FilmCANon is a new regular feature that explores significant films from Canada’s vaults, in an attempt to examine the notion of a canon in Canadian film, and to trace the leaps and hurdles in the story of our independent-minded national cinema. Our eventual goal is to create a comprehensive database of essays and reviews about Canadian films we believe helped to shape our current cinema and to influence the Canadian filmmakers of today.

In an interview published in This is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich asks Welles what he thinks of Film Comment critic Andrew Sarris’ quote that “Citizen Kane is the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation.” Welles’ response is to suggest that Kane’s immediate influence on cinema was in camera setups and lens choices, but that from a story point-of-view, particularly how stories were told, the influence was minimal. What I think Welles may have been getting at was his frustration with Hollywood’s hesitation to embrace the particular style of formalism that he loved. The great power that cinema affords both filmmakers and viewers is not only to play with time and space, but to fundamentally change how stories are told; that power remained essentially untapped for the first 60 to 70 years of American movies. Even to this day, the vast majority of films coming out of Hollywood use essentially the same form that they always have. If you need convincing, simply pick up any of the thousands of books on how to write a successful screenplay – chances are they will tell you that devices like narration, flashbacks and dream sequences are absolute no-nos.

John Paizs’ Crime Wave (1985) is a film that suggests what might have been if the creative people in studio development departments had been more willing to embrace alternatives to the Syd Field/Robert McKee format of storytelling. For that reason, summarizing the film’s plot is difficult. Perhaps I should start by saying that it’s the story of Steven Penny (played by Paizs himself), described as a quiet man – although silent would be more apt – whose only goal in life is to make the “greatest colour crime movie” of all time. Or, wait a second… maybe the movie is really about Kim (Eva Kovacs), the precocious little girl whose parents rent Steven a room above their garage, and her attempts to help Steven realize his colour crime movie dreams. Kim is fascinated with the idea of having a real-life movie person in the house, however dubious his claims to the profession may be.

In reality, I suspect Crime Wave is about John Paizs learning how to make a feature film as he goes along. Of course, films are, for the most part, written ahead of time and then shot in a non-linear fashion, but watching Crime Wave one gets the feeling of witnessing an artist grow and develop onscreen as the film moves along. This is possibly because Paizs plays the main character, who is himself an aspiring filmmaker, but I’m not sure it’s that simple.

The film starts with different variations of the colour crime movie (also titled Crime Wave) that Steven is trying to write. Steven, by the way, is (according to Kim) fantastic at writing beginnings and endings but not middles. However, we that Steven has one beginning and one ending that he plays over and over in his mind with only mild variations. After befriending Kim, Steven suffers a bout of writer’s block (or perhaps he just gets sick of rewriting the same beginning and ending every night). No longer able to write, Steven seems to fall into an aimless daze, and so does the plot of the film. Steven tries his hand at writing a couple of middles, but, obviously unsatisfied, he quickly deposits them in the trash, where Kim finds them later. The film’s middle sequence naturally becomes similar to the middles that Steven attempts to write: disconnected. Scenes appear like they’re plot threads from another movie. Steven’s room becomes infested with rats, he witnesses some toughs hassling a skateboarder and he attends a party where he doesn’t really connect with the other guests (possibly because he doesn’t speak or possibly because his costume makes him look like a cross between Travis Bickle and Rambo). Life hits rock bottom for Steven when he ends up sitting around his room at night imagining all the characters from his colour crime movie sitting around waiting for something to happen. One of the characters bangs his head repeatedly against the floor.

It’s Kim who pushes the narrative forward by answering (in Steven’s name) an open call for a screenplay collaborator from a supposedly well-known veteran screenwriter named Dr. Jolly (Neal Lawrie). Dr. Jolly replies to Steven suggesting a meeting between the two and offering some sage advice: “middles have twists.” After a night of partying with Kim (the party and aftermath sequence is one of a few scenes that begin to suggest something darker and slightly unsettling between Steven and Kim’s seemingly innocent friendship), Steven sees the word “twists” appear before his eyes as he falls asleep. The next day Steven is off on his big road trip to meet Dr Jolly. Here’s where the film’s stylistic and thematic elements begin to grow. The camera setups become bolder, the lighting scheme more complex, and the narrative delves deeper into the darker territory that was at first only suggested. There are, of course, a series of increasingly outlandish and illogical twists that propel the film toward something that resembles a conventional conclusion.

