Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

"It's true that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but the emperor doesn't like to be told it, and the emperor's lapdogs like The New York Times are not going to enjoy the experience if you do." – Noam Chomsky

With the media frenzy that surrounded Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 911 (2004), it is interesting to observe how the controversy that swirled around it (Disney backed it financially but wouldn’t distribute it) had been documented in the press. It made a film like Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) all the more relevant more than ten years after its release. Noam Chomsky is a soft-spoken professor at MIT who has become quite a vocal political activist and critic of the American media. He believes that ordinary people can comprehend and act on the issues he raises, but this is not always an easy task because of the thick web of deceit and doublespeak that the government creates to blind us from "elementary truths" that are right in front of us.

However, he believes people are indoctrinated to be apathetic so that they don't want to make the effort that is needed to see what is really going on. And the media doesn't help either. In fact, one might say that they promote this sense of apathy by showing redundant, repetitive sitcoms and reality shows that turn us into mindless couch potatoes. Now, you might be thinking, this sounds like a lot of conspiracy theory garbage, but Chomsky does not look, act or speak like some crazed conspiracy nut. He is an intelligent man who talks to a BBC reporter the same way he would talk to an ordinary person. Chomsky is a clear and concise speaker who backs up everything he says with an ample supply of facts and unfaltering logic. He is a man dedicated to uncovering the deception and atrocities that are committed by governments all over the world and teaching others how to become aware of and act on these acts.

With funding from the National Film Board of Canada, filmmakers Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar followed Chomsky around the globe for five years. The result was a two hour and forty-five minute documentary that explored Chomsky's view of the media and his relationship with it. The film acts as a sort of "stepping stone" to Chomsky's books, which are filled with pretty heavy concepts and a lot of information to absorb. The film doesn't water down his ideas, but rather represents them on a visual level so that they are a bit easier to grasp.

The film wisely begins with Chomsky’s origins so that we can get a handle on who he is and where he came from. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928, his parents taught Hebrew and as a result Chomsky became fascinated with literature, reading voraciously at an early age (often borrowing 12 books out of the library at once). He grew up during the Depression and was surrounded by a frightening amount of anti-Semitism, which were probably the roots to him championing the cause of the underdog. Growing up, Chomsky would take the train to New York City and hang out at anarchist bookstores on Fourth Avenue, which exposed him to working class ideals and culture. He learned all about politics and how to organize and fight back against oppressive institutions, which he would employ later in life.

Chomsky started as a linguist with the publishing of Syntactic Structures in 1957, which offered a radical new way of looking at grammar. He began to look at language and behaviorism. The established belief at the time was based on the writings of B.F. Skinner who stated in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, that "the control of population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies." Skinner suggested a control of speech, creating strict rules for us to follow to make the world a safer place. These rules are really restrictions to ensure that people say what is politically correct so as to ensure advancement. Anyone who deviates or questions the party line is punished.

Chomsky disagreed with Skinner's theory, effectively saying that we are not living in a democracy where the power is exercised by a population free of hierarchy or ordered classes, but actually living in a "regime of dictatorship," as Michel Foucault says. The most powerful class uses violence and coercion to control the masses. Chomsky criticizes these powerful institutions for the abuses they perpetrate on weaker nations and exposes the subtle and not so subtle ways that they go about performing these actions. It is important that we understand, as he puts it, the "nature of power and oppression and terror and destruction in our society," and combat it. The United States in particular, is guilty of all of these abuses, and we are guilty for sitting by and letting it happen.

Once Chomsky realized that the government and media were working hand in hand to support this system of behaviorism, he decided to take an active role. His first major action as a dissident was participating in a weekend anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon on October 19-21, 1967. He was arrested and ended up sharing a cell with Norman Mailer. From that point on Chomsky has never looked back, releasing countless books criticizing the U.S. government, its foreign policy, and how periodicals like The New York Times push these covert actions under the carpet and out of sight from the public.

Chomsky has always remained a sort of character on the fringes, never getting any real media exposure. He has never enjoyed the limelight, emphasizing his ideas more than himself. To this end, he avoids becoming a role-model for other people, instead stressing that you can change your own life. Chomsky rarely does T.V. because it is a medium that does not conform with his way of speaking. He will make a radical statement and then have less than two minutes to support it. Chomsky just does not fit into the two commercial time slot of Nightline. However, on those rare occasions where he does get his time to speak, like on Bill Moyer's show, A World of Ideas, he garners a huge response. Chomsky's appearance generated over 1,000 letters and more requests for transcripts than any other show in the series.

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky reveals that all major decisions over what happens in our society are controlled by a heavily concentrated network of corporations, conglomerates and investment firms. This network also has considerable influence over positions in the government. Just looking at the big Savings and Loans scandals that plagued the U.S. years ago reveals this link. Corporations also own the media and therefore decide what we watch and hear for the most part. They control the resources and as a result show only what is in their best interests. This is achieved by propaganda or the "manufacturing of consent," a term borrowed from political philosopher and journalist, Walter Lippmann. Manufacturing consent is a technique of control over the masses — in other words, propaganda or the creation of necessary illusions to marginalize the general public or reduce them to apathy in some form. The news media participates in this manufacture of consent by simplifying, selecting, and dramatizing events. Propaganda affects not only the masses, but is targeted at what Chomsky calls the "political class," approximately 20% of the population who are educated and articulated decision makers. These are teachers, managers and so forth — people who vote and whose consent is crucial. The rest of the population follow orders, are apathetic, and rarely vote, therefore paying for their inactions by living in impoverished conditions.

The national media for example, The New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, or CBS set the general framework for local media to adapt to. The national media ignore and place emphasis on certain issues, in effect shaping history. Another great trick of the trade is rhetoric. Everyone knows about the military doublespeak used in the Persian Gulf War, but the government used it long before then. During the 1980 and 1984 elections, the Reagan administration blasted the Democrats as the "party of special interests," which was negative because special interests were considered a bad quality. However, upon closer scrutiny, they listed special interests as: women, poor people, workers, young people, old people, and ethnic minorities — everybody, but corporations because they belonged to the national interest, and everyone is in favor of that. So, people voted for a person who was against the population and who supported corporations.

Perhaps the most effective part of Manufacturing Consent is a case study of how selective the U.S. media is of what they report. They usually support the party line, rarely criticizing their actions. There are always exceptions to the rule, but the most startling case of selective reporting by the U.S. media is the simultaneous genocides in Cambodia and East Timor between 1975 and 1978. In Cambodia during these years, the Communist backed Khmer Rouge wiped out thousands upon thousands of people, which received tons of press coverage because it was backed by our official enemy. What the press barely covered was the period before that (1973-1975) when U.S. backed forces were wiping out the people of Cambodia. That period was described by the U.S. press as a tranquil, peaceful time. While the Communist backed genocide was occurring in Cambodia, a genocide on a comparable level was taking place in East Timor, a little country north of Australia between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It was hardly covered at all in the U.S. press because it was backed by the U.S. government. They provided 90% of the arms to the Indonesian forces and Ford and Kissinger were even near the area prior to the invasion, but conveniently delayed the attack so that their hasty departure would not look suspicious. By February of 1976, approximately 60,000 people were killed in East Timor. When 1978 rolled around, the killings were approaching real genocidal levels with around 200,000 people dead.

