Should We Hand Polley a Tall Poppy?
National Post
Published: Friday, May 18, 2007

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, so why isn't film reviewing? Each week in this space, experts, artists and paying movie customers come together to take apart a recent release. It's salty. It's full of hot air. It's The Popcorn Panel.

The week's panel

- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall

- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show. His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca

- Joe Belanger, a Montreal-based film critic who blogs at www.blacksheepreviews.blogspot.com

This week's subject Away from Her

CRAIG: You know the saying, "Don't shoot the messenger." Well, Away from Her has a poignant message, but Sarah Polley deserves to be shot -- metaphorically speaking, of course. I know, I know, it's a movie about Alzheimer's adapted from an Alice Munro story and directed by that cute, little Road to Avonlea girl. Obviously, it's bulletproof to critics. But this is some lousy filmmaking. The angles are all wrong. The details -- the horseshoes, the hockey game -- are all wrong. And when Polley gets a nice moment, she flubs it by cutting away too soon. I'm thinking specifically of the dance scene set to Neil Young's Harvest Moon. The perfect song, the perfect actors, and we get four or five seconds of it. I remember a clip of Krzysztof Kieslowski talking about editing a scene with Juliette Binoche in the Blue episode of his Three Colours trilogy. In the scene, Binoche dips a sugar cube in her coffee. She is contemplating her life. Kieslowski said the key to the scene was how long it took for the sugar cube to dissolve. Too early, say five seconds, and it wouldn't register that she was contemplative. Too long, 11 seconds, and the moment would be lost because the audience would find it self-indulgent. Kieslowki had his assistant go to the grocery store and buy different brands of sugar cubes and find the one that dissolved in exactly seven seconds. This is the difference between Polley, who, to be fair, is just a rookie, and a real pro.

RICHARD: Hey Craig, I have two questions for you. First:What the hell do Kieslowski's sugar cubes have to do with anything? Secondly: Have you lost your mind? Away from Her is a deeply touching movie that connects with the audience on a very intimate level. Polley doesn't spend time counting the number of seconds it takes for a sugar cube to dissolve; instead, she gracefully draws the viewer into a story about a married couple torn apart by illness. In a careful and straightforward way, she sets the scene and then lets the characters do their work. It's a nicely controlled directorial debut that could easily have veered into melodrama, but she avoids that pitfall and presents a story simply told that rings true. I failed to notice the alleged "lousy filmmaking" you mentioned because I was swept up by the beauty of the story. Polley isn't counting the emotions of the piece in seconds; she's too busy showing us the grand scope of a 45-year relationship in tatters.

JOSEPH: Ah, to go third and fall right in between each of your opposing views. I did find Away from Her to be subtle and graceful. I also found the filmmaking to be sadly flawed. What gives Away from Her its gentle beauty are the performances of the veteran leads. Still, I doubt Polley needed to coach actors like Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent that much. Where she does succeed as a director is in setting a tone. The love that is slipping through the fingers of Fiona and Grant is fully rich and subsequently, all the more tragic to watch disappear. Only it isn't disappearing as much as it is changing. Polley allows their relationship to progress at a pace that gives the viewer the chance to see that and to understand why that change is necessary for both to find happiness. She should have spent some more time experimenting with the proverbial sugar cubes, mind you. She almost loses that flow on a number of occasions by awkwardly cutting back and forth in space and time between the Alzheimer's facility and a conversation between Grant and Marian (Olympia Dukakis). The scenes between the two fine actors are often cut too short to fully grasp their nature and purpose and they ultimately distract from the larger love story. The film does feel laboured and clunky at times, but I wouldn't go so far as to shoot the director, not even metaphorically. It is a very promising first feature. I mean, the girl's clearly got talent.

CRAIG: Does she have talent or does she have Atom Egoyan's art director (and, indeed, Egoyan as an executive producer), Guy Maddin's cinematographer, Pinsent, Christie and Dukakis for actors, Neil Young's music and a short story by Munro to work from? I posit even someone with Alzheimer's might be able to put together a decent picture with that much talent. I still think Away from Her has some moving moments and that Polley deserves credit for pulling all of these elements together. I just wish the media wouldn't fall all over themselves trying to anoint her as the next Egoyan. It's embarrassing. Then again, maybe I'm just ready for the second floor.

JOSEPH: Oh, Craig. When you first wanted to shoot Polley, albeit not literally, I let my shock and awe slide, but don't you think suggesting an Alzheimer's patient could accomplish what Polley has to be pushing it? The fact remains that all these talents lent their time to a new filmmaker whom they clearly must have faith in. While I agree that naming her Egoyan's successor is a premature exaggeration, I believe she is a still a talent, one that is fortunate enough to have solid connections and strong influences. I had the chance to attend a Q & A session with her. She was not nearly as morose as I expected she would be and came across as appreciative and humble. She knows that she has advantages over other upstart directors, but she is making every effort to ensure she doesn't squander this chance. She struck me as an artist interested in growth through experience. That being said, is this week's panel about Polley or her movie?