If my description of the final third of the film sounds a little similar to the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze meta-romp Adaptation (a film that famously directly tackled the Robert McKee format), then maybe you can see what I mean when I suggested that Crime Wave is really about John Paizs making a film. In the end, Paizs and his alter ego Steven Penny become indistinguishable from one another. Is Crime Wave (the film that we’re watching) the same Crime Wave that Steven is writing? And how much of Crime Wave is Kim’s invention?

Kim is an interesting character. Her voiceover narration, which makes up most of the exposition in the film, occasionally reflects Sissy Spacek’s narration in Terrence Malick’s Badlands: she alternates between being incredibly perceptive and missing the point entirely. It’s also worth noting that both films deal with a young girl’s crush on an adult misfit, and Kim’s veneer of naïvety also suggests a narrator more skilled at withholding information than revealing it. Her cheerful, seemingly obvious comments don’t always match up with the action we’re seeing, especially when dealing with her and Steven’s budding friendship.

Welles loved unreliable narrators and their ability to tamper with an audience’s expectations. Twisting memories and stories are at the heart of a number of his films, particularly Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin and F for Fake – three of Welles’ most formalistic films. All three of those films suggest the way the storyteller, and not just the story, can be used to develop dramatic tension.

Crime Wave’s formalism is both a blessing and a curse. The simple rhyming style of editing, the childish music which segues occasionally into darker territory, the expository-heavy narration and the utterly amateurish acting all work well within the context of the film, but I highly doubt they convinced many people within the industry that Paizs could work well in a conventional setting.

And yet 12 years later, after a stint in television, Paizs directed Top of the Food Chain, a low budget sci-fi comedy that emulated the style of old 1950s B-movies. When Paizs spoke before a recent screening of Food Chain at the Royal Cinema in Toronto, he demurely responded to a number of auteurist-themed questions by stating that on Food Chain he was simply a director-for-hire, attempting to serve a screenplay he found amusing. To that end, Food Chain is certainly a more stylistically straightforward film than his debut Crime Wave. And although Food Chain is a hilarious movie in its own right, it lacks many of the bold flourishes that made Paizs such an interesting emerging director with Crime Wave. In hindsight, one is left wondering what Steven Penny and Kim might have done with the same material, and the same career.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan, 1964

“Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination.
You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.”
Brian O’Blivion, 1983

In his recent films, David Cronenberg has been steadily moving away from science fiction, and it’s a bit of a shame he’s chosen to do so before making a big Internet film. If there’s any filmmaker who has the ability to wring a masterpiece out of our mutating relationship with the online labyrinth, it’s Cronenberg, and as much as his post-2000 period has produced some excellent cinema, I can’t help but feel that in turning to psychological drama at this point his career, he’s missing a chance to make a definitive statement on how Facebook is a giant virtual wound in which we are all accumulating like pus.

If the one recent Cronenberg film that qualifies as addressing digital culture, 1999’s eXistenZ, seems like something of a shrug, it might be because its thematic predecessor still feels so potent and visionary. Produced in 1983 – barely six years after JVC introduced the VHS format into the North American market, and six more before the creation of the World Wide Web – Videodrome is astonishing in its grasp of how fundamentally the culture of the transient image would come to change the way we apprehend and understand the world. The film itself parodies so-called media “prophets,” but it’s hard to resist applying the label to Cronenberg himself, who wrote the script (notably, a task he wouldn’t tackle again until eXistenZ) about a sinister pirate television signal that causes bizarre hallucinations and (possibly) physical transformations in those who watch it.

James Woods plays Max Renn, owner of low-budget TV station CIVIC-TV, which programs soft-core porn and violence to cater to its audience’s baser tastes. (Torontonians will note the not-coincidental resemblance to their own local peddlers of the late-night blue screen.) Bored with Greek orgies and dildos in kimonos, Max goes in search of “something that will break through… something tough,” and uses his roof-mounted satellite to tap into an illegal channel that shows nothing but a shot of a rust-coloured room in which young girls are whipped, electrocuted and generally tortured to death by a pair of hooded wraiths. He’s intrigued by the feed, and his interest deepens when he shares it with his new lover, Nicki Brand (Blondie’s Deborah Harry), who works as a patronizing radio show counsellor, dabbles in masochism and admits on live TV to be living in a “highly excited state of overstimulation.” To find the source of the images, which bear the title “Videodrome,” Max consults Masha (Lynne Gorman), a pornography merchant with connections in the “subterranean grapevine,” who eventually leads him to Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), a McLuhanesque media guru who refuses to appear on TV, “…except on TV.” Soon, Max begins to feel strange – “I think I’m gettin’ like a rash or somethin’” he tells his secretary – and realizes something is wrong when his television seduces him into a heated session of face fellatio via its newly penetrable screen. 