Coverage in The New York Times had a definite bias. Between 1975-79 the Times spent only 70 column inches on East Timor, while 1,175 column inches was dedicated to Cambodia. These stats are just of index listings and don't even cover the length of the actual stories which would probably show an even more dramatic gap. The Times made the excuse that they couldn't possibly cover every story with the same detail and depth, but this act was on such a devastating level that it should not have been ignored. And it wasn't ignored in the international press. Australian media in particular, deserves a large part of the credit for keeping the story alive. At least six Australian journalists lost their lives covering the story that the U.S. media tried to bury.

Manufacturing Consent goes on to not only identify this problem of manufacturing of consent, but how to fight back. Wintonick and Achbar take a look at various forms of alternative media, from the successful independent publishers, South End Press to Alternative Radio that is dedicated to reporting events that the U.S. media conveniently ignores and giving people like Noam Chomsky more exposure. The film has certainly exposed Chomsky's ideas to a wider audience creating a sort of cult following in Canada and in Europe where he is more popular than in his native United States.

The film doesn't talk down to the viewer and brilliantly conveys Chomsky's ideas on a visual level utilizing all forms of media. The directors also dedicate time to show some of Chomsky's detractors like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Tom Wolfe who come across like pretentious bullies while Chomsky appears calm and rational in response to their vicious, snide attacks. They are ironic scenes that add more credibility to Chomsky's views.

Manufacturing Consent received positive reviews from critics at the time. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Whether or not you agree with Mr. Chomsky's conclusions, his reading of the American scene is persuasive: that the government is most responsive to the wishes expressed by the minority of citizens who vote, which is also one of the principal points made by John Kenneth Galbraith in his recent book The Culture of Contentment.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson wrote, “With regard to this journey, Manufacturing Consent makes an excellent starting point. With it, Achbar and Wintonick have made a significant and timely contribution to the debate. Even if their arguments are not wholly persuasive, their movie is well-supported, confidently reasoned, imaginatively presented and, without a doubt, seductive." The Chicago Sun-Times gave the documentary three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "Ultimately, we shouldn't judge a film like this on whether we agree with its positions, but on how well it presents them. On those terms, Manufacturing Consent is a brilliant success. It casts a haunting, post-1984 glow with its use of video imagery – Chomsky's talking head is seen, among other places, atop Times Square and on a giant amalgamation of screens. At the same time, it plugs into a deep, humanist belief in the people's ability to change things.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle wrote, “The documentary is a good movie in different ways. For one thing, it's an admirable piece of film making that provides satisfying visual contexts for what is essentially three hours worth of ideas. Though the film begins to strain in the last 20 to 30 minutes, Manufacturing Consent is often fascinating and never boring.”

When asked about the documentary, Chomsky’s biggest gripe about it was that he felt it portrayed him as a leader of a movement for people to join: “I don't think the medium can make people understand that if they film me giving a talk somewhere, that's because somebody else organized the talk, and the real work is being done by the people who organized the talk, and then followed it up and are out there working in their communities. If they can bring in some speaker to help get people together, terrific, but that person is in no sense ‘the leader.’ That somehow doesn't get across in a movie – what gets across is, ‘How can I join your movement?’ And then I've got to write a letter which is a big speech about this. So I am ambivalent about it.”

Manufacturing Consent is a fascinating look Chomsky and his ideas that are guaranteed to provoke discussion. It also makes one want to check out some of his work and sparks a desire to wake up and realize what is going on in our society. The film is a real eye-opener to the behind the scenes mechanics of our government and the media and how little we realize what they are really up to. The film does not dip into tabloid or conspiracy depths, but presents a logical and intelligent analysis with a good sense of humor that is often missing from such material. Chomsky is a man who sincerely believes that we can identify and react to the problems in our government and media, but realizes that it cannot be done by just one man, it will take a massive grass-roots organization. First, people must be educated and this is hard because it is so easy to do nothing. Realizing that there is a problem is the first step, correcting it is the next.

 
This documentary is available to download at the Internet Archives.

Friday the 13th: The Series

In the late 1980’s, Frank Mancuso Jr., then caretaker of the popular and profitable Friday the 13th series of films, decided to branch off into a television series but without the hockey mask-clad killer Jason, much like John Carpenter’s decision for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) to not feature Michael Myers. Of course, we all know how well that went over with fans of that particular franchise so most were expecting history to repeat itself with the Friday the 13th show. After much publicized growing pains, the show hit its stride towards the end of the first season as it followed the adventures of a trio of antique store owners searching for cursed objects. It became the second highest rated first-run syndicated show for the much coveted male 18 to 49-year-old demographic, just behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show went on for two more season before being cancelled and now enjoys a dedicated cult following.


After their Uncle Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) leaves them his antiques shop, distant cousins Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay) and Micki Foster (Louise Robey) discover that it houses all kinds of supernatural-endowed objects. In the pilot episode, they attempt to sell off all the items in the store, not realizing their otherworldly properties. Pretty soon they meet Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a friend of their recently deceased uncle and supplier of several of the items in the store. He informs them that the items they sold were cursed and together discover the store manifest. It turns out that Lewis made a pact with the Devil for some of the items in the store. And so, Jack, Micki and Ryan have to locate and retrieve each item before they do too much damage to their new owners.

First on the list is a possessed doll belonging to a spoiled brat of a girl (played by a very young, pre-The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Sarah Polley). Pretty soon the doll turns homicidal a la the killer toys in Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987). “The Baron’s Bride” features a cursed cape that transports a newly turned vampire as well as Ryan and Micki to Victorian England for striking sequences that are shot in black and white so as to evoke classic horror films with Bram Stoker featured as a prominent character. This is perhaps my favorite episode of this season and shows how the show’s producers were able to get a surprisingly atmospheric and cinematic look on a low budget.

“Faith Healer” was directed by none other than horror auteur David Cronenberg and features a smoke and mirrors miracle man by the name of Stewart Fishoff (Miguel Fernandez). In the opening scene, he’s exposed as a fraud by Jerry Scott (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman), a friend of Jack’s. However, Fishoff discovers a magical glove that can transfer someone’s physical ailments to innocent people, killing them. Naturally, he abuses this ability for dubious personal gain, becoming famous on T.V. as a result. Jack happens to catch Fishoff’s theatrics on T.V. and discovers that the glove is a cursed item. Cronenberg’s trademark skepticism for power hungry public figures is channeled through the amoral Fishoff. This episode is anchored by a strong performance from Robert Silverman whose character, as it turns out, has his own agenda. He brings an eccentric style of acting that gives the episode emotional resonance, especially when he comes up against Jack and their friendship is put to the test.

“The Quilt of Hathor” is season one’s magnum opus, a two-parter about a cursed quilt that allows whoever sleeps under it to dream to death their enemies – Satan’s security blanket perhaps? However, it turns out that the quilt was created by Salem witches. Ryan and Micki travel to a village populated by Amish-like people. He even ends up falling in love with the preacher’s daughter in a forbidden romance a la Witness (1985), albeit with a supernatural angle.