RICHARD: Do I detect the foul odour of Tall Poppy Syndrome in the air? Born and bred Canadian film success stories are few and far between, and in Away from Her, we have one. Audiences are relating to it, critics are applauding it -- so why the backlash? Healthy debate is always welcome, but this smacks of something else. It isn't a perfect film, but the use of words like "lousy" and the sarcastic implication that anyone could have made this movie given the right crew contains a snarkiness the movie simply doesn't deserve. Let's take a deep breath and enjoy the movie for what it is, a movingly made film that sensitively deals with Alzheimer's and the tragic toll it takes on families. Perhaps we should bask in its success instead of trying to debase it.

Unpopped kernels: Oh that Sarah Polley
Craig Courtice, National Post
Published: Friday, June 01, 2007

In the May 18 Popcorn Panel I said, "Sarah Polley deserves to be shot." I also might have said something along the lines that even an Alzheimer patient would have been able to direct Away From Her, Polley's debut feature starring Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple dealing with this horrible disease. Harsh!

My fellow panelist, the esteemed host of Rogers' Reel to Real, Richard Crouse, accused me of suffering from tall-poppy syndrome. He also asked me: "Have you lost your mind?"

Away From Her, you see, is the critics' darling. On the Web site RottenTomatoes.com its Fresh rating is 95%, which means that percentage of film scribes recommended it.

"The movie, [Sarah] Polley's feature dbut, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career," wrote The New Yorker's David Denby. The gushing doesn't stop there. "Certain people just have it," said no less than Sandra Bernhard about Polley to a reporter from Fashionweekdaily. com. "You either have it from the beginning or you never have it at all."

At the end of our discussion I was ready to defend myself against these charges of tall-poppyism, but I let Richard have the last word. Had we more space I would have written about The Trailer Park Boys or even The Sweet Hereafter, examples not only of superior filmmaking, but also films that created a buzz that translated into bums in the seats.

But I let it pass.

The next film we did for the panel was Waitress, another feature by a female director, Adrienne Shelley, who tragically won't be up-and-coming because she came and went, the victim of a brutal murder in her New York apartment. Waitress shined with wit, surprising choices and, of course, Andy Griffith.

Heartwarmingly, the film climbed up the charts, holding its own against big-budget fare such as 28 Weeks Later, even though it played on a third of the screens.

But if you looked just a few slots down, there was Away From Her. "Probably, the New York liberals reacting to Denby and The Times reviews," I thought.

This week our panel discussion centred around the William Friedkin-helmed Bug. I was surprised after watching it that it did as well as it did considering it was basically an art film. I guess it must have been folks figuring it was another Ashley Judd, hottie-in-peril story. We shall see.

But again, a few slots down, there was Away From Her. "Maybe, it's the new Amanda Bynes movie with the same title," I posited. I checked. Nope. It's that damn Sarah Polley. How can this be? Away From Her has been released on 256 screens.

Compare that to the newest Pirates of the Caribbean, which raided whole theatres and played on close to 4,400 screens. Or Bug at just over 1,500. Or even Waitress, which doubled Away From Her at 500. Despite being outplayed and out-budgeted, the story about an ageing couple in north Ontario has brought in US$2.7-million in its four weeks.

To give some context to this figure, let's take the case of The Sweet Hereafter. The film, about a small town dealing with the death-by-bus-crash of many of its school children, went on to garner director Atom Egoyan an Academy Award nomination for best director. The film, which also starred Polley as a sexually abused girl, went on to gross US$3.2-million in North America.

To recap: set in a small town, depressing subject matter. Yet Egoyan, the undisputed champion of our national cinema, will soon be surpassed by his protg. And that's before Polley receives any Oscar buzz.

The Sweet Hereafter is probably the best comparison, but take a look also at these notable achievements in Canadian box-office history. Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, another Oscar-nominee (for best foreign film) made US$3.4-million. Sunshine, the lavish film about a Hungarian family produced by Robert Lantos, brought in US$5-million. Even those lovable louts from Sunnyvale might not hold off Polley; Trailer Park Boys: The Movie made US$3.8-million last year.

"There is a persistent, well-entrenched perception that Canadian filmmakers are somehow genetically incapable of directing or producing crowd-pleasing, commercial features," wrote Take One's Wyndham Wise in 1998. "Of course, a major contributing factor to this misconception is that commercially successful Canadian films are so damn hard to identify, cleverly disguised as they mostly always are to appear as either American or European: the better the disguise, the more successful the film."

All of this is a bit tough to swallow for someone who genuinely dislikes Polley's public persona. I don't know the lady, but I am really sick of the Hollywood-loves-Polley-but-Polley-hates-Hollywood story our national media keeps trotting out. Maybe, this is a symptom of tall-poppy syndrome, I don't know. But even hating Polley hating Hollywood is getting tough.

