The CBC showed Don McKellar's film Last Night last night as there was no late hockey game to be shown. For my money, his TV and film are the best expression of the not quite right in the head perspective that somehow plays a part in the Canadian character. [Twitch City is the best Canadian TV show ever made and I do not care if that loses me The Beachcombers readership.] Like the Tragically Hip, Kids in the Hall (one episode of which he appeared in apparently) or Trailer Park Boys, there is a thread of cheery menace and the cosmos-being-not-what-we-think-it-is that runs through a type of Canadian art which parallels, say, the Scots one in Bill Forsyth films. The cast of Last Night is populated with many Twitch City actors and could be taken for the what happens on that day to a group of second cousins.
One set in Last Night was striking as I believe I was in the space last fall. The offices of the Management Board Secretariat in Toronto, the main provincial cabinet fiscal committee, where I spoke on PIPEDA last October is housed, along with other offices like the Ontario Mines and Minerals office, in the MacDonald Block at 900 Bay Street, a 1958-ish modernish confection of glossy stone walls and metal railings and 1960's abstract art from the government collection. I am pretty sure the gas company secretary who stays on shift almost to the end to ensure the gas keeps flowing has her desk sitting in one of the open mezzanine hallways on the second floor.
Comments
Shelley - April 11, 2004 9:45 AM
Looks interesting, it may be worth checking out. Though I don't know how or where I'd find it - Blockbuster? Forgive me, but I've never heard of Twitch City either. (Beachcombers, I've heard of. Couldn't see what all the fuss was about, but I've heard of it) Sigh. Really, I am so Canadian, honest.
I see Sarah Polley's in it. Can she really act? She tends to be one of those actors that's perpetually 9 nears old, in my mind, like Megan Follows.
Alan - April 11, 2004 10:50 AM
<i>Twitch City</i> has been showing on Showcase in rerun on Thursday nights at 9:00 pm before <i>Trailer Park Boys</i>. Sarah Polley plays a good but fairly minor role in <i>Last Night</i>. I have hated Anne of Green Gables for long enough that neither Polley or Follows has that taint for me. My wife just about left me during my taunting as she was watching the truly pathetic CBC return of Anne crapfest where she ends up involved in WWI geo-politics and spying. Something about my inquiries as to when we might expect her calling in the spaceships from Mars to help her seemed to irritate dearest.
Mike - April 11, 2004 7:57 PM
Perhaps I should have stuck with Last Night last night; the beginning didn't appeal to me. I am a big fan of Forsyth; I've seen 3 of his films, with Local Hero being my favourite film (period).
Alan - April 11, 2004 8:39 PM
<i>Local Hero</i> is great. I saw it at Wormwood's. My folks are from Scotland so I got jokes in <i>Gregory's Girl</i> and <i>Comfort and Joy</i> that might have been misable for North Americans. The latter has the line - given by a doctor pal of the main character - "don't forget to take your alcohol" which is fairly handy.
Alan - April 11, 2004 9:01 PM
Having said that, I think there is a big difference between Scots humour and Canadian...by which I really mean Ontarian. Each of the Atlantic provinces have separate senses of humour - PEI's is so mild and gentle while Newfoundlands is so over the top happy. Judging by Quebec version of Dunkin' Donut ads caught between Habs game periods, there is a madcap Jerry Lewis things going on. <p>But in Ontario and perhaps the West there is the underlying menace thing, the Tom Thompson / Bill Barlico dark woods of Algonquin grabbing you or the Edmund Fitzgerald snapping thing that is in the Hip or Kids in the Hall. It is not urban but edge of the hinterland - which Ontario is...even the cities. I look out my window, see the CN main line miles away, the 401 a few beyond that but at the edge the horizon is forest. Even in the lakeshore a mauling by a bear is just a handful of kilometres to the north if I really wanted it and slathered myself with peanut butter and salmon steaks. The closest I have come to it in Scots art are the short stories by James Kelman but there the source of the menace is the industrial world, the economic order that takes away. <p>If you don't take the menace into account, the humour does not work. The funniest jokes and the best TV ads always have bears standing on their hind legs.
Uncle Iain - April 13, 2004 1:40 AM
Thank you for providing me this all-too-rare opportunity to drop names ....
... I actually saw Last Night in a cinema at one of its earliest showings -- at the 1998 Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax, about a week after it debuted in Trawna. And, afterward, I MET Don McKellar.
I was tagging along behind Marla Cranston -- then a Halifax Daily News infotainment reporter, now chief flak for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design -- at some festival "apres do" as she staked out McKellar to soften him up for an interview the next day. She quickly cornered him and, as she peppered him with pleasantries, he gradually noticed this strange man looming next to him. He turned and asked me what my story was. As it happened, I had just left the employ of one Conrad Black. This piqued his interest and he grilled me on the Not-Yet-Noble One and his impact on Western civilization. I'm afraid I had no insight to offer other than my admiration for the size of his severance cheques.
...Since then, I have seen the film Last Night several times. I bought a ragged VHS copy over eBay from some guy in Texas and am always on the lookout for the frustratingly rare DVD (the only version of which, sadly, seems to be full-frame, not widescreen).
Now that I've moved to Toronto, I appreciate what a document of the place it is. I feel like I'm always waking through Last Night moments ... During the SARS crisis, when the streetcars through Chinatown were all but empty for a couple of weeks ... During the blackout, when they stopped dead in their tracks all over the city ... On a midnight stroll through the Bay St. financial district one recent weekend, when it was absolutely deserted.
To the eyes of this Maritime exile, Last Night is a perfect metaphor. It isn't about Toronto AT the end of the world. It's about Toronto BEING the end of the world.
Shelagh Edwards - March 24, 2005 10:43 AM
I too happend to think "Last Nite" was wicked... really enjoyed it as one of my fave Canadian indies ever. I think the only other I would consider "on par" would be "Way Downtown" (shot in Calgary but supposed to be Trawna) and ironically Don McKellar is in this movie too. Heck, maybe it's just a "Don McKeller" thang...