Sense and Censor Ability

Without government funding, there would be no Canadian film industry – that’s not breaking news. Canuck flicks get made with the help of funding bodies on both the federal and provincial levels, with different provinces having different incentives and mandates for distributing the money. Traditionally, this has resulted in “culture-building” projects, meaning narratives about racial, social, sexual, political diversity; historical struggles against this, vast, unforgiving landscape, which shaped the character of our nation; and more high-brow (read: non-Hollywood) projects exploring the struggle for national identity.

Or, as the average Canadian will tell you: a lot of really boring movies.

But not always. Some of our greatest and most famous films have been horrific (David Cronenberg, for example), critically-acclaimed dark dramas (Atom Egoyan’s award-winning work) or light comedy (films by sketch comedy actors come to mind).

I’ve been thinking about this since reading a couple of New York Times pieces. The first is about how, in the U.S., state funding bodies increasingly are acting like censors by denying funding to projects that they don’t agree with on moral grounds, often using provisions in state law that allow them to deny funding if a film portrays the state in a negative way.

The second piece is a companion article that hilariously re-envisions classic New York-set films as being sanitized to make the city look favourable. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is a helpful cabbie trying to return a laptop left in his car by a twelve-year-old girl; in Wall Street, Gordon Gecko is an environmental crusader using his financial know-how to stop big business polluters; and King Kong just wants to scale the Empire State building to soak up that famous skyline.

What if the same thing happened to some of Canada’s most famous Toronto-set films? Let’s rework the plots of three T.O.-based stories to make them less morally questionable.

Strange Brew

This time, the Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas film sees two friends, Robert and Douglas (bonded over a mutual enthusiasm for soda pop), take a break from job hunting to visit the Canada Dry factory, in order to offer their advice on how to improve the product. To their surprise, they’re both offered employment and embark on careers as quality control representatives. However, while on the job, they uncover a troubling plot in which the ginger ale brewmaster plans on donating expired cases of pop to a local hockey team for troubled youth – and telling them that it’s fresh! To thwart the nefarious plan, Robert drinks all of the expired soda at once, causing him to balloon up to a comical size. Douglas rolls him over to the hockey rink, where the two men lecture the team on the dangers of consuming an abundance of sugary liquids, before the brewmaster, seeing the error of his ways, arrives to deliver fresh Canada Dry to the team. Everyone on the squad also gets a free toque.

Exotica

Atom Egoyan’s film gets re-envisioned, so it’s about a Revenue Canada employee who regularly visits the library, where he requests that his favourite librarian, a pretty young woman, help him peruse the exotic plants section. A clerk at the check-out desk who used to date the librarian becomes jealous and tampers with the man’s account so it appears that he’s assessed a massive late fine, and he is then barred from going to the library. A pet store owner, grateful to the man for auditing him so he could pay the correct sum to the government, decides to help. Together, they construct a detailed timeline – depicted in a series of flashbacks – proving that the late fee could not possibly be correct. When confronted with the evidence, the clerk decides that the right thing to do is resign. In a final flashback, we learn that the librarian reminds the man of his daughter, who he misses dearly because she’s gone away tree-planting in British Columbia for the summer.

Crash

In this version of the David Cronenberg film, a husband and wife with marital concerns get in a car accident and become inspired to hold a demolition derby to raise money for people injured in automobile mishaps. Along the way, they meet others – including a doctor and a James Dean fan – who had similar experiences, and they all decide to work together to channel their mutual car crash-related interests for the greater good of society. The group members go out dancing together and, while switching partners, decide to overcome their anxieties stemming from the various accidents by participating in the derby themselves. In the end, they realize that the ultimate thrill is helping others, which brings the husband and wife closer together, effectively saving their marriage. Prolonged sequences showcasing the importance of seatbelts, hammers home the film’s ultimate message of vehicular safety.

-Dave Alexander