Check out this nugget I read in Shinan Govani's column the other day. "In terms of the earnestness that people perceive in me," Polley said to cbc.ca, "that's completely my own doing. In the struggle to not create an image for myself and just be myself, I somehow actually created a totally false image of who I am. I've become this humourless nightmare in the press, and I am slightly bugged by that because I find it really irritating in other people."

You're right, Richard. I am losing my mind.

On Demrawkracy
National Post
Published: Friday, March 30, 2007

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, so why isn't film reviewing? Each week in this space, experts, artists and plain paying movie customers come together to take apart a recent release. It's salty. It's full of hot air. It's The Popcorn Panel.

- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall

- Matthew Pioro, Canadian representative at the 2002 Air Guitar World Championships

- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest running movie review show. He appears on Best! Movies! Ever! on Star TV every Wednesday at 8 p.m. His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca

This week's subject: Air Guitar Nation

Craig: The filmmaker, Alexandra Lipsitz, managed a neat trick here: She took a subject that could easily be a mock doc and transcended it. C-Diddy and Bjorn Turoque are complex characters that made me wonder if irony has turned back on itself in this mass-media age? Because when nine-to-fivers dress up in their rawkingest outfit and wail away to their favourite guitar lick, it's no joke. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Air Guitar Nation made me question my own smart-assedness.

Matthew: The great thing about air guitar as it's practised at the Air Guitar World Championships and in countries with national championships is the way that it skirts earnestness and irony. The filmmakers did a good job of capturing this quality. Kriston Rucker, one of the executive producers, feels that, yes, you can simply treat air guitar as a joke, but things are much more interesting when you look at it seriously. An air guitarist can't help but be aware of the silliness of it all, but it's the most democratic route to feeling like a rock star. So, I'm happy with the way air guitar was portrayed. It always gets some small mention in the media, especially after the world championships, but the coverage is never very deep. A Canadian doc, Air Guitar in Oulu, which followed Andrew Buckles as he went to Finland in 2002 and tied for second, wasn't nearly as well executed as Air Guitar Nation. Air Guitar in Oulu didn't have a fraction of the music clearance that Air Guitar Nation did. What's air guitar without a lot of rock 'n' roll?

Richard: You can't stop the rock! You can take away the Flying Vs, the capos and whammy bars but, as we see in this movie, you can't take away people's desire to rawk out in front of a crowd. There's nothing ironic or smart-assed about it; it's simply a primal urge to strut your stuff. The excellently named Bjorn Turoque and his air guitar nemesis C-Diddy are rock stars in the purest sense -- they are out there having a great time, playing for large crowds, all the while unencumbered by actually having to play. It's brilliantly post-modern. Unlike a mutual fund that will eventually mature and start making money, these make-believe guitarists are taking full advantage of their arrested development by indulging in airborne Yngwie Malmsteen-esque rock 'n' roll fantasies.

Craig: So we all agree Air Guitar Nation wailed, but it occurs to me that one of the reasons it rawked is because the two main characters were camera whores. It's not like the interviewers had to go very deep to get these guys to open up. I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's book Bluebeard, in which the author mused about the loud, obnoxious people who danced on the tables at office parties. His theory was that because of mass media there are fewer and fewer storytellers, so the descendents of past storytellers have been displaced. Those who take up air guitar and karaoke as serious hobbies are those descendents, Vonnegut would argue. I think one of the reasons the film works is because it captures the sadness that comes when Diddy and Turoque realize that the World Championship of Air Guitar is as good as they're ever gonna get. This point is driven home further with the clips of C-Diddy back as David Jung selling pooper-scoopers.

Matthew: I think it's fair to call air guitarists storytellers. They create rock identities and perform them on stage and in front of media; it's all part of the rock 'n' roll game. In a sense, the air guitarists are more open and honest about the game than Mick Jagger or Lou Reed. The real rockers manage personas that they've maintained for so long they probably don't remember how they consciously cooled themselves up years ago. But, Craig's comment that these air guitarists represent the sad castoffs of a once proud storytelling tradition is to paint all air guitarists with the same brush. For some the practice is performance art, but for others it truly is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That's the beauty of air guitar: It's an inclusive art for the high-minded and the hosers.

Richard: Well put, Matthew. Air guitar is democratic, inclusive of everyone who wants to get their rawk on. Not so sure about Craig's inference that air guitar represents the death of storytelling, though. I'll buy that Bjorn and Diddy are the same personalities who would dance on tables at office parties, but that is, of course, one of the personality traits crucial to any aspiring rock star. Find me a rock star who hasn't danced on a table and I'll show you a rock star with a secret stash of Christopher Cross tunes loaded onto his iPod. Bjorn and Diddy may be a little too wrapped up in themselves to be considered great oral traditionalists, but despite the odd subject matter they are still communicating in an open and honest way, which is the basis of all storytelling.

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