++ relapsed catholic ++ religion politics culture blog

(RESPONSES BELOW -- KEEP 'EM COMIN'... New ones added around 5:30 PM)

(July 3: Greetings, SDA readers! This is the original post, and I've set up others here and here to handle additional responses. All your suggestions were great.)


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You know what I'm talking about. You're watching TV and 3 seconds into a show -- if that -- you're thinking: "This is Canadian, isn't it?" Your mother said it, and so did mine. Your friends say it, too.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. Click the little Superman:



Awful, ain't it?

(All those Heritage Minutes are like that. "The Time We Almost Invented Something." "Some Guy Who Invented Something Drove Through Calgary One Time." "The Time That Thing Blew Up." In my hometown there's a giant mural on the side of a downtown building commemorating the day a hundred years ago when a train derailed. No, nobody died. It just fell over. You think I'm kidding...)

The Canada Day long weekend is about to begin, so please help me solve this puzzle once and for all:

How can we tell "it's Canadian"?

It can't be the quality of the show's writing (stuff like that cringe-inducing line about "Cousin Frank in Toronto" notwithstanding); 3 seconds is too short to judge script quality. It may be that our actors are, shall we say, notoriously less photogenic, more "ordinary looking", than their American counterparts.

Is it the quality of film stock we use? The lighting? Something about shot composition?

I'm begging everyone out there with a working knowledge of the Canadian film & TV industry to tell me why we can't make a movie that looks one-tenth as pretty as, just off the top of my head, Wedding Crashers (don't laugh: did you see those stunning pastels and brilliant jewel-like greens...?) I know we have no money. The point is: what is it about "no money" that makes Canadian stuff look the way it does?

Thanks to YouTube, I found a couple of other examples. Even if you aren't Canadian, maybe you can tell me what it is about these things.

This was filmed for $1.95, I think. Teenagers From Outer Space looked better. (No really. Have you seen it? It's kinda good except for the "giant" lobster...)



Look, I like Trailer Park Boys, but you can still tell it's Canadian. It's not the content, it's the "look and feel". What is that?? (Yeah, our shows have lots of swearing and sex stuff. Sorry. And that's not the right answer.)



But back to the point. Email me at kshaidle - AT - rogers.com and tell me:

How can you tell it's Canadian? I'm serious. Now that somebody told me why Canadian Tire smells like that (turns out it's, well, the tires... Hey, I'm a girl...), this information will make my life complete.

Anyway, here's some more Trailer Park Boys cuz it's so funny:



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Dom writes:

I can't tell you why it is that way, but here is another data point to consider: Why is it that so many American movies and TV shows are made in Canada, but don't look Canadian? And there are tons of Canadian actors in American productions (just consider the lead actress in the hottest US show right now is Evangeline Lilly of "Lost." Yep, Canadian), so it's not that Canadians look different. It is weird.

Well, our good looking actors all head South, where the big money is. We're stuck with The Bald Guy and the Frumpy Lady who show up in every commercial. I can usually tell when something is shot in Toronto, because I live here, and the Secret Subway Station shows up in so many flicks.

RightGirl blames the foley:

You can tell it's Canadian because little effort is expended on sound design. In the US, if you bite an apple, there's a crunch. In Canada we have mushy apples apparently, because there's no crunch.

Background music is too obviously background music, if there is any at all. Usually Canuck's don't spring for music, and when they do, it's the latest Sarah McLachlin [sp?] instead of a little delicate ambience. We can't mix sound to save our lives or our industry!

Toronto may be Hollywood North, but I bet you a large Tim's Iced Cap that anything produced here for the US will have a US sound designer.

Could be. I swear I detect "something" missing in the sound as well, as if empty "white noise" gets picked up in the background/atmosphere during filming. Can't articulate it any better than that, though.

I still say it is primarily a mix of lighting and film stock/development, though? Anybody?

Click here for some new school Degrassi clips to further illustrate the "look & feel" thing I'm picking up.

If you think you can stand it, the official Royal Canadian Air Farce site has clips, too. Urgh. (Check out the mail they get: You're [sic] humor is dry and so not funny its [sic] sad. You make the rest of Canada ashamed to have you on our television programs.)

And this recent article asks the burning question: "Why is Canadian TV trash so stinkingly bad?"

* Sean says, "If they're complaining about Americans, it's Canadian." True nuff.


* Patrick writes:

Great question, one I've asked myself before. That undefineable yet all-too-identifiable suckage factor that makes its odor (sorry, odour) present immediately upon clicking upon the channel!

I think there are three overlapping reasons:

1) Lack of money -- and not just for sound design and foley work -- the entertainment biz in Canada has not managed to leave the tarmac because it's not able or is unwilling to risk bigger piles of investment capital to get some REALLY hot equipment that's reflected in the production values on-screen. When you use cameras built in 1991 (or rented by a thousand previous NFB filmmakers) or "make do" with less expensive sets and sound gear, and hire less skilled actors, it all shows up -- or rather fails to show up -- on the screen.