Like Atom Egoyan’s early work, Videodrome is a movie full of screens; it’s often been noted that many of the main characters make their first appearance on a TV screen.  Unlike Egoyan’s films, however, which often posit the screen as an alienating barrier, Videodrome is in keeping with Cronenberg’s particularly sensual style of horror in its conception of the screen as a physical membrane, as evinced most clearly by its famous tagline: “Long live the new flesh!” Here, screens are not only the mediators between reality and audience, but a connective tissue that grafts physical mass onto the flickering map laid out by (in 1983, at least) the cathode ray tube.

Sickness is one of Cronenberg’s favourite themes, and the changes caused by watching the Videodrome signal are eventually revealed to be causing a tumour in Max’s brain. However, the horror usually associated with disease – again, in keeping with other Cronenberg projects, especially The Fly (1985) – is tempered by a sense of possibility, a consideration of disease as evolution. This balance between fear and seduction is where Max Renn finds himself perched like a man trying to stand on a seesaw, petrified by his loss of control but at the same time open to manipulation that promises to enhance his power.

The notion of a simulated reality – of, as Brian O’Blivion puts it to Max in their first private video meeting, a reality that consists of “total hallucination” – is an idea familiar from postmodern theory, notably Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, which posits that reality has been superceded by a system of signs constituted by the media: the media does not conceal reality, but rather creates it. Baudrillard’s most famous statement, that “the Gulf War did not take place,” has drawn some ridicule from those who dismiss it as po-mo hogwash, but Simulacra and Simulation’s thesis looks more vital every day: as millions collect “friends” via social networking sites – many of them people with whom they’ve had no physical interaction for years, and may never have again; as politics increasingly becomes a game of televised (and now, YouTubed) spin; as we spend more and more time experiencing the world through snippets of video posted online, building relationships with half-real characters from the video blogosphere the same way we do with half-real characters from so-called reality TV, the question of how much of our lives has been transferred to video – how much of our reality is “video hallucination” – is not just potent, but fundamental to understanding the way we now operate in the world, and what impact it has on concerns raging from our treatment of the natural world to the very ways we think and learn.

None of this is news. The point of repeating it is to show just how forward-thinking Videodrome’s ideas, even those that were conceived as parody or satire, were for 1983 – but also to ask how the film should be read in the context of Cronenberg’s recent output, his would-be entry into the world of mainstream drama (versus, say, gynaecological horror, non-linear heroin narrative or abstract visual fetish poetry). It’s worth noting that, with A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), Cronenberg has begun to directly address and analyze the boundaries and meaning of genre film through an adoption of certain genre conventions. In genre – where Cronenberg (before he was “Cronenberg”) used to reside, at least according to shapers of the established canon, and if only because his subject matter was considered profane and therefore unsuitable for inclusion in the ambiguous umbrella of the topical mainstream – we find the ultimate in constructed reality, where whole universes (and furthermore, whole styles of universes) have been built parallel to the accepted creed of reality and its cinematic familiar, dramatic naturalism. Cronenberg’s move from the worlds of Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999), in which alternate reality was a product of external forces (drugs and video games, respectively), to the purely psychological blurring of identity and reality found in Spider (2002) and, in more subtle guises, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, suggests that the director may have willingly followed Max Renn into the world of total hallucination.

