I told this, the newest Worst Joke In The World, last night at dinner, which turned out to be an inadvertent prelude to a Night Of Canadian Hilarity.
Talked about the AM script, which has several Canadian settings and elements, and is, obviously hilarious. Talked about South Park, too.
Read this funny, slight Timothy Noah piece in Slate about “the novelty of seeing the words “danger” and “Toronto” in the same sentence.”
Saw the kooky Mayor of Toronto on The Daily Show. He reminded me of Robert Novak doing a bad Ed Koch.
But the surprise was a midnight screening of the first contemporary film to deal with the Torontonian Threat, a film I only recently learned was about the US staging a phony war against Canada, a film you might even call the 300-pound gorilla of Blame Canada Movies,Canadian Bacon.
It was largely funny, intermittently hilarious, but it had some really slack moments, too. Like Orgazmo, Gangs of New York or The Cremaster Cycle, Canadian Bacon feels made by a supreme creator, someone who can’t/won’t take (or doesn’t get) any suggestions or advice. They’re all unconventional concepts coming from auteurs with unassailable-seeming points of view, which may inhibit people from giving suggestions. Maybe the auteurs, having convinced themselves that no one else could understand their vision, closed themselves off to outside perspectives. Whatever, in any case, all thesemovies had tremendous promise, moments of greatness and unnecessary flaws.
Perhaps one IMDb user said it best: “Of course, only somebody like Roger Moore could make this movie.”
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the making of, by greg allen