Telefilm's most recent Great White (Northern) Hype is another "Men With Brooms" (didn't they learn the first time?!). Ultra-contrived to match its funders' ideas of 'quirky', it manages to be a comedy almost entirely lacking any actual humour, with just about the shallowest, one- dimensional characters I've seen outside of third-rate TV shows.
As a Canadian, I would very much like for the films made in our country to be of high quality and worthy of taking pride in. Think of the output in the late 80's through the 90's, when we still funded auteur directors and invested in their development, regardless of how much 'commercial' potential their films had - this is how actual cinematic talents like Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan, Deepa Mehta, Patricia Rozema, Don McKellar and Bruce MacDonald were able to get their start. Now, we're at a point where people in the industry think they've matured/progressed while they're making and promoting films like this one, which turns out, almost unbelievably, to be just as terrible a film as "The Love Guru". Seriously.
What is it going to take for those who are in a position to make decisions as to funding, etc. to realise that trying to pander to domestic audiences through forced, patronising, on-the- nose attempts at 'Canadian content' is never going to result in a film that is as commercially successful as they hope (not to mention that it's never going to result in anything of any actual cinematic or aesthetic quality)? And anyway, if they're really trying to appeal to some genuine, albeit misguided and juvenile, sense of Canadian patriotism, why make one of the main selling points of your film the casting of Olivia Newton-John?