Genre veteran Billy Drago stars in “Read My Lips” as Edgar, the owner of a supernatural ventriloquist’s dummy known as Oscar. The dummy forces Edgar to kill and before you can say Child’s Play (1988), their act has become a success. In an intriguing twist, Micki and Ryan discover that the dummy derives its powers from a cursed boutonniere that was actually used by Hitler in occult ceremonies. Edgar manages to break free from Oscar’s influence and the dummy latches onto a new owner, show biz wannabe Travis Plunkette (John Byner). Freed from playing one-note villains, Drago displays a refreshing amount of depth, imbuing Edgar with a twinge of tragedy.

“Scarlet Cinema” is an atmospheric homage to the classic Universal horror films with a geeky film student (Jonathan Wise) obsessed with The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains. He discovers a cursed movie camera, which allows him to realize his own lycanthropic aspirations and get revenge on some of his classmates. There are even clips from the actual film integrated into this episode in order to show how closely this guy identifies with it. Highlights include the footage that manifests itself within the cursed camera, shot in black and white just like The Wolf Man. The use of noirish lighting during the night time scenes on campus are excellent, enhancing the cinematic feel of this episode. The tense, final showdown between our heroes and the film student are juxtaposed with the actual film for quite an exciting finale.

John D. LeMay plays Ryan as an energetic goofball and a bit of a geek who is eager to believe in the supernatural, while Robey’s red-haired Micki is beautiful and the resident skeptic. In some respects they anticipate the dynamic between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files by a few years. Ryan and Micki’s relationship with Jack, the older wiser mentor and bookish type, also anticipates a similar one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer between Buffy, her friends and Giles, the school’s librarian. The Curious Goods antiques shop with its cursed objects that often fall into the wrong hands with disastrous consequences seems to evoke the one that all the stories revolve around in the classic British horror anthology film From Beyond the Grave (1974).

From its inception, Friday the 13th: The Series was never intended to have ties to the series of films of the same name and was intended to exist in its own world. It was originally called The 13th Hour among other titles but the show’s creators – Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams – soon realized that to survive in first-run syndication they needed a title that created awareness and curiosity. So, they took the title Friday the 13th from the popular horror film series and came up with a whole new idea around it. This was the first time that Mancuso had produced a T.V. show and he admitted that it went through some growing pains during the first season as “it took the first three or four episodes to figure out what we did and did now want to be doing.” He felt that it wasn’t as cinematic looking as he would’ve liked and they didn’t get the right mix of humor either. Mancuso candidly admitted that the show’s three protagonists were not fully developed and were often overshadowed by the flashy FX. However, he did feel that towards the end of the first season the show became more character-driven.

However, there was plenty turmoil behind the scenes as the show had a very rocky start. The budget for the FX was not very large and so screenplays featured 10-60 effects shots with only ten days of pre-production, forcing the crew to work fast and improvise when necessary. In addition, filming in Toronto, Canada forced the production to adhere to regulations of 50% Canadian talent. To make matters worse, a disgruntled former employee claimed that the story editors took control of the show, dictating the amount of special effects used leading to a breakdown in communication. Head of the FX department Michael (The Dead Zone) Lennick left the show after four episodes during the first season because of the long hours he worked for wages that did not reflect the time and energy he put it in. FX artist Al (Brain Damage) Magliochetti also left around the same time for similar reasons and cited the conflict between Mancuso, who wanted an effects-heavy show, versus producer Iain Patterson, who did not, and this resulted in confusion as to the direction the show should take.

Friday the 13th: The Series was the second highest rated syndicated series male 18 to 49-year-old demographic after Star Trek: The Next Generation. For its second season, the show moved from late-night to prime time going up against the likes of Freddy’s Nightmares and yet another incarnation of the Twilight Zone. Friday also enjoyed a significant increase in budget allowing for more elaborate sets and a wider variety of locations.

Despite some cheesy effects (check out the floating monk in “The Poison Pen”), the first season featured episodes directed by notable Canadian filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and the aforementioned Cronenberg. Along with genre shows like War of the Worlds and Freddy’s Nightmares, Friday the 13th: The Series pushed the envelope for what was known at the time as “acceptable content” with its depiction of violence, gore and sexuality on T.V. It was also part of an exciting mini-invasion of Canadian T.V. along with Diamonds, Night Heat and Degrassi Junior High. Its legacy continues on with shows like Warehouse 13, whose premise seems like a thinly-veiled copy of Friday the 13th: The Series with a goofy young man and sexy woman duo seeking cursed items with the help of an older mentor type. Regardless, Friday has endured with many episodes standing the test of time, featuring thought-provoking ideas, clever premises and a striking cinematic look that anticipated shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I think it’s safe to say that the show has finally gotten out from under the shadow of its more famous cinematic namesake and deserves to be regarded among some of the best genre T.V. that the 1980’s had to offer.

Note: Check out this fantastic fansite dedicated to the show.

Top of the Food Chain

After a 15-year hiatus from making feature films, Canadian auteur John Paizs returned with a wickedly funny, little-seen 1950’s alien invasion parody, Top of the Food Chain (1999). He was no stranger to deconstructing genres as he had satirized the B-crime/noir previously with Crime Wave (1985). However, this film actually featured two recognizable name actors with Campbell Scott and Tom Everett Scott. Sadly, they could not save this gem from obscurity where it has been languishing on home video. However, it was the beginning of a cycle of films that parodied ‘50s B-movies, along with Psycho Beach Party (2000), The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001), and more recently Alien Trespass (2009). For my money, Paizs’ film is the funniest of the bunch as it pokes fun at the repressed attitude towards sex that was indicative of that era and brings the kinkiness right up front with hilarious results.


The town of Exceptional Vista looks like the aftermath of a George Romero zombie invasion: deserted, abandoned cars littering the streets with run-down-looking buildings everywhere. It seems that the Fine Nuts factory (“The finest nuts in the western central northeast.”) closed down and moved to Left Hemisphere some time ago with almost all of the other businesses following suit. What a perfect spot for the beginning of an alien invasion! A hapless fisherman is the first victim when he encounters a beautiful woman who asks him, “Would you like to perform the copulatory act with me?” The fact that her come-on is right out of a science textbook should send up a red flag but it’s too late for this backwoods angler.

A few of the remaining townsfolk hang out at the general store where they complain about the lack of television reception. Among them is Mayor Claire (Bernard Behrens), a character who seems to be channeling Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy with incredulous exclamations like, “By the beheaded John the Baptist…” or “By the blessed fruit of Mary’s womb!” The beautiful Miss Sandy Fawkes (Fiona Loewi) shows up with news that Dr. Karel Lamonte (Campbell Scott), the most brilliant atomic scientist at the atomic academy, will be staying at her motel. She encounters him lurking at the back of the store, perusing a pig fetishist magazine (called Pig Parliament no less?!) He is the typical brainy scientist albeit with some kinky twists that become apparent later on.