2) Paranoia of joining creativity to commercialism. If Canadians really do prefer homegrown talent, then why does no one watch CBC adaptations of depressing plays by Michel Tremblay? To belong in the canon of worthy subjects -- you must invariably include incest, rape, gay tragi-comedy, alienated Inuits, or the suicide of any of the above. These themes seem to make up the Canadian ideal of drama. Why can't reruns of Street Legal compete with those of LA Law? Because even though every US program has its target constituency, American TV writers write with a maximal audience in mind. The Canadian attitude seems to be, "This is more avant garde; no sell-out Yankee cliches here." No audience, either.

3) Brain drain. Top Canadian talent moves south. Almost always. If I'm wrong, can anyone name one US-born entertainer who moved to Scarborough in the hopes of making there, so he can make it anywhere? When asked which is the greatest Canadian movie, most people answer, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (filmed in Montreal from a novel by Mordechai Richler)....but...wait for it... starring the very American Richard Dreyfuss.

When you watch any American-made movie filmed in Toronto, you're observing a product that has been conceived, planned, budgeted, marketed, produced and typically directed by south-of-the-border players, an enterprise virtually parachuted into Toronto for principal photography. The real levers of power lie elsewhere and always have. Notice Hollywood of not referred to as "Toronto South."

* Alison Baird is relieved to learn she's not alone!

I thought I was the only one who ever noticed that Canadian "look & feel" thing!! It's partly the production values, I think. Every Canadian film I've ever seen looks as though it was made on the cheap, with poor-quality grainy film. And the lighting always seems about half as bright as in an American film, making each production look dull and murky, while more than half the scenes in any given film seem to be at night.

Also, the soundtrack is invariably muted and dull. The sound effects lack punch, as has been noted. But also the musical score is always aimless and tuneless. No rousing themes, no romantic leitmotiv: just this sort of gloomy elevator music that meanders incessantly in the background regardless of whatever's happening onscreen.

Also, you're probably watching a Canadian movie if:

1) the dialogue is pointless and non sequitur;

2) the pacing is agonizingly slow and unrelieved by any real action;

3) at some point, two characters gaze into each other's eyes for no apparent reason and for what feels like an eternity (while gloomy elevator music plays in the background);

4) it's about growing up gay in Montreal. 90% of Canadian movies are about growing up gay in Montreal

5) there is no conclusion or resolution of any kind. The thing just ENDS, and you sit there saying "What the %$#& ...?" (If you haven't already switched the channel or left the theatre, that is.)

To which I have to add: it has frickin' Don Frickin' McKeller in it!!


* Chris says:

1) Incredibly bad writing. A lot of the time major characters are simply one-dimensional constructs that behave in a way totally detached from reality (think of the way, for instance, senior authority figures behave in disaster movies). There is no nuance in Canadian characters, they look and behave like Central Casting's ideal stereotype.

2) Inappropriate environments / set dressing / sound. RightGirl has it correct when she says that the foley work is atrocious. I recall watching a CanCon air-disaster flick where all of the aircraft interior shots were completely devoid of aircraft ambient noise ( i.e. engines), and the pilots used trucker-style breaker-breaker-10-4-good-buddy handheld mics instead of the traditional pilot's noise-cancelling headset with mic boom. Just TRY using a handheld mic on even the smallest plane and see if the guy on the other end can understand your transmission.

I've seen plenty of TV shows where poorly-dressed "office" sets are billed as military command centres (think NORAD) or nerve centers of major federal agencies. Instead of having four or five giant situation displays and lots and lots of rows of computers with many many people click-clacking away, there's three guys at an extended desk with one monitor each. Sure, that seems like the sort of system we'd have in place monitoring missile launches and objects in near-Earth-orbit.

Or conversely the location is supposed to be the swanky offices of some billion-dollar multionational firm and yet their office looks like some two-room suite in an industrial park in Brampton. And it's furnished with 1970s old steel desks and those low-backed chairs with chrome-and wood armrests.

Getting badge / medal / nametag placement incorrect on military uniforms, and so on and so forth.

3) Smalltown angst. A lot of our shows are all about living in some crappy town and pining to get away from the insular crapulence of it all. As a born-and-bred Toronto kid I point and laugh when I see this sort of thing. I know this country is full of small towns but I don't understand the need of many writers to share their craptastic smalltown upbringing with the rest of the country. Really and sincerely, we don't care. Move to an urban centre and get over it.

* Entertainment lawyer Bob "Quitty Quit Qut" Tarantino may well deserve the last word:

Lighting and film stock. Mostly it's about the budgets - low-budget films look crappy the world over. Tight budgets force producers to scrimp where they can, which includes lighting and film stock. Big budget productions look identical, whether filmed in Los Angeles or Toronto. And, for the most part, "Canadian" productions (i.e., productions made without the involvement of a US studio) are, relatively speaking, "low budget" - hence the "Canadian" look. It's similar to local newscasts in smaller markets: they all sort of look the same, because they're all operating in roughly the same budget range.

I still think I "hear" a hollow void of "ambient silence", though. Because I'm very very strange.