over backwards to let
people know when Canadian movies are on," says Fox, "because
we know how hard it is for them to compete with hugely promoted
Hollywood movies. But no one told us about this one. The day
before it opened, I found out by accident while trying to check
some information about another movie. Several phone calls later,
I tracked down the information, but it was too late to assign
a review. The distributor had not notified our movie critics,
Geoff Pevere and Peter Howell, and it was too late for me to
assign a review," Fox says. "So instead, we ran a capsule
Pevere had written for the film festival."
It's only a hunch, but this promotion void
could explain why virtually nobody has gone to see the movie.
The total box-office revenue for the week at the Carlton was
$910. That compares to $9,300 for Lost In Translation -
which is already out on video. Apparently only about 100 people
bought tickets over the entire week. This current week, Hollywood
North is being shown once a day only at the Carlton, at 4:50
p.m. It has disappeared from Interchange 30.
- frustrated and disappointed -
No wonder filmmaker Peter O'Brian - who spent more
than 20 years trying to get this picture made - is frustrated
and disappointed. "We were trying to reach an audience and
get them to have fun and laugh at our film industry," he
explained the other day. But after the events of the past nine
days, he confesses: "I'm not laughing now."
The picture is set in 1979, at the height
of tax-shelter madness, that most embarrassing interlude in the
troubled history of Canadian movie-making. O'Brian was just starting
his own career in those days, and he was never one of the rascals
and scam artists who gave Hollywood North a bad name.
During the 1970s, O'Brian produced several
low-budget pictures of interest. Me, based on a landmark
Toronto fringe stage play, was made for just $98,000. Love
At First Sight starred the young Dan Aykroyd. A racing car
movie called Fast C ompany was directed by David Cronenberg
before he became a cult figure.
During the 1980s, O'Brian was a dominant
figure in Canadian movies. His greatest success was The Grey
Fox, which is almost always included in critics' polls of
the best Canadian movies ever made, and marked the beginning
of his long collaboration with the talented director Phillip
Borsos. (That movie also happens to be on the very short list
of English-language Canadian films that made a profit and returned
its investment to Telefilm Canada.)
O'Brian was also the producer of another
Canadian film classic, My American Cousin , written and
directed by Sandy Wilson. O'Brian's collaboration with Borsos
included the 1985 Disney movie One Magic Christmas and
Far From Home, a film about a missing dog that was a top-selling
video in the U.S. And for years they pursued their dream project
of filming John Irving's The Cider House Rules - which
was eventually brought to the screen by other people. Borsos
died of leukemia in 1995, and O'Brian has not produced a movie
since then.
- Bates is the one you'll remember
-
After years of almost but not quite getting Hollywood
North made, he agreed to direct the film instead, and let
John Gillespie produce it. They managed to get it shot in the
fall of 2002, with the help of several imported marquee names,
on a budget of just under $4 million.
Surprisingly, however, Telefilm Canada -
which was short on funds that year - did not invest in the picture.
Money came from TMN (the pay-movie channel), private investors
and an international sales agent. Another unusual point: The
movie was made without a Canadian distributor. Thinkfilm came
on board after it was shot.
Hollywood North is hardly a masterpiece.
It does not build real momentum and it wears thin in the last
half hour. But those who have a taste for showbiz satire - in
the tradition of The Producers, The Stuntman and
My Favourite Year - won't want to miss it.
The script is a stop-and-go affair, and the
tone is a bit wobbly. Yet the movie keeps you laughing, and it
also has the fringe benefit of giving anyone who cares a cultural
history lesson in what went wrong with Canadian movies.
Matthew Modine plays a long-suffering producer
who takes a deep breath while Lantern Moon, a respectable
Canadian novel set in Cuba, is turned into Flight To Bogeda,
a ludicrous right-wing political conspiracy thriller set
in South America.
The complicated plot involves not just a
movie-within-the movie but a documentary about the making of
the movie-within-the-movie, plus a low-budget movie being shot
at the same time.
Fortunately, the material provides several
good comedy roles, and some notable actors - including Jennifer
Tilly, John Neville, Kim Coates and Clare Coulter - seize their
opportunities. But Bates is the one you'll remember. That is,
if you ever see the movie. It has already been released on video
in the U.S. And one day you may see it in video shops in Toronto.
Make a note of it.
And perhaps 20 years from now, someone will
produce a movie about the idiocies of the Canadian movie business,
circa 2004. It will be a satire about distribution and marketing
- sort of a Canadian version of The Producers, about people
in the business of releasing movies doing so in a way that ensures
nobody will go to see them.
mknelma@thestar.ca
REVIEW
By Christopher Null
filmcritic.com
HERE'S AN IDEA for a Canadian movie: Canadians
make a movie!
Any cinephile knows that Canada's government
will gladly fund the production of just about anything a Canadian
wants to produce, no matter how bad the script. All it takes
is a Canadian cast, crew, and shooting in the country.
In the tradition of The Player and
Living in Oblivion ,Hollywood North chronicles
the creation of a film in which all manner of things go awry.
It starts with a beloved Canadian sitting-room novel reinvented
as an action story. The leading man decides to do his own stunts,
landing flat on his face after a leap from a balcony. The sexy
leading lady has sex with his replacement. Money runs out...
it turns out one of the crew is shooting her own film on the
sly and using the production funds to buy film stock and process
the development.
As cliche as Hollywood North is, it's
also utterly absurd and surprisingly enjoyable for long stretches
(largely thanks to Alan Bates as an eccentric star and John Neville
(Baron Munchausen to you) as the director of the film-within-a-film.
Leading man Matthew Modine is forgettable -- though his sideburns
are ridiculous -- and Deborah Unger (playing the sneak) relies
on her charm to carry her part of the film -- which actually
drives the bulk of the story.
Of course, North ends up as so utterly
dumb you can't help but care little about how its satire ends
up, which is predictably in utter chaos. While Oblivion had
a sense of nudge-nudge style and finesse, North is so
obsessed with the Canadian insider scene and telling corny, '80s-infused
jokes that you ultimately can't help but feel a little sorry
for this movie. |||
|