Dr. Lamonte soon encounters other significant townsfolk. There’s Officer Gayle (Hardee T. Lineham) who takes an instant dislike to the professor. Guy Fawkes (Tom Everett Scott) is Sandy’s dimwitted brother with whom she seems to have an incestuous relationship. Also staying at the motel is Michel O’Shea (Nigel Bennett), a little too-friendly traveling salesman who specializes in vacuums. In most alien invasion films it is the people who act strangely that we suspect are from another world but in Top of the Food Chain everyone is odd.

While hiking through the lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town, Dr. Lamonte discovers the decomposing remains of someone and dutifully informs Gayle and the mayor. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are being picked off by the aliens. Just who are they? Is it, as Mr. O’Shea speculates, some sort of man-eating Sasquatch-type thing roaming the countryside, or quite possibly a gang of genetically engineered serial killers, possibly devil worshippers?

Campbell Scott doesn’t do many comedies but displays fantastic comic timing in this film as a straight-laced (sort of) scientist. The actor nails the stuffy, uptight archetypal ‘50s egghead with uncanny fidelity, right down to the authoritative voice all these characters seem to have, which makes his kooky dialogue that much funnier. The 1990’s were a great decade for Scott as he appeared in such diverse fare as Singles (1992), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), and The Spanish Prisoner (1997). Top of the Food Chain demonstrated his knack for broad, farcical comedy.

Canadian television screenwriters and co-producers Phil Bedard and Larry Lalonde (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues) were looking for a director with the right sensibilities for their unusual screenplay and happened to catch John Paizs’ first feature film Crime Wave one night on pay T.V. and were taken with its deadpan humor and faux-Technicolor look. They wanted Top of the Food Chain to have the same look. Afterwards, they knew he was the right person for the job. He was sent a copy of the script in 1994. Paizs developed his comedic sensibilities directing episodes of the T.V. show The Kids in the Hall whose oddball, often surreal humor was perfect for this film. He described it as “an amalgam of a certain kind of rural comedy and the 50’s sci-fi picture. Or as a sort of cinematic platypus.”

The filmmakers called Campbell Scott’s agent and asked if he was interested in being in the film. He was drawn to the project for the chance to work with Paizs after seeing and enjoying Crime Wave, and to also dispel the notion that he was not funny. He also had a fondness for old ‘50s monster movies and used to watch them on T.V. as a child. “It was perhaps the only era where science was considered sexy.” Lalonde and Bedard had previously cast Fiona Loewi in the T.V. series John Woo’s Once a Thief and were impressed with her work and cast her in the film. She had done a lot of dramatic work and was drawn to this film for the chance to do something different, funnier.

Top of the Food Chain took years to finance because it was such unusual project but producer Suzanne Berger found a wealthy investment banker in New York City who wanted to invest in a film. Scott signed on a week before production began and this helped secure the last bit of financing the filmmakers needed. The film was shot over five weeks in the summer of 1998 in a former G.E. factory in west-end Toronto. Paizs encouraged Loewi to improvise and she “sexed up the character to a degree not seen on the page,” the director remembered. She said, “we were allowed to experiment – Campbell and I would make up our own little bits.”

The production mostly eschewed CGI in favor of old school prosthetic and animatronic effects mostly because of the small budget they had to work with but also to give the film a campy, retro feel. F/X and makeup artist Paul Jones tried to keep the opticals to a minimum, “so all the transformation in the movie is in the camera.”

In his review for Variety, Ken Eisner wrote, “Not everything in the script works, but there's so much irreverent, movie-loving stuff flying at you, it hardly matters. Real belly laughs come only occasionally, but the chortle-out-loud factor is almost 90%.” The Montreal Gazette’s John Griffin wrote, “With any justice in this darned old world it will become the cult movie about cult movies by which all cult movies about cult movies are judged.” The Toronto Star’s Peter Howell wrote, “Paizs and his cast obviously had a ball making this film; at times they can barely keep straight faces. But they make this cheeseball roll, if a little too slowly at times. Most impressive are the retro-riffic special effects, which are better than you'd expect for a movie with a budget of about $1.98.” However, the Calgary Herald’s Katrina Onstad wrote, “Despite some smiley moments and good intentions, Top of the Food Chain never generates the big laugh payoff. In comedy, that's an issue.” In his review for the Village Voice, Dennis Lim wrote, “the movie seems curiously off-target, like a spoof of a spoof, and for every moment of throwaway lunacy, there are too many that turn Mystery Science Theater-style lampoon into heavy lifting.”

No matter how ridiculous things get (and they get pretty wacky), the cast plays it straight, never winking knowingly at the camera, which makes the crazy dialogue they say even funnier. Bedard and Lalonde’s script is very clever with many laugh-out loud moments. These guys are obviously big fans of ‘50s B-movies as they serve up many of their clichés and then poke fun while also celebrating them. This is an affectionate satire. They have a deliciously warped sense of humor that comes out in their dialogue, which apes the often stilted speak of those old films. Much like Psycho Beach Party would do a year later, Top of the Food Chain takes all the sexual subtext of those old B-movies and brings it right to the surface with hilarious results. It is one of the funniest, little known alien invasion spoofs with a perverse sense of humor that gives it an added zing. When it was released on home video in the United States it was unfortunately renamed Invasion! and deserves to be the kind of cult film that people quote from fondly.

 

Roadkill

Growing up in Canada I never fully appreciated Canadian cinema. Oh sure, I liked the films of David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Strange Brew (1983). They were able to break out of the ghetto that is Canadian cinema and actually make an impact in the United States and the rest of the world. It took being in another country to finally appreciate what I took for granted so many years ago. Whenever I got homesick I put on a film like Roadkill (1989), which is fiercely proud of its Canadian culture, and it reminded me of home. Roadkill is the first part of a loosely connected rock ‘n’ roll/road movie trilogy by Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald. The film was something of a breath of fresh air when it debuted because Canadian film had, up until then, been traditionally known as notoriously boring or, worse, derivative of American cinema. McDonald managed to fuse the low budget aesthetics of the emerging U.S. indie film movement with a distinctively Canadian take on the road movie genre.

Ramona (Valerie Buhagiar) is a naïve assistant who works for a slimy rock promoter named Roy Seth (Gerry Quigley). He orders her to travel through Northern Ontario and find delinquent rock ‘n’ roll band The Children of Paradise and their enigmatic lead singer, Mathew (Shaun Bowring). The band has gone AWOL and missed their last four gigs. Seth tells Ramona to terminate their contract once she finds them. If this premise sounds familiar, it should, because it more than resembles the structure of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) albeit as a comedy. Ramona, like Captain Willard, is a lone protagonist assigned a job she doesn’t want but can’t refuse. She has to navigate dangerous terrain and encounter all sorts of odd characters. Along the way she even writes her thoughts down in a diary that is conveyed to the audience in the form of a voiceover just like Willard does in Coppola’s movie.

