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People Feature
Why do elephants paint?
Well, because there's a shortage of jobs in the logging industry these days. And, no, as a matter of fact, they don't sell their canvases for peanuts.
By Elizabeth Bukowski
[03/23/00]

Nothing Personal
Hugs 'n' drugs
Mackenzie Phillips: "My father taught me how to shoot up"; Halle Berry: Why do bad drivers happen to good dogs? Plus: Mariah Carey says ninth-graders are hotter than she is!
By Amy Reiter
[03/22/00]

People Feature
Where the boys are
A new wave of films shows a fresh element in filmmaking: The sexualization of the male actor by the female director.
By Jessica Hundley
[03/22/00]

Nothing Personal
Another one cites the bust
"Love my breasts" disease strikes Zeta-Jones; Hef's a uniter, not a divider; and Beck on why he was bullied ... but in a fair way.
By Amy Reiter
[03/21/00]

Brilliant Careers
Timothy Ferris
Disregarding our illusory firewalls of thought, he boldly goes where no science writer has gone before.
By William Speed Weed
[03/21/00]

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And then suddenly, last summer, those two fart-happy vulgarians Terrance and Phillip "warped the fragile little minds" of (fictional) American kids in South Park, Colo. It turns out these anti-intellectual anti-heroes are from -- you guessed it -- Canada, leading one angry and animated mother in the "South Park" movie to "Blame Canada!" in a highly memorable musical number, during which American troops pound Canadian cities with artillery fire. Amusingly, the song was nominated for an Oscar. But was it the humor of the lyrics that garnered the song a nomination?

This might be a stretch, but the song may also have been nominated as a message from the movie industry to Ottawa, hinting at underlying tensions between, believe it or not, Canada and Hollywood.

Dozens of film and television projects are being lured north of the border because of cheaper production costs in Canada, which is putting the hurt on Hollywood. Plus, if a movie is deemed a "Canadian production" by the powers that be in Ottawa, it can qualify for direct financial subsidies from the Canadian government.

Hollywood guilds and trade papers have angrily labeled these film and TV operations "runaway productions," in that they are fleeing Hollywood for cheaper costs elsewhere. "The Canadian government has adopted an array of policies to promote Canadian culture, some of which American media and entertainment companies claim are protectionist in restricting access to the market," said a Canadian diplomat who requested anonymity. "We say that film is a global industry and that these are films that would never have been made because of what they would cost in California."

Perhaps these sentiments were present when recent films such as Michael Moore's "Canadian Bacon" and Trey Parker's "South Park" -- both of which contain a scenario in which the United States and Canada go to war -- received green lights from U.S. studio executives.

The American government also believes that the Canadian entertainment market is restricted -- for magazines, newspapers and radio, for example. "Americans cannot establish or create magazines with more than 49 percent ownership," said the Canadian diplomat. "And we have quotas on radio airplay in Canada -- 35 percent of the programming has to be Canadian in origin." There is even a point system for determining what is "Canadian": Two of the three main entities involved in each song -- the artist, writer and producer -- have to be Canadian for the song to qualify.

Meanwhile, Canadian women dominated the Grammy Awards earlier this month, as Shania Twain, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Diana Krall and Sarah McLachlan all were nominated, three of them taking home trophies for their mantels.

Perhaps to alleviate the escalating tensions, the Canadians are sponsoring a couple of lighthearted cultural events in New York. Monday was the kickoff of Canadian Restaurant Week, in which a few Canadian chefs are visiting Gotham restaurants, bringing with them their recipes for peppered strip loin of arctic caribou with merlot-blueberry reduction, Prince Edward Island oysters with sunchoke cream and sevruga caviar, and pea-meal-wrapped buffalo fillet. And on April 14, the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater will present, with the Canadian Consulate's approval, a mini-film festival cheekily titled "Blame Canada!"

"For many supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers," reads the program of the festival, which will feature Canadian-made films by directors such as Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, "the image of Canada remains a stereotype: a land filled with lumberjacks in ear muffs, trudging around the frozen tundra on their snowshoes, humming Gordon Lightfoot songs. But if you take a close look at the steady output of fine movies being made north of the border, the view changes."

What kind of insidious propaganda is this? First the Oscar ballots are mysteriously "misplaced" before turning up again. Then the Oscar statues themselves go missing.

Everybody has his or her own theories, but I smell a maple thief.
salon.com | March 23, 2000

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