For Cronenberg, it is no longer feasible to operate within the constraints of genre as a transgressive otherworld. Just as for Max Renn television becomes reality, for Cronenberg, genre has become reality; in Baudrillard’s terms, the simulacra has so fully replaced the real that truth is now to be found through full immersion in it, wherein transformation is accomplished not via technology, but within the individual, from character to character. A History of Violence’s Tom Stall is an alien, but one generated by the host mind itself; the same goes for Eastern Promises’ Nikolai Luzhin, a thug who rides in the body and over the mind of the Russian Secret Services officer working for Scotland Yard – which two identities are on the verge of becoming inseparable as the film closes. The “realities” Cronenberg builds in these films, which are surely considered by many to be more “realistic” than the one represented in Videodrome – vaginas that suddenly open in your stomach are just so far-fetched – are in fact highly stylized, self-contained worlds based in genre formulas, in which total hallucination is normal, even inevitable, and there is no feasible way to get back to what previously constituted reality. Tom Stall and Nikolai Luzhin are Facebook profiles made flesh: there is no one left who really knows them, not entirely, and their lives are now artificial social systems built beyond the frontier of the screen. And so we have it: maybe Cronenberg has made his Internet film – it’s just that the border back to reality is no longer visible. To once again quote Brian O’Blivion, “After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality… is there?”

Videodrome will surely continue to be worshipped as a “text,” but it’s important to remember its value as a film, as well. After all, that’s the reason it has managed to maintain such staying power; its ideas are infectious, but it’s only through the images conceived and captured by Cronenberg and cinematographer Mark Irwin that they are given power – just as with Videodrome the pirate video signal, if no one was interested in watching, its effect on the mind wouldn’t matter. Indeed, credit goes to all of Cronenberg’s longtime contributors – composer Howard Shore, editor Roland Sanders, Production Designer Carol Spier – all of whom have followed him through the membrane of the Videodrome into his new worlds, pushing creative limits and producing a celluloid muscle that is among the strongest organs in Canadian culture. Despite the ambiguity of the meaning and the sentiment, it is ever so tempting to end with the classic line that ends Videodrome – “Long live the new flesh!” – but it seems more pertinent to instead quote the director himself, in an interview with SPLICEDwire in 1999: “Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure expression of human creative will.” The same, perhaps, can be said of Cronenberg’s films: for all their seeming strangeness and obsession with the grotesque, they are us – and in their ambition and willingness to look beyond the horizon of the feasible, we should find, I think, a great deal of hope.

“The subtle scent of ripe grapes is wafting through the October air as I drive through the morning, talking to myself, the lake on my right visible through the trees. And I’m saying things like ‘Sometimes life is tough going, slow and sticky, like trying to swim through molasses. Sometimes a wave you made 20 years ago becomes the same wave you’re trying to cut through today.’”
Michael McFadden, A Trip Around Lake Ontario

The best shot in the history of Canadian cinema – not simply my favourite – starts, of course, with the shot before it. David McFadden, an insightful, wordy, and hardened 40-year-old author completing a series of books about road trips around the Great Lakes, chugs a plastic gallon of orange juice in a close-up. He’s driving his recently fixed red Triumph convertible, heading along the American side of Lake Ontario, as part of the 23-minute film’s dénouement.

The (Canadian) money shot in question begins next – at about the 20 minute mark –  from a view behind and above McFadden’s car, as he passes a garbage truck (inexplicably) driving in the adjacent left lane of the single-lane river route. From the height of the garbage truck, McFadden swerves toward the truck, handing off his empty carton to a young garbage man riding the back. The man tosses the jug into the truck, naturally, and as the car speeds ahead, the camera follows and pans toward the garbage man, who gleefully smiles at the camera, saluting in affirmation that he was more than happy to play his small part.

This particular shot – or its sequence if we’re to include the close-up of McFadden drinking the OJ, which was shot later, director Colin Brunton notes – is exemplary of the earnest playfulness of the entire short film. In a movie full of self-reflexive glances into the camera – most often involving staid portraits of unique faces encountered en route – this is a strong moment of encouragement to continue the mythmaking process not only for the re-hydrated McFadden, but also for Canadian cinema itself.

For director Brunton, A Trip Around Lake Ontario (1985) marked the beginning of a transition from general wise-ass punk taxi driver into full-fledged producer of some of Canada’s most significant independent films of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Much of the credit for the success of ATALO goes to the visual team of Director of Photography Peter Mettler (who would shoot Egoyan’s Next of Kin the following year, and his first feature The Top of His Head in 1989), and with camera assistant Douglas Koch (Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard The Mermaid’s Singing, 1987). The cut of editor Brunton and the eye of Mettler are inescapably meshed, with the edit deserving of praise for holding onto shots that Mettler himself seemingly never stopped shooting.

