drn5

This is a pretty intense experience, especially if you know nothing about the subject matter. A community of Mohawks form a road block to prevent local land developers from turning their ancestral burial grounds into a golf course. Incredibly, the Canadian government sends in tanks and soldiers to break them up. Negotiations fail, and events escalate to an astonishing degree. I kept assuming that things couldn't get any worse, and each time they they did. Eventually we have the Canadian Army beating up an old man and stabbing a teenage girl with a bayonet. It's incredible to watch, given that Canada has a reputation as a warm and fuzzy nation.

I guess the only problem with this film is that it's heavily slanted toward the Mohawks and their supporters. We rarely get to hear the alternative opinions from the other side, from the Quebecois who became so angry that they threw rocks at cars, and the soldiers who behaved with such brutality. Why was there so much anger? It would have been useful to know. And the filmmaker never explains who she is and why she is able to film everything on both sides of the supposedly impenetrable siege fence with good quality sound and images. I'm sure there are answers to these questions but the documentary's naive use of an omniscient narrator avoids answering them.

Still, you come out of this shaking with anger and ashamed of the Canadian government. A '10 years on' documentary would be interesting.

I saw 'The Porcelain Pussy' at the Halifax Film Festival and thought it was great fun. It's a gender-reversed film noir spoof, in which a hard-boiled female detective tries to locate the eponymous ceramic feline. All the noir clichés are amusingly inverted, so there's a scene in which the lady detective meets a glamorous homme fatale who bats his eyelashes a lot and is filmed in a soft focus glow. The chick whom plays the detective is very funny and has the hard-boiled style down perfectly. Also, the cinematographer deserves praise for beautifully capturing the film noir look.

It's not going to change the world but it's a funny film with some great performances and I hope it gets distribution of some kind.

Yes, it's just one joke, and not a very funny one at that, but you have to admit that the Dam Dog, when we finally see him, is cute. He has a happy face and looks overjoyed to have made it in the movies. While I am unlikely to place this squib of a film in my top 10,000, I hope the Dam Dog is resting peacefully in his grave, wherever it is.