Roadkill has the grainy, black and white film stock look of a low-budget independent films, like Stranger than Paradise (1983) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), to name just a couple of examples. The road movie format is a familiar genre and one that lends itself to the no-frills attitude of independent film because everything can be shot on location with very little money having to be spent on constructing sets. This format also gives McDonald and screenwriter Don McKellar an excuse to introduce all sorts of colorful characters. For example, Ramona meets a documentary crew led by none other than Roadkill’s actual director (he would do this again in Hard Core Logo) who is supposed to be making a music video on the band but ends up coming across more like a riff on Dennis Hopper’s crazed photographer in Apocalypse Now.

This type of film also allows McDonald to show off the Canadian landscape and play up the stereotype of a harsh, desolate environment that is comprised mostly of wilderness. Like he would later do in Hard Core Logo (1996), the director establishes a sense of place and seems to be gently making fun of it while simultaneously romanticizing the trademarks of the Canadian climate. This romanticism also translates to his view of the characters, in particular Ramona played with loads of charm by Valerie Buhagiar (whom McDonald was courting at the time of filming). For all of the gonzo humor of the film, McDonald cares about the character of Ramona, and this comes through in a wonderful scene where she hangs out with a young man (Mark Tarantino) and his friends in an abandoned drive-in. They dance to the sad, soulful music of the Cowboy Junkies with only the headlights of their cars as the source of illumination. The scene is a touching respite from the random weirdness of the movie.

McKellar’s screenplay also contains some very funny dialogue that occasionally plays on the stereotypical image of Canada forever living in the shadow of the United States. McKellar plays Russel the Serial Killer (although, he hasn’t killed anyone yet) and delivers a monologue partway through the film that acts as a funny riff on the cultural war between Canada and the U.S. “I’m a serial killer … It’s more of an American thing, traditionally, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s like everything else, there’s this colonial attitude about it. That if you want to make it you’ve got to go down to California or something. But I’m going to change all that.” Russel figures that the only options he has to get out a small-town are either becoming a serial killer or a hockey player (but he’s got “weak ankles”). It’s an inspired character with little details — like his business cards and a beeper where he can be reached — that makes him so memorable.

In late 1988, McDonald was a film editor working on films for Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing and Speaking Parts) and Ron Mann (Comic Book Confidential) and trying to come up with an idea for his first film. He was a big music fan and decided to make a documentary about an underground Toronto-based rock band called A Neon Rome. According to McDonald, the lead singer had, “this kind of Iggy Pop thing going, the Iggy moves and [Jim] Morrison kind of tone, I guess, in terms of their songs.” McDonald raised the money for the documentary and then, approximately six weeks before he was supposed to go on the road with the band, the lead singer shaved his head and took a vow of silence. He would sing on stage but would not do interviews. The band broke up and McDonald called screenwriter Don McKellar and told him he had money to make a film. They thought up a story about a woman looking for a band.

McDonald proudly populates Roadkill with all kinds of Canadian music. Children of Paradise, the fictitious band in the film, were played by local band Teknakullar Raincoats while neo-folk band the Leslie Spit Treeo and New Wave electronic musician Nash the Slash have cameos as themselves. The latter musician also composed the film’s score and said at the time: “I’m not interested in competing with the whole video and single business, so in scoring this, I got to do some of my most satisfying instrumental work.” According to Peter McFadzean, the film’s music coordinator, the idea was to use the music to enhance the film, and “use the film to enhance the music.”

At that year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Roadkill won the Toronto-City Award for Excellence in Canadian Production and $25,000. McDonald delivered the now legendary acceptance speech: “I hope with the $25,000 I can buy a cure for my hangover. Twenty-five thousand bucks is going to buy me a big chunk of hash. So tell those guys waiting in the back alley with the pipes that everything’s going to be OK.” The Canadian press generally warmly received the film. The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “Roadkill is a woman’s Easy Rider, also a doper’s remake of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, also a nod to Goin’ Down the Road.” Conversely, in his review for the Toronto Star, Peter Goddard wrote, “It’s a hustler’s move, a movie that has you thinking, ‘Hey, what a big dumb hunk of nothing this is,’ only to suddenly snap you awake with something so neat and clever you start to realize you’re being had.”

Roadkill is an excellent example of Canadian cinema. While it adopts a distinctly American genre like the road movie, it remains uniquely Canadian in content (except for a cameo by Joey Ramone) and attitude. Bruce McDonald remains one of the unsung heroes of the Canadian film scene, often overshadowed by its better-known figures, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Denys Arcand. McDonald has remained fiercely independent over the years, supplementing his film career with a prolific one in Canadian television. Roadkill is an excellent example of his early work and an engaging, entertaining film in its own right.

Comic Book Confidential

Often regarded as just for kids, comic books finally gained a modicum of respectability in the mid to late 1980s with the rise in popularity of titles like Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Maus to name but only a few. Harlan Ellison’s seminal essay, entitled “Did Your Mother Throw Yours Out?”, in the pages of Playboy magazine also helped wake up the mainstream to what comic book fans had known for years – that they were not strictly for juveniles and that they dared to explore complex issues, like the depiction of violence, what it means to be a hero and even using the medium to tell personal, meaningful stories. Around this time, Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann made Comic Book Confidential (1988), a primer, of sorts, for comic books, tracing their origins, documenting their near-extinction and their maturation into a viable art form.

In a nice touch that establishes the playful mood of the documentary, an illustrator does the opening credits as we watch him assemble what was the film’s poster. What better way to list all of the interview subjects than in the medium they work in? Right from the get-go, Mann establishes his unique approach. Not only does he have his subjects talk about their work but he also has them read a sampling as well. As they are doing this, he crudely animates the artwork from which they’re reading and includes sound effects and music in an attempt to free the images from the static confines of the page. It’s a ballsy technique that divided people within the comic book industry (see The Comics Journal coverage).

Mann takes us back to 1933 and the birthplace of comic books with William M. Gaines recalling his memories of the medium’s first baby steps. We meet groundbreaking pioneers like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner who helped create the grammar of comic books and gave birth to iconic characters like Captain America and The Spirit. Ever the eloquent elder statesman, Eisner talks about what the medium did for him: “I was a frustrated writer, frustrated painter. Here, for the first time was this marvelous opportunity that happens to any creative man once in a lifetime. Suddenly there appears a medium, a receptacle, that can take your ineptitudes in both fields, put them together and come out with an eptitude.” It says something when Eisner, reading over moving panels of The Spirit, complete with sound effects, is more effective in conveying the comic book than the entirety of the recent, big-budget live-action film by Frank Miller.

The 1950s saw the rise in horror comics like Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and so on. Gaines talks about his run-ins with censorship thanks to conservative watchdogs like Dr. Fredric Wertham who led the charge to have them cleaned up. Mann includes hilarious vintage footage warning people of the dangerous effects of comic books. Publishers decided to self-censor and created the Comics Code, which drove the horror comic books underground. This led to a return of superhero comic books in the 1960s with the rise of Marvel Comics and Stan Lee’s incredible stable of titles: The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, and many others.