“I do remember some semblance of structuring around what was largely an improvisation. David (McFadden) himself was improvising around the simple structure of a travel around the perimeter of a lake. Colin and I followed suit. I liked this approach of course, and I had just done my own diary film Eastern Avenue which was similarly improvised but had no central subject - only the perception of the viewer/me.

I don't know that I ever have thought of the OJ shot since then but when you mention it, it is all clear. Just a moment in time when the camera is running and things happen - like the kid pointing the rifle at me which we later realized had a cartridge in it. I wish I could
always just go around and film, the world is the richest when you are just open to seeing and reacting.

I also remember spending a lot of time sitting on a roof rack on top of a van. Kind of like flying around with a camera. I think the OJ shot must have been from up there.
We also cruised into the US border crossing like that, first scaring then ultimately interviewing the border guard himself. Those were the days - before face recognition cameras and finger-printing...”
Peter Mettler

This instinctual approach – intrinsic to the material at hand – nets both great montages entering or leaving locations, but most of all really helps emphasize the portrait-structured, first-person voice-over perspective, and the extraordinary task of making something up about the shores of Lake Ontario.

“Falling never used to hurt so much. My failed marriage is much on my mind today, with fantasies of what might have been.”
Mike McFadden

In the scene previous to the infamous best shot ever, we watch as McFadden, in a stupor over the impending end of his trip and the slow but sure progression of his life, walks the rocky outcroppings of Lake Ontario. Just as he’s about to reminisce over his failed marriage and (very likely self-imposed) loneliness, he actually falls on the rocks. Mettler’s camera, as in the rest of the film, lingers, capturing McFadden slowly crouching, finally getting up and brushing himself off, and walking on. The one-minute single take, with eerily sad prog soundtrack accompaniment by Nash the Slash, dissolves into a glorious focus pull out of glistening water to a barren tree in the foreground.

“Everything in Ontario is a different shade of grey.”
Mike McFadden

Structure is a game subverted repeatedly (wandering voiceover and POV; direct to camera portraits; multiple levels of narration), yet also classically employed when needed (square-dancing and greasy spoon montages). In the diner scene, an introduction to “America the way it’s supposed to be,” an older waitress tries to deliver a plate of eggs to the camera operator, who remains the prototypical fly at the table, moving back as much as possible, as she smiles and accommodatingly places the eggs across from him. ATALO’s heavily self-reflexive design echoes mock-doc convention of future Canadian films like Brunton’s 1987 Gemini short winner The Mysterious Moon Men of Canada, Roadkill, produced by Brunton and directed by Bruce McDonald, the Don McKellar starring short Arrowhead (1994, Peter Lynch), and even the recent The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico (Michael Mabbott) or It’s All Gone Pete Tong and FUBAR (Mike Dowse). In each case, the lead character, also the viewer’s “guide” through the film, is acknowledged as a historical fabricator, somehow unworthy of our complete trust, though possessing a fascinating secret within the realm of his particular daily existence.

In ATALO that character is a writer, McFadden, narrating the film, the characters in it, and also offering commentary both alongside and on the visuals. The unique portrait device that captures most of the subjects involves a slow zoom into a tight frame of a character’s face, usually silent, occasionally laughing; some conscious of the camera, some unsure. McFadden accompanies these portraits with voiceover narration that acts as the voice of the viewer’s elbow-nudging co-conspirator, riding shotgun with the camera – rarely in scenes himself, but just as often present through these aural sketches based on remembered exchanges or fabricated scraps of dialogue. At one level existing as the voice of McFadden reading from his novel-to-be, it’s most enjoyable for its earnest, repeatedly melodramatic attempts at poetic contextualisation of his encounters. McFadden’s delivery isn’t perfect either, but somehow the combination of a red-haired Ontario writer taking up the challenge of the film/book’s story arc – charged with the unfathomable task of romanticizing the five inland, fresh-water anchors of Ontario – is novel enough to tag along for the ride.

