ACADEMY AWARDS: MARCH 5 -- Paul Haggis gets six Oscar nominations for Crash.
Can this hometown boy . . . beat out those Hollywood heavyweights?
Noel Gallagher, Arts & Entertainment Reporter
The London Free Press
February 1, 2006  

London native Paul Haggis hasn't gone Hollywood, despite a lot of attention from Oscar.

"I'm just shocked, pleasantly shocked, that Crash got so many nominations," said the director, co-writer and co-producer of Crash, which yesterday (Jan. 31) drew six nominations for the 2006 Academy Awards, to be presented March 5.
The transplanted Canadian woke yesterday to news from his wife that he'd received Oscar nominations for best director and best original screenplay and that Crash was also up for best picture.

"I slept in again, just like last year, and got the phone call from Deborah this morning," said Haggis, referring to his wife, singer-actor Deborah Rennard.
These days, Haggis has been closeted in a Los Angeles hotel, finishing the script for Death and Dishonor, a drama about a father and his son, a soldier returning from the war in Iraq.

He had left word not to be disturbed until 8:30 a.m., (L.A. time) yesterday, three hours after the Academy Award nominations were announced.

Even though he was in the Oscar spotlight last year for his work on Academy Award winner Million Dollar Baby, Haggis isn't blase when it comes to Oscar.

"It's been a little crazy," Haggis said of the Oscar hoopla yesterday.

Asked how such Hollywood success has affected him, the director joked: "It's completely changed me. I'm now huge."

Haggis, who garnered a best director nomination from the Directors Guild of America and a top screenplay nomination from the Golden Globes, is a nominee at the Writers Guild Awards to be handed out in Los Angeles this weekend.

"My dad's on his way down here to go with me to those awards and he'll be coming back again for the Oscars," adds the son of Ted Haggis, the former owner of London's Gallery Theatre.

In the director's race, he's up against heavyweights and big names: George Clooney, Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg.

Although it's too early for Vegas oddsmakers, Sun Media movie critic Louis. B. Hobson didn't mind wading in.

He thinks Haggis is running second in the director's race to Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain).

"I'm just honoured to be included in that great group of brave filmmakers," said Haggis who left London at age 22 to launch a highly successful, 25-year career as a Hollywood TV producer-director.

"What really thrills me is that the academy voters took notice of films that actually took chances," Haggis says of this year's top picture race that also features Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Munich and Good Night, and Good Luck.

Crash, a tense L.A. crime drama, has also been nominated in the best supporting actor (Matt Dillon), film editing (Hughes Winborn) and original song (In the Deep) Oscar categories.

"I'd like to have seen our actors get more than just that one nomination for Matt," says Crash's director.

"My cast was just fabulous and they all worked for nothing."

On Sunday night, the film's performers did win the ensemble cast prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Toronto film critic Richard Crouse of TV's Reel to Real says Haggis was tired of writing for sitcoms like Facts of Life and made a decision to switch from TV work to writing serious film screenplays. Now he's one of the hottest writers in Hollywood.

"There's probably in the soul of everyone who writes sitcoms and writes on television, in their heart of hearts they would like to write stuff like Crash, something serious," Crouse said. "You just don't often get the chance."

Crouse, author of a new book on the Oscars called Reel Winners, says it takes a Canadian outsider like Haggis to see L.A. for what it is and to come up with a commentary like Crash.

Nightmare in Canada
By steve newton
Publish Date: 19-Jan-2006 in The Georgia Straight

A documentary by Jennifer Adcock. Unrated. Plays Friday, January 20, at the Cinemark Tinseltown as part of the Moving Pictures Festival

Is there a Canadian identity when it comes to horror films? Director Jennifer Adcock ponders that idea in Nightmare in Canada: Canadian Horror on Film, a provocative one-hour documentary that collects snippets of seminal Canadian fright flicks and intersperses them with commentary from a bevy of critics, authors, and filmmakers. Even if you don’t support the theory of a uniquely Canadian vision of horror, you will exit this Nightmare knowing that our country has spawned some pretty sick ’n’ twisted little mind messers.

Toronto Star movie critic Geoff Pevere contends that there aren’t a lot of monsters in Canuck scare films. Horror novelist Edo van Belkom seconds that impression by pointing out that Canadian horror flicks more often pit man against nature, citing the Stephen King–endorsed terror-in-the-wilds outing Rituals of 1977. (Apparently, it’s very Canadian to get hopelessly lost in the woods.)

Pop-culture critic Richard Crouse asserts that Canuck horror is typified more by an atmosphere of dread than by blatant gore, using Bob Clark’s widely acclaimed 1974 shocker Black Christmas as a prime example. Crouse admits that we do have our share of mindless ’80s body-count flicks, though, such as Prom Night and the Maritimes-shot My Bloody Valentine, which he describes as “the dirty little secrets of Canadian film”.

No analysis of Canadian horror would be worthy without emphasis on the career of director David Cronenberg. Pevere relates how, in Cronenberg’s early flesh-obsessed work like Shivers and Rabid, the director saw horror as something that was essentially viral. Later ’80s films like Scanners and Videodrome explored what goes on in the psyche. According to Ginger Snaps screenwriter Karen Walton, Cronenberg is “the undisputed champion of just messing up your brain for good”.

A clip from Shivers shows a sluglike parasite crawling up from a bathtub drain to painfully penetrate an unsuspecting brunette (B-movie queen Barbara Steele).
Nightmare in Canada also features insights on the attraction of the horror genre in general. According to Walton, “the allure of horror is absolutely the ability to talk about what nobody wants to talk about.”

Pevere recalls, when he was a child, descending an open stairway to the basement freezer. There was always the fear that hands might shoot out from between the steps and grab his ankles. “For me,” he states, “the horror movie allows me to vicariously peek behind those stairs without actually having to go down and get the ice cream.”
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Homolka film won't show in hometown 
Last updated Jan 17 2006 12:47 PM EST
CBC News

A film about sex killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo will not be shown in their hometown of St. Catharines when it opens in Ontario this week.

Karla, which was shot in Los Angeles, is mainly set in St. Catharines, where the couple abducted and killed schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.

"It does feel like that's ground zero," said producer Michael Sellers, who added that he has no objections to the decision to keep the film out of the city.

Sellers also reviewed the film's content with Tim Danson, the lawyer who represents the French and Mahaffy families, and made at least one significant change to the script at his request.

Nonetheless, distributor Cineplex Entertainment is only releasing the film in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa.

"We know that some customers will have a challenge with the film's content," said spokesperson Pat Marshall.

One Toronto movie critic says that's not all that audiences will have problems with.
"It really is done so badly, that I don't see the point of releasing this," said Richard Crouse.

"Strictly speaking, from a film perspective, this is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time."

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