On the flipside, underground comic books that reflected the thriving counterculture at the time began to emerge with Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, Spain Rodriguez’s Trashman and Gilbert Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. This portion of the documentary is fascinating as this period of comics isn’t talked about much anymore but these titles really reflected their times and paved the way for the rise of the independents in the ’80s. The cautionary tale that comes out of this time is when Dan O’Neill took on Disney with The Air Pirates, which dared to satire Mickey Mouse. He was sued for his troubles and taken to the cleaners.

Mann also takes a look at an often overlooked aspect: female comic book creators and interviews Shary Flenniken, Lynda Barry and Sue Coe who weren’t afraid to address controversial subject matter in the 1970s, like capital punishment or honest examinations of relationships between men and women or addressing girls coming of age. Women seem to still get short-changed in this medium and it would be great to see a documentary dedicated exclusive to their work, expanding on what was started in Comic Book Confidential.

Mann takes a look at the rise of indie comic book companies and artists that were interested in documenting their own lives, like Harvey Pekar with American Splendor or that of marginalized cultures like Jaime Hernandez with Love and Rockets. These titles are more authentic, slice-of-life stories with rich characters that eschew the endlessly formulaic costumed superhero genre. In the ‘80s, Art Spiegelman strove to have comics regarded as legit art with a European or even avant-garde sensibility. His magazine Raw really pushed the envelope and wasn’t afraid to experiment with how it was presented, not just visually, but in terms of texture (type of paper used, etc.) as well.

One of my favorite subjects comes from this period – Charles Burns who does the kind of stories and art that evokes David Lynch if he decided to work in comic books instead of film. Burns reads from one of his stories where a kid confronts horror under the façade of suburbia. Frank Miller comes in near the end and talks about how he made superheroes relevant again by radically reinventing Batman by returning the character to his darker, more ruthless roots but with a contemporary spin that reflected ‘80s America.

The idea for Comic Book Confidential came in 1985 when Ron Mann’s friend b.p. nichol got him into comic books and he subsequently attended a major comic book convention in San Diego. Mark Askwith, who had worked at Coach House Press, a previous subject of a Mann documentary, pitched the idea of a documentary to Mann who was interested. Originally, it was a love letter of sorts to Marvel Comics but Askwith felt that Mann would be drawn to underground comic book artists as well and with nichols help, the documentary began to take shape. Mann actually started work on it while making an electronic press kit for the Ivan Reitman comedy Legal Eagles (1986). He secretly used the studio’s resources, including their crew, money and film stock to interview the likes of Will Eisner and Jack Kirby during his off hours.

Mann also interviewed a wide range of subjects that never made the final cut, including musician Frank Zappa and important figures in comic books like Carl Banks, Julie Schwartz, and Trina Robbins. Mann was very protective of his subjects and recalled the difficulty he had interviewing legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby in his twilight years and whose memory was very slow: “As I was leaving Jack Kirby’s house, I rolled down the window of my car and unspooled and exposed the film and threw it out on the highway because I didn’t want anybody to see it – because I didn’t want anyone to see Jack Kirby that way … I went back three or four times, just to get a section of Jack Kirby where it was coherent.”

Comic Book Confidential received mostly positive notices from mainstream critics. In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott found the film, “culturally energizing, the cinematic equivalent of listening to one of the ‘bad girl’ groups of the early sixties – when you realize that so much irreverent satire, straightforward iconoclasm and downright subversion is being absorbed by impressionable minds, it gives you hope for the future.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “there’s a whole world out there Mann has identified well. He’s also done what the good comic strip aims to – keep you absorbed from first frame to last.” However, comic book writer Neil Gaiman felt that “as an attempt to explain why comics are maturing, or even as a snappy overview of the current state of the medium, the film is trivial, weak and misguided.”

Not content with showing a series of talking heads, Mann pushed the envelope with Comic Book Confidential by presenting his subject matter in a dynamic way that no one had thought to do before – or often, since – but perfectly suited the material. The documentary features a healthy cross-section of people in the medium, from pioneers like Will Eisner and William M. Gaines, to underground provocateurs like Robert Crumb and the new wave (at the time) of independents like Charles Burns. The problem with a documentary like this is that you can criticize it for all the subjects it doesn’t interview, important figures like Alan Moore and Neal Adams, but you can only squeeze so many into one film and I think that Mann does an admirable job with the people he does include. Let’s not forget, Comic Book Confidential is not meant to be the definitive word on the medium but merely a primer, a jumping off point for one to become familiar with the major figures and the important movements.

Thanks to the success of Mann’s film, Mark Askwith went on to create Prisoners of Gravity, a half-hour weekly television program dedicated to science fiction, fantasy and comic books with every episode devoted to a particular theme. It first aired in 1989 on TVOntario, a Canadian public television station, where it ran for five seasons and 137 episodes before being canceled in 1994. Mann has gone on to create a series of idiosyncratic documentaries about a wide range of subjects (the Twist dance craze, marijuana, and custom car artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth) and continuing to push the envelope in terms of style and presentation.

Strange Brew

Anybody who grew up in Canada during the 1980s should be familiar with the McKenzie brothers – Bob (Rick Moranis) and Doug (Dave Thomas) – the missing link that bridges the gap between Cheech and Chong and Bill and Ted. The McKenzie brothers had cultivated a sizable cult following with their memorable and largely improvised skits on SCTV. Eventually, Hollywood beckoned, only Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas decided to the make the film on their own terms, directing it themselves on location in Toronto. The result is Strange Brew (1983), a quest for beer money with allusions to Hamlet.

The film begins much like their skits on SCTV with the boys on the set of their Great White North show with the topic, not surprisingly, being movies. Bob and Doug show off the film that they made together and it turns out to be a crudely shot science fiction tale called The Mutants of 2051 AD that pokes fun at post-apocalyptic films that were all the rage at the time. When their film fails to satisfy a theater full of people (what were they expecting?), Bob and Doug give their dad’s beer money to a man and his pitiful two children begging for a refund. To mollify their irate dad (his voice provided by none other than Mel Blanc), the boys unsuccessfully try to get free beer with the ol’ mouse-in-the-beer-bottle gag which, of course, doesn’t work.

So, they decide to go to the source: Elsinore Brewery, an ominous-looking castle-like complex located right next to the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane. Bob and Dog end up saving a woman whose car is stuck in the electrified gate of the complex. Her name is Pamela (Lynne Griffin) and her father, who used to run Elsinore, has been killed by his brother (Paul Dooley) who proceeded to marry Pamela’s mother. Sound familiar? However, it is the malevolent Brewmeister Smith (Max von Sydow) who is the puppetmaster, manipulating the brother so that he can take control of Elsinore and perfect his mind control formula through an electronic music device that he experiments on the neighboring mental patients.

In a nice touch, the patients don plastic armor and play hockey while this creepy synthesizer music plays reminiscent of Rollerball (1975) with a bit of the Stormtroopers from Star Wars (1977). Doug even pretends he’s Darth Vader to which Bob proudly says, “He saw Jedi 17 times.” As thanks for saving Pamela, Bob and Doug are given jobs in the brewery counting bottles of beer on the assembly line. It’s a dream come true and they end up bringing cases of free beer home to their ecstatic father. However, the McKenzie brothers also become unwittingly involved in the power struggle between Pamela and Brewmeister Smith.