What I ultimately love most about this particular cinematic trip is the unbridled enthusiasm for the multiple possibilities of cinema: the potential for the frame reflected in Mettler and Koch’s bucolic imagery, the editorial faith to see those images through long takes, as well as to embrace an unorthodox direct-to-camera technique in production and post, and legendary Nash the Slash’s genre bending (blues, swing, square-dance) synth-pop (reminiscent of, 20 years later, the Handsome Furs’ anti-urban tech-rock).
Brunton subsequently worked with Bruce McDonald, producing first Roadkill (with a beginning scene that could literally be a continuation from the final shot of ATALO), then Highway 61, and line or executive producing other big budget features including Hedwig The Angry Inch and Cube, and a whack of TV comedies. In spite of his forays into television, he’s always kept an ear to the independent music ground, co-directing and producing Jandek: Duality of Self (SXSW 2007) and currently working on The Last Pogo Jumps Again: Cha Cha Cha. Many members of the key creatives involved in ATALO have gone on to successful industry careers as well, namely Mettler.

The turtle at the end of the film, trying to cross the road against all odds, is the perfect reflection of both the hopeless process of contextualizing ancient Canadian landforms from a modern perspective, and more significantly of the importance of playing with the idea of land as the significant history of Canadians. Though McFadden’s trip concluded with the five lakes, the viewer’s uncertainty of the turtle’s future leaves open the hope that Brunton mythologizes a few more great lakes sooner than later.

Anvil is a heavy metal band that was last popular in the early 80s. Unlike all the other headbangers, however, the members of Anvil continue to live their dream without critical or financial success. Inadvisable? Yes. Inspirational? Also, surprisingly, yes. This documentary strikes a chord even if you never wanted to be a rock God.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil centres on founding members Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner – best buddies since they were teenagers – and their odyssey to recapture the brief success Anvil enjoyed thirty years ago. The film opens with famous musicians like Slash and Lars Ulrich opining on the importance of Anvil to heavy metal, and theories on why the band never made the big leagues. Cut to Toronto, present day, and the lads of Anvil have grown into greying delivery men and construction workers. They play gigs on weekends and continue to record albums, but Anvil's future is bleak. Hard rock is a young man's game, and Anvil's members are way past their marketable prime. Everything seems destined to finally, perhaps mercifully, decline until an email suggests the possibility of a European tour. With little to go on but a wing and a prayer, Anvil packs up their gear and heads to Europe.

From this point on, the film is a roller coaster ride of huge expectations and crushing defeat. The European tour in particular is alternatively hilarious and heart breaking. Clashing egos, bad tour managers, skipped payments and empty venues test the band's mettle. Reconciliation and appreciative fans give the band strength. And even when they are yelling and throwing tantrums, the members of Anvil are likeable; their ignorance is somehow endearing. Lips, especially, is reminiscent of a muppet – part Animal, part hoser – who remains eternally optimistic in the face of defeat.

Visually, the film is very well shot and the editing is strong. Concert footage features song snippets but thankfully cuts out loud, extended tracks. The film's director, Sacha Gervasi, was a roadie with Anvil on one of their early tours and obviously has affection for his documentary subjects, though he never makes the uninitiated feel left out. This is not a geeky inside story that will only appeal to metal heads. The larger questions in the film – questions about personal fulfilment, fame, respect and selfish needs – can apply to anyone in any walk of life. We've all felt the desire to shake off our nine to five jobs and become the person we dreamed about when we were teenagers. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, I'm glad Anvil is out there, rocking it out for the rest of us.

Emoticons is an hour-long documentary that takes a look at how isolated teenage girls use the Internet. Social networking sites link girls who are bullied, misunderstood, depressed or ignored, so that they can communicate with each other. Some of the girls find real friends who give them the support they may lack at home or school. Others use the internet for autonomous advice and entertainment.

Director Heddy Honigmann uses webcams to conduct many of the interviews in her film. Not only is watching people on a computer visually boring, but there is something almost creepy about Honigmann, seen always partially in shadow, using chat rooms to coax her young subjects into telling us why they're lonely. Is it okay for teenagers to chat with each other but not, necessarily, to adults (or perhaps it is the absence of adults that sends teens to the Internet in the first place)? To be fair, Honigmann also uses traditional in-person interview techniques with her subjects. In these segments, however, the cinematography remains flat and uninteresting.