Strange Brew displays its Canadiana with pride. During the opening credits, TTC streetcars can be plainly seen and, at one point, Bob and Doug’s van launches into Lake Ontario and the distinctive CN Tower can be plainly seen in the background, gracing the Toronto skyline. That’s kinda the point with Bob and Doug as they were Canada’s cultural ambassadors during the ‘80s, preserving and also poking fun at the Canadian stereotype: the beer-drinking, doughnut-eating, hockey-playing Canuck. Bob and Doug speak with words like “hoser”, “knob”, “take off, eh”, and “beauty” that were meant to poke fun at the way Canadian accents are perceived by those outside of the country but they ended up being absorbed into our popular culture lexicon anyway.

The McKenzie brothers were created in 1980 when the Canadian version of SCTV had to be two minutes longer than the syndicated version on American television. However, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission dictated that the two extra minutes be Canadian in content. Thus, Bob and Doug were born as a flip response to that decree. A typical skit would involve the brothers announcing a topic of discussion, like back bacon or snowshoes, and end up getting into an argument about beer or other petty sibling disagreements. The skit became quite popular and in 1981, they recorded a comedy album which sold a million copies. Because the record did so well, Moranis and Thomas thought about parlaying that success into a film.

After fellow SCTV cast member John Candy got an offer from Universal Pictures to do a film called Going Berserk (1983), Moranis and Thomas started talking about writing a screenplay for a Bob and Doug film. Andrew Alexander, executive producer for SCTV, reminded them that he had exclusive contracts and if they wrote a script he would sue them. So, they hired Steve De Jarnatt (the cult film genius behind Cherry 2000 and Miracle Mile) to write the first draft. Initially, Thomas told De Jarnatt that he wanted to base the film’s story around Hamlet but the writer stuck to it too faithfully and Thomas told him to have fun with it by making Bob and Doug like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Pamela like Hamlet. Their agents sent the script to various studios in Hollywood and a few days later they had a deal with MGM based not on the script but on record sales, “the breakout potential, and the fact that it was being advertised on a television show,” Thomas remembers. He and Moranis were unhappy with the script because Bob and Doug were improvised characters done in their “comic voices” and they felt that nobody but them could write these characters.

Moranis and Thomas faced the challenge of expanding their improvisations from “two guys talking about how hard it was to get parking spaces in donut shops to a full-length story,” said Thomas at the time of the film’s release. He began re-writing the script without Moranis who began to get cold feet about doing the film. After working on the first 50 pages, Moranis took a look at what he’d done and they worked together rewriting it. However, they weren’t sure just how much they could legally change and did most of the major alterations in the first third with Bob and Doug’s cheesy lo-fi SF film and the McKenzies watching it in a movie theater and causing a riot. Thomas remembers that the script was “far more bizarre and conceptual in the beginning ... If we had been able to rewrite the whole thing, we would have made the whole thing like that.”

Originally, Moranis and Thomas were not going to direct or write Strange Brew but ended up doing both with the guidance of executive producer Jack Grossberg, who had produced films by Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. They were given a modest budget of $5 million. Before filming, all of the major breweries wanted the McKenzie brothers to appear in beer ads. Molson’s Brewery was even featured prominently in their SCTV segments. They had the promise of Molson’s but once the company found out that there was a joke in the film about putting a mouse in a beer bottle so that a complaint can be made in order to get a free case of beer, the company distanced themselves from the film. The filmmakers were also banned from filming in a Brewers’ Retail store so they built a replica of an outlet at a cost of more than $15,000 and used the Old Fort Brewing Co. in Prince George, British Columbia to double for Elsinore Brewery.

Moranis and Thomas had already been playing these characters for some time by the time they did Strange Brew – in fact, the characters were at the height of their popularity at the time of the film – and so they effortlessly slipped into these roles. They really capture the sibling dynamic so well. Bob and Doug may bicker and pick on each other but when it counts they get it together and save the day. The casting of Max von Sydow as Brewmeister Smith was an inspired choice as he brings a certain amount of gravitas to the role and is actually a threatening presence, not some cartoon buffoon, which is in sharp contrast to Paul Dooley’s easily bullied character.

Strange Brew received generally positive reviews from critics. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “Anyone who's partial to the McKenzies' humor doubtless has a fondness for beer. The price of a ticket could buy enough beer for an experience at least as memorable as this one.” In his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold called the film, “neither triumph nor fiasco, Strange Brew leaves plenty of room for improvement, but I hope Thomas and Moranis get the chance to demonstrate that they've learned a lot from the mixed assortment of nuttiness in their first movie comedy.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “What's terrific about the McKenzie Brothers is their offhand depiction of two English-Canadian working-class dimwits ... and what's terrific about the movie is its equally offhand surrealism.”

For a film about two goofball brothers, Strange Brew is surprisingly clever with a fairly elaborate plot that riffs on Hamlet quite a bit with Bob and Doug essentially playing the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern parts. By today’s gross-out comedy standards Strange Brew is kinda tame but that is certainly part of its appeal because it reflects the Canadian identity at the time. There is almost a sweetness to the goofy humor that is endearing. A film like this one probably couldn’t be made today, which may explain how a few years ago a proposed sequel fell through at the last minute when financing didn’t come through. Moranis’ self-imposed exile after the death of his wife didn’t help matters but Thomas was able to coax him out of retirement for a television special that took a irreverent look back at Bob and Doug’s legacy. At least we will always have Strange Brew.

Here are two great fan sites dedicated to all things Bob and Doug:

An Unofficial Bob & Doug McKenzie Page

The Hoser

Hard Core Logo

“People don’t want your sounds, they just want to use you.” – Bucky Haight

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is generally regarded as the quintessential rock 'n' roll mockumentary — a hilarious look at the inept trials and tribulations of a heavy metal band. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Hard Core Logo (1996), a no frills, balls-to-the-wall adaptation Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s book about a fictitious Canadian punk rock band. Where Tap is a funny satire, Logo has a much darker undercurrent that gives it an unpredictable edge.

Retired for some years, legendary Canadian punk rock band, Hard Core Logo reunites for a one-off benefit concert in honor their mentor, Bucky Haight (Julian Richings), who supposedly had both legs amputated after being shot by a crazy fan. The gig goes so well that the band's charismatic lead singer, Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon), convinces everyone to go on a mini-tour across Western Canada with a documentary crew tagging along for the ride. They all pile into a beat-up van and travel across 4,000 kilometers on a bar tour of Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. It takes no time at all for all the old gripes and grudges to resurface, most significantly, the fact that lead guitarist, Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie), is close to signing on with Jenifur, an MTV-friendly band that has made it to the cover of Spin magazine. This does not sit too well with Joe who comes from the old school of punk rock that refuses to sell-out to major labels or appear in glossy corporate magazines. As the tour progresses, the friction between the band members becomes more palpable until it reaches a critical mass.