The subjects of the film are varied in their particular situations but they share hardships any teenager could recognise. The desire for acceptance while feeling alienated is a universal teenage experience. The fact that teens now connect over the Internet is a valid point, but not very surprising. I don't want to give the impression that I couldn’t relate to some of these kids, or that I was insensitive to their problems. I was just too aware of what I was supposed to feel, with the film giving emotional cues as obvious as an awkward slow motion hug. Also, some subjects were forced through to not very satisfying conclusions, while other teens were dropped from the narrative without reason. In the end Emoticons felt a little too distant and disjointed to have any real impact. 

Who knew a film about a Neil Diamond impersonator would be so fraught with pathos and tragedy? I went into the screening expecting to have a few laughs and maybe gain some insight into the competitive world of tribute artists. I didn't expect the sympathy I came to feel for Mike Sardina, his wife Claire, and their family. Much like the song in the title, this doc stays in your head long after the credits roll.

Of course, Mike and Claire Sardina are pretty unforgettable people. Stationed in Milwaukee, they eke out a living at bars and parties as the duo "Lightning and Thunder". Mike (Lightning), is a completely committed Neil Diamond impersonator and musician in his own right, and Claire (Thunder) provides backup vocals and steals the spotlight with her occasional Patsy Cline covers. They are in love with performing and the promise of fame. They have fans who follow them over the years and across the midwest. On stage, they are an entertaining mix of enthusiasm and corn ball dramatics.

Off stage, however, the Sardina family is unravelling at the seams. Although obviously in love, Mike and Claire go through a bizarre accident that leaves Claire dependent on painkillers and in a deep depression. As she goes, so does the family, and the intimate access granted to the film makers (supplemented by home videos) gives a front row seat to the resulting dysfunction.

Without giving anything else away, there is redemption, of sorts, for the family. Through all the hardships Lightning and Thunder remain committed to their music and to each other. This is a strangely epic story told on a very small, almost suffocatingly close scale. It's an exploration of family dynamics, personal struggle, and even the American dream. It’s a surreal and often strange journey, but one that leaves the viewer with more than just old pop songs to contemplate.

Everyone is more than happy to (re-)discover lost works of art - be it from an old attic and yielding a high quote on Antiques Roadshow, or even more specialized, including the subset of curious members of humanity compelled to discover all ranges and manners of subcultures, looking for the inspiration behind more well-known artists. In the case of Arthur Russel, an avant-garde American cellist, songwriter, and producer, his rather recent popular re-assessment seems more like a necessary gestation period for his miraculous sounds to wash out at sea, and ferment in the soil. So contemporary does his sound feel, World of Echo being the standout (re-)release of his catalogue to date, that you could picture him as the lonesome opening act for countless indie bands circuiting the globe in search of connections, if not fame.

It’s true that director Matt Wolf manages to frame Russel’s story without the conventions of talking head musicologists, openly declaring after his screening at the ROM in Toronto that he wanted to make a specific (one imagines ‘personal’) portrait of Russell, one that meant excluding anecdotes music geeks like to play connect the dots with, but don’t always serve a complete narrative. And, for the most part, Wolf’s story arc of Russel’s actual life - acne scarred youth in Iowa; retreat to a Budhist temple in San Francisco; collaborations with Allan Ginsberg and associations with Phillip Glass; musical director of The Kitchen in NYC; early disco savant producer; complications with AIDS in the 80’s – is told through well shot, well planned, and properly edited segments that evoke effective emotions Exemplary art direction takes the re-creation of key moments in his life – Russell riding the Staten Island Ferry with an 80’s walkman, listening to his mixes alongside the water; a copy of The Iron Horse, an out-of-print Coach House Books publication by Ginsberg, on a table in his teenage Iowa room – to another level, partly through the use Super 8 and even 80’s era VHS camcorders to convincingly re-create archival footage.

But what none of these artifices do, despite their seamless integration into the film, are really explore the divine intentions and inspiration of Russell – his desire to transcend the form of pop music alongside the audience, into a realm of simple, ethereal sound. And while the film tells that Russell was grating and difficult - an obsessive re-mixer of his own songs, never feeling any piece was complete - the film itself too often comes to easy conclusions of the traditional, misunderstood staggering genius. If not narratively, even a structural echo of Russell’s inner world of demented angelic reverberations could have taken the subject to another level; but as it is, given Russell’s incessantly innovative re-working of both popular and avant-garde music, Weird Combination feels, by contrast, like a rather conventional snapshot.