Hard Core Logo is the third film in Bruce McDonald's informal rock 'n' roll road movie trilogy that started with Roadkill (1989) and Highway 61 (1991). The filmmaker grew up in the Vancouver punk rock scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s and so he was drawn to Turner’s book about aging musicians. In 1994, a friend gave McDonald a copy of the book which consisted of a collage of song lyrics, diary entries and contract riders. As McDonald commented in an interview, “what I thought was really interesting is where it is 15 years later, and what are these guys doing now.” The director wanted to be true to the “sense of being 35 and having to decide whether to keep going or quit and get a day job.”

McDonald had just come off the critically acclaimed Dance Me Outside (1995) and his friends warned him not to repeat himself with another road movie. However, McDonald did not see Logo as a repeat of previous films. “On the other films, they (the anti-heroes of Roadkill and Highway 61) go down the road and meet a nutty person and things happened. Here you’re with the same people throughout — and they are the nutty people!” Initially, McDonald and novice screenwriter Noel Baker were not sure how to adapt the book and finally settled on making a mockumentary.

What McDonald was not interested in making was a Canadian version of Spinal Tap. He even jokingly referred to his film as “Spinal Tap’s mean little brother.” Furthermore, he said, “We were not setting out to make a parody or satire. This is more of a true documentary voice — these are real people.” There is a certain raw vibe that permeates Logo and this is perfect for its rough around the edges subject matter.

The unrefined attitude is due in large part to the presence of Hugh Dillon as Joe Dick. McDonald had a tough time casting the role and had to persuade Dillon to do the film. “He was going ‘Wow, what if the movie is shit, then I’d lose all my fans from the band, I’d lose all my credibility!’” The director auditioned 200 actors for the role but “couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t posing or doing some fake-o rock-guy shtick.” He had used musicians in his before and Dillon had a small role in Dance Me Outside. However, McDonald wasn’t sure how Dillon would work with actors and so he consulted with Callum Keith Rennie. The actor and the musician got along famously. Not a professional actor but rather lead singer of the Canadian blues punk bank, the Headstones, Dillon's lack of formal training gives his performance a certain unpredictability that is perfect for his character. Dillon remembers, “as soon as he gave me freedom to make the screenplay more believable, I became interested. Bruce allowed me creative input and that’s what made it a special piece for me.” Dillon obviously drew a lot on his own real life experiences of being in a band and this makes everything he says and does that much more believable.

The interplay between the rest of the band is also very well done. Callum Keith Rennie plays the gifted, low key guitarist who has clearly surpassed his bandmates, Bernie Coulson is the crazy drummer who seems clueless but knows what to do when it counts, and finally John Pyper-Ferguson is the terminally burnt out bass player whose road diary provides the film's voice-over narration. The way these guys joke and argue with each other — like adults who refuse to grow-up — is so good that it feels like they have really been in a band together for many years. This was important for McDonald who wanted to realistically portray the dynamics of being in a band. “It’s a grueling career, struggling to keep a band together. A band’s a bit like a family — you can treat each other very badly and get away it. And because of those magical moments on stage, the band goes on and on.”

Armed with a $1.1 million budget, McDonald shot the bulk of the film in Vancouver over three weeks in November 1995 with additional footage shot in southern Alberta. As McDonald was about to start principal photography, the Ontario Film Development Corp. froze funding as part of the government’s restraint program. The producers quickly looked for new investors and, at one point, discussed rewriting the film to make it about a Toronto band heading east to the Maritimes. McDonald quickly nixed the idea. Fortunately, British Columbia Film agreed to provide financing on the condition that he hire a local producer and crew. The landscape of western Canada also played an important role and McDonald realized “what a nightmare it is for any Canadian band that tries to tour the West and tries to deal with the huge distances between places.” Post-production was finished the weekend before its first screening.

McDonald keeps the film together with his solid direction. He has an excellent sense of pacing — the film never gets boring — and he instinctively knows that the essence of any good rock 'n' roll movie is, as he puts it, "extremely loud music and cool shots." Cinematographer Danny Nowak uses the shaky, hand-held camerawork that documentaries are known for and he also shoots the band in cool slow motion shots that emphasizes their iconic status.

Hard Core Logo had its world premiere at the 49th Cannes Film Festival with three screenings. McDonald remembers, “Cannes was very humbling. You’re in the same arena as Bernardo Bertolucci and Czechoslovakian pornographers. It’s such a bizarre spectrum.” After screening at the Venice Film Festival, the film had its Canadian premiere on September 20, 1996 at Sudbury’s Cinefest and was then shown at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 10 before being released across Canada eight days later. It was offered the opening spot in the Perspective Canada series at the Toronto International Festival with two screenings. The film’s distributors felt that the slot might “ghetto-ize” it and that McDonald had outgrown the Perspective Canada spot. They wanted only one screening in a 300-theater with a “special attraction” billing but the Festival organizers did not agree and the film was not shown there.

Hard Core Logo was well-received by Canadian film critics. In his review for the Montreal Gazette, John Griffin praised the film as a “masterful exercise in edgy virtuoso film craft, subversive propaganda and exhilarating entertainment.” The Toronto Sun’s Bruce Kirkland praised the cast: “They’re all so convincing it is impossible to believe they’re not all the real thing.” In his review for the Toronto Star, Bruce Kirkland wrote, “Screenwriter Noel S. Baker has provided some of the funniest and deftest writing Canadian moviemaking has heard in years. But it can’t hide the bitter-sweetness just below the surface.” The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey gave the film a mixed review: “Though the jumpy, parodic, disruptive style suits rock music, the same techniques prevent viewers from investing deeply in the characters and the story. The ride is fun, but it doesn’t quite reach a destination.”

At the Vancouver International Film Festival, Hard Core Logo received the $40,000 CITY-TV award for Best Canadian Film and Noel Baker won the Rogers prize for Best Canadian Screenplay. The film went on to be nominated for six Genie Awards (the Canadian version of the Academy Awards), including Best Picture and Director but only won for Best Original Song for “Who the Hell You Think You Are?” While something of a minor sensation in Canada, McDonald's films have been largely ignored in the United States, due mostly to lack of proper distribution. This changed somewhat with Logo when Quentin Tarantino saw it a film festival and liked it so much that he bought the U.S. distribution rights under his Rolling Thunder vanity label and even toyed with casting Dillon in Jackie Brown (1997).

Along with the aforementioned Spinal Tap and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000), Hard Core Logo is one of the best fictitious rock 'n' roll movies ever made. It has a genuine appreciation for music and an acute knowledge of the conventions and clichés of the genre. Like Spinal Tap, McDonald's film is not afraid to make fun of these conventions and like Almost Famous, there is an authenticity to how the band is portrayed and the music they make.

If you decide to get this film on DVD, avoid the crappy, bare bones edition on Amazon.com and instead get the Special Edition here or go to Amazon.ca. Trust me, it's worth it. The SE has a great audio commentary with McDonald, Dillon and Baker along with music vids.

Here is a trailer for the film:

Here is an interview with Hugh Dillon around the time the film came out:

An excerpt from a Making of doc